Mann's insight on the nature of evil

--"And yet: this moral fibre, surviving the hampering and disintegrating simplification, does it not result in its turn in a dangerous simplification, in a tendency to equate the world and the human soul, and thus to strengthen the hold of the evil, the forbidden, and the ethically impossible? And has not form two aspects? It is not moral and immoral at once: moral insofar as it is the expression and result of discipline, immoral--yes, actually hostile to morality--in that of its very essence it is indifferent to good and evil, and deliberately concerned to make the world stoop beneath its proud and undivided sphere?"

Death in Venice