Are Humans Inherently Evil?

Right, so it's a fact that humans have committed some truly evil acts en masse. Swathes of seemingly perfectly "normal" people have been known to kill torture and maim one another just because a more powerful person has told them to.

So why did they do it? The two reasons don't exactly have much between them. Either, humans will take the opportunity to be beastly to one another as soon as they believe that they have permission, or humans will more readily inflict harm on countless others rather than refuse and run the risk of being harmed themselves.

Either option isn't all that great to be honest.

We prefer to think of the people who commit these atrocities as monsters, somehow different from the rest of us. 

Hey, if that helps you sleep at night then go ahead, but anyone who has ever seen the images of Hitler flirting with Eva Braun, or playing with Goebbels' young daughter, Helga, will testify to how very disturbing it is to see him do anything but screaming "kill them all". 

This is because, if we make "evil" people into unnatural beasts, it dehumanizes them, and we can convince ourselves that the potential to do bad things doesn't lie within all of us.

Incidentally, presenting people as inhuman monsters is how the Nazis made it seem okay to exterminate over 11,000,000 people. Just sayin'.