For most people there is only one small step between vulgarity and refinement, between blows and kisses, between spitting at one’s neighbor’s face and showering him with kindness.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father’s Court
Then the real killing began. Tutsi men, women, and children were massacred in the Red Cross refugee camps where they sought protection. Tutsi patients and staff were hacked to death in a hospital as foreign doctors watched. Tutsi families huddling for sanctuary inside a mission were blown up with hand grenades, then doused with gasoline and set on fire; the few survivors who tried to run away were cut down with machetes.
account of the Rwanda massacre.[1]
What makes some people do good and others do evil? In 1997, in the city of Denver, Colorado, a 19-year-old neo-Nazi named Nathan Thill was interviewed by a local TV station after he and an accomplice had been charged for the murder of Oumar Dia, an immigrant from Mauritania. The murder of Dia, a father of three young children, was racially motivated. Thill, who did not know Dia, shot him as he was about to board a city bus. Without a trace of remorse, the young assassin described the shooting as getting rid of someone who “didn’t belong where he was at.” Thill saw himself as a soldier in a racial war. “In a war,” he declared in the interview, “anybody wearing the enemy’s uniform is an enemy and should be taken out. I guess I was kind of thinking of him because he was black.”[2]
Jeannie Van Velkinburgh, a 36-year-old white woman went to Dia’s aid. Thill, enraged by this act of mercy, shot Jeannie in the back, severing her spinal cord, and leaving her paralyzed from the waist down. The woman, a nursing home aide and single mother of two boys, declared that she was “trying to help someone who needed help and didn’t have any idea I would end up in this situation.” Nevertheless, she added, “I would do it again if I thought there was a chance that I could save someone’s life.”[3] In this one story, we can see both the worst of human behavior, and the best. How do people get to these diverse points in their life?
People around the world would probably provide different explanations for the actions of the killer and the nurse aide. The 19th-century cleric Thomas Martin, believed in the “native depravity” of children and that “we bring with us into the world a nature replete with evil propensities,” which are “the source of all moral evil in the conduct of man-kind.”[4] In the US, with its Puritan heritage, constant control and discipline are required if any real goodness is to be achieved and the danger of regression is always present. Hardly anyone today would call children depraved, but quite a few may think that Thill lacked the proper spiritual discipline.
In contrast, the ancient philosophies of the East (Buddhism and Confucianism) emphasize the original goodness of human nature, although good can also be mutable. Confucius, for example, thought that human nature is good, but it can turn bad without proper education and intentional personal development. Perhaps, then, Thill’s actions could be the result of a lack of proper education and development.
The power of context and circumstance on our behavior
Are humans then, inherently good but corrupted by the forces of evil, or intrinsically evil yet redeemable by the forces of good? Scientific evidence suggests that we are both things simultaneously. As the humanist psychologist Carl Rogers put it, “there is no beast in man; there is only man in man.” Humans are neither innately good nor innately evil. Humans can show great kindness as well as despicable evil. Humans are predisposed to cooperate in certain situations and not in others, to cheat when the occasion arises, and to suffer from self-delusions. We all share these proclivities to some degree although our behavior is also the product of factors specific to our culture (see also Idea 16, forthcoming).
For example, most humans can experience empathy, an innate emotion that is the basis for intimate relationships and to relate to others. Empathy is a primary emotion that we share with other species such as chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas. In addition, evolution has endowed humans with a moral sense. “Children as young as a year and a half,” writes Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, “spontaneously give toys, proffer help and try to comfort adults or other children who are visibly distressed. People in all cultures distinguish right from wrong, have a sense of fairness, help one another, impose rights and obligations, believe that wrongs should be redressed, and proscribe rape, murder and some kinds of violence. These moral sentiments are conspicuous by their absence in the aberrant individuals we call psychopaths.”[5]
Emotions like empathy and a moral sense are the foundation for universal social behaviors such as attachment, forming of coalitions and friendships, care giving and mating, division of labor, exchange, cooperation, and reciprocity. These behaviors are universal to the extent that they are found among all people known to ethnography and history. This does not mean, however, that they are tightly regulated by our genes; culture and individual upbringing matter a great deal. During the Nazi occupation in the Second World War, some countries were more protective of their Jewish population than others. Many ordinary people acted heroically and risked their lives to help total strangers. But ordinary people also perpetrated many of the most heinous crimes.
This is the case of the genocidal master Adolf Eichmann, who came from a conventional middle-class household in northern Austria. Before joining the Nazi party, Eichmann worked as an oil and kerosene salesman for a Jewish-owned business. He was essentially a bureaucrat, with little more on his mind than pleasing his superiors. He was neither fanatical nor bloodthirsty; in fact, he never directly killed anyone. He made trains run on time.
Yet he was indisputably a mass murderer. The journalist Hanna Arendt, in the articles she wrote for The New Yorker, on the Eichmann trial, which evolved into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), introduced a phrase to describe Eichmann that has become part of the modern vocabulary – “the banality of evil.” She was frightened by the insight that the most awful crimes may be committed by ordinary people. She raised the crucial question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness – the tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without critically thinking about the results of their action or inaction.
Could it be that Eichmann and his accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders as they claimed? Classical experiments like the one on obedience to authority by Stanley Milgram, conducted in 1963, in which ordinary people fulfilled orders to administer what appeared to be fatal electric shocks to a confederate of the experimenter,[6]and the mock prison at Stanford by Philip Zimbardo, show how easy it is for ordinary people to inflict pain on others if authoritarian figures order them to do so.
In the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), in the summer of 1971, volunteers played the roles of guards and prisoners and lived in a mock prison. The experiment quickly got out of hand. The planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be stopped prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students in the study. In only a few days, the guards became sadistic, and the prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.[7]
In his 2007 book The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo revisits the SPE and applies it to historical examples of injustice and atrocity, including the torture and abuse tactics allegedly employed in their interrogations of Abu Ghraib prisoners by the US military. His troubling finding is that almost anyone, given the right “situational” influences, can be made to abandon moral scruples and cooperate in violence and oppression. “The majority of people,” writes Zimbardo, “can get seduced across the line of good and evil in a very short period of time by a variety of circumstances that they’re usually not aware of — coercion, anonymity, dehumanization. We don’t want to accept the notion because it attacks our concept of the dignity of human nature.” [8]
This is what psychologists refer to as situational attributions of behavior rather than dispositional attributions. In other words, the situation caused the participants’ behavior rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities.
New ethical regulations on human research have prevented psychologists from replicating Zimbardo’s prison experiment and Milgram’s obedience experiments. However, the evidence from places like Abu Ghraib and recent studies suggest that their findings still hold up today, decades after these experiments were done. For example, a 2009 study found that, like in Milgram’s original study, a high number of people obeyed the request from the “authority” to shock the confederates. Also, no gender differences were found in the rates of obedience.[9]
The capacity for cruelty of “peaceful citizens”
Most researchers agree that these experiments reveal important aspects of human nature, although they are still debating what exactly they are. Yet, it is true that under certain conditions otherwise peaceful citizens are prone to extreme violence. Witness the events of Jan 6, 2021, when a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump attacked the United States Capitol in Washington, DC. They sought to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election by disrupting the joint session of Congress assembled to count electoral votes that would formalize then President-elect Joe Biden's victory. During a rally that took place on the ellipse at noon on Jan 6, Trump repeated false claims of election irregularities and said, “If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.”[10] After his speech, thousands of his supporters walked to the Capitol and many broke into the building, attempting to locate lawmakers to capture and harm.
During the melee, police officers were beaten, a rioter was shot, and three people died. Some rioters erected gallows on the west side of the Capitol and chanted “Hang Mike Pence” after Pence rejected false claims by Trump that the vice president could overturn election results. Many of those who breached the Capitol were found to be listed in the FBI’s terrorist database, most as suspected white supremacists. Over 30 members of anti-government groups, including the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters, were charged with conspiracy for planning their attacks on the Capitol. However, most of the people charged with crimes relating to the riot had no known affiliation with far-right groups; they were “an array of everyday Americans that included community leaders, small-business owners, teachers and yoga instructors.”[11]
The Rwandan massacre offers a harrowing example of the extreme violence and cruelty that can be committed by ordinary citizens. In 1994, Rwandan citizens massacred more than half a million of their compatriots. Most of the death belonged to the Tutsi ethnic minority. Militias from the majority Hutu were primarily responsible for the genocide, incited by the Hutu-controlled Rwandan government, the army, and the media, especially the radio. The militia groups systematically set out to murder all the Tutsis they could capture, irrespective of their age or gender, as well as the Hutu political moderates.[12]
While these groups were responsible for most of the violence, they involved a wide spectrum of society. Most of the victims were killed in their villages or in towns, often by their neighbors and fellow villagers. The militia members typically murdered their victims by hacking them with machetes, although some army units used rifles. The victims were often found hiding in churches and school buildings, where Hutu gangs massacred them. Local officials called on ordinary citizens to kill their neighbors, and those who refused to kill were often killed themselves. Many people enthusiastically responded to this call, including otherwise outstanding citizens such as mayors and members of police. Numerous priests, pastors, nuns, brothers, catechists and Catholic and Protestant lay leaders supported, participated in, or helped to organize the killings.
Despite the intimidations and threats, not all Hutus participated in the killing spree. One such case is described in the movie Hotel Rwanda, released in 2004. The film, based on actual events, relates the brave actions of Paul Rusesabagina, a Kigali hotelier, and the events around the Hôtel des Mille Collines, a sanctuary for Tutsis and moderate Hutus after its owner shut his doors against the genocide. By and large, however, the Hutu population responded to the call to exterminate their fellow Tutsi. Similar events occurred in the neighboring country of Burundi. In 1993, during a period of strife, Hutu militias killed as many as 400,000 Tutsis. Trying to bring order back, elements of the Burundian army killed culprits together with innocent Hutus who were not part of the killings.[13]
It is important to clarify that the Hutu are not “more” violent than the Tutsi; in 1972, the situation in Burundi was reversed. Following a rebellion of some Hutu members of the gendarmerie, the Tutsi-dominated army proceeded to slaughter Hutus systematically. Over 50,000 Hutus were killed in just over a 3-month period. As the cases of Serbia and Somalia also exemplify, there are many other examples of violence of neighbor against neighbor.
Even believers in traditionally peaceful religions and traditions have participated in violence. In March 2013, Buddhist monks in the city of Meikthila, in central Myanmar, incited a mob armed with machetes and swords to attack the local Muslim population. Within hours, up to 25 Muslims had been massacred by the Buddhist mob. The bloodshed was followed by Buddhist-led mob violence in at least 14 other villages. In January 2022, before a packed audience and thousands watching online, Hindu monks called for violence against the country’s minority Muslims. Their speeches in Haridwar, India – one of India’s holiest cities – promoted a genocidal campaign to “kill two million of them” and urged an ethnic cleansing.[14]
The main lesson: Always remain aware and alert
I agree with Zimbardo that while humans are not innately evil, they can be compelled to do evil things given the right situational influences. This may sound grim, but this is how we humans are. On the positive side, it also gives us hope that we will be able to avoid the kind of conditions that compel people to do evil acts, like those discussed here. In their book Ethnic Conflict, Stefan Wolff and Karl Cordell review the causes of ethnic strife and conclude that the most effective responses are those that consider factors at the local, state, regional and global level and which avoid seeking simplistic explanations and solutions to what is a truly complex phenomenon. It takes, they argue, skillful, committed, and principled leaders to achieve just solutions that are supported by their followers. It also takes the long-term commitment of the international community to enable and sustain these solutions.[15]
Indeed, like the examples reviewed here, most of the cases of mob violence are incited by corrupt, unprincipled leaders that seek their own agendas at the expense of the wellbeing of the population at large. There is no substitute, however, for personal responsibility. At the end of the day, we are all accountable for our own actions (see discussion on free will in Idea 15, forthcoming). Eichmann was indeed an evil person, no qualms about it.
It is therefore critical to understand why some people decide to resist peer pressure and stand by their values. What motivated Oskar Schindler, Paul Rusesabagina and Jeannie VanVelkinburgh to risk their lives to help strangers?
While finding an explanation to this, maybe unanswerable, question is relevant for our understanding of human nature, the most valuable lesson is that we should all keep our minds perennially open and alert to avoid becoming mindless followers and, more importantly, we should always act with caring and compassion for our fellow humans.
[1]Peterson, D. & Wrangham, R. (1997). Demonic males: Apes and the origins of human violence, Mariner Books. p.4. [2]“Skinhead confesses/ Racially tolerant city reels in shock,” Wilmington Morning Star, November 22, 1997. [3]“Killing wasn’t much, skinhead says,” The New York Times, November 22, 1997. [4] Quoted in Bloom P. (2004). Descartes’ baby: How the science of child development explains what makes us human, Perseus Book Group: New York, p.123. [5] Pinker, S. (2003). The Blank Slate: The modern denial of human nature, Penguin Books, p.188. [6]For information on Milgram’s experiment see: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/obsonline/the-obedience-experiments-at-50.html [7]See http://www.prisonexp.org/ for the “official” SPE web site (retrieved 4 Jan 2022.) [8] Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how good people turn evil, Random House. [9]This was demonstrated dramatically in a pilot French reality TV show, in which men and women were more than willing to kill their fellow compatriots for their 15 minutes of fame. Eighty people who thought they were participating in the shooting of a pilot for a French reality series were willing to deliver potentially lethal electric shocks to a contestant who had incorrectly answered knowledge questions. The participants were part of an experiment that was turned into the documentary. Only 16 contestants walked away. Interestingly, the earlier a participant expressed hesitation, the more likely it was that she would end up defying the host. See “The game of death: France’s shocking TV experiment,’ by Bruce Crumley, Time, Mar 17, 2010. [10] “This is what Trump told supporters before many stormed Capitol Hill,” by Julia Jacobo. abc News. 7 Jan 2021. [11]“Desperate, angry, destructive: How Americans morphed into a mob,” by Rachel Weiner, Spencer S. Hsu, Tom Jackman and Sahana Jayaraman. Washington Post. Nov 9, 2021. [12]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide. [13] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burundi_genocide. [14] “Buddhist monks incite Muslim killings in Myanmar,” by Jason Szep. Reuters Special Report, Apr 8, 2013. Also “As Officials Look Away, Hate Speech in India Nears Dangerous Levels,” by Mujib Mashal, The New York Times, Feb 9, 2022. [15]Cordell, K.& Wolff, S. (2010). Ethnic Conflict: Causes, Consequences, and Responses. Polity ed.
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