Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on evil and ideology

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.  Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him.  Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too.  The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses.  Because they had no ideology.

Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and deterimination.  That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.  That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.

~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, pp. 173-174

1973