I went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that the manifestation of evil is often found in ordinary individuals rather than in extraordinary monsters.
Joshua Oppenheimer's quote reflects on the often unsettling reality that acts of evil do not always come from malevolent beings or monsters; instead, they can stem from regular people who make cruel choices. This challenges our understanding of morality and complicates the narrative of good versus evil, implying that we must confront the uncomfortable truth of our shared humanity, even when it leads to horrific actions.
In practice
Discussing the nature of evil in a philosophy class.
If we don't accept the uncomfortable proposition that every perpetrator of virtually every act of evil in our history has been a human being like us, then we actually foreclose the possibility of understanding how we do this to one another and therefore make it impossible to figure out how we might prevent these things.
In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.
My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again.
We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths.
People may assume 'The Act of Killing' is a historical documentary about what happened in 1965. But our purpose was to expose a present-day regime of fear for what it is.
I think 'The Act of Killing' forced people to look at the problem, but the problem is actually a state run by thugs, or a shadow state, a part of the state that's run by thugs, and a military that enjoys complete legal - not just impunity, but immunity.
A rogue does not laugh in the same way that an honest man does; a hypocrite does not shed the tears of a man of good faith. All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face.
Esteem must be founded on preference: to hold everyone in high esteem is to esteem nothing.
The Flower that once has blown forever dies.
At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.
Sometimes the story we're telling the world isn't half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.
In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.
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