Read EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial Online
Authors: Marc Hauser
In reality, there is no such thing as “eradicating” evil tendencies …. [T]he deepest essence of human nature consists of instinctual impulses which are of an elementary nature, … and which aim at the satisfaction of certain primal needs.
— Sigmund Freud
I
t is a fact that humans destroy the lives of other humans — strangers, friends, lovers, and kin — and have been doing so for a long time. These cases are unsurprising and easily explained: we harm others when it benefits us directly, fighting to win resources or wipe out the competition. In this sense we are no different from any other social animal. The mystery is why seemingly normal people torture, mutilate, and kill others for the fun of it — or for no apparent benefit at all. Why did we, alone among the social animals, develop an appetite for gratuitous cruelty? This is the core problem of evil. It is a problem that has engaged scholars for centuries and is the central topic of this book.
Evildoers have many personalities. Some are cruel for cruelty’s sake. Some believe that extreme violence is the only way to secure resources or defend sacred values. Some inspire others to do their dirty work. And some stand by and watch as others carry out horrific acts of violence, unwilling — though not unable — to intervene. You might think that these different behaviors require different explanations. I suggest that they all stem from a single psychological recipe that is part of every human mind but of no other mind in the animal kingdom. This is a stripped-down account of evil, one that explains how it grows within some individuals and how it uniquely evolved in our species.
The idea I develop is that evildoers are made in much the same way that addicts are made. Both processes start with unsatisfied desires. Whether it is a taste for violence or a taste for alcohol, drugs, food, or gambling, individuals develop cravings but find the desired experience less and less rewarding — a separation between desire and reward that leads to excess. To justify the excess, the psychology of desire recruits the psychology of denial, enabling individuals to immerse themselves in a new reality that feels right. Whereas addicts cause great harm to themselves by indulging in excessive consumption or expenditures, evildoers cause great harm to others by indulging in excessive or gratuitous cruelty. Whereas addicts deny their drug dependency or their obesity, evildoers deny the moral worth of their victims or invent a reality that presents them as dangerous threats. The cruelty carries no moral weight because the victims have been dehumanized or conceived as dangerous. The combination of unsatisfied desire and denial is a recipe for evil. Like the addict’s search for ever more satisfying means of consuming or spending, evildoers search for ever more satisfying and creative ways of harming others.
This perspective, I suggest, explains not just the pathology of the sadist or the sexual predator but the actions of “ordinary” individuals who perpetrate unimaginable cruelties. It also illuminates the evolution of our capacity for evil, which, I will argue, evolved as an incidental consequence of our brain’s unique design. This is an idea developed in somewhat similar ways by the philosopher David Livingstone Smith in his book
Less than Human
, and by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister in his book
Evil.
Unlike the brains of other animals, where circuitry specialized for one function slavishly serves that function, our brain circuitry works in harmony to serve a variety of novel functions. Thus, when we dehumanize other human beings — thinking of them, say, as vermin or parasites — and then torture them without guilt, we have connected brain areas involved in recognizing objects, determining moral standards, and justifying actions with brain areas involved in emotion, reward, motivation, and aggression. This is just one of many ways we can combine and recombine thoughts and emotions to create new ways of seeing the world. The point here is that this mental flexibility did not evolve to serve evil; rather, evil was enabled as an incidental consequence of our brain’s unique design.
1
Once the capacity for evil was in place in the human brain, it could be harnessed to serve a useful and adaptive function. By carrying out costly, over-the-top acts of violence, individuals signaled their ability to waste resources simply because they could — because they had the power or the wealth to do so. These displays sent credible messages of ongoing and impending terror to victims, freezing them in their own fear. This explanation for costly signaling, proposed by the evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi and developed in interesting ways by others, is one way of interpreting the paradoxical, gob-smacking episodes of gratuitous cruelty carried out by otherwise civilized people.
2
It is an idea I develop further in
chapter 3
.
If my explanation for how evil develops in individuals and how it evolved is correct, it suggests that each of us has the potential to engage in cruel acts against innocent others. Equipped with the gift of imagination, we all entertain goals that are out of reach either because of personal limitations or because of constraints imposed by our own and others’ moral standards. Tempted to achieve such goals, we may morally disengage, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. When we morally disengage, we enable a process of false justification for our actions, including self-deception and the dehumanization of others. On this view, everyone is capable of engaging in gratuitous cruelty because the ingredients that make up the recipe for evil are part of human nature, part of our uniquely evolved brains.
To understand evil is neither to justify nor excuse it, reflexively converting inhumane acts into mere accidents of biology or the unfortunate consequences of bad environments. To understand evil is to clarify its causes. In some cases, understanding entails recognizing that a perpetrator suffers from brain damage or a developmental disorder and thus lacks self-control or awareness of others’ pain — mitigating factors that influence legal decisions and should influence public perception as well. In other cases, it entails recognizing that a perpetrator was sound of mind yet knowingly caused harm to innocent others and relished the act. By describing and understanding an individual’s character with the tools of science, we are more likely to make appropriate assignments of responsibility, blame, punishment, and future risk to society.
• • •
Homo sapiens
, the knowing and wise animal, has logged an uncontested record of atrocities, despite moral norms prohibiting such actions. No other species has abducted children into rogue armies and then killed those who refused to kill, tossed infants into the air as targets for shooting practice, gang-raped women and forced them to carry the enemy’s fetus to term, and burned people to death because more humane forms of killing were deemed less politically effective (or less enjoyable). These horrific acts have been universally described as “evil” by scholars, clerics, journalists, filmmakers, and novelists, as well as by those who have survived the mayhem. Despite the pervasiveness of such atrocities, some thinkers see them as rare defects of human nature, unfortunate malignancies that have metastasized within our species’ essential goodness.
3
Yet others, such as the philosopher Luke Russell, recognize their ubiquity but see no value in labeling them as evil, because they merely represent actions along a continuum of moral wrongs.
4
It may well be a pointless debate. Even if one is unimpressed by the enormous number of people — approximately 80 million — who were tortured, brutalized, maimed, and senselessly killed on the watch of the most egregious dictators of the past hundred years — Idi Amin, Francisco Franco, Adolf Hitler, Kim Jong-il, Slobodan Milošević, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, Charles Taylor, and Mao Zedong — this brief sampling of history points to a common pattern, cutting across continents, cultures, and economies. It is a pattern that warrants serious attention and explanation and that I will address in this book.
There is merit to using the word “evil” to describe certain human acts as long as one is clear about the concept and its defining features. This is the path I have chosen, building on the recent philosophical writings of Colin McGinn, John Kekes, and David Livingstone Smith and the work of psychologists Roy Baumeister and Ervin Taub. As I see it,
evil arises when innocent victims are subjected to gratuitous cruelty by individuals who either directly intend such excessive harm or allow it to happen when they could have prevented it.
This view of evil includes specific means (gratuitous cruelty), consequences (excessive harm), causes (intentions, desires, and goals), and potential benefits, both short- and long-term. These features require explanation, sketched below and developed in the chapters that follow.
Our commonsense understanding of evil, as portrayed in movies or novels as well as in media reports, typically centers on individuals who use gratuitous violence against others, often an excessive number of others. In the majority of genocides, for example, the perpetrators rarely seem satisfied with persecuting a subset of an ethnic group — or with just killing their victims. They slash or burn them to death, making sure that the “cleansing” leaves no survivors and no traces of the doomed minority. Eliminating an alien creed, say, or reducing competition for scarce resources by painlessly killing a segment of the hated population is not an option. Unlike sadists or serial killers who, because of their diseased minds can’t stop themselves, mentally sound perpetrators of genocide or other atrocities could stop but choose not to. The question I will try to answer is: What leads seemingly sane people to use — or allow others to use — such horrific means and target such massive numbers, when simpler means and smaller numbers would suffice?
I will also attempt to explain why some individuals derive pleasure from seeing others destroyed, whereas others destroy lives without feeling any emotion at all.
5
When individuals use excessive methods of harming others, sometimes it is a “fix” for a diseased mind that has developed a predilection for inflicting pain. Sometimes it is the result of a long process of de-sensitization, in which cruelty yields no personal reward at all because hurting others has become routine. And sometimes it is the result of a long-term political strategy in which the use of extravagant and seemingly unnecessary means of hurting others is designed to stifle opposition, leaving surviving witnesses in a state of terror, uncertain as to where such cruelty might stop. I will discuss each of these situations, highlighting genes that shift individuals’ perception of risk, self-control, and anticipated pleasure, as well as environments that encourage selfishness and lack of empathy for those who are different.
• • •
Students of human nature often end up in futile disagreements about the causes of behavior because they confuse explanations of how things work with explanations of how they evolved. These disagreements arise in scholarly discussions of language, of singing, of sex, of violence, even of eating. If you explain the human sweet tooth by describing the response of the brain’s reward areas to sugar, this is not an alternative explanation for the one that identifies the selective pressures that favored fruit consumption among our primate ancestors. As originally explained by the Nobel laureate and ethologist Niko Tinbergen, explaining any aspect of behavior requires understanding not just how it works but how it evolved. Both explanations are critical to my account of evil.
Part I
of this book focuses on how individuals develop the capacity for evil.
Part II
explains how our species, uniquely, may have evolved this capacity. Here I provide a brief overview of the book’s main ideas and the evidence I will present to support them.
Individuals develop into evildoers when unsatisfied desires accumulate and combine with a denial of reality, causing them to see others as morally worthless or dangerous.
This proposal breaks down the capacity for evil into its minimal form, a recipe born out of only two psychological ingredients: desire and denial. When these combine, there is little to prevent people from engaging in gratuitous cruelty and much to inspire it.
Every one of us has desires to acquire resources and to seek out experiences because of the pleasure they bring. Our desires motivate us, sometimes to fulfill our own needs, sometimes to help others. We all desire good health, satisfying relationships, and knowledge of the world around us. Some also desire great wealth and power. Every culture has its signature vision of what counts, including money, land, livestock, wives, and subordinates. The desire system motivates action in order to achieve rewarding experiences. Some of our actions have benign, even beneficial consequences for ourselves or the welfare of others; some have malignant consequences for others and costly consequences for ourselves. Some desires can be satisfied; some cannot. To understand both outcomes, we need to understand how desire works.
Scientific studies pioneered in the 1950s by James Olds and Peter Milner and developed over the past two decades by Morten Kringelbach and Kent Berridge reveal that pleasure, and our desire to obtain it, consists of three different processes:
wanting
,
liking,
and
learning
.
6
We, together with the rest of the animal kingdom, typically want things we like and like things we want. For example, many monkeys and apes rely on a diet consisting primarily of fruit. These species are therefore motivated to find fruit as it is critical to their survival. These primates want fruit. These primates also like fruit, as evidenced by their emotional responses, including high-pitched coos and chirps when they see it. These primates don’t have to learn to like fruit, but they do have to learn which objects are fruits and among these, which are edible and which are toxic. This coupling between wanting, liking, and learning is obviously adaptive. It would be odd if we or other animals consistently wanted things we didn’t like or liked things we didn’t want. But because these are distinct systems, they can be decoupled, either experimentally in the lab or naturally as a result of addiction. Addicts want more and more but like less and less the experience of getting what they want. When an individual develops an addiction — whether to alcohol, drugs, food, gambling, sex, shopping, or smoking — the wanting system ends up decoupled from the liking system, leaving the desire unsatisfied. The result is a stockpile of unsatisfied desires and an increasing resort to excess. Faced with this situation, individuals often turn to denial, persuading themselves that they are svelte, non-dependent or in need of another closetful of shoes. The idea I develop in
Part I
is that we initiate the recipe for evil when, as with other addictions, our unsatisfied desires for power — based in resources or ideological domination — accumulate to create cravings for more. When denial accompanies desire, progress in completing this recipe accelerates.