GUEST COLUMN
Becoming Evil
How do good men turn evil? Or how do they become comfortable committing evil acts? Don’t they recognize those acts are evil? Don’t they recognize that they become what they do?
Countless historical anecdotes, including those documented in such books as James Waller’s “Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing” and Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” demonstrate the ease with which all of us are susceptible to vicious behavior if the context around us normalizes or otherwise downplays the horror of our actions.
Given the enormous power, virtually unopposed and unsupervised, entrusted to our school district senior administrators, is it any surprise to see them engage in vicious, dishonest actions? “Wait,” we think. “I know these guys. They are GOOD people. They wouldn’t do vicious acts.” Unfortunately, there is scarcely any evil that has been done in the world that wasn’t first justified in the minds of the perpetrators. Those who are convinced they are serving the greater good can easily rationalize using evil means to accomplish it. There is even a name for this: noble cause corruption. As Joseph Schumpeter observed, “The first thing a man will do for his ideal is lie.” When we see our cause as a crusade, it doesn’t matter how many innocent people are harmed in pursuit of the virtuous end we pursue. C.S. Lewis further explained, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. … those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” Inherent goodness doesn’t change anything here. It only ensures that the perpetrators have generated a moral justification in their own minds, no matter how repellent that justification would seem to others if it were known.
The problem in Ozark School District is not that our senior administrators are bad people. The problem is that they have no opposition and no effective supervision. There is no one to whom they have to justify their behavior. There is no one who will scrutinize their actions and render objective judgment on them.
Sure, we have a school board. But it doesn’t recognize the problem. This isn’t a problem unique to Ozark.
It is ubiquitous across the nation: school boards are not well-positioned to govern their senior administrators. School administrations and school budgets have swelled while the number of hours school board members spend supervising has remained static.
The scale of a superintendent’s job has grown exponentially while our school board members’ involvement has remained unchanged. Collaboration among school district administrators and guidance from state school board associations (which serve superintendents more than their constituents) have vastly expanded administrators’ sense of what they can get away with while the school board’s attentiveness remains unimproved.
The supervision of the school board is grossly insufficient to stop administrators from turning foul.
A is for Accountability…
Everyone needs an accountability agent, someone to keep them honest, someone to call foul when they are thinking and acting wrong. This isn’t just for the sake of their potential victims. This is for their own sake. It is to preserve their moral character and moral authority. Perhaps you have heard it said before that locks don’t stop thieves. Locks just keep honest people honest. By making it harder for good people to behave dishonestly, we help them remain good people. We all have the potential to join the dark side if we don’t have enough opposing influence in our lives. The forces tempting us to darkness are ever-present. The arguments for why evil isn’t really evil are subtle and seductive. We can easily get caught up in thought spirals that deviate from reality. Knowing that we must justify our conduct to a neutral (and perhaps even skeptical) third party is how we ensure we don’t go awry. If we don’t have to do this, we ensure distorted thinking. Sadly, this is that situation of our school superintendent. He doesn’t have anyone to provide him the much (and regularly) needed “reality check.” He has instead an echo chamber of “yes men” reflecting back whatever perspective he adopts.
H is for Honesty…
Getting an honest perspective on anything requires that we HONESTLY consider both sides of the argument. When deciding who qualified for sainthood, the Catholic church prudently thought to appoint a “devil’s advocate” to argue AGAINST the virtues of the candidate clergyman in order to ensure they were not being too disposed in his favor. In courts of law, we think the truth is most likely to emerge when opposing attorneys argue zealously against each other on behalf of their clients. Attorneys know full well that clients develop distorted views of the merits of their own case. In fact, this tendency is so readily recognized that attorneys won’t even represent themselves in court. They hire another attorney to represent them. They are too close to their own cases to see them objectively. (Humorously, they say that he who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.) Similarly, loyalty to friends and institutions often requires that we argue AGAINST their own agendas for themselves.
Free Speech is for the Community
As Jon Stuart Mill argued, the critical value of free speech is not found in its benefit to the individual speaker (as a form of self-expression, etc.) but to the community who are recipients of the ideas free speech enables. He termed this the “marketplace of ideas.” Only when good and bad ideas are free to contend against each other for public embrace are we going to arrive at the best ideas for ourselves and our society.
The value of a couple of famous aphorisms now becomes blatantly obvious. We are all aware of the adage, “Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Our Founding Fathers repeatedly warned our nation that too much power in the hands of one individual corrupts that individual and produces tyranny for the nation. No one, no matter how noble his character, is immune from this truth. We are also all familiar with the adage that “those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.” If we don’t take seriously our Founding Fathers’ counsel and find a way to better supervise a superintendent who is presently too powerful and too unaccountable, then Ozark’s next superintendent will surely be another person of high moral character who will soon be acting just like the last scoundrel.
Check up on the Leader…
The problem isn’t dishonest people getting hired as administrators. The problem is an organizational structure that lacks sufficient oversight. The solution isn’t to hire a more honest administrator. The solution is to figure out where our administrators are susceptible to distorted perspective and to implement effective supervision and accountability measures.