How Do You Become An Ice Agent or an Anti-Ice Protestor? Us or Them? You Could Be Either More Easily Than You Think

“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

One of the most dangerous myths we carry is the belief that evil lives somewhere else—in other people, other nations, other eras of history. It is comforting, but it is not true.

What social psychology, history, and lived experience tell us—again and again—is that the capacity for cruelty and the capacity for courage live side by side in all of us. Which one emerges often depends less on who we think we are and more on the situations we find ourselves in, the roles we are given, and the people around us.

Dr. Philip Zimbardo spent much of his life trying to help us face this truth without despair. In his research, he showed how quickly ordinary people can change when placed in environments shaped by power, anonymity, stress, and dehumanization.

In the Stanford Prison Experiment, students assigned to be “guards” became increasingly harsh, while those labeled “prisoners” grew passive and withdrawn. Zimbardo later acknowledged the experiment’s flaws, but its central insight has been confirmed many times since: situations matter, roles matter, and systems shape behavior more than we like to admit.

The world saw this with devastating clarity in 2004, when images emerged from Abu Ghraib prison, located about twenty miles west of Baghdad, Iraq. Iraqi detainees were humiliated, tied to leashes, stripped of dignity, and abused by U.S. military guards. These were not people who had set out to become symbols of cruelty. They were young, ordinary Americans operating inside a system that normalized dehumanization, rewarded compliance, blurred moral boundaries, and punished dissent.

Zimbardo testified not to excuse what happened, but to warn us that if we only blame “bad people,” we guarantee that the conditions which produce harm will remain intact.

This lesson is not confined to prisons or war zones. We see it in policing, politics, workplaces, online spaces, and families. Research shows that small cues—uniforms, titles, briefcases, group language—can quietly reduce empathy. Stress narrows moral imagination. Us-versus-them thinking spreads quickly. Silence becomes a form of participation. None of this requires malice. It only requires momentum.

This is why the story of Isak Gasi matters so deeply to me.

I came to know Isak personally and later endorsed the book Eyewitness: My Journey to The Hague, written with Shaun Koos. Isak was a Bosnian Muslim, an international rower, a husband and father, living an ordinary and meaningful life before war tore Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s. He was imprisoned and tortured in a Serbian prison camp, not because of anything he had done, but because of who he was said to be.

What has stayed with me is not only what Isak endured, but how he survived without surrendering his humanity. Early in the conflict, when ethnic categories began to dominate everything, Isak and his wife were asked to declare what they were. In a small but telling act of resistance, they answered that they were Eskimos—a refusal to let identity be weaponized.

Later, in the camp, Isak worked quietly against the brainwashing that taught guards to see prisoners as less than human. He spoke of his children. He spoke of his life before the war. He reminded them, again and again, that he was a person, not a category.

One reason Isak survived was that he was sometimes seen as more human—an athlete, a father, a man with a story. That should unsettle us. It shows how easily dehumanization takes hold, and how powerful even small acts of humanizing resistance can be.

Solzhenitsyn understood this from the inside of the Gulag. Evil is not something we can lock away in one group and declare ourselves safe. The line runs through us all. The question is how we stay awake to it.

There are concrete things we can do to reduce the pull toward harmful action when we find ourselves in morally risky situations.

The first is to slow the moment down. Situations gain power when everything feels urgent and unquestionable. Pausing—physically and mentally—creates space for choice.

The second is to name what is happening, even if only to yourself. Saying, “This feels like dehumanization,” or “This is how harm escalates,” activates moral awareness and weakens automatic compliance.

The third is to redefine your role before someone else does. Instead of “I’m just following orders” or “This is how things are done here,” choose a different identity: witness, protector, bridge-builder, conscience-keeper. Zimbardo called this cultivating the heroic imagination—training ourselves to see intervention as normal, not exceptional.

Equally important is paying attention to who we are “hanging out with,” morally speaking. Group norms are powerful. When cruelty is laughed at, minimized, or rewarded, it spreads.

When empathy is modeled and reinforced, it spreads too. Seeking out people who value dignity, questioning voices that rely on contempt, and refusing to participate in casual dehumanization are not small acts. They are preventive ones.

And what if you find yourself on the other side—when others are dehumanizing you?

Isak Gasi’s life offers guidance here as well. One response is to make your humanity unmistakable whenever possible. Speak of your relationships, your work, your losses, your hopes. This does not guarantee safety, and it does not mean accepting abuse, but it can interrupt the story others are telling about you.

Another is to resist internalizing the lie. Dehumanization works best when it convinces its targets that they are, in fact, less than. Holding onto your own narrative—through memory, writing, prayer, trusted witnesses, or community—is an act of survival and defiance. And finally, when possible, seek allies. Isolation is one of the most powerful tools of harm. Connection, even fragile connection, restores perspective.

The good life is not about believing we are immune to evil. We are not, but to be able to do it successfully, we must dehumanize the other. Otherwise it doesn't work well. One thing we have going for us as humans is that we don't like killing or hurting other humans as a rule. So it's about designing lives, communities, and systems that make seeing our common humanity easier - compassion easier and demonization and cruelty harder.

It is about vigilance and courage practiced in ordinary moments before history demands it.

The line runs through us all. Each day, in small ways, we decide which side of it we will tend. And of course, we all know it, the legend of the Cherokee grandfather and his grandson, the one about the two wolves. Which one wins? The one we feed. That story was the first one Shaun Koos told me to pay attention to when we met to discuss the book. He looked at me knowingly. That story holds a lot of wisdom and guidance for us today...

And though we must hold each other accountable for our actions, perhaps it also allows us to find a bit of compassion for ALL of us humans.

How might we journey together to the good life by being aware, mindful, vigilant of what prompts us toward good or evil and make sure that we feed the good in us?

And if you have some extra time and would like to feed your good wolf, may I suggest re-reading the blog, Survival of the Kindest...especially take a look at the cartoon.