/lit/ - Literature

>>12766462
It's difficult to say from this distance. I don't think his mental state was necessarily a swirling cauldron of chthonic and rage. Emotional inadequacies almost certainly played a role, but they might not have been particularly spectacular. They might not have anything more complicated or intense than the sort of troubles that make others commit petty theft. Just channeled through a different medium. You think about the 'banality of evil'; a completely polite, "generous", average person like Hoess could oversee the deaths of hundreds of thousands under his tenure as the commandant of Auschwitz. But then again, Hoess and are Himmler are the inverse of the Tarrant situation, because while they planned the deaths of millions, they couldn't stomach watching people get shot or beaten. There's an anecdote about Himmler screaming and nearly fainting while watching a firing squad.

Humans are very variable. The ease of killing, and the impact it has on someone's conscience, probably differs substantially from person to person, situation to situation, culture to culture. Not that anything goes and that there is no such thing as human nature, but that subjective scruples are often mistaken for natural law. Pathology is dictated by the norms it transgresses; norms which may be more particular than universal.