A few people want to watch the world burn; many more can be persuaded to put it through the refiner’s fire in order to make it better

From Moral Zealotry and the Seductive Nature of Evil by Spencer Case. Echoes of The True Believer by Eric Hoffer.

A tempting fallacy about morality is to think that wickedness must arise from transparently abhorrent motives, and goodness from nice ones. Few explicitly endorse this crude dualism, but many breezily equate hatred with evil, love with goodness, or both. This way of thinking makes it difficult for us to see the dangers of moral zealotry, one of the most insidious motives for wicked behavior.

The notion of moral zealotry as a vice is somewhat puzzling. Shouldn’t we want people to be as moral as possible? Republican Presidential hopeful Barry Goldwater is often quoted as saying, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” That’s true of idealized people who have perfect knowledge of justice and how best to pursue it, and whose commitment to goodness is untainted by less saintly motives. The rest of us are at risk of having our minds hijacked by intense, but not necessarily reflective, moral passions.

People so hijacked are moral zealots. A paradigmatic example is early twentieth century anti-alcohol crusader Carrie A. Nation. Believing that God wanted her to personally vanquish alcohol from the land, she attacked Kansas saloons with rocks and, emblematically, hatchets (affectionately named “faith,” “hope” and “charity”) in rampages she called “Hatchetations.” Kansas was an early adopter of prohibition, but the law was being widely ignored. Nation saw herself as a vigilante enforcer of the law. Saloon owners and patrons stood agog as she plied her instruments of God’s will on barrels of liquor and bar fixtures, thundering Biblical exhortations. As her reputation spread, saloons put up signs saying, “All Nations are Welcome Except Carrie.”

Nation was no mere hater of merriment. She had good reason to believe that alcohol was harmful. Her first husband had died of alcoholism at the age of 29, leaving her alone to raise a sickly child. Through her involvement in the temperance movement, she heard the testimonies of women whose husbands became abusive drunks and wastrels. Saloons were also associated with gambling and extramarital sex—at a time when syphilis was incurable and childbirth quite hazardous. Her hatred of saloons is understandable, even somewhat admirable, in light of these facts. Her sanctimonious vandalism was nonetheless wrong. Her moral passions blinded her to the fact that some of her means were inappropriate.

Moral zealotry is a social phenomenon. Nation probably wouldn’t have reached this degree of radicalism without her proximity to like-minded women (one suspects she didn’t have much exposure to responsible men who drank a moderate amount). In the 2008 movie, The Dark Knight, Alfred describes the Joker’s nihilistic motives: “Some people just want to watch the world burn.” Most people are not like this. For that reason, even the most reprehensible ideologies must appeal to the moral passions of potential converts. A few people want to watch the world burn; many more can be persuaded to put it through the refiner’s fire in order to make it better.