Roy F. Baunmeister
| Consider the following questions as you read the selection below: 1. Can ordinary people commit evil acts, or does evil require an “evil” personality? Consider the idea of the “banality of evil” and how everyday individuals may participate in harmful systems. 2. Which of the four root causes of evil—material gain, threatened egotism, idealism, or sadism—do you think is most responsible for violence and injustice in society today? Why? 3. Can humanity ever eliminate evil, or is evil an unavoidable part of human existence? Use philosophical, psychological, or sociological perspectives to support your answer. |
Why, then, is there evil: crime, violence, oppression, cruelty, and the rest? As we have seen, there is no single or simple answer. Evil does not exist in terms of solitary actions by solitary individuals. Perpetrators and victims—and in many cases, bystanders or observers, too—are necessary to the vast majority of evil acts. Evil is socially enacted and constructed. It does not reside in our genes or in our soul, but in the way we relate to other people. Evil requires the deliberate actions of one person, the suffering of another, and the perception or judgment of either the second person or an observer. Very few people see their own actions as evil, and hardly any acts are regarded as evil if they do not bring harm, pain, or suffering to someone. Occasionally, masturbation, intoxication, or blasphemy may be considered evil even though no one is hurt, but victimless evil is a marginal, derivative category. Victimization is generally essential to evil. Victims are the first persons to spot evil. Because evil depends so heavily on the perceptions of the victim (along with those of observers who identify with the victim), it is disturbing to the social scientist to realize how many biases and distortions shape the victim’s perceptions. I have called these stereotypes collectively the myth of pure evil. Social scientists are fully prepared for whitewashing rationalizations on the part of perpetrators, but to recognize the extent to which everyone else’s perceptions are also biased discourages one about the prospects of seeing through to the essential nature of evil. People tend to adapt real events to their expectations, based on the myth of pure evil. The result is a scenario involving wholly innocent, well-meaning victims attacked for no valid reason by arrogant, sadistic, out-of-control evildoers who hate peace and beauty and get pleasure from making people suffer.
There are four major root causes of evil, or reasons that people act in ways that others will perceive as evil. Ordinary, well-intentioned people may perform evil acts when under the influence of these factors, singly or in combination. Combinations are harder to defeat.
The first root cause of evil is the simple desire for material gain, such as money or power. These ends are not universally regarded as wrong, although occasionally a religious group or other authority has condemned the desire itself. What distinguishes evil in these cases is not the ends, however, but the means. Everyone wants money, but only criminals use violence to get it. Violent or evil means are chosen because the individual does not think that more legitimate means will be successful. Violent and evil means often do furnish short-term, limited success, but in the long run they do not reliably furnish the material benefits they were intended to bring. At best, violence seems to be an effective tool for creating and sustaining power relationships.
The second root of evil is threatened egotism. Villains, bullies, criminals, killers, and other evildoers have high self-esteem, contrary to the comfortable fiction that has recently spread through American culture. Violence results when a person’s favorable image of self is questioned or impugned by someone else. Showing disrespect, attacking someone’s honor, insulting or humiliating someone, or in some other way causing a person to lose face will often elicit an aggressive response. The people (or groups or countries) most prone to violence are the ones who are most susceptible to ego threats, especially those who have inflated, exalted opinions of themselves or whose normally high self-esteem does occasionally take a nosedive. Moreover, violence is usually directed toward the source of the ego threat (or occasionally, a meaningful substitute). Such violence may often fall short of providing proof of the disputed self-worth, but it does intimidate, silence, and punish the critic, and it boosts the ego by establishing dominance over the critic.
The third root of evil is idealism. When people believe firmly that they are on the side of the good and are working to make the world a better place, they often feel justified in using strong measures against the seemingly evil forces that oppose them. Noble ends are often seen as justifying violent means. In reality, such means often discredit and contaminate the noble goals, but this outcome is rarely anticipated. Human nature inclines people to align themselves in groups that square off against each other, each group seeing itself as good and the other as bad. Group competition can evolve into brutal conflict in which each side sincerely sees itself as the good guys who need to take strong measures to defeat the forces of evil that oppose them. When the perpetrators are driven by idealism, the victims do not get much mercy.
The fourth root of evil is the pursuit of sadistic pleasure. This root is responsible for a much smaller proportion of the world’s evil than the others, and indeed most observations of killers, torturers, rapists, and similar evildoers indicate that only about 5 or 6 percent of perpetrators actually get enjoyment out of inflicting harm. Moreover, sadism appears to be an acquired taste. Possibly, it emerges from the body’s natural pattern of compensating for unpleasant emotional reactions with positive feelings, so that people might learn to enjoy torturing or killing in much the same way as they learn to enjoy skydiving despite the innate fear of falling. Still, most people do not seem to learn to enjoy hurting others (possibly because they refuse to let themselves do so, out of guilt or empathy). What looks to victims like sadism, such as when perpetrators laugh among themselves, may be simply insensitivity or camaraderie.
All told, the four root causes of evil are pervasive, which leads one to wonder why violence and oppression are not even more common than they are. The answer is that violent impulses are typically restrained by inner inhibitions; people exercise self-control to avoid lashing out at others every time they might feel like it. The four root causes of evil must therefore be augmented by an understanding of the proximal cause, which is the breakdown of these internal restraints. Self-control may fail because upbringing and socialization have not made it strong enough, because the capacity for self-control is depleted by stress, because being emotionally upset makes people cease to care, or because the culture tells people that it is appropriate to lose self-control under some circumstances. Many instances of profound evil begin with a small, ambiguous act that crosses a fuzzy line and then escalates gradually into ever greater levels of violence. In groups, especially, evil escalates as the group members bring out one another’s worst impulses, lose track of individual responsibility, and reinforce one another’s wavering faith in the broad justifications for what they are doing.
Harming another person typically makes one feel bad, although this feeling often takes the form of physical disgust rather than pangs of conscience. Many evildoers work out elaborate justifications by which they convince themselves that what they are doing is acceptable and that they should ignore their own unpleasant feelings. Victims and observers often find these justifications to be feeble and absurdly inadequate. But perpetrators make them work by building them around some palpable grains of truth and by refusing to subject them to critical scrutiny. When they want to believe that their actions are justified, they can often manage to do so. The justifications look weak to victims and outsiders because victims and outsiders are far less motivated to accept them.
The myth of pure evil may portray cohesive, dedicated groups of evildoers preying on homogeneous ranks of innocent victims, but in actual cases of evil there tends to be division on both sides. Some members of the victim group collaborate with and accept the perpetrators, and some members of the perpetrator group object to the violence and try to help the victims. In addition, there is often a large group of uninvolved bystanders who may have far more power than they realize.
These are the broad outlines of the structure of evil. It is important to acknowledge that there are many other factors that can make a difference by altering the odds of aggressive action or affecting the degree to which victims will suffer. Researchers on aggression, for example, have identified an impressive assortment of moderator variables, such as hot weather and aggressive cues, and although this book has not devoted much space to them,1 they are real and important. This book has emphasized the root causes and the subjective processes of evil. There is ample room in this theoretical framework for moderator variables, which are indeed often essential to the success of evil.
Magnitude and Banality
“He seemed like such a nice guy.” That line has become a cliché of interviews with neighbors of someone who has just been convicted of some monstrous crime. It means that the neighbors cannot bring themselves to change their perception of this person they have known, to see him as evil. They are surprised that someone who showed no outward sign of being evil—or even of being extraordinary in any way—could do such terrible things.
The neighbors’ surprise and their reluctance to believe the awful truth are indicative of the pervasive difficulty of understanding perpetrators of evil. To believe that an apparently normal and decent person from one’s own circle—a friend, a neighbor, a colleague—could commit violent atrocities seems to go against one’s basic understanding of the world. Some exceptional explanation must be required, because it seems that evil deeds should be done by evil people, and yet many such deeds are committed by people who do not conform to the stereotypes of evil.
Yet these stereotypes are one of the major obstacles to understanding evil. This is ironic, because the myth of pure evil was constructed to help us understand evil—but it ends up hampering that understanding. The myth is a victim’s myth, and there is often a wide, almost impassable gap between the viewpoints of victims and perpetrators. As long as our thinking about evil invokes the victim’s perspective, our chances of truly understanding the perpetrators are slim.
Nearly all writers about evil have been influenced by Hannah Arendt’s famous insight about “the banality of evil,” which was based on her observation of the famous Nazi Adolf Eichmann during his trial. Everyone expected a demon in human form, but he was an ordinary person. His ordinariness was profoundly disappointing. When coming into the presence of a high-ranking mass murderer of historical proportions, you expect to feel an electricity, a gut fear even to sit nearby or have his glance fall upon you. Instead, there was a man who looked and acted like just some guy who might have sat next to you on the bus a few times, someone you would scarcely notice or remember.
The essential shock of banality is the disproportion between the person and the crime. The mind reels with the enormity of what this person has done, and so the mind expects to reel with the force of the perpetrator’s presence and personality. When it does not, it is surprised. Yet the magnitude gap provides one explanation for the surprise and disappointment at evil’s banality. The enormity of the crime is apparent from the victim’s perspective, but often to the perpetrator it was far less enormous. It might seem quite fitting and appropriate to be a rather ordinary, banal person, if the crime is viewed from the perpetrator’s perspective.
Thus, readers are shocked to hear that “Monster” Kody Scott drove home to watch “The Benny Hill Show” just after he had killed a young acquaintance by shooting him several times in the chest at close range. One thinks he ought to be consumed with feelings of triumph, or guilt, or fear of being caught, or remorse, or sadistic and vengeful satisfaction, after ending someone’s life. But that expectation comes from viewing the act on the victim’s scale of life-and-death importance. At that point in Scott’s life, the killing was not a big deal, and indeed the point of that story was the end of his personal turmoil about his competing obligations and commitments.
Nature and Culture
Many centuries of human thought and religious dogma have explained evil as a supernatural phenomenon, but the present approach of treating evil as a human, interpersonal phenomenon raises the question of whether one should look to nature or culture to explain evil. Psychology has certainly witnessed strong and powerful statements on both sides, with some wise and profound observers proposing that human beings are naturally, instinctively aggressive, while laboratory researchers have scrupulously insisted that learning and socialization explain a great deal and perhaps all of aggression.
The deeper questions here are more than a matter of fashion and parsimony in scientific explanation. The deeper questions are ones that are familiar to most thoughtful people: Are human beings basically good or evil? Are certain human beings basically evil? Should parents blame their own mistakes when their children grow up to become killers, rapists, or swindlers? Do genes dictate violent, criminal behavior, and if so, is the liberal ideal of rehabilitation merely a foolish, idle fantasy? Can society be redesigned so that everyone will live together in peace and harmony? Not all these questions can be answered with total confidence based on the currently available research evidence, but the material covered in this book provides a basis for proposing some tentative answers.
We are past the point at which an explanation in terms of either innate nature or socializing culture can completely explain what is known about human aggression. Both extreme views are untenable. Violence and aggression cannot be fully explained by pointing simply to instincts or heredity. It is clear that much aggression is learned and that most is specific to particular situations. Nature does not program most mammals to kill one another, and the awesome carnage of the twentieth century suggests that the process of civilizing the human animal has, if anything, increased rather than decreased the violence.2 The cultural and historical variation in rates of violent crime and similar indices of evil also suggests that culture plays a powerful role.
A sobering look at some other facts also makes it implausible to chalk up all human violence up to culture and socialization. Social structures can increase or decrease violence and other evils within certain limits, but no one has come close to eliminating it. Contrary to some idealistic fantasies, children do not need to be taught hate and prejudice: They are all too ready to pick on the one kid who is different or to reject the children in the other group. Physiological processes such as testosterone levels have a significant effect on aggressive behavior. And all over the world, regardless of culture or background, the same biological group is responsible for the bulk of the violence: young males from puberty through the prime age of reproductive potency.
Some years ago, at a professional conference, I had the opportunity to speak to a prominent social psychologist whose work I had long admired, and he told me a story that has been for me a lasting image of the disappointment with theories about socialization and aggression. Like many progressive California academics, he and his wife had resolved to bring up their children surrounded only by healthy, socially desirable values, and this meant that their boys would receive no toy guns. The boys did not complain much about not having such playthings. They simply pretended that the toys they did have were guns. The turning point for the parents came when they found one of their boys chasing the other through the house, holding the remains of his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, from which he had taken carefully planned bites to sculpt it into the shape of a pistol. He was pointing the gun-shaped remnant of sandwich at his brother and making loud shooting noises. At this point, his parents were more upset by the peanut butter and jelly that was dripping onto their expensive white carpet than about their dwindling faith in the chances of raising androgynous, pacifist sons by surrounding them with educational playthings, and so they gave in and bought the kids some toy guns.
Those parents were hardly alone in the disappointment they must have felt when they broke down and bought their sons a shooting toy. Human nature has not generally proved as pliable as the tabula rasa theorists have hoped. Hundreds of experimental utopian communes have broken down amid undone chores and minor bickering or, in some cases, have led to large-scale mass murder. America’s ideological shift from the melting pot to multicultural diversity has not eliminated rancor between groups. Shifting control over upbringing from fathers to mothers has not resulted in a more sensitive and pacifist generation of young males; if anything, the statistics say they are worse than ever. Periodic policy changes in the violent content of television programs have not made a noticeable dent in the crime wave.
A satisfactory understanding of human aggression is likely to invoke both culture and nature. It is unlikely that researchers will ever be able to trace specific violent actions directly to specific genes or other inherited physiological properties, but it is clear that nature has programmed people with some tendencies that can lead toward aggressive responses. Rage appears very early in life and is expressed in lashing out at the source of frustration. The tendency to align with one’s fellows and feel hostile toward potential opponents and rivals seems almost ineradicable. Yet culture can exert a great deal of influence in teaching people how to express and control their aggressive impulses. Culture also shapes the situations that form the context for those impulses, including the opportunities for response, the importance of proper response, and the norms of what is proper. And culture articulates the beliefs and myths about evil.
The causes of evil have roots that are deep in human nature as well as in human culture, and it does not seem likely that culture can be changed to eliminate them. Culture can make them better or worse, however. Equalizing opportunity can perhaps reduce the tendency to resort to violent means as a way of achieving material gain, although there is no very convincing proof of this. Decreasing the emphasis on pride, self-esteem, and public respect, or providing multiple and clear criteria for proving oneself, may work against the tendency to use violence to maintain one’s face. A strong cultural belief in the rights of individuals and in the inability of noble ends to justify violent means can help prevent idealism from fostering brutality. Individuals have far less control over broad cultural patterns than over one another, however.
Individuals can do far less about the root causes of evil than about the immediate causes. The internal restraints that prevent violent impulses from turning into action are probably the most important and promising place for people to make a difference. The question of whether parents should blame themselves because their child grew up to kill someone has a two-part answer. They should probably not blame themselves for the fact that their child had such murderous or violent impulses. But they may blame themselves for failing to teach their child enough self-control to stifle those urges. In some cases, however, they probably had no chance.
The Future of Evil
Is the world getting better or worse? The enlightened intellectuals of the nineteenth century understood history as a gradual evolution toward more perfect societies filled with more perfect individuals. The twentieth century, in contrast, was marked by pessimism about history and a growing sense that the future might be a nasty, evil place. The century’s wars and massacres far outclassed anything the less civilized past came up with. By one careful count, the four decades after the end of World War II saw 150 wars and only 26 days of world peace—and that’s not even counting internal wars and police actions.3 The Nazis set the historical standard for efficient mass killing, yet even their records have been broken. Their body count has been surpassed by the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. The Cambodians of the 1970s destroyed a larger percentage of the population. The Rwandese genocide of the 1990s killed people at five times the rate of the Nazi death camps, even though the country was much smaller.4 Meanwhile, even in peaceful countries like the United States, rates of violent crime continue to rise.
Yet toward the end of the century, the totalitarian regimes that kept much of the world’s population enslaved changed or were overthrown. Eastern Europe and South America have shifted almost completely to democratic governments in place of the Fascist and Communist ones that ruled for decades. Even Asia and Africa have made huge steps toward freedom and human rights. The progress of democracy is especially welcome because historical surveys suggest that democracies hardly ever choose to go to war against one another. If the world’s governments continue to become more democratic, and democracies remain nonviolent toward one another, the world might actually be able to sustain peace.
Thus, both optimists and pessimists can find plenty of current trends to support their predictions of humanity’s future. Let us consider the issue from the perspective of what has been covered in this book as the major sources of human evil.
The perceived need to use violence as a means of securing material gain is probably going to diminish, although slowly. The spread of opportunity and freedom gives people more access to legitimate, nonviolent means of getting what they want, and in the long run these work far better than violent ones. On the other hand, the planet’s population may be approaching the limit of what the resources can support, in which case wars over arable land or drinking water may arise.
Egotism is unfortunately on the rise, especially now that modern morality has abandoned its religious commitment to humility and the condemnation of selfishness. At the international level, one has to worry about Russia, whose rapid loss of global prominence and prestige is reminiscent of the humiliations that pushed Germany toward World War II. The rising appeal of strong nationalist and Communist parties in Russia does not bode well for international harmony.
In the United States, the push to raise everyone’s self-esteem seems ill-advised. Pacifist virtue is found among people such as nuns who cultivate self-control and condemn self-esteem (as pride). The national trend is now in the opposite direction, toward pursuing self-esteem and relaxing self-control. As long as this trend predominates, it seems safe to expect that individual crime and violence in the United States will be high.
Idealistic violence is difficult to forecast. Christianity no longer seems to have the force to set off holy wars, but Islam does. The Soviet Union is no longer actively committed to fostering world socialist revolution, and indeed there is no longer any Soviet Union as such. On the other hand, the main reason that the United States never seriously flirted with Communist revolution was that social reforms improved the lot of the poor and narrowed the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and recent economic commentators seem to agree that this gap is widening again. Extreme differences between wealth and poverty increase the potential for violent political movements that promise leveling in the name of fairness. It is difficult to imagine that the United States would actually have an internal war based on political idealism, but the possibility of such conflicts (especially if one extends the argument to include all countries with vast inequalities of wealth) cannot be dismissed.
I have hardly mentioned China, which is ironic because in my own lifetime China has certainly done more evil than any other country in the world. China’s record is remarkable. The body count of the Cultural Revolution, as already mentioned, is currently estimated at around 20 million, which is unsurpassed in world history. China also played a major role in helping the Khmer Rouge, whose mass murder campaign in Cambodia nearly destroyed the country in a few years and showed a ferocity that has rarely been matched. In 1989, when other Communist countries abandoned their repressive ways and let freedom begin, the Chinese brutally put down demonstrators, most famously in the massacre at Tiananmen Square. China has consistently been one of the most unscrupulous members of the international community: They have abused human rights without even pretending remorse, they violate international copyright laws and flagrantly steal the property of other nations, and they show minimal concern for the environment. Worst of all, they destroyed the Tibetan culture, with its priceless knowledge of the human mind and spirituality. China marches on unreformed and unrepentant, and any attempt to make optimistic forecasts about the twenty-first century must reckon with it.
Future generations are likely to look back on people living now as evil, because of the profligate use of the planet’s limited and dwindling resources. When future centuries say that the twentieth was the age of supreme evil, they will be referring not only to death camps and world wars, but also to the selfish, reckless consumption of energy and the destructive pollution of the air and water. Projections vary as to how long the planet’s precious resources will last, but inevitably they will start to become scarce. Technological advances will probably postpone the crisis—but not forever.
Citizens of the future will look back on us much the way people today look back on the slave traders or warmongers of past eras, with one twist: Future populations will be our victims, whereas relatively little of today’s suffering is directly caused by the actions of our nefarious ancestors. When the oil really runs out, or when the water supply is fatally contaminated, or even when the national debt forces a major drop in everyone’s standard of living, people will look back on our era as the culprits responsible for their suffering. Moreover, as we have seen, victims’ perceptions tend to be especially stark and unforgiving. The future will have its own version of Satan, and it is likely to be you and me (and our governments). But, like most perpetrators, we do not see ourselves as doing evil.
After Understanding, What?
It is customary for psychology or social-science books on evil to insist that understanding does not mean forgiving. Unfortunately, there is ample reason to fear that understanding can promote forgiving. Seeing deeds from the perpetrator’s point of view does change things in many ways. To perpetrators, their apparently voluntary acts appear to be driven or mitigated by external circumstances. To perpetrators, starkly evil motives lie in moral gray areas. To perpetrators, the scope and power of events seem much less extensive than to victims. Even when perpetrators recognize that what they did was wrong, it seems much smaller to them than to the victims. This book has tried to understand violent, cruel, and oppressive actions as an extraordinary human phenomenon. The effort to understand has required some suppression of moral judgment. Few social scientists today really believe that their work can be totally value-free, but still the ideal of being value-free is important because values prevent one from seeing the facts. For students of torture, of rape, of the Holocaust, and of countless other forms of cruelty, the dilemma is unavoidable, because the interest in these topics is driven by values. Mass murder is not just another interesting human phenomenon comparable to wearing blue jeans or forgetting someone’s name.
Yet one can learn about evil most effectively by studying it as if it were. It is difficult and perhaps impossible to understand any human phenomenon at the same time that one is condemning it. Setting aside one’s moral values, however risky that may be, is helpful when one attempts to understand the perpetrators of evil. Yet, after making a long and strenuous effort to set aside one’s values and look objectively and dispassionately at the causes of human violence—a look that itself requires a complex understanding of a daunting mass of information—it is all too easy to stop with that understanding. It is too easy to forget that we had to take a one-sided view of things in order to understand them, and to escape the intuitive tyranny of the victim’s view. Understanding how people commit evil acts is one important key to appreciating the human condition, and it may even hold some helpful clues on how to control human violence. But knowledge about evil ultimately can be fully useful only if it is used with the moral sense that had to be silenced for the sake of gaining that knowledge.
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