Daily Inspiration Quote by Hans Bender

It is the kind of sentence that sounds liberating until you notice how neatly it dodges responsibility. When Hans Bender claims “Good and evil do not exist for me any more,” he’s not just rejecting moral categories; he’s staging a therapist’s version of transcendence, where the messy work of judgment gets rebranded as psychological immaturity. The follow-up line sharpens the move: evil isn’t denied because history is kind, but because fear itself is diagnosed as “mass projection,” a collective hallucination shared “here and on Earth.” That phrasing smuggles in a cosmology: the speaker stands above the crowd, viewing both the local and the planetary from a cooler, supposedly clinical altitude.

As a psychologist working in an era saturated with world war, propaganda, and the long afterimage of totalitarianism, Bender’s posture reads as both understandable and risky. Psychology, especially in its mid-century ambition, often wanted to demystify the moral panic machine: how groups manufacture devils, how dread becomes contagious, how “evil” can be a story used to justify violence. But the quote also flirts with a too-clean reduction. Calling fear of evil a projection can illuminate scapegoating; it can also flatten real harm into mere perception, turning victims into data points in someone else’s theory.

The intent, then, is double-edged: to puncture hysteria and moral absolutism, and to claim a kind of serenity. The subtext is power. If good and evil “do not exist” for you, you get to decide which alarms are irrational - and which realities don’t count.