Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2025
In today's human society, more and more people are less and less in agreement and that is the reason they fight among themselves. But why can't they understand each other? Why can't they get themselves out of this situation?
Luis Buñuel (in de la Colina and Turrent 1986, 160)No one should be astonished that men are so far removed from one another that they cannot understand one another, that they wage war and kill one another. One should be much more surprised that men believe they are close, understand one another, and love one another.
C. G. Jung (2009, 317–18)Prologue
In his book of interviews with the documentary maker Nick Broomfield, Jason Wood describes the following scene from Broomfield's 1975 film Juvenile Liaison, a case study of the questionable ‘no-nonsense’ methods employed by the officers of a police unit in Blackburn, Lancashire (UK) focused on young offenders from ‘impoverished working-class backgrounds’:
There's a sequence with a young Asian girl who is accused of stealing pencils, and what becomes all too apparent from the reaction of her teachers and from the female police officer who visits the girl's parents is that there is absolutely no understanding of this culture. The police officer is unable to even understand what the father of the girl is saying. (Wood 2005, 47; emphasis added)
Broomfield responds as follows:
One of the troubles, for all of us really, is that we grow up and are taught in a very particular moment of history, but history does not continue in that moment, so somebody who is trained at that moment will be out of date twenty years later – which was certainly the case with these teachers, who certainly needed to be retrained. They weren't bad people with a sadistic side to them; they were largely well-meaning people who just happened to be a little out of their depth. (Ibid.)
Broomfield isn't offering a general answer to the perennial question of why good people do bad things, let alone an account of how our evaluations of them relate to our evaluations of their deeds (see Sandis 2017a).
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