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A BRIEF STORY OF EVIL. How Ordinary People, Ideas, and Institutions Create Extraordinary Harm: The intellectual journey of the mechanisms that make cr
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 19 2026
Pages: 132
Weight: 0.41
Height: 0.28 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Evil is not always monstrous. Sometimes it wears a uniform, fills out paperwork, follows orders, obeys authority, or tells itself it is doing good.
A Brief Story of Evil is a clear, disturbing, and necessary journey through one of humanity's oldest and most urgent questions: how do ordinary human beings become capable of extraordinary harm?
From ancient myths and Zoroastrian dualism to Augustine, Kant, Hannah Arendt, Milgram, Zimbardo, genocide, totalitarianism, colonial violence, digital manipulation, and artificial intelligence, this book explores evil not as a supernatural force, but as a human possibility shaped by ideas, institutions, obedience, ideology, dehumanization, and power.
This is not a catalogue of horrors for its own sake. It is an intellectual history of the mechanisms that make cruelty possible and the moral courage that can resist it. The book examines the Holocaust, Rwanda, Stalinist terror, My Lai, the psychology of bystanders, the banality of evil, and the dangerous myth that evil belongs only to monsters.
Accessible, wide-ranging, and deeply relevant to the modern world, A Brief Story of Evil asks what evil reveals about civilization, responsibility, and the fragile future of human moral choice.
If you want to understand how evil works, why it spreads, and what can stand against it, read A Brief Story of Evil today.
TAGS
evil, history of evil, philosophy of evil, psychology of evil, human cruelty, Hannah Arendt, banality of evil, genocide, moral philosophy, totalitarianism, dehumanization, obedience to authority, moral responsibility, human nature, artificial intelligence
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