ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the probably unprecedented western focus in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries upon humanity’s potential for suggestibility, credulity and evil. It argues that the possibility of an inescapable sickness at the heart of the human psyche has, to some extent, been foreclosed in its considerable implications partly through an emphasis in social and cultural representations upon difference, so that the potentially suggestible, credulous and evil human being begins to look—and think and feel—nothing like ‘us.’ Some sense of a perceptible well-being or good existence for many people is thus preserved when they contemplate the moral darkness of the human race. Key sources include psychoanalytical and philosophical texts, the work of Barbara Ehrenreich and Daniel Pick on Nazism, and Bertolt Brecht and Margarete Steffin’s play Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children).
