People generally want to be good, but they’ll commit any number of atrocities if society says it’s okay. Like eating meat and driving cars. It’s pure, unfiltered evil, but it obeys their idea of what the social construct is, so they do it.
What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, holocaust survivor.