EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (17 page)

Even resting human brains show signs of being wired for combinations. When you lie down in bed and close your eyes, but before you drift off to sleep, your brain — assuming
you
are a healthy adult — shows activity in a family of inter-connected brain regions called the
default network
. This is your brain at rest, but it is anything but at rest. Some of the most active areas involve those that are engaged when we evaluate social relationships, consider what others believe and desire, who they are, and how we might interact in the future. This same default network looks very different in children, as well as in the elderly: it is much less connected. Growing up is connecting up. Growing old is disconnecting. We gain the power of combinatorial thinking as we mature and lose it as we age.

If connection is key, then developmental disorders of the mind or physical insult to the brain should result in predictable loss. A brain imaging study of individuals with autism is revealing. Individuals with autism fall along a spectrum, from low to high functioning. Though this spectrum captures important differences, all inflicted with this developmental disorder have difficulty with social relationships because of difficulties understanding the beliefs, intentions and emotions of others. All of these capacities require a system that can integrate multiple sources of information. During brain scanning, individuals with autism show a striking reduction of activity in three connected areas of the brain: the
insula
,
somatosensory cortex
and
amygdala
. The insula is an area of the brain that is like a traffic cop, responsible for coordinating the flow of information in the brain, both where it’s coming from and where it should go. The somatosensory cortex handles our body’s sensations, including how aroused we are about our experiences. The amygdala plays a key role in generating feelings and placing value on our experiences. With the traffic cop asleep, and the body’s sensations and feelings dormant, it is no wonder that those with autism lack empathy, can’t understand what it means for someone to be in love, are befuddled by deception, and find the bombardment from our media-intense world truly overwhelming. The lack of connectivity among those with autism is proof that connectivity is necessary for fluid, creative, unconstrained thinking.

We don’t know exactly when rich connectivity within the brain evolved. We also don’t know why it evolved, in the sense of explaining the ecological and social pressures that would have favored this particular brain design. What we do know is that once we evolved our massively connected, combinatorial brain, we were liberated from the myopic and functionally narrow domains of thought and emotion that typify the animal kingdom. This change paved the way for remarkably creative ways of thinking, including a new pattern of harming others, with both beneficial and toxic consequences.

Incidental justice

Most forms of violence in the animal kingdom are, as noted, non-lethal, emerging in the context of resource competition: two individuals or two groups fighting over food, water, land or mates. In the much more uncommon situation in which individuals use lethal violence, resource competition nonetheless dominates. In both lethal and non-lethal cases, the violence often occurs because of an infraction — an individual violating a social norm. For example, when an intruder steps into a resident’s territory or a subordinate attempts to mate within the alpha’s arena, a fight often breaks out. These attacks look like punishment, designed to teach a lesson. And in many of these cases, they function in this way
⁵⁰
. But like the other capacities described above for non-human animals, the capacity for punishment is myopic, restricted to the context of competition. In contrast, humans punish competitors who transgress and cooperators who cheat. When we punish, we harm those who deserve to be harmed, at least based on certain social and moral standards. And when we punish, we use both non-lethal and lethal means, including excessive, gratuitous cruelty. Once again, the capacity to harm in this particular way didn’t evolve for punishment. Rather, punishment evolved as an incidental consequence of our brain’s connected and combinatorial design. The evidence to support this idea comes from comparative work on other animals, together with observations of human brain scans
⁵¹
.

The first point to make is that the absence of punishment in cooperative situations is not because animals never cheat in this context. On the contrary, animals cheat in both cooperative and competitive contexts. For example, both lions and chimpanzees cooperate in group defense against dangerous neighbors. Some individuals cheat by lagging behind or failing to join in altogether. These cheaters never suffer any adverse consequences. This stands in contrast to the many cases in which individuals cheat in a competitive context and are physically attacked or shunned for it. Nonhuman animals thus have the capacity to recognize, harm, and potentially change rule breakers. And yet, these capacities and behaviors are not applied in the context of cooperative interactions. Myopic thinking rules.

We can begin to understand how and why we evolved our broad-brush capacity to punish by comparing competitive and cooperative situations. When an individual attacks a rule breaker in a competitive context, there is an immediate benefit: the attacker gains access to the challenged resource. In contrast, when an individual attacks a cheater in a cooperative context, the benefit is at best delayed, and often uncertain. If a lion attacked a laggard who failed to cooperate in group defense, the laggard might join in on the next opportunity or not. Punishment in a cooperative context thus involves more delayed and uncertain returns. Waiting, especially when the payoffs are uncertain, is hard for most animals, humans included.

Unique evolutionary changes in the human brain allowed us to exert much greater patience than any other animal, overriding the pull of the hedonistic now. These changes include brain areas involved in imagining the future, as well as suppressing the pull of current emotions and temptations. These changes didn’t evolve
for
punishment, but they were readily deployed by this system of justice. We rely on creative strategies to place value on the future, including putting resources away so that we can’t use them, and making verbal commitments that bind us to the future. These strategies, each emblematic of our combinatorial brain, help diminish the emotional pull of immediate temptations, while raising the attractiveness of future payoffs. This is a brain that can wait for the delayed benefits of punishment. This change was accompanied by another that made punishing a cheater feel good, immediately.

When we punish or get even with those who have acted badly, we feel a hedonic high, an experience captured by the metaphor “revenge is sweet but not fattening.” As demonstrated by the economist Ernst Fehr, this is more than a metaphor. When we hand someone his just deserts, punishing someone for cheating, lying, or breaking a promise, our brain responds as if we handed ourselves just desserts, activating brain circuitry associated with reward, including those that are associated with the release of dopamine. In one study carried out by Fehr, two subjects played an exchange game for money. One player — the donor — decided how much of the money to give to another; the other player had no say, simply receiving whatever was offered. A third player observed, out of view, the outcome of the exchange. In some cases, observers witnessed a fair division of the money and in other cases an unfair division in which the donor kept a disproportionate amount of the total. The observer then faced a difficult decision: leave the two players with their take-home earnings or use personal funds to take away money from the donor, returning it to the bank. Taking money away from the donor is a form of costly punishment. It is costly in two ways: the punisher loses money he could have kept, and the donor loses money that he unfairly kept in his previous exchange. It is also highly moralistic — the donor’s action has no direct bearing on the observer, especially since the game is played anonymously. Thus, punishment, if carried out, is geared for the greater good, designed to teach those who play unfairly a lesson.

When donors kept a significantly larger portion of the original sum, observers punished, paying the costs. They also reported feeling good about taking down the cheapskates. Where was this honey hit to the brain coming from?

To answer this question, Fehr and his colleagues put people in a brain scanner and used a technique called Positron Emission Tomography or PET. This type of scanning provides an image of how much glucose is used up by different brain areas during a task. Higher glucose consumption occurs when there is higher activity in a brain region. When punishers decided to punish a selfish donor, glucose consumption increased in a region of the brain associated with reward: the
dorsal striatum
, a major part of the dopamine system. This region is also active when you eat ice cream, earn money, solve an unexpected problem, and develop cravings for cocaine. Punishers incurred a financial cost, but gained emotional elation and internal reward. Punishment, as a form of harm, feels good to members of our species.

This section started with a comparative puzzle: why do social animals physically punish in the context of competition for resources, but only humans punish cheaters in both competitive and cooperative situations? Why, more generally, is punishment in animals myopic whereas punishment in humans is unrestricted in its application? What the evidence suggests is that our combined capacity to delay gratification and feel good when we harm cheaters, enabled us to punish in any context. It provided us with the tools to not only repair a puncture in the system of norms, but to feel good about incurring costs with uncertain payoffs. This is yet another context in which our brains deliver rewards for harming others.

Once we evolved a brain that could punish in both competitive and cooperative contexts, it enabled us to solve another problem: large-scale cooperation among genetically unrelated individuals, including strangers. When other animals cooperate, they restrict their altruistic acts to close kin, or if they engage unrelated individuals, the number of recipients are small and familiar. By restricting costly altruistic acts to kin, individuals gain by helping their genetic fitness. By restricting their actions to a small number of unrelated but familiar individuals, they allow reputation to build, thereby reducing the odds of being cheated. When group size grows, and with it the number of unrelated individuals, many of whom are strangers, the odds of being cheated grows. Humans solved this problem, to some extent, by recruiting punishment. As Robert Trivers, Ernst Fehr, Samuel Bowles and others have noted, punishment enabled humans to harm cheaters, either physically or by exclusion from the group. Though punishment is costly, it benefits the punisher who gains in status and often, access to resources; it also benefits the individuals within the group by weeding out the cheaters who can undermine cooperative goals. One such cooperative goal is the unification of members of one group to wipe out another group. This is cooperation in the service of competition. It is a capacity that often recruits large numbers of unrelated strangers, linked by a core set of beliefs. It is a capacity that often enables excessive harm to those with different beliefs.

Only humans recruit the faculty of imagination to invent novel ways of inflicting excruciating pain before we kill those who have violated a social or moral norm. In cultures of honor, thieves and adulteresses are stoned, bludgeoned, and burned to death, often by close family members. In war, enemy captives are tortured to extract information and often for cruelty’s sake alone. For both torture and the death penalty, we have invested considerable intellectual capital to invent devices that inflict the greatest amount of pain before terminating an individual’s life. Though the Middle Ages in Europe are often associated with the horrors of famine and disease, the most horrific human disasters involved the torture devices created by the Christian judicial system. For virtually every body part, and especially, every orifice, there was an appropriate technology, including knee splitters, joint dislocaters, jaw, anus, and vaginal rippers, flesh stretchers, body impalers, head crushers, and breast mutilators. Humans designed these devices for one clear purpose: to bring excruciating pain and disfigurement to the victim.

Torture and execution were often public affairs, witnessed with raucous pleasure by hundreds. Such entertainment continues today, either live with real audiences, or broadcast over the internet for the benefit of millions of eager viewers. In 2010, the videotaped execution of Saddam Hussein received some 12 million hits on YouTube, with comparable numbers for other public executions taking place in Yemen, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. As I discuss further ahead, the fact that we often use gratuitous cruelty in a public forum suggests that it plays a highly social function, one in which we attempt to impress with excess.

What we have learned in these last two sections is that the evolution of a highly connected and combinatorial brain enabled us to creatively approach problems that have stymied other animals. Relative to their myopia, we have a broad vision. This change in brain structure led to many incidental consequences. Of most direct relevance here is the observation that we evolved a capacity to feel good when we punish cheaters. This form of punishment, together with the cases of schadenfreude and revenge discussed in
chapter 1
, provide a suite of situations in which our brain rewards us for harming someone else or cheering while others carry out the violence. This intimate connection between feeling good and violence facilitated the evolution of HARMING OTHERS, version 2.0.

HARMING OTHERS, version 2.0: designed for Homo sapiens

In
chapters 1
and
2
, I described several cases where humans develop an appetite for harming others. Lust killers represent an extreme version, but other examples are not too far behind, including brain washed child soldiers and the brutal dictators that have placed their mark on every continent and in every epoch of history. These people often feel good when they harm others, and especially when they cause great pain along the way; sometimes they feel nothing at all. What I suggest is that this level of cruelty is only possible with the neural hardware that uniquely evolved in our species.