Article: Why People Reject Goodness: What Plato, a Nazi-Era Psychiatrist, and the Cross Have in Common

Let’s take a trip through time through four different time periods. There are four different witnesses who all come to the same conclusion.

1.   Plato 375 BC

Plato once wrote, “If a perfectly moral man entered this world, he would be humiliated and impaled.” This quote comes from Plato’s Republic, centuries before crucifixion became a common Roman method of execution.

In the Republic, there is a character named Glaucon who is actually Plato’s older brother. In one section of the book, Socrates and his companions debate the nature of justice — what it is, whether it’s worth having, and what it does to the person who possesses a just heart. The conversation in the book centers around lifting up the importance of being just.

Glaucon decides to play devil’s advocate. So, he pushes Socrates to make a real case for justice, not just an easy answer or a virtuous reply.

So Glaucon sets up a scenario: imagine the perfectly just man, a perfect man of principles. Now strip away every reward and reputation for being just in society (not a far stretch, right?). Next, accuse the perfectly just man of injustice even though it is a false allegation.  What happens?

Glaucon’s answer is unflinching — others will destroy him because they now have the justification to get rid of the just man. They will get rid of him because the perfectly just man makes everyone else “look bad.” This man will be whipped, tortured, and impaled.

The word Plato uses in the Republic is this: anastaurōthēsetai — literally means fixed to a stake. A cross.

From Isaiah 53:  He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away. For the transgression of my people, he was stricken.

What Glaucon Is Actually Saying

Glaucon isn’t primarily making a point about corrupt governments. He’s making a point about human nature.

His argument is that human beings pursue self-interest by nature. We value the reputation of being just (in appearances only) and its benefits of social standing, and the trust of others. But actual justice itself or being an actual just person is not what humanity actually desires.

The perfectly just man is dangerous not because he threatens people physically, but because he exposes everyone else as a fraud. This just man’s very existence holds up a mirror to everyone else’s compromises and shortfalls.

And that is intolerable to those who are exposed as less than just. So “society” destroys the just man — not through some organized conspiracy of evil, but through the ordinary operation of ordinary people protecting their common and shared self-interest.

Glaucon gets the mechanism right. He just doesn’t know what to do with it. So let’s move ahead.

From Isaiah 53: But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.

2.    Dr. Douglas Kelley and the Ordinary Men 1946 AD

In 1945 and 1946, American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley was assigned to evaluate the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials. He expected to find monsters — people whose psychology would explain the horror of the Holocaust by being fundamentally aberrant.

What he found was the opposite. The men who ran the Nazi regime were, by every clinical measure that he could apply, psychologically normal. No diagnosable pathology. No clinical evil. They were ordinary men who had operated within a system that rewarded self-interest, punished conscience, and stripped justice of any social benefit.

Kelley’s conclusion disturbed him for the rest of his life: the conditions and people that produced the Holocaust were not unique to Germany. American institutions — political, corporate, social — could produce the same people under the same conditions. He wasn’t being provocative. He was being clinical.

This is Glaucon’s mechanism confirmed at scale. The machinery of atrocity doesn’t require monsters. It requires ordinary people doing what ordinary people do — pursuing reputation and reward (making a name for themselves), avoiding the cost of genuine justice, and destroying the person whose existence exposes their false and shallow justice.

From Exodus 23: Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd…

3.   Mel Gibson 2002 AD

When Mel Gibson directed The Passion of the Christ, he made one quiet directorial choice that most viewers missed. In the crucifixion sequence, when the nail is driven through Jesus’ hand, the hand holding the hammer belongs to Gibson himself.

Gibson has said, “I am responsible for his death as is all of humanity.”

It’s a theologically precise act. If Glaucon is right, if Kelley’s data confirms it, if Paul is right in Romans 3 — then the crucifixion of Jesus is not something done by the authorities to Jesus. It is something done by all of us to Jesus.

The cross is not the product of exceptional evil. It is the product of our broken human nature, doing what it always does when it meets uncorrupted righteousness. It is a mirror reflecting the human response to the righteousness found in Plato’s “perfectly moral man.”

Gibson put himself in the frame literally to make sure no one watching could locate the guilt somewhere else. The hammer isn’t a Roman soldier’s hammer. It belongs to the director. It belongs to the viewer.

Saint Paul doesn’t soften what Glaucon and Kelley already showed us.

From Romans 3: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.” “The poison of vipers is on their lips.” “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.” “Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know.”

The Full Circle

What’s remarkable about this convergence is that these four witnesses — a Greek philosopher, a World War II psychiatrist, a Hollywood filmmaker, and the Apostle Paul — arrived at the same place independently.

The world cannot tolerate genuine righteousness. Not because it is uniquely corrupt, but because it is ordinarily human. The cross is not an anomaly in history. It is what happens when perfect justice enters a world built on the management of self-interest.

Plato saw it coming and called it a tragedy. Kelley saw it in a courtroom and called it a warning. Gibson saw it in a script and put his own hand on the hammer.

The gospels call this “the good news of God’s love” — but only after we see the scandal and the injustice of the cross and our part in it.

From Romans 3: God presented Jesus as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. God did this to demonstrate his justice, because in God’s forbearance he had left the sins committed before Jesus’ death unpunished, God did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.

God bless,
Pr. Ben