We are all evil, we are all good. What side we end up walking on is a result of so many things that listing them would be exhausting. We are all victims or beneficiaries of our nature, our surroundings, our dna and our own minds.
Some people are born with urges that makes them do evil acts, some are trained to be evil, some are so evil that they desperately fight to do good regardless of what it costs them. We have laws to protect, to deter, to punish, but our laws are tainted by the people who wrote them.
We allow murders in certain situations, self defense and war comes to mind first, we allow a whole host of evil acts in the name of protecting our communities way of life. Just because we no longer live in little tribes consisting of a few families, doesn't mean that we are not just larger versions of what was.
We have prison's to punish the guilty, yet what does prison do, what does locking criminals up with other criminals accomplish? How many prisoners come out of prison rehabilitated as valued members of society and how many end up right back in prison after a time?
One of the more interesting statements I've heard was that "Your normal soldier will not aim to kill an enemy unless ordered to do so by a superior officer, a sociopath will aim to kill." This means that sociopaths do make better soldiers in wartime purely because of their ability to kill other human beings without facing any psychological or physical backlash from their actions.
This made me take a look back at history, at men and women who are deemed great by history and take a look at their actions. Olaf Haraldson, also known as "Olaf the holy" after his sainthood, the patron saint of Norway was a massmurderer who made Norway a Christian country by force.
"Olaf, a rather stubborn and rash ruler, prone to rough treatment of his enemies, ironically became Norway's patron saint. His canonization was performed only a year after his death by the bishop of Nidaros. The cult of Olaf not only unified the country, it also fulfilled the conversion of the nation, something for which the king had fought so hard." From Wikipedia.
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