Inside Man's Final Take On Humanity Is So Wrong

 I don't think there are any serious spoilers here.  Inside Man (on Netflix) is going where it's going, no major surprises.  

At the end,  Stanley Tucci, as Jefferson Grieff, gives a short soliloquy on the theme "We're all murderers given the right situations."

I just want to push back on that belief.  Particularly since it will give lots of already hyped up MAGA folks more justification for violence and murder.  

Is every human being capable of murder under the right conditions?  NO.  What about being capable of killing?  I think more people could kill another under the right conditions, but for many the conditions would have to be extreme indeed.  

From a Chicago Tribune column by Rabbi Marc Gellman:

"In biblical Hebrew, as in English, killing (harag) and murder (ratzah) are two different words with two very different moral connotations, and the commandment uses the Hebrew word ratzah, which means that the proper translation of the commandment from Hebrew into English is, "Thou shalt not murder." The difference is crucial.

Killing is taking a life. Murder is taking a life with no moral justification. Murder is morally wrong, but there is wide moral agreement (not complete agreement) that some forms of killing are morally just. . ."

This is more or less consistent with a number of other writings I saw on the topic.  

But Grieff's take (the Tucci character) is that every person is capable of murder, and the examples in this short Netflix series are not even extreme.  They're more about stupid decisions getting way out of hand.  We've got a beloved (in his community) vicar who apparently loves his wife (and she him) as well as his son.  And then he makes a series of terrible decisions.  

I'm with 

"Anita Singh of The Daily Telegraph [who] said, "Moffat can throw any amount of good lines or clever little plot twists into this show, but it is built on a flaw so fundamental that it's impossible to get past it."[5]"  (from Wikipedia)

Under normal social conditions, a relatively small percent of our population will ever become murders.  Probably a few more might actually kill someone.  I'm not making this up.  The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says that in 2017, world wide, 6.1 out of 100,000 people were murdered.  

That's less than one percent.  And we know some murderers kill more than one person, so the percentage of murderers is lower than the percentage of people murdered.  I'd note that in the Americas, the rate of murder was almost three times the world average at 17.1 per 100,000.  

In a Zombie Apocalypse?  Probably the percent will go up, if killing Zombies counts as murder, but it would be most likely in self-defense.  

So NO!  Most people are not capable of murder.  They might be capable of killing another human being if circumstances got really extreme.  The circumstances in Inside Man were not extreme and the people involved made really stupid decisions that I doubt the real human beings those characters were meant to portray would have made.  

(Am I saying religious leaders aren't capable of murder?  Not at all.  Many have taken such positions because of the status attached and are capable of such evil actions as promoting laws that ban abortions in all circumstances.  Those aren't real men or women of God.  These are people who want power over other people, over women.  The vicar in the series was not presented as that kind of man of God.)