Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, one of those who had to experience the brutality of real left-wing violence in the Soviet gulags, said it best: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
We are all capable of evil. A good belief system can often guide us further from this capacity, but as we’ve all seen countless times, as our heroes are revealed to be monsters, there is no short supply of moral failures and hypocrites in even the wisest moral traditions.
The binary option of “right wing” and “left wing” can blind us to this. Personality psychologists have long known that those who prioritize the security and reliability found in institutions will be more likely to support the “right,” and those that are more open to change will support the “left.” But it’s obviously simplistic to think that a society should never change its institutions and traditions, or conversely, that they should always be throwing them into chaos.
Some institutions should be torn down (like slavery), others need tweaking, and others should be defended at all costs. Historically, the “far right” (like fascists, monarchists, and theocrats) has been willing to commit acts of violence to defend the institutions, “right or wrong,” which is close-minded and a net-negative for society. But the “far left” has often been willing to tear down these institutions (think of efforts to abolish the police, abolish ICE, abolish the gender binary), without considering if those might be societal load-bearing structures.
There are countless examples of when this leveling spirit, as Edmund Burke called it, caused just as much, and often much more, violence as that caused by reactionary protection of institutions from the right. If you doubt that, read up on the horrors of the French and Russian revolutions and their aftermath.
So, if after every tragedy you find yourself immediately confirming all your prior assumptions that the other guy is the source of all evil, even if the facts have not yet come to that conclusion, maybe take a moment of self-reflection. While you’re undoubtedly correct that there is evil in your enemy, there is some buried in you as well.