‘In memoriam’ tributes sometimes describe a deceased acquaintance as “a perfect gentleman”. There is no such man. If you remove the masks that men wear in society, you’ll understand what Joseph de Maistre meant when he said: “I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be; I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.”
Long ago, in ancient Greece, the poet Theognis of Megara wrote that we should take human nature as we find it, “a mixture of ingredients good and bad – such are we all, the best that can be had.
“The best are found defective, and the rest, for common use, are equal to the best.”
People tend to see only the evil that others do, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed: “How simple it would be 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?”