I was recently rereading an abridged version of The Gulag Archipelago and came across one of the most famous lines:

But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

This line gets at the nature of human beings and the fate of every individual. But as I read the sentences around this quote, I picked some sociological leanings. Here is more of the passage:

So let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good an evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

An individualistic reading may not be the only one. Solzhenitsyn argues this issue faces every person. Individuals did make choices for evil and good but a these do not take place in a vacuum. At the same time, we can be swayed toward evil. He mentions “various circumstances.” Those might be our reactions to situations but it could also be about the people and norms around us. How much harder is to choose good when the people and institutions around us are pushing a different direction? The archipelago described in the book is not solely the result of one person; it was a system developed over time that involved millions. By the time Solzhenitsyn encountered the gulag, it had been operating for decades and would continue to do so.