Are We Sure We Are Not the Bad Guys?

Every generation looks back in horror at some of the things previous generations did.

We look back and wonder how they could possibly have believed what they believed, permitted what they permitted, defended what they defended, and failed to see what now seems so obvious.

How could educated people have supported slavery? How could doctors have promoted cigarettes? How could governments have allowed lead to be pumped into the air through petrol? How could respectable professionals have endorsed eugenics? How could opiates have been celebrated as a miracle drug? How could whole societies have allowed industrial cruelty, medical barbarism, institutional abuse, environmental destruction and the organised mistreatment of children while still thinking of themselves as decent?

The answer we tell ourselves is that they were different from us. They were less enlightened, less informed, less compassionate, less sophisticated, less morally developed. We would not have done those things. We would have seen through them. We would have stood apart. We tell ourselves this to comfort ourselves.

But this is almost certainly untrue.

Most people in every age believe broadly what the respectable people around them believe. They absorb the assumptions of their time. They learn which opinions are acceptable, which questions are dangerous, which words are respectable, which doubts are socially costly, and which silences are rewarded. They do not experience this as cowardice. They experience it as decency.

This is why Charles Mackay’s famous observation still stands. People go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one. The madness of crowds is not usually experienced as madness by those inside the crowd. It feels like solidarity, compassion, moral clarity, professionalism, expertise, progress, science or public duty.

That is what makes it so dangerous.

The people history judges most harshly rarely believed they were the bad guys. They believed they were the good guys, doing what good people were expected to do.

The most obvious and extreme example is Nazi Germany, a comparison too often wielded. But the horrors the Nazis inflicted are so morally enormous that it can distort every comparison. The point is not that every modern error is equivalent to Nazism. That would be absurd. The point is that the psychological machinery which allowed ordinary people to become participants in evil has not vanished.

Hitler was a monster. But his plans required more than one monster. They required clerks, railway workers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, police officers, engineers, administrators and neighbours. Many of these people loved their families, cared for their communities, went to church, paid their bills and regarded themselves as normal, decent citizens. They did not all wake each morning feeling themselves to be villains. Many simply did their jobs. They obeyed the law. They followed orders. They trusted authority. And then they adjusted their language and looked away.

The question that should trouble us is not, “How could they have done that?”

It is, “Why are we so confident that we would have behaved differently?”

That question does not allow us to stand outside of history as judges. It drags us back into history as participants. It asks whether we possess some moral immunity that previous generations lacked. It asks whether our credentials, our compassion, our access to information and our belief in progress really protect us from collective delusion.

If we think deeply, if we truly search our souls, we know the honest answer is that they probably do not.

We are not less susceptible to conformity than our ancestors. We are not less vulnerable to prestige, fashion, slogans, institutional incentives or fear of exclusion. We are not immune to the desire to be regarded as kind, clever, modern and on the right side of history. Indeed, that phrase itself should make us nervous. Many terrible things have been done by people convinced they were on the right side of history.

One of our greatest mistakes is to imagine that history’s atrocities were committed by people who lacked compassion. More often, they were committed by people whose compassion became narrowly focused. They saw one group clearly while another disappeared from view. They became so determined to relieve one form of suffering that they stopped noticing another. The problem was not usually an absence of empathy, but empathy without sufficient breadth, humility or foresight. Moral blindness is rarely the consequence of not caring. More often, it is the consequence of caring so intensely about one thing that we cease to see everything else.

So, the proper lesson of history is not merely that previous generations were wrong. It is that we are almost certainly wrong about something too.

There must be things we are doing now that future generations will find incomprehensible. There must be practices that seem ordinary to us but will seem grotesque to our grandchildren. There must be assumptions that feel humane, progressive, scientific or necessary today, but will later be understood as cowardly, cruel, reckless or mad.

The only uncertainty is which ones they are.

This should place a duty upon us to maintain psychic distance from the moral certainties of our own age. I am not suggesting cynicism, nor automatic opposition, nor the adolescent pleasure of being contrarian. But distance. The ability to step back from the crowd, even when the crowd is made up of people we like, trust and admire. The ability to ask whether a new initiative, a fashionable policy, a supposedly just intervention or a widely accepted practice might one day be seen very differently.

We should apply a simple test to everything we do. We should ask, are we sure we are not the bad guys here?

This question should be asked in boardrooms, classrooms, hospitals, universities, parliaments, safeguarding meetings, technology companies, research laboratories and family homes. It should be asked most urgently when everybody seems to agree. Consensus is not proof of truth. Sometimes it is merely evidence that the social cost of dissent has become too high.

It is not the crowd that we should protect. It is not the consensus. We should instead always protect the dissident. The one who disagrees when all others are on the same page.

Every great moral correction in history began as an unpopular opinion. If societies suppress dissent because consensus feels comforting, they also suppress the mechanism by which consensus is corrected. We do not protect dissent because dissenters are usually right. We protect them because civilisation cannot identify its own blind spots without them.

If that argument is correct, then the obvious next question is this. What might future generations accuse us of? None of us can know. The point is not to predict history with certainty, because that would simply repeat the arrogance this essay criticises. But we can identify areas where we ought to be asking harder questions than we currently are.

Social media may be one of them. It was clear many years ago that these technologies were not neutral tools of communication. They were engineered to capture attention, exploit insecurity, distort status, accelerate outrage and keep people scrolling. This was especially obvious in relation to children. We knew enough to be worried. Yet we gave children devices and apps that adults themselves could barely manage, then acted surprised when anxiety, loneliness, self-harm, distraction and social fragmentation followed. Future generations may ask why we allowed some of the most powerful corporations in history to conduct a vast psychological experiment on childhood.

I suspect the answer will not be flattering.

Today, we are placing the most powerful cognitive technology ever invented into human hands before we have decided which aspects of thinking should never be delegated. Artificial intelligence is likely to become another candidate. Not because AI is evil, nor because technological development should be resisted, but because we are already moving faster than our ethical, educational and institutional understanding. We are placing tools of immense cognitive power into the hands of children and adults without yet knowing how they will alter thought, attention, authorship, expertise, memory, judgement and dependence. We risk treating human thinking as an inefficiency to be eliminated rather than a capacity to be cultivated. Future generations may ask why we were so eager to automate the very activities through which human beings become more capable.

And education offers many other examples. We have industrialised childhood to an extraordinary degree. We measure, rank, intervene, monitor, structure and optimise. We have reduced unsupervised play. We have narrowed education toward performance. We have created systems in which children are constantly assessed but not always known, constantly protected but not always allowed to grow, constantly included, but not always inducted into the disciplines, traditions and communities that inevitably make demands of us. We have turned childhood into a managed process and then wondered why so many children appear anxious, fragile or disengaged.

Perhaps future generations will judge us kindly. Perhaps they will see our intentions and forgive our confusion. But perhaps they will ask why, having inherited so much knowledge about child development, friendship, play, family, attention and belonging, we still built systems that made childhood smaller.

COVID may become one of the clearest examples of our age’s moral confusion. This is not because the pandemic was simple to navigate. It certainly was not. Governments faced genuine uncertainty, fear, rapidly changing evidence and the terrifying possibility of mass death. Some restrictions were, of course, understandable. Some may have been necessary. But the treatment of children during that period deserves much more serious moral scrutiny than it has yet received.

We closed schools. We taped off playgrounds. We isolated children from friends, teachers, grandparents and extended family. We interrupted important rites of passage, friendships, routines, examinations, sport, play and ordinary human development. In some cases, we left vulnerable children trapped in unsafe homes. For perhaps the first time in modern history, we deliberately imposed the greatest social and developmental burdens upon those least threatened by the disease itself.

Future generations may understand the fear. They may accept some of the decisions. But they may still ask why children’s interests were given so little independent weight. They may ask why so few adults were willing to say, clearly and repeatedly, that childhood itself was being harmed. They may ask why dissent was so readily characterised as selfishness or anti-science. And they may ask whether, in trying to protect life, we forgot to protect living.

These are the kind of questions history asks.

We should ask such questions even while an issue is live and the debate unsettled. How will the current debate around medical interventions for children experiencing gender distress be judged in the future? It is entirely possible that future generations will question not only the clinical decisions that were made, but the culture in which those decisions were made. They may ask how caution became suspect, how professional disagreement came to be interpreted as hostility, how questioning became socially or professionally hazardous, and how a subject demanding the greatest intellectual humility so often came to reward certainty over inquiry.

This is not an argument for cruelty. Quite the opposite. It is an argument for moral seriousness. Children experiencing profound distress deserve our love, compassion, protection and the very best care we can provide. But compassion must not require adults to surrender judgement, nor should disagreement be mistaken for malice. When the stakes are so high, society should be most suspicious of certainty, especially when that certainty is reinforced by social pressure rather than tested through open, rigorous and honest debate.

The same applies to the organised sexual exploitation of vulnerable girls in some towns and cities across England. Future generations may be horrified not only by the crimes themselves, but by the institutional failures around them. They may ask how fears about reputation, community tension, accusations of prejudice or professional embarrassment could ever have been allowed to obscure the suffering of children. They may ask why adults who existed to protect the vulnerable sometimes seemed more concerned with managing narratives than confronting reality.

Again, the lesson is not that people sat around consciously choosing evil. That is rarely how these things happen. The lesson is far more disturbing. People follow incentives. They avoid difficult conversations. They protect institutions. They fear labels. They defer to group norms. They persuade themselves that caution is wisdom, silence is sensitivity, and delay is process. And in the meantime, someone suffers.

You may disagree with one or more of these examples. Indeed, you may believe I have become the victim of precisely the kind of moral blindness I have been describing. That is entirely possible. In fifty years’ time, history will decide. But if reading those examples made you uncomfortable, or tempted you to dismiss the argument because one illustration challenged your own convictions, then perhaps you have experienced exactly the problem this essay is trying to describe. None of us, me included, is outside history. None of us is immune from becoming certain about things that later prove mistaken.

This is why we must routinely return to the question.

Are we sure we are not the bad guys here?

The point of asking this question is not to become paralysed. Of course, society must act, leaders must decide, schools must teach, governments must govern, and doctors must treat. Technology will develop. New ideas will emerge. There is no morally pure position outside the world from which we can avoid risk altogether.

But action without humility is dangerous.

We need to ensure our institutions make dissent possible. We need leaders who are not intoxicated by the apparent consensus on whichever social media platform they happen to view most often. We need professional cultures in which people can ask awkward questions without being cast as immoral. We need education that teaches children not merely what to think, but how crowds think, how language hides reality, how prestige operates, how institutions protect themselves, and how good people become complicit in bad things.

Above all, we need to abandon the comforting belief that moral catastrophe is caused only by obviously wicked people. Sometimes it is. More often, it is caused by ordinary people accepting the moral grammar of their age without sufficient resistance.

The great danger is not that we might fail to recognise evil when it appears in a form we already despise. That is easy. The danger is that we fail to recognise it when it arrives dressed as kindness, safety, science, progress, inclusion, efficiency or care.

That is when we are at our most vulnerable.

History is almost entirely indifferent to our intentions. History does not ask whether we meant well. It asks what we did. It asks whom we harmed. It asks what we refused to see. It asks which truths were hidden because they were inconvenient. It asks which questions were not asked because asking them was socially dangerous.

The greatest moral failures in history were not committed by people who asked too many difficult questions. They were committed by societies that stopped asking them.

Every generation stands before that judgement eventually.

So perhaps the most important moral discipline is not certainty, but suspicion of certainty. Not cynicism, but humility. Not cowardice, but the courage to step outside the crowd while the crowd is still applauding itself.

We should look around more often at the settled practices of our age, especially the ones defended by respectable people using respectable language, and ask the question that every generation should have asked earlier.

Are we sure we are not the bad guys?

Because history offers no evidence at all that ours will be the first generation to escape moral blindness. Rather, it suggests we are almost certainly living alongside practices that our descendants will regard with disbelief. Our responsibility, therefore, is not to congratulate ourselves on our enlightenment, but to ask, every day and about everything, whether we have mistaken consensus for conscience, and whether the things we now defend most passionately will one day become the very things our descendants struggle to forgive.