I would like you to consider that a) the police may be nice to you, a local small town boy, in ways that they are not nice to others, and b) people who are nice

I would like you to consider that a) the police may be nice to you, a local small town boy, in ways that they are not nice to others, and b) people who are nice to some can in fact do terrible things to others. For example, consider slavery in America before emancipation. Lots of apparently perfectly lovely people were slave owners. It wasn't a few bad apples or a sprinkling of the lower orders. It was a wide swathe of the society's best, many Founding Fathers included, whose lives were built on massive cruelty to a subset of people because they didn't see them as people. Many were surely nice to their own and to those they saw as peers. And it's not like that sort of doublethink died out. For example, I am a nice person and I eat meat pretty regularly. I do that by ignoring the cruelty and violence performed on my dime. And when I can't ignore it, I have clever justifications for it. On the rare occasions I meet a cow I find them as charming as I do dogs and cats. Intellectually, I recognize the contradiction. And yet, I'm sure I have many more cheeseburgers ahead of me yet.