What would you do if you had lived during a past atrocity? It’s easy to imagine what you would have done in that situation but how accurate can you be in your assessment? After all, values change greatly over time and many values that are now common were pretty rare hundreds of years ago. If you had been raised back then with the values of that time and faced all the pressure to conform to those values, would you still do what you think is right by your present values?
A few complications to this include the facts that most people are raised to follow orders (starting early on in their families) and such conditioning is reinforced all through their lives, often with harsh punishments for refusing to follow orders. Further, it’s hard to avoid being swayed by manipulation and even outright propaganda since, as Daniel Kahneman talks about, it’s often incredibly difficult to distinguish what is familiar from what is true. With that in mind, it’s understandable how huge numbers of people can do something they believe to be beneficial even if it turns out to be harmful (something Dietrich Bonhoeffer contemplated leading up to his death), especially if they’re driven by an enormous amount of fear.
This is even more of an issue when looking at group behavior. Popular causes come with little to no personal risk so it’s easy to stand up when everyone you know is standing with you. Would you still stand up even if everyone you knew were sitting down and wishing you’d do the same? How about if, by going against the majority, you could lose your job, lose the support of everyone close to you, have to leave your country, or risk being imprisoned, tortured, or executed? What would those potential consequences compel you to do: follow the crowd or follow your conscience?
There’s also the issue of not learning from history by understanding how massive atrocities started as small issues and grew larger over time as they remained insufficiently opposed. This can prevent examining how massive atrocities could arise from seemingly benign activities in the present age. That may result in an unfortunate situation in which some massive atrocities aren’t prevented while they’re still small issues, which is when they’ve done the least damage and are easiest to stop; instead, they’re not addressed until they’re huge problems, which is when they’ve done the most damage and are hardest to stop.
Anyone who says that they know exactly how they’d behave in any major past situation is only speculating. They don’t have access to a reality in which they lived back then so they can’t know for sure what they would have actually done in that situation. I include myself in this and, personally, I feel relieved that I don’t have to find out what I’d have done in a lot of past situations where the risks of getting involved were incredibly high. I hope I’d have followed my conscience. I often wonder how future generations will think of what those of us alive today are doing now and will do later in our lives. I hope we give them reason to feel gratitude toward us rather than scorn.