The road to hell is paved by good people

If you believe in the First Principle (uh-oh, there he goes again mabel), that it is self-evidently true that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable natural rights, then you understand that there are no good people and there are no bad people. There are just people. People who take actions which are both good and bad.

Now everybody knows that the taliban and isis are bad people, right? I mean they chop off peoples heads and machine-gun children mutilate the genitals of little girls. Bad people, right? Only bad people do bad things, right?

And you're a good person, right? You would never do those kind of bad things, right?

Oh really?

Down throughout history, from the time when Cain slew Abel to the genocide happening right this minute in Syria and Venezuela and North Korea and Bolivia and Somalia, in every case, the killers were normal people who thought of themselves as good people. When confronted with the choice of doing good or doing evil, their choice came down to whether or not they actually believed in the First Principle, whether they believed in treating others as they themselves would be treated, whether they believed in holding themselves to the same standard they held others to.

We never know when we're going to face a crisis in which we have to choose to do good or to do evil. History tells us that those who don't already know the right path when the crisis arrives will pick one that appears to be easiest or least immediately painful.

So yeah. Those guys at Babi Yar? They weren't bad people. They were just people. People who made a conscious decision to do bad stuff, to perpetuate evil.

Far better to know that you are simply a person, nothing special, and just as capable of doing good and bad as the next person. Otherwise you might not have worked out what you will not allow yourself to do, and why.