There’s a comforting myth we like to tell ourselves: people are basically good. Scratch the surface, though, and history offers a far harsher lesson. Ordinary men and women—neighbors, clerks, bus drivers, and teachers—have again and again transformed into enforcers of cruelty when authority granted them permission. From Nazi Germany’s concentration camps, to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge killing fields, to the brutal treatment of migrants in U.S. detention centers, the evidence piles up: humans, when allowed, often become awful.

The Illusion of Morality

We assume morality is fixed inside each person, a kind of internal compass that always points toward compassion. Yet morality is largely contextual. Authority bends it. Culture reframes it. When power structures declare that cruelty is acceptable—even necessary—ordinary people often comply without hesitation.

Stanley Milgram’s famous 1960s experiment demonstrated this vividly: volunteers, told by a scientist to administer shocks to a stranger, pushed the dial far past what they believed to be dangerous levels. Their conscience wavered, but obedience carried the day. It wasn’t sadism driving them; it was permission.

The Nazi Machine of Death

It is tempting to think the Holocaust was engineered only by fanatics. In reality, it required legions of ordinary Germans: railway workers who scheduled trains to Auschwitz, secretaries who typed orders, guards who turned the key on the gas chamber doors. Very few believed themselves to be villains; they believed themselves to be following orders. The state not only gave permission but demanded it, and millions complied.

The Khmer Rouge and the Logic of Purity

In 1970s Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge regime unleashed a frenzy of killing in the name of ideological purity. Teachers, intellectuals, monks—even children—were targeted. Neighbors betrayed neighbors. Young recruits, barely teenagers, beat prisoners to death with sticks to save bullets. Why? Because permission was everywhere. The state redefined brutality as duty, and cruelty became virtue.

ICE and the Modern Bureaucracy of Cruelty

We need not look only to distant atrocities. In the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has drawn criticism for practices that dehumanize migrants: family separations, abusive detention conditions, and preventable deaths in custody. Agents may insist they are simply enforcing the law, yet the logic is familiar. The institution grants permission to treat human beings as less than human, and ordinary individuals follow through.

This isn’t genocide, but it is the same principle in miniature: when permission is given, the moral brakes come off.

The Feral Truth

So what does this imply about human nature? At our core, stripped of restraint, humans may not default to kindness but to cruelty. Civilization is less a triumph of innate goodness and more a fragile cage built from laws, empathy, and accountability. Remove those bars, and the feral animal emerges.

We are not monsters all the time. Most people, most of the time, treat others decently. But the fact that cruelty can be switched on so quickly suggests that decency is not as natural as we’d like to believe. It is cultivated, enforced, and constantly in danger of erosion.

Lessons for Today

This recognition is not an argument for despair—it is a call for vigilance. If cruelty is our default when permission is granted, then society must never hand out that permission lightly. Safeguards matter:

• Transparency prevents hidden abuses.
• Oversight ensures authority can’t operate unchecked.
• Education teaches citizens to question commands.
• Dissent must be protected, because silence is the accomplice of cruelty.

The lesson is clear. When permission is given, humans can become awful. Our task is to resist the systems that grant that permission, to remember that law does not equal morality, and to defend the fragile structures that keep the feral side of humanity in check.

Because once permission is granted, history shows us where the road leads.