Would you secretly kill someone to get the things you want the most?

By David McElroy · January 4, 2015

Are you a good person? Or a bad person? Are you capable of theft? Deception? Murder? Is it a black-and-white question? Or is the answer a lot more gray — for all of us?

One of my favorite podcasts of 2014 was a spinoff of This American Life called Serial. In 12 episodes, the show explored a 15-year-old murder case, seeking to answer the question of whether the right man is in prison for the crime. (If you haven’t heard the show, I recommend it.)

In one of the final episodes of the season, the reporter spent a tremendous amount of time going over and over the question of whether the guy in prison seems like a killer or not. She seemed tormented by the need to know whether the man she had been interviewing could possibly have committed the murder.

She seemed obsessed with answering that question. Was this guy capable of murder?

I think she was asking the wrong question, so let me set it up in a different way. Let’s talk about you instead of the man sitting in prison for a murder which I suspect he didn’t commit.

Let’s say there’s something you want badly. I don’t just mean a new television or a boat or even a fancy house. I’m talking about something you’re emotionally committed to. Maybe it’s a woman who you’re in love with. (Or a man.) Maybe it’s some money that you think is rightfully yours. Maybe it’s some position of prestige or power that you believe should be yours.

With all of those things, let’s say that you want the person or thing, but there’s one other person standing in your way. Would you kill that person to get what you desperately want?

Now, let’s further refine the question. Let’s say that some omnipotent power gives you a big red button. You have been given a magical power. You can kill someone of your choice just by pressing this button. Nobody will ever know. The death will be immediate and painless. The other person will simply cease to exist. But with that person out of the way, you can have the thing or person that you desperately want.

Would you press that big red button?

Most of the people I know would like to say they wouldn’t do it. We want to believe we are “good people” — whatever that means. But I think a lot more of us would do it than would be willing to admit it, even to ourselves. Since we know that isn’t possible, it’s easy for us to feel good about ourselves by saying we wouldn’t do something so evil.

I started thinking about this a few years ago, because there was something I wanted badly at the time which I could have had if one person had simply ceased to exist. As I examined my thoughts and passions, I started to ask myself whether I would kill this person if I had the chance and if I knew I couldn’t possibly get caught. It was easy to wish somebody would die — and then feel the horrible guilt of the wrongness of it — but it’s another thing to ask whether you’re capable of killing.

I never could answer the question, but the very fact that I couldn’t say for sure told me something about dark corners of my own soul that I prefer not to explore.

As far as most others are concerned, I’m a “good person.” I try to help others when I reasonably can. I try to follow a strict moral and ethical code for myself. But the more I explore this question, the more I’m aware that every “good person” has evil that he keeps hidden — and every “bad person” has good that others probably prefer not to see.

When I was a child, a friend and I had access to a locker room where athletes’ clothes were stored while their team practiced, but nobody knew we had access. While nobody was in there, we went through the pockets of some of the players and stole money from them. It wasn’t a lot of money, probably enough to buy candy or drinks for ourselves. It probably wasn’t even enough for the victims to be certain that money was missing.

But we were thieves. We still saw ourselves as “good boys.” Nobody around us would have suspected that we were capable of such things. Even to this day, I suspect this is the only time I’ve ever mentioned it to anyone, because it was one of my shameful secrets.

There have been a few other times in life when I did things that I knew were wrong, despite the fact that I’m a “good person” with good morals and a Christian faith that many people would assume would stop me from doing wrong. But I’ve had the ability at times to justify what I wanted to do — despite clearly knowing it was wrong.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot again lately. The question on Serial frustrated me and I found myself wanting to yell back at the reporter. I wanted to say, “Of course Adnan is capable of having killed Hae. We’re all capable of doing dark deeds, even if we don’t think so.”

There’s something else I’ve wanted lately — needed very badly, in fact — that I think I could have if one person were dead. I certainly haven’t been plotting a murder, but I’ve wished this person might die. I always feel terrible when I think that — even for a moment — and I’m left wondering just what I might be capable of.

I’m not sure I want to know.

Despite all our progress, humans are still essentially savages who are driven by passions. We don’t like to see this, especially about our own sinful selves. Underneath the thin veneer of civilization, there’s tremendous potential for evil, even though we prefer to present another image to the world — even if we act as though it’s “those other people” who are capable of evil things, not us.

What is it that keeps me on the straight and narrow path of morality? Is it my own moral and ethical code? Is it my belief in a God who I don’t want to disappoint? Is it our strong cultural and religious training about right and wrong? Or is it simply the fear of being caught and punished?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. I truly want to believe that I’m good. I want to believe I’m moral and ethical. I want to believe that I wouldn’t hurt other people. I look around me at people like you and I want to believe the people I love are also “good people” who wouldn’t do anything wrong.

But I have to question everything — about you and about myself and about everyone else — because in a dark corner of my soul, there lives a cold, calculating part of me that would be willing to press that red button.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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