Evil

Contextual Quote

• Evil in an Evolutionary Universe

"In an evolutionary cosmology (which both Whitehead and Rudolf Steiner articulate) we must address evil because death is clearly one of the most potent engines of evolution through natural selection. It's obvious that this occurs, though it's not the only thing driving evolution.

The simple answer to “Why evil?” would be that spirit needs to meet resistance in order to learn and grow. If the universe is aimed at the production of beauty, then in some sense it's a school for love. We're learning how to love despite strife, malice, suffering, and death in the world. That's why spirit is engaged in this process of evolution.

What Steiner and Whitehead invite us to consider is that evil isn't something that might be eliminated—not even by God. Rather, it's a necessary by-product of an evolutionary universe. As Jesus said, we must love our enemies."

- Matthew Seagall [1]

Typology

Rob Henderson:

Evil As A Means To An End

"The book describes four basic causes of evil.

The first is instrumental evil: inflicting harm as a means to an end.

An easy way to understand instrumental harm is that the perpetrator would abandon violence if they could achieve the same goal without it. They’d rather not do it, but it’s the quickest path to get what they want.

People who commit instrumental evil come off looking relatively good compared to other kinds of violent perpetrators. For example, people who choose violence because the victim’s suffering is the essential point. This, some say, is what distinguishes a hate crime from other harmful crimes.

Baumeister shares research indicating that instrumental violence seldom works in the long run. Very few criminals become rich and retire to a life of ease.

For example, the average payoff in a bank robbery is $2,664. But 4 out of 5 bank robbers are eventually caught. The expected value here is well into the negative digits.

The same applies to governments that commit instrumental violence. Consider the instrumental use of torture.

In most instances, interrogators who use torture are not sadistic. They simply want information. Violence is a means to an end.

But what seems to happen is that torturers, of course, do not tell the victims what to confess. They want the truth, and forcing someone to agree to a ready-made accusation is often unacceptable.

So the victim, in order to make the pain stop, tries to guess what the interrogator wants to hear and starts to announce all sorts of crimes, which the torturers dutifully record.

Torturers often ask for accomplices under threat of further torture. So victims begin naming various people.

This is often what happened in the first place—a former victim named the current victim being tortured as an accomplice.

This is how blood purges worked in Maoist China and the Soviet Union. Innocent people fabricating crimes and naming others. Those others then do the same, and so on.

Another form of instrumental violence is to establish dominance.

In The Sopranos, after Tony recovers from a severe injury, he thinks his Mafia underlings sense weakness in him. He then physically attacks one of them to send the message to the others that he is still the top dog.

Domestic violence may also fall under the category of instrumental violence. Batterers are often men whose wives outrank them in some way, such as earning more money or having a better education. Moreover, men whose wives earn more money than themselves are more likely to be unfaithful. Both abuse and infidelity appear to be ways for these men to reaffirm their position in their relationships. A way of getting the upper hand.

-Idealism: The Most Pernicious Cause of Evil

“The worst evils in history have always been committed by those who truly believed they were combating evil. Beware of combating evil.”

—Kevin Kelly

The second root cause of evil is idealism.

This is the most disquieting and tragic cause, because perpetrators are driven by the belief that they are doing something good.

In The Happiness Hypothesis, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt pointed out:

“Two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism…The major atrocities of the 20th century were carried out largely by men who thought they were creating a Utopia.”

Driven by idealism, and the belief that their actions are leading to something good, perpetrators believe they are obliged to commit harm.

To some degree, this overlaps with instrumental evil, or harm as a means to an end.

But idealists commit violence not to obtain money, or power, or other selfish rewards. Rather, they commit evil in their quest to improve society for others.

This is why idealism might be the most pernicious cause of evil.

As Baumeister writes, “When inflicting violent harm goes from being a right to being a duty, it is fair to expect that the violence will become relentless and merciless.”

In a twisted way, idealism uses people’s moral intuitions against them. If you harm someone to take their money, you might feel guilty, even if you needed the cash. But if you harm someone because you believe they are an obstacle to the gates of paradise, then any guilt is quelled.

This helps to explain how ordinary people became murderous in the regimes of the twentieth century. They believed themselves to be moral. And the more evil acts they committed, the more moral they believed themselves to be.

In The Status Game, Will Storr describes how communists in the Soviet Union were ordered to “throw [their] bourgeois humanitarianism out the window.” For those responsible for systematic mass murder, “status was awarded for actively suppressing human sympathy.”

Additionally, high moral principles reduce room for compromise. In fact, compromise itself is often seen as suspect.

Moral idealism leads to evil because good, desirable ends provide the justification for violent or oppressive means.

Committing mass murder might be unpleasant, but if in the end it’s for a good cause, then people will fulfill their duties.

The twentieth-century British philosopher Isaiah Berlin has written, “eggs are broken, but the omelette is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end the passionate idealists forget the omelette, and just go on breaking eggs.”

Another facet of idealistic evil is how idealists view their victims. Sometimes perpetrators feel guilty about how they treat their victims. But idealism masks this feeling.

The logic is that if you think you are on the side of the good, then whoever opposes you must be your opposite. They must be evil.

To perceive them as anything less than that is to diminish one’s own side’s claim to be good. Thus, to maintain one’s image as good, it is necessary to see the enemy as evil. This quells perpetrators’ guilt, and they can continue inflicting harm against anyone they deem to be adversaries.

The book states, “idealists and utopians cannot easily acknowledge that their opponents have a legitimate, acceptable claim on being good themselves, because to do so would undermine their own claim to be on the side of the good.”

Idealistic perpetrators, full of self-righteous conviction, believe they have a license, or even a duty, to hate.

Furthermore, when dealing with fellow peers who might have doubts about the cruel methods, one feels morally confident to chide them for their insufficient animosity toward the evil enemies. After all, if the cause is virtuous, then one must hold the right attitude of hostility toward those standing in the way.

It is also necessary to be around people who constantly reaffirm the goodness of the cause, to subdue doubts about hurting others.

People need their beliefs and actions validated, especially when they commit violence.

Most people want to believe they are good. The more evil they commit, the more they require others to tell them they are not evil.

Relatedly, groups tend to be more violent than individuals. One reason is group polarization. That is, when people are around others who hold similar views to themselves, their own confidence in those views becomes stronger.

Thus, if each member within a group has mildly hostile feelings toward another group, those feelings will magnify as they interact with likeminded people. This is because doubling down on that opinion builds social bonds with fellow group members.

Baumeister also writes that groups tend to reserve their strongest hostility not for enemies, but for apostates:

“People who leave the group represent an even greater threat than its enemies. If other members were to interact with them, perhaps they would leave the group too, and the solidarity of the group would be undermined…Keeping the group together…is in many cases a more fundamental and urgent goal than accomplishing its stated purpose or defeating its actual external enemies.”

Often, the primary aim of social groups is to keep the group together. The group is more important than any particular mission. Any threat to cohesion is viewed as especially dangerous.

The book lists massacre after massacre, including the crusades, the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, and the communist and fascist regimes of the twentieth century.

The general conclusion is that evil means do not result in noble ends. In fact, evil acts tend to corrupt the ideals they were meant to serve.

A notable example is the history of slavery and the devastation of indigenous cultures in the New World. The U.S. is, on balance, the best thing that has ever happened to humanity. But its ideals are overshadowed by its ugly history. People will forever be able to invoke slavery to challenge the legitimacy of the country’s original principles of freedom and equality. In the long run, the U.S. may be undermined by something that it practiced and abolished long before any person alive today was born.

Any human alive in 1776 would in many ways consider the U.S. today a kind of utopia. But building the utopia required a lot of death and devastation. In all likelihood, any other utopia people have in mind would likewise require a lot of unimaginable pain, with no guarantee the utopia would come into existence. In the case of the U.S., a kind of utopia did eventually arrive. But the practices it took to get there could lead to its undoing.

Evil tends to have unforeseen consequences, side effects, and backlashes that weaken or overturn the very ideals that the perpetrators hoped to promote.

Threatened Egotism

“Once you know who or what humiliates you, you know what it is about yourself that you worship. Tell me what makes you enraged—what makes you feel truly diminished—and I will tell you what you believe, what you want to believe, about yourself.”

—Adam Phillips

The third root cause of evil is threatened egotism.

The book cites several studies indicating that perpetrators of violence are often highly sensitive to perceived slights.

Baumeister writes, “Bullies, wife-beaters, tyrants, and other violent people tend to think that other people are attacking or belittling them, even when others would not have the same interpretation.”

Such people are hypersensitive to challenges to their self-image. And react with fury to any sign that someone is disrespecting them.

Among young boys, studies indicate that the most aggressive are those who are most likely to see hostility and aggression when it isn't really there. Hostile young males were prepared to see insults that did not necessarily exist.

The same seems to go for abusive husbands. For example, a man’s wife says, “I don’t know, that sounds really expensive.”

A vulnerable narcissist—more likely than average to experience threatened egotism—would think that she is implying he doesn’t earn enough money. Or that he isn’t succeeding in his career. Or that he is a failure as a man.

As Baumeister writes, “abusive husbands tend to think that their pride and dignity are being attacked whenever there is any disagreement or conflict.” Such men carefully scrutinize their wives’ behaviors for signs of assault on their own self-esteem.

People prone to overestimating the degree to which comments by others are insulting are more likely to lash out with narcissistic rage.

Importantly, the book reports findings from several studies which overturn the widespread belief that low self-esteem is a cause of violence.

In fact, violence is most often committed by those with high self-esteem. Baumeister cites research indicating that perpetrators of violence typically think highly of themselves.

Dangerous people, from playground bullies to gang leaders to warmongering dictators consist mostly of narcissists with positive self-images.

Egotistic people most likely to commit violence are those who feel that their favorable views of themselves are somehow threatened. They are prone to what some psychologists call “humiliated fury.”

There are two ways you can react to a negative evaluation by someone else.

One is to accept their assessment as correct, and revise your opinion of yourself downward. To think less of yourself than you did before.

Generally, people hate doing this. Lower self-esteem is often accompanied by depression, anxiety, and shame, which are unpleasant states people naturally want to avoid.

Second, you can reject their negative evaluation of you as wrong. But why would they say such a thing, if it’s so obviously incorrect? They must be unfair or unreasonably malevolent. Thus, it becomes more acceptable to inflict harm on them.

People who think they’re better than they really are will be more likely to commit violence, because the external world is not validating their own high opinion of themselves.

Baumeister describes how status inconsistency can give rise to violence.

For example, conventional wisdom dictates that housewives are more likely to be victims of violence than working wives. But research indicates that the opposite is true—housewives are especially safe from violence. Why? It seems that husbands are not threatened by their nonworking housewives. In contrast, as noted before, women who earn more than their husbands are often more at risk of violence.

Furthermore, men who have high qualifications but poor careers were six times more likely than average to commit violence against their wives. In contrast, men who had poor qualifications but successful careers were six times less likely to commit violence against their wives.

For men, doing worse than they expected is associated with greater hostility. While doing better than they expected is associated with greater calm.

Generally speaking, the most abusive husbands are those with little money, education, or other resources or signs of status. Shorter men report greater levels of jealousy and lower levels of relationship satisfaction than average.

Additionally, Baumeister reports research indicating that those least prone to hostility are those with high and stable self-esteem.

And the people most prone to hostility are those with high and unstable self-esteem. These people are more prone to shame.

Shame arises when people feel worthless and devalued. People who are especially vulnerable to shame are the most likely to react with hostility when their self-esteem is threatened.

This is because getting mad at others is a way of escaping the terrible feeling of shame.

It goes something like this: Someone says you’re stupid, or incompetent, or pathetic, or whatever. If you are prone to shame, you think maybe they are right, maybe you are a loser. You start to panic, and your heartbeat increases.

To break free of these feelings, you dismiss what they say and redirect your negative feelings about yourself toward the person insulting you. You unconsciously transform your intense emotions and fast heartbeat—your shame and panic—into anger at the other person. And then verbally or physically assail them. Which then quells the shame.

What about deep down inside? Maybe violent people are just pretending to have high self-esteem.

This seems unlikely. Multiple studies indicate that aggressive people have high opinions of themselves. To take a few extreme examples, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot were not suffering from a lack of self-esteem.

In more everyday cases of aggression, research repeatedly finds that bullies have higher self-esteem than average. And they find evidence of low self-esteem in the victims of schoolyard bullies.

Furthermore, studies of violent youth gangs find that gang members have high opinions of themselves.

Baumeister writes:

“People with low self-esteem tend to blame themselves when things go wrong. People with high self-esteem tend to blame external factors, such as other people, the situation, or various obstacles.”

He continues:

“Thinking that all your problems and failures are your own fault is a style that fits low self-esteem. Thinking that nothing bad should ever reflect on you is an integral part of high self-esteem.”

People have asked me how I avoided an unfortunate fate given my turbulent youth. I’ve cited a number of factors. But while reviewing this book, I distinctly recalled having extremely low self-esteem as a kid. I’d been rejected by so many parental figures that I figured I wasn’t worth caring about. In a kind of tortured logic that makes sense to children, I believed I’d done something wrong to have not been adequately cared for.

I did get into a lot of fights, because that’s what boys did where I grew up. But I seldom blamed anyone else for my unfortunate circumstances. My reluctance to place blame on anyone liberated me to take responsibility for myself.

Sadistic Evil

The fourth and final cause of evil is sadism. This is about as close to “pure evil” as any of the causes get.

Sadism is sincere enjoyment from inflicting harm.

Baumeister writes, “The question of whether people enjoy harming others—and, if they do, the question of how much evil can be explained by this pleasure—is the single most elusive and vexing problem in the entire topic of evil.”

He concludes that the inconsistent and often contradictory evidence suggests that “sadistic pleasure is genuine, unusual, acquired only gradually, and responsible for only a minority of evil.”

The book delves into research on BDSM. Studies suggest that there are far more masochists than sadists. In fact, one common problem is that a person desires to play the role of the masochist but they have difficulty finding anyone to play the dominant role.

Thus, people with such preferences often have to pay prostitutes to take on that role. Other findings indicate that the desire to be spanked is far more common than the desire to spank someone.

Sometimes people laugh when they hurt someone. The book cites research indicating that “laughter is not a sign of pleasure or amusement but rather reflected some effort to cope with one’s distress as a pressure-filled, upsetting situation in which one was hurting someone.”

When perpetrators laugh, it is not typically out of enjoyment, but as a way to relieve their discomfort at the harm they are inflicting.

It is true, though, that some people come to enjoy hurting others. In most cases, this may be due to what is called “opponent process theory.”

Opponent process theory states that the body maintains homeostasis by counteracting any process that departs from its baseline.

Under intense stress, the body releases soothing and pleasant chemicals to return to normal (homeostasis). Over time, this feeling becomes addictive.

This is how people come to enjoy bungee jumping or skydiving. I’ve done both. The act itself is both terrifying and thrilling, but the feeling of coming back down from the rush is enjoyable.

I have read that people with bulimia experience something similar. They can become addicted to purging. Because although vomiting is unpleasant, the body’s restorative process afterwards feels soothing.

Baumeister suggests this happens with repeated acts of inflicting harm.

People unfamiliar with violence often feel physically unwell when they cause severe physical pain to someone else.

At first, people feel a sense of terror, anxiety, or disgust. The body then counteracts such feelings to restore itself to baseline. People gradually become addicted to this feeling.

With alcohol and drugs, the process is reversed. The initial process is pleasant, and the restorative process is unpleasant. Being drunk feels great, being hungover sucks. You enjoy the benefit now, and pay the cost later.

But with opponent process theory, the initial phase is nasty, and the restorative process is pleasant.

In this view, the pleasure of harming someone comes mostly from the restorative process, not the initial act. You pay the cost up front, and enjoy the benefit after.

As the book puts it, “The thrill of killing may be closer to the thrill of parachute jumping than to the thrill of taking drugs.”

Actual sadists are a rare minority. For them, power is the fundamental motive. Their need for power comes from the desire to have an impact on others.

Some people find validation in seeing others change their behavior because of them.

Baumeister is careful to note that power is not inherently bad. Influencing people to the good can be gratifying for powerful people.

But for sadists, they derive pleasure from using power to hurt others. When they inflict pain, the victim’s cries serve as validation of their own being, their importance, their power.

Baumeister quotes a torturer who states, “When we’re dealing with those tough ones, the first thing we do is make them squeal; and sooner or later, we manage it.”

To sadists, the victim’s resistance is a denial of their power, a way of refusing to acknowledge who is in control. The squeal is the victim’s acknowledgement of the power the torturers have.

Interestingly, the best sadists are those who can empathize with their victims.

As the book states, “the most extreme cruelty makes use of empathy. To be seriously, thoroughly cruel, it is necessary to know what the victim is feeling, in order to maximize the suffering…To hurt someone, you must know what the person’s sensitivities and vulnerabilities are.”

Cruel acts require an empathic understanding of what causes people pain. Empathy can be dangerous.

Many traits people view either positively or negatively are in fact morally neutral and can be used for good or evil ends. Intelligence, power, and empathy are examples. They can be beneficial or destructive, depending on how they are used.

Even resilience and mindfulness can be used for nefarious ends. Zen helped the samurai become more detached and efficient killers. Stoicism helped Greek warriors cope after committing atrocities in war. There is evidence suggesting that clinical therapy makes psychopaths worse because it allows them to rationalize their harmful actions. And there is research indicating that yoga, meditation, and other spiritual practices can sometimes make people more self-centered and narcissistic.

Human nature is often far more complicated than we think."

(https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/unmasking-malevolence?)

Source

• Rob Henderson's review of the book: Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. by the renowned psychology professor Roy Baumeister.

Full review at https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/unmasking-malevolence?