> It may very well have been the case, that without the bad, there could never have been the good - they were inexorably linked.
I think there's something important to this notion. I once read a biography of Churchill that suggested Churchill's distrust of Hitler in the 1930's partly sprang from Churchill being the kind of egomaniac who could recognize an egomaniac. I'm sure I've done neither Churchill nor the book justice in this description, but I think there's support for the notion that personality doesn't simply or easily decompose into good parts and bad parts.
[1] 'The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940', William Manchester
Churchill's an interesting example to bring up in what has become a thread about hero worship. The man was revered during the war and in all the gosh-wasn't-it-a-romantic-age reminiscences since; so much so that they gloss over things like his having proposed the Battle of Gallipoli and being sacked from the cabinet for that; his being the first person to push using gas on the Kurds (beating Saddam to it by quite a few years); and him being the only wartime leader to be ousted by a landslide majority before the war ended (and thus getting himself chucked out of cabinet in both world wars -- I don't think anyone else managed to do that either).
It does rather support the idea that hero worship is a really bad waste of time at best, and downright dangerous at worst...
I think there's something important to this notion. I once read a biography of Churchill that suggested Churchill's distrust of Hitler in the 1930's partly sprang from Churchill being the kind of egomaniac who could recognize an egomaniac. I'm sure I've done neither Churchill nor the book justice in this description, but I think there's support for the notion that personality doesn't simply or easily decompose into good parts and bad parts.
[1] 'The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940', William Manchester