EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (18 page)

To see how version 2.0 works, let’s return to some of the raging physiology that I discussed a few sections back. Recall that there are hormones like testosterone that surge when individuals win a competition, whether this involves deer banging antlers, humans banging fists, or chess masters banging minds. Along with testosterone’s increase is an increase in dopamine, a decrease in cortisol and serotonin, and a decrease in frontal lobe activity and control. Within the environment of a combinatorial brain, this physiological ballet affects our sense of fairness, empathy, moral conscience, attitude toward retribution and justice, as well our willingness to engage in lethal aggression.

Brain imaging studies reveal that the prefrontal cortex plays an essential role in regulating our aggressive impulses. The prefrontal cortex has deep connections with other areas of the brain, including those that regulate our emotions, determine what others believe and intend, and place value on our experiences. When individuals respond aggressively to an unfair offer in a bargaining game, testosterone levels rise and activity decreases in a part of the prefrontal cortex associated with self-control. Testosterone’s effectiveness in human aggression arises, therefore, through its capacity to turn down activity in brain areas critical for self-control. Further evidence for the importance of self-control, and these brain areas in particular, comes from studies of patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex. These patients not only show abnormal aggressive responses to direct insult, but also to such trivial matters as being offered a lowish offer in an experimental bargaining game. Putting these different studies together reveals that regions of the brain involved in the calculation of equity are closely tied to those that determine just deserts, which in turn are tied to those that enable our aggressive instincts. But unlike other animals, where aggressive responses to inequities are limited to non-lethal means, such constraints are often lifted in our case. To understand how these constraints are removed, we turn first to pathology and the case of psychopathology.

When we label individuals as “psychopaths” in casual conversation, we typically refer to people who are selfish, callous, and manipulative. These are all characteristics that fit with clinical reports as well as scientific analysis. When Hollywood portrays the psychopathic profile, these same traits appear along with a brutally violent character, capable of cold, gratuitous cruelty. The psychopath, in this sense, is the poster child for my definition of evil: an
individual who uses gratuitous cruelty to cause excessive harm to innocent victims
. Of most immediate relevance is the fact that the brain abnormalities that result in psychopathy — abnormalities that are due more to nature than nurture — are the same brain areas involved in the healthy condition. What we can learn from studies of psychopaths, then, is both the vulnerabilities of healthy individuals to carrying out acts of gratuitous cruelty, and ways in which the psychopathic mind is so very different.

Psychopathy, like many other clinical disorders including the case of autism discussed earlier, represents a spectrum with both extreme and mild forms, the latter represented by many healthy individuals at some point in their lives. Thus, many relatively normal people have acted selfishly for longish periods of time, often showing little regard for the feelings of others. Sometimes such callousness and self-absorption can lead to outbursts of violence, resulting in harm to innocent others. For the clinical psychopath, however, there is not only an extreme Narcissistic personality, but an inability to control impulses (associated with structural and functional abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex), a tendency for heightened aggression, a lack of remorse or empathy, and an inability to connect emotions up with moral norms. These processes may have their origin, at least in part, in genetic differences: psychopaths commonly have genetic variants that result in higher levels of dopamine within brain pathways that regulate self-control. As a result, psychopaths not only experience a higher anticipated reward in planning their actions, but have less self-control over what they do. These same genetic differences also underlie substance abuse, another case of poor self-control that ties us back to the arguments presented in
chapter 1
on desire and addiction: when willpower to overcome temptation is weak, and the anticipation of rewarding experiences is high, excessive behavior commonly follows, aimed at satisfying desires. Together, this suite of genetic, neurobiological and psychological processes results in an individual that is morally disengaged. Psychopaths are not only freed from the emotions and thoughts that typically constrain our capacity for violence, but further freed from the neural brakes that stop us from hurting others.

The essential point to keep in mind is that psychopathy is a clinical disorder that presents a spectrum — like autism. Though clinicians often suggest that there are different types of psychopaths, each with their own unique clustering of psychological and behavioral problems, the diagnosis rests on the fact that the patterns of abnormal behaviors are consistent and predictable. In contrast, when we casually say that an individual is a psychopath, we are pointing to characteristics that are shared in common with the clinical type, but are more ephemeral in their expression. And the important point here is that a fleeting expression of narcissism, impulsivity, callousness, and moral disengagement can turn into a habit, one that causes great harm to others, especially those unlike us. As I discussed in
chapter 2
, we are equipped with a variety pack of mechanisms to take out the other, often without feeling any guilt at all. We dehumanize those unlike us or think of them as dangerous. Either way, we have paved a path of justification. This path is further deepened by yet one other corruption of an otherwise beneficent process, providing one final example of our brain’s combinatorial creativity.

Among mammals, including humans, oxytocin is released in females during labor and breastfeeding, and in both males and females during social bonding and parenting. This has led many to think of oxytocin as the cuddle hormone. But when oxytocin surges within our distinctively human brain, it does something extra: it fuels hatred toward those unlike us. Experiments by the psychologist Carsten De Dreu suggests how.

Subjects first sprayed either oxytocin or a placebo up their noses, and then played a series of bargaining games, much like those described in the last section on punishment. When oxytocin shoots up the nose, it goes straight to the brain. When De Dreu analyzed his results, he found that those who sniffed oxytocin (relative to placebo) perceived in-group members (relative to out-group members) as more likeable, more human, more richly endowed with social emotions such as embarrassment, contempt, humiliation and admiration, more worthy of saving in an emergency, and more deserving of money in the bargaining game. In contrast, with oxytocin, they were more likely to use their own money to take away money from out-group members and were more likely to perceive them as non-human, bleached of the features of experience and agency that define our humanity. Oxytocin is thus two-faced, cuddling with its left profile and harming with its right. It is part of the artillery that facilitates our unique capacity to harm others.

This is a small sampling of the ways in which the human brain enables new forms of harm, including adulticide. We didn’t invent lethal aggression. We share this capacity with a small group of animals that also kill other adults. But whereas these other species typically restrict their lethal attacks to situations in which one group greatly outnumbers another, typically targeting adults from a neighboring group, we evolved far beyond this pattern. We adopted the cost-benefit analysis that drives killing in other animals and applied it to killing in a virtually limitless space of homicidal opportunities. We kill when we outnumber our opponents or are outnumbered by them, attacking individuals within and outside our core group. We kill spouses, ex-lovers, stepchildren, those who believe in God and those who don’t, the wealthy and the poor, kin and non-kin, and even ourselves if the cause is important enough. Virtually anything goes.

Our combinatorial brain opened a vista of harmful means, including the capacity to address a multitude of injustices. This is a capacity that may well have evolved for inherently good and justifiable situations, but has resulted in cases that are incidentally bad and unjustifiable. It is a capacity that evolved in response to growing pressures to balance inequities and take care of those who attempt to cheat society. It is a capacity that enabled us to engage in punishment in a broad range of contexts, righting wrongs and opening a new path to feeling good about harming others. It is also a capacity that enabled us to take advantage of the seemingly irrational, unpredictable and intimidating use of gratuitous cruelty to destroy our opponent’s willingness to fight back. But like so many other processes that I have discussed in this book, our capacity to impress with excess is not restricted to violence, but deployed in the context of charitable giving and sex.

Impress with excess

This passage, though similar in many ways to the vignette about the Shawnee Indians at the start of this chapter, was written by the ethologist Hans Kruuk and describes a seemingly cruel attack by four hyenas on a wildebeest. But hyenas aren’t cruel because they don’t intend pain for pain’s sake. All they intend, if they intend anything at all, is to bring down their prey with minimal cost. When they pull out a wildebeest’s insides, it is not to inflict pain but to obtain nutritional gains. When the Shawnee pulled out Mr. and Mrs. Greathouse’s insides, and tied them to a tree so that they could unravel themselves, their only goal was to inflict excruciating pain prior to death. This is excess and one explanation for it is Zahavi’s theory of costly signaling that I discussed at the start of this chapter.

The basic idea is that high cost signals are honest indicators of the signaler’s quality. They are honest because only those individuals in good enough condition can afford to expend time or energy displaying. Costly signals are also social, public displays, designed to influence others, with personal payoffs in terms of survival and mating. When a gazelle stots — a jumping motion that does little to advance its position — it does so when cheetahs are lurking. Only those gazelles in good physical condition stot
⁵³
. When a gazelle stots, it is signaling to the cheetah “I am in such good condition that I am willing to handicap myself by bouncing up and down. Don’t chase me. Chase one of the other gazelles who are running but not stotting.” This signal is effective: cheetah are much
less
likely to hunt and kill stotting than running gazelles.

Stotting appears excessive, but in fact is an honest signal of power
⁵⁴
. It is, to borrow a phrase from the economist Thorstein Veblen, “conspicuous consumption.” By flaunting their superior condition, throwing away resources just because they can, these stotting gazelles benefit in the long run, living longer and leaving more offspring who will inherit their qualities. These ideas carry over into human behavior, and across a vast range of contexts, unlike the myopia of the gazelle or any other species.

The anthropologist James Boone and evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller suggest that human magnanimity evolved as did stotting, as an honest signal of wealth and power. It represents a desire to impress through wastage. Publicly handicap yourself in the short run to benefit your wealth and status in the long run. Hunter-gatherers who bring home large prey from a day of hunting don’t make cryptic deposits for others, but make sure that their offerings are public. The Mayans didn’t build the pyramids for personal enjoyment behind walled enclosures, but in the open, visible to potential enemies as displays of excessive power to create something really big and costly. Among the Kwakiutl Indians, those chiefs with the highest status publicly gave away or burned the largest quantities of their own possessions. Big tippers don’t tip in private, but in the presence of those who can admire their lavish tips. Billionaires who give to charities, such as Donald Trump and Ted Turner, don’t make anonymous contributions, but broadcast their altruism through social media outlets. Rappers such as JayZ, Puff Daddy, and 50 cent don’t have absurdly lavish cribs with a six pack of sports cars because this is what they like, but because this is what they can show off on MTV. Flaunting, even at a substantial cost, provides a path to power. This is a club whose motto reads “Impress with excess.”

To explore when people flaunt their status by throwing away resources that they could keep, the psychologists Mark Van Vugt and Wendy Iredale carried out a public goods game like the Carlsmith studies on revenge that I discussed in
chapter 1
. Like other bargaining games, this one also presented people with a conflict between feeding self-interest and helping others, but with an interesting social and sexual twist. Based on Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, briefly discussed at the start of this chapter, Van Vugt and Iredale predicted that men would be more motivated to show off their capacity for conspicuous consumption in front of women because in the majority of species, males compete among each other for access to reproducing females, and females choose males on the basis of the resources they can provide. In the bargaining game, individuals either kept the money that the experimenter gave them, or contributed some or all of it to a public fund; their choice was expressed in front of an observer of the same or opposite sex. At the end of the game, the experimenter doubled the amount of money that players contributed and divided it equally among the players. On a purely selfish level, keeping all of your own money pays off, especially if others contribute to the public fund: you get your money plus a share of the fund.