EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (13 page)

Self-deception and deception are not only part of normal brain function, but adaptive processes that can yield significant dividends in the struggle of life. Like other behaviors that are tied to survival, self-deception can run out of control, as individuals are tempted to tell bigger and bigger lies in order to obtain bigger and bigger resources. Individuals can come to believe that they have super powers, and thus, are invincible, god-like. These self-deceptive beliefs can lead to personal ruin, along with the destruction of innocent lives.

E = D + D

My goal thus far has been to extract the universal core of our capacity for evil, identifying the elements or ingredients that are shared across all cases and all time periods. This is a minimalist approach, one that recognizes the variety of forms of gratuitous cruelty as well as the causes that trigger them. Some may engage in acts of gratuitous cruelty because of brain damage or developmental disorders, whereas others, who are perfectly healthy, engage because they feel threatened or wish to crush a competitor. I believe, however, that all of this variation can be distilled to two ingredients that are both necessary and sufficient parts of the recipe for evil: desire and denial. Some environments discourage this combination, whereas other environments encourage it. The important point is that all of us are endowed with the capacity to express our desires, deny elements of reality, and combine these two psychological states to cause both morally justifiable ends as well as horrifically immoral and unjustifiable ends. As noted, when a doctor has the desire to help his patient, he often recruits denial (in the form of dehumanization) to fend off emotions that can get in the way of clear-headed, precise surgery, operations that entail cutting into human flesh. This is justifiable. When a doctor has the desire to help his group and carries out experimental surgeries on those outside of the group by denying their moral worth, he facilitates cutting into human flesh, but for unjustifiable ends: other humans are simply not tools to be manipulated for personal satisfaction and knowledge.

The idea that we are all endowed with the capacity for evil, and that this capacity requires the combination of desire and denial, in no way implies that the expression of this capacity is inevitable. Even in environments that promote a psychology of evil, some will resist. Resistance comes from individual differences in creating both unsatisfied desires and unconstrained systems of denial. Conversely, others are heavily predisposed to engage in acts of cruelty because their biology tilts them toward high risk, high reward, and low empathy. These differences originate in our biology, and with the evolutionary history of our species. This is our story, our history.

Recommended books

Baron-Cohen, S. (2011).
The Science of Evil.
New York: Basic Books.

Christakis, N.A. & Fowler, J.H. (2011).
Connected
. San Francisco: Back Bay Books.

Hamburg, D. (2008).
Preventing Genocide
. Denver: Paradigm Publishers.

Johnson, D. P. (2004).
Overconfidence and War.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Kelman, H.C., & Hamilton, V.L. (1989).
Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility
. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P.R. (Eds.). (2011).
The Social Psychology of Morality
. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Staub, E. (2010).
Overcoming Evil
. New York: Oxford University Press.

Trivers, R. (2011).
The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life
. New York: Basic Books.

Part II

ONE HISTORY

Chapter 3:

Kingdom of cruelty

Man is the cruel animal. He is alone in that distinction.

— Mark Twain

In 1791, the Shawnee Indians of Ohio massacred sixteen white children and adults as revenge for a prior crime on their people:

This is a spectacular display of cruelty, but by no means an isolated case in our history, nor a particularly creative example. Looking ahead one and half centuries later, and on the opposite side of the globe, we find the equally innovative techniques used by the Japanese in the massacre of Chinese citizens at Nanking in 1937: individuals were drenched in acid and left to disintegrate, alive; men’s testicles and eyes were ripped out before burning them alive; babies were put on skewers and then tossed into boiling water; fetuses were cut out of awake women and then presented to them inside a jar of preservative. To many, these actions seem unimaginable. And yet we are faced with the reality that our minds have an ancient track record of imagining them, over and over again.

Paradoxically, there are also cases where we seem incapable of killing others, even when we are licensed to do so. Detailed historical accounts of warfare reveal that soldiers often fail to kill even when this is their mandate. Such records also reveal that soldiers often experience extreme fear before firing the first shot, defecate and urinate in their pants when they do, and suffer from severe post-traumatic stress disorder when a war ends. These accounts tell a different story about human nature: we often have great difficulty killing other human beings, including cases where there are reasonable justifications to do so. In this sense, we are like most other animals who resolve disputes over resources by means of non-lethal aggression.

What requires explanation is how we evolved the capacity for not only killing but extreme cruelty, despite the internal brakes that sometimes operate to stop us. This is an explanation that requires an understanding of our evolutionary history as a species, including the nature of violence in other species and the factors that led to our own unique brand of violence.

The idea I develop, echoing Mark Twain’s prescient quote in the opening of this chapter, as well as some of the ideas presented by the psychologist Victor Nell, is that we are the only cruel animal in the kingdom of animals, and we got here as an incidental consequence of our uniquely engineered brain. Unlike any other animal, our brain freely combines and recombines thoughts and emotions to create a virtually limitless range of solutions to an ever-changing environment. The combination of desire and denial is one example, a mix that enabled us alone to kill infants and adults, friends and foe, lovers and competitors, family members and strangers, and with a vastness and level of maliciousness that is unprecedented in the history of life on earth. But before modern humans evolved this capacity, millions of other social species found ways to satisfy their desires for valuable resources, most often by means of non-lethal aggression. This is part of our inheritance. Understanding this evolutionary history helps explain why many of our aggressive instincts parallel those seen in other animals. Understanding this history also reveals how far we have departed from our last common ancestor — a chimpanzee-like animal that could kill other species, as well as infants and adults from its own species, but with nothing like the gratuitous cruelty seen in our own species.

HARMING OTHERS, version 1.0: the design of non-lethal behaviors

All animals are motivated to secure resources that will enable them to survive and reproduce. At the most basic and universal level, this is what life is all about. Gaining access to resources enables individuals to accrue more resources, live longer, and produce more offspring. The path to acquiring resources is complicated by two facts of life that were central to Darwin’s insights into the process of evolution: resources are limited and individuals must compete with others from the same and different species for these resources. Competition often triggers aggression and aggression often results in harm to one or more individuals. But for the majority of animals, the harm is non-lethal. This section describes the behavioral strategies that are in play when animals fight for valuable resources and why death-by-fighting is a rare event.
⁴²

Consider life on Earth before human existence, say 10 million years ago. Our closest living relatives the chimpanzees and bonobos are living in the forests of Africa, and so too are dozens of other mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and insects. And of course there are animals populating every other continent and the seas that surround them. Among the social animals — those living in groups — the common form of aggression is one-on-one, and the context is typically competition over food, a place to rest, or access to a mate. Sometimes the aggression is initiated as an attack and sometimes it is in self-defense. Sometimes it is highly ritualized and planned, and sometimes it is a reactive free-for-all. Sometimes it occurs within the group and sometimes between. Severe injuries arise, but deaths are rare. The aim is to resolve a competitive dispute by means of non-lethal aggression, and if possible, non-physical contact. If someone dies it is because an injury leaves them incapacitated or vulnerable to disease. It is not because their opponent aimed to kill. The ubiquity of non-lethal aggression points to a suite of constraints that prevent animals from killing their opponents.

It all starts with two or more individuals perceiving a desirable resource within reaching distance. What launches a first move and subsequently guides the process to its completion with a winner and a loser? In some species there are rules of thumb that deflate any aggressive instincts before they are launched, even though there are clear competitive interests. For example, in territorial lizards and birds, if an emigrating individual lands in an area and sees or hears another individual vigorously displaying — push-ups with colorfully flashing neck sacs in lizards, vocal arias in birds — they move on. The rule: territory owners win, no questions asked. Another rule of thumb arises in species organized around either permanent or breeding-only harems: one male and many females. Here, the rule is: harem master wins access to females, virtually all of the time. Two classic cases are the well-studied hamadryas baboons of Ethiopia and the elephant seals of California. In both species, males are much larger than females, with elephant seals providing an extreme case — the harem
master
can be ten times bigger than the females he mates with, and substantially larger than most males. In hamadryas, no one challenges the male over access to the females in his harem. Competition arises in acquiring females into a harem, a process that starts early, with individual males recruiting juvenile females. In elephant seals, either one or a few males completely monopolize the mating among the often hundred or more females within the harem. These males rule. As evidenced by genetic fingerprinting, virtually all of the offspring are sired by the alpha male, with leftovers going to numbers two and three. No mating competition. Competition arises when the young turks try to wear down the harem master through repeated challenges over the season. Eventually, often over the course of several mating seasons, the harem master loses a fight and hangs up his gloves.

These rules evolved to minimize aggression. When aggression arises it is because a once dominant animal has gotten weaker, either due to age or injury; this opens the door to challenges from younger and healthier individuals.

Dominance hierarchies, briefly discussed in
chapter 1
, provide another set of rules or norms that guide competition and thus, put limits on aggression. In general, irrespective of the species, high ranking animals outcompete low ranking animals for access to resources. If the rank distance between two individuals within the hierarchy is large, the subordinate acts like a migrating lizard or bird landing in a resident’s territory: no contest, no competition, no fighting, no harm done. If the spread is less, say two individuals who hold adjacent ranks within the hierarchy, then other factors enter into the calculation. This is where the problem gets interesting as these other factors determine the start and end of a contest, and thus the landscape of potential harm.

Novel insights into the dynamics of aggressive competition emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s due to two fundamental developments within evolutionary biology. The first was due to the evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith who recognized that for any competitive interaction, there are different strategies, each with different payoffs. Some strategies are more costly, but return greater benefits. Others are more conservative and less costly, but return smaller benefits. How well any given strategy does depends on its frequency in the population, and thus, on whether the particular strategy is dominant or rare. This is the logic of games, and game theory developed by economists. Maynard Smith’s central insight was to see these games as evolving over long periods of time, locked into epic arms races with predators battling prey, hosts competing with parasites, and males challenging each other for access to females. For example, consider a baboon troop with 20 adult males. Imagine that one of the males decides to bare his canines, stand up on his two hind legs, and charge
whenever
anyone comes near him and he is eating. This male is displaying his intent to attack at the slightest provocation. One could imagine that this would be very effective, especially if he is the only one displaying in this way. But if this display pattern spreads, and all other males do the same thing, then this strategy fails as it no longer distinguishes among the 20 males in the troop. The key insight from evolutionary game theory is that the effectiveness of a strategy depends on how common it is within the population. Power comes, in part, from being not too common or predictable.

The second development involved signaling theory and a challenge to the traditional approach that considered animal signals as truthful messengers of information. On the traditional view, when a monkey bares his canines, he is signaling his motivation to attack. When a dog puts his tail between his legs, he is signaling his submissive status. When a bird gives an alarm call, she is telling others that a predator is nearby. When a human smiles, he is conveying his desire for friendship. The new signaling theory presented a challenge to this honest view of communication. Why, for example, wouldn’t individuals lie, deceiving others into believing that they were really tough, meek, in danger, or friendly, only to take advantage of the situation and gain added resources. This is deception, Trivers-style. Why, for example, wouldn’t a baboon who was actually afraid, put on a tough-guy show and scare off his opponents? Why wouldn’t a dog who was actually tough, send a submissive signal at the start of the interaction, cause his opponent to lower his guard and then attack? Why wouldn’t a bird send an alarm in the absence of danger, knowing that others will run for cover and leave all the food behind – no competition? Why wouldn’t a human send a seductive smile to lure in an innocent victim for robbery? This line of questioning, developed by the evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and John Krebs, led to a number of studies showing that animals are engaged in a much more complicated and dynamic dance when they compete. Signalers attempt to manipulate their audience and the audience attempts to read the true intentions of the signalers. The question now becomes: how much should signalers deviate from their actual capacity and what can the audience do to best assess the signaler’s honesty?

Static properties of the animal — its height, weight, tail length, antler size — indicate its raw, unfakeable ability to fight, what biologists call
Resource Holding Potential
or
RHP
. A red deer with a large set of antlers has paid the costs of growth, and is thus, a serious opponent with considerable strength. A tall, heavy, long-tusked elephant bull has spent the time and energy to bulk up, and can throw his weight around in a fight. Added to an animal’s RHP are dynamic properties, features that require energetic investment in the moment such as the loudness or duration of a vocalization, or the height of a jump display. These dynamic properties form the foundation of competitive interactions and the raw material for assessments. When a resource is up for grabs and no simple rule of thumb or RHP factor trumps, animals assess each others’ displays, attempting to work out what is real and what is bluff. This assessment is critical as it helps mediate the odds of being harmed.

The evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi provided a simple, yet far-reaching explanation of how animals — humans included — can determine the honesty behind the message: look at the costliness of the message as one sign of credibility. Signals gain honesty if they are costly to produce, where cost is relative to current condition or health. If every red deer can roar as loudly as the next one, then roaring carries no weight. It carries no weight because in every naturally living population, there is variation in physical condition due to limited resources and competition. Since roaring requires energy, the power and duration of roaring should be linked to an individual’s condition. Only those who can afford to roar like mad will do so. Cheating is not possible on this view of signaling, or if it occurs, it is easy to detect; a red deer roaring like mad, but with a dull coat and ribs showing, will be exhausted after one bout and fail to provide a repeat performance.