Will Smith was quoted two or three days ago saying he’d been misinterpreted over a recent remark he passed along to a reporter for the Scottish Daily Record about Adolf Hitler. “Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today,'” Smith said. “I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good.”‘
Exactly. Of course. Each and every person believes that whatever the world might think of them or their deeds, they’re basically decent, reasonable-minded folk whose mothers and in-laws think well of them. They also see themselves as trying to carry out or at least live by a plan that is not only moral but, in a certain way, visionary. Everybody has a rationale. Every bad guy looks in the bathroom mirror every morning and goes, “I’m not a bad guy. I have my flaws, my mistakes I have to live with. But I’m not that bad, not that bad.”
And of course, people have given Smith a hard time for saying this. The Daily Record reporter allegedly wrote, “Remarkably, Will believes everyone is basically good.” Remarkably, some people go through life with their heads encased in concrete.