Big Think Post: Beyond Good and Evil

Today's topic on Big Think was Paleolithic morality. While I searched the articles connected to this topic, I found this video, which has a great deal to do with duality.

http://bigthink.com/videos/beyond-good-and-evil-understanding-our-capacity-for-moral-failure

The video starts off strong, establishing the speaker (the Dean of the Harvard Business school) as a credible, intelligent source who is obviously qualified to speak on the subject. The video corroborates one of my principal views on duality; that black and white are very rare in the world, with gray being very common (the colors representing, of course, evil and good and in-between the two). Personally, I feel that there are no people in the world who are completely good, and only a few people who are completely bad. My own opinion, as I believe I may have mentioned previously, is that we all have good sides and bad sides, making us both good and bad at the same time; a shade of gray, if you will. Owing to our own differences in personality, background and mentality, we each are a different shade of gray, some darker than others. (No reference to the literary pornography is intended, of course.) The human ego factors into the reason why we see the world in shades of black and white, as mentioned in the video. Thanks to our big heads, as Nohria mentions, we feel that when somebody does something horrible, or even slips up in a minor way, such a thing would never happen to us, because we feel that we are perfect beings living in an imperfect world, when we are actually flawed beings living in an equally flawed world. For example, it's easy for us to blame the citizens of Nazi Germany for the atrocities their nation committed to many people, and to assume that it would never happen to us. But say the economic crisis took a turn for the worse. Say that more than half the people in the nation lost their jobs. Say inflation was so bad, what could buy a Lamborghini today would be less than the price of a loaf of bread. And say a man brought us back from all that, and laid out a path for us to follow. Would you follow him? That's exactly what happened in Nazi Germany. No matter how you spin it, Hitler saved Germany as a whole from total destruction. And as for the Nazi citizens' guilt when it comes to the Holocaust, most of them were completely unaware. To the majority of the German people, Hitler was their hero, their savior. It's hard for us to view Hitler in any light that could even be remotely viewed as positive, of course, but try and see things from the perspective of the German people of the time, and that changes radically; from the 1930's German Protestant's point of view, it was hard to view Hitler in a light that was anything but positive. This in no way vindicates any of the atrocities that the Nazis committed, but, in all honesty, Americans would have acted the same way as the Germans did if the situation was reversed. So were the citizens of Nazi Germany black or white? We'd say black, thanks to our American egos, but in actuality, they were gray. A very dark gray, in some instances, but gray nonetheless.