(The following chapter is from my upcoming book Live Life Aggressively What Self Help Gurus Don't Want You To Know)
Are You Capable of Evil? Why You Must Address The Evil Within
By Mike Mahler
Are we born good and then corrupted by an evil society or born evil and redeemed by a good society? Maybe each of us has the capacity to be a saint or a sinner, altruistic or selfish, gentle or cruel, dominant or submissive, perpetrator or victim, prisoner or guard. Maybe it is our social circumstances that determine which of our many mental templates, our potentials, we develop.—Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Philip Zimbardo) isn't pleasant reading, but thought-provoking and, once read, you'll never see people around you in the same way again. More importantly, you'll never see yourself the same way, since the book urges you to take a hard self-inventory of who you are and what you're capable of.
While we might prefer to think we're incapable of committing acts of cruelty, the reality is we are all capable of criminal behavior and denying this merely strengthens the dark aspect lying in wait within us. As humans, we have the potential for both great compassion and great cruelty and although we must accept our more unsavory potential--this doesn't mean we must fulfill it. Living life aggressively entails taking charge of your life, and doing so requires ruthless honesty and self-awareness. I promise you this article is not a pleasant read; however, it nevertheless describes a journey each of us must eventually take. Failing to do so at your peril--and the peril of those around you.
My own journey into my heart of darkness began about ten years ago when I read a book about Bosnia's ethnic cleansing campaign. In 1995--over just a few days--Bosnian Serbian forces murdered over 8,000 people. In the book, acts of unspeakable cruelty were graphically detailed, such as fathers forced at gunpoint to rape their own daughters and women being sexually mutilated and cannibalized as they bled to death. Family members were sexually assaulted in front of one other, then everyone slaughtered. After reading dozens of these terrifying and depressing accounts I had to put the book down. How could people contain the magnitude of hatred required to commit such crimes? At the time, I couldn't stand to answer my own question, but I intuitively knew the answer would appear sooner or later.
Thankfully, I never identified with the horrors I was reading. In other words, even as I read the words on the page, never for a second did I imagine myself in such a gruesome scenario. I didn't have to question myself with would I? could I? since the answer was resolutely No. I am a compassionate person, to the point of experiencing depression if I haven't met my need to contribute to the well being of others.
While I feel deep compassion, Zimbardo’s book forced me see the whole spectrum of my personality and I came to understand I also contain a potential for cruelty and violence--as we all do. While I've never committed Bosnian-scale violence, neither have I ever found myself in such a volatile environment--and as much as we may hate to admit it, we can't say for sure what we would do in unfamiliar circumstances. Speculate all day of what you would and wouldn’t do--but you'll never know for sure, and hopefully, you're never given the opportunity to find out. In order to overcome such circumstances, you must get to thoroughly know yourself and the underlying forces driving you.
We like to think of evil as something confined to a small percentage of the population. We hope that the evil ones are aberrations and somehow different from the rest of us but, in the end, most people are only as "good" as their current circumstances. Taken out of their comfort zone and placed into situations for which they're unprepared, peoples' resulting behavior can be shocking, and worse, those "people" might be you.
Let's take a look at the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. For years (and for a variety of reasons) animosity had built between the majority tribe Hutus and the minority tribe Tutsis. In 1994 this animosity reached a tipping point with the assassination of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu. The Hutus blamed the Tutsis, in particular, Paul Kagame, a leader of a Tutsi rebel group. Kagame denied the allegations and insisted Hutu extremists were instead to blame. To this day, it's uncertain who was responsible.
After President Habyarimana’s assassination, a full throttle hate campaign commenced wherein the Hutus publicly declared the Tutsis as the cause of all Hutu ills. In just over three months, Hutu death squads, bearing machetes and clubs, killed over 800,000 people--the most expeditious and horrific massacre on record. Tutsi women were typically raped prior to their murders or, if not murdered, unfortunate Tutsi women were gang-raped and physically mutilated. Set free, these victimized women made a powerful, low-tech Hutu fear campaign. This sort of sadism, and the sense of power it provides, can have a narcotic, addicting effect on the perpetrators, leading to increased frequency and intensity of assault.
How could the Hutus turn so decisively upon the Tutsis? They had co-existed for generations. From the outside, it looked as if a button were pushed and neighbors and friends suddenly became mortal enemies, but the truth is more complicated.
According to Zimbardo, the cause would be:
...hostile imagination, a psychological construction embedded deeply in [the Hutu] minds by propaganda that [transformed the Tutsis into the enemy.
When people already blame others for their own problems, they are ripe for immoral social controls. In other words, popular media can effectively be used to direct collective aggression.
Another of the human ego's easily exploited vulnerabilities is the superiority complex. People like to think of themselves as superior to other people. In fact, on most tests in which people are compared to others, the vast majority will rate themselves as "better than average".
Superiority complexes can be dangerous weapons. Commonly wielded, sometimes concealed, sometimes not. Unfortunately, in order for people to think of themselves as better looking, better earning, better educated, stronger, or more sophisticated there must be "others" with which to compare themselves and so, put down. Considering yourself superior to others is a milder version of scapegoating, which is the lesser version of dehumanizing the "other".
Ironically, those who declare their superior status are more likely to themselves feel inferior deep down and crave acceptance within the group--to the point of desiring the group's approval by any means necessary. I've observed this phenomenon within every corporate--and otherwise--organization in which I've participated. What I've seen people willing to do in order to elevate their own status--within everyday socially acceptable circumstances, in other words, hardly civil war--is disturbing and disappointing both. The themes are uncannily similar: blaming others for your own lack, backstabbing and/or using people for your own upward mobility.
Pathological desires for superior status and group acceptance were two of the
driving forces in the Rwanda genocide. In the previous era of Belgian imperialism in Rwanda, the Tutsis received preferential treatment. This went on for twenty years. During this time, Tutsis and Hutus were mandated to carry identification cards, with the Tutsis receiving more and better benefits, like access to better education and jobs. This preferential treatment generated immense resentment and jealousy among the Hutus which, over time, reached a boiling point. Later, in the aftermath of the presidential assassination, using an intensive propaganda program, Hutu leader Mayor Silvester Cacumbibito exploited the ready, latent resentment in Hutu population. This tried and true tactic of social manipulation was similarly used by Adolf Hitler in Germany and later, by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Besides identifying the Tutsis as the source of all of their ills, the Hutus further referred to the Tutsis as cockroaches. This is a well-known dehumanizing tactic which effectively increases hatred and a lack of compassion towards the perceived enemy--as a less-than-human subject is less likely to invoke feelings of sympathy or moral inhibition within the aggressor. Quoting psychologist Albert
Bandura:
Our ability to selectively engage and disengage or moral standards…helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate the next. It is much easier to disengage your moral standards when you no longer look at your enemy as human. Once you are convinced that they are beneath you, there is no telling how much cruelty will be inflicted on the dehumanized enemy.
(Sometimes I don't know which I find more disturbing: the cruelty people commit against others or their rationalizations for the same. Moral codes seem very fluid these days.)
Another powerful factor in the Rwandan genocide was group influence. There were Hutus who did not condone their tribe's actions yet were unwilling to risk the dire consequences of taking a stand against the group. Where does individual responsibility begin and end in such ugly circumstances? Think about how many times in your life--and for far lower stakes--you've fallen under group influence. You might be sitting there on your couch, shaking your head at how dissenting Hutus did nothing to halt the atrocities going on in their name, but in the same situation--your neighbors slaying each other--are you so sure you'd behave differently? I assert you do not know what you would do.
In addition to those unwilling to go against the flow--and thus suffer potentially mortal consequences, there were other Hutus who desired the praise and accolades of the group--by any means--and the more people they killed the more praise they received. The more cruelty they inflicted, the greater their status rose within the group. I'm not rationalizing their behavior, nor looking for ways to justify their actions. It's not possible to rationalize such actions; however, I mean to point out the fact that these people were not so different than any other confused people who allow their inner criminal aspects to take the lead--en masse. In a state of confusion and self-ignorance, virtually anyone is vulnerable to such an error. When such a baleful event occurs in a collective consequence, the results are amplified.
Group influence can be overwhelming, thus most people unconsciously go with the flow around them without the bother of thinking for themselves. When worldly events take a turn for the worse, the unconscious acceptance-seeking habit can be so entrenched such people easily find themselves immersed in the moment and caught up in the group accord. These are not extremists in everyday life, but "regular" people leading "regular" lives. Yet when situational forces, i.e, external circumstances, turn extreme such "normal" people, time and again through history, become barbaric without realizing the tipping point. Such is the insidious power of the collective unconscious combined with situational forces, making us only as noble as a given situation.
And so, many acts of terrible violence and cruelty are committed within the context of groups. Individuals will behave in ways they would never permit themselves on their own volition. Studies show that mental functioning literally changes in an individual "under the influence" of group pressure.
According to Zimbardo:
...when all members of a group are in a de-individuated state, their mental functioning changes: they live in an expanded-present moment that makes past and future distant and irrelevant. Feelings dominate reason, and action dominates reflection. In such a state, the usual cognitive and motivational processes that steer their behavior in socially desirable paths no longer guide people.
The above implies that living in the moment isn't necessarily a good thing--at least for someone of a lower (unconscious) state of mind. When we forget our past, we forget who we essentially are--at least the noble self--and to compound the problem, we forget what it is we've forgotten. Our higher morals, knowledge of truth, and standards, no longer apply as we succumb to immediate, primitive desires. This negative version of living in the moment (and therefore failing to consider the results of our present actions) is dangerous. Remaining amnesiac to consequences gives too much sway to any present situational forces. Whenever I'm faced with a tough decision, I mentally place myself in the future, and look back from that vantage. Is my future self proud of my choice of action--or ashamed? This method works well because anytime we stop and think about who we really are beneath our social persona--and who we want to be, and how we want to feel as that self--hopefully we make the higher, more noble, choice.
Group pressure isn't bad per se. As a member of society, you belong to a group, and just as group pressure can provoke people to terrible things, group pressure will also prevent people from doing unreasonable things. Moreover, the upside of group influence is that people often commit acts of compassion and kindness when "under the influence" of the more positive versions of social situational forces. But that is not the point of this article. To comprehend the full range of experience of the human condition we must understand how it is that so-called "normal" people are capable of terrible acts of violence. In order to do so, we might be faced with the previously unthinkable: an admission that we, too, are capable of cruelty and further denying that potential only hardens it.
Zimbardo writes:
It is only by becoming aware of our vulnerability to social pressure that we can begin to build resistance to conformity when it is not in our best interest to yield to the mentality of the herd.
This process requires a ruthless self-inventory. Do you really know who you are? Have you ever taken time to analyze your past actions? While not a joyful undertaking, getting to know yourself is a forthright act of discovering what's real--something too few people pursue.
1 Think about the times when you succumbed to group pressure--have you do things of which you are not proud?
2 Is social acceptance so important to you that you reside within the collective consciousness?
3 Do you apply critical thinking in the decision process or do you rely on what others think is best for you?
4 Are you willing to speak out against the group or are you too frightened to rock the boat?
You may not feel proud of your answers, but take this opportunity anyway to pursue the process. My experience is that few people are willing to rock the boat and counter the group. Most people prefer the comfort of going through the same socially-approved-if-destructive superficial motions day to day, all the while gossiping and complaining of the unpleasant circumstances in which they find themselves.
The world is not made up of only good people, light and compassion. Life, in all its manifestation is multi-faceted, complex, and darkly shadowed. While we must discern light from dark--and good from evil--in order to do so, we must see things unfiltered by our own delusive inclinations. We must look at things in the open. and head on, and make the higher, better, choice. Avoidance of the harsher aspects of life doesn't result in empowerment--and it's empowerment which helps us transcend the harsh and the ugly. There is nothing wrong with attempting to see the good in any situation, but this tendency can be fraught with error--better to identify evil for what it is.
Just as alcoholics must admit they have a drinking problem before proceeding to the recovery phase, each of us must acknowledge our own inner criminal and its potential for misdeeds. By realizing your own capacity for--and possible contribution to--evil behavior, you'll remain conscious of all aspects of your personality and are less likely to unconsciously succumb to situational forces. This allows you to take inventory of the hows and whys of your past actions. Maybe you succumbed to group pressure at some point in your life and did things that you'd never do of your own volition. Maybe these were good things you did, or maybe not. All of us have succumbed to group pressure at one time or another, and most of us continue to do so, sometimes with disastrous results.
We all hope for ourselves to never experience the suffering of the people of Rwanda, Bosnia, Nazi Germany, and Cambodia, among a long list of others, but at the same time we mustn't believe we're above it all. We are just as human as everyone else in history, accountable for ourselves and the actions we take. Intimate self-knowledge transcends social influence and empowers each of us to resist social pressure and situational forces which offend our moral code.
In a follow-up article, I'll discuss some of the strategies covered in The Lucifer Effect on how to take a comprehensive self-inventory, which is the first strategy in resisting situational forces. This is the core of living life aggressively: relentlessly developing the higher self, even when it means recognizing the lower self within.
Live Life Aggressively!
Mike Mahler
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