Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

by Jared Diamond

“The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs.”

We may subconsciously expect people to be homogeneously “good” or “bad,” as if there were a single quality of virtue that should shine through every aspect of a person’s behavior. If we find people virtuous or admirable in one respect, it troubles us to find them not so in another respect. It is difficult for us to acknowledge that people are not consistent, but are instead mosaics of traits formed by different sets of experiences that often do not correlate with each other.