One day back in college, one of my favorite business professors was doing a lecture on ethics in business when one of the students (most of us were in our late teens and early twenties – just kids really) raised her hand and said that she would never work for the kind of unethical company he was talking about.

The professor just laughed.  He said, “So you think you would just know what an evil person or an evil company looks like?”

She said yes and he laughed again.  The professor went on saying, “You know what evil looks like?  It looks normal.  Evil people look and talk just like everyone else – even better sometimes.  Same thing with evil companies – they look just like all the rest, even better sometimes.  If you go and work for them, more often than not you’ll get sucked into whatever they’re doing and into things you never thought you would, and you’ll do them almost without a second thought because it will have become normal for you.

Few people in the room were willing to believe it at the time, but growing up a little more, life experience, and learning more about history have convinced me that this old professor was right; more often than not, evil surprisingly looks normal.

I’ve heard it in the stories of abused women and children – people who felt that something wasn’t quite right in their abusive situation but for them it had become just how things were, maybe not great, but it was normal.  It wasn’t until after they got out of those situations and got healthy enough that they could see that what they knew as normal was actually evil.

Germans in Nazi Germany knew much of what was going on in the concentration camps but for the most never voiced a complaint.  What was going on in the concentration camps was talked about publically and written about in the papers, but few seemed to have a problem with it because people had become desensitized to the point that it had become normal.  Millions of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and a number of ethnic and religious minorities were being exterminated and it was normal.

For as long as history can tell, human beings from every corner of the globe have made other human beings their property by physically and psychologically subjugating them to their will.  For almost all of our existence this abhorrent practice has been seen as normal and with few exceptions (pre-empire Christianity is one), people couldn’t imagine a world where slavery didn’t exist.  It wasn’t until the 1800s when Christian convictions began leading people to see that slavery was both evil and could and should be done away with on a universal scale.  And surprising to many today, these Christian convictions inspired a white, colonial empire to use both its blood and treasure to remove this practice from the world – a first in human history.

The frightening abuses that went on during the Stanford Prison Experiment were all quickly seen as normal by everyone involved.  It wasn’t until someone from the outside came in and insisted that what they were doing was wrong, evil, and had to stop, that anyone involved began to see for themselves that what they were doing wasn’t normal, but evil.

The possible examples and cautionary tales are innumerable.  None of us are immune from being taken in and even deceived by the normal and even pleasant appearance evil often takes.