There is nothing more instrumental to large scale deployment of ideological evil than fostering victim and oppressor narratives. Such narratives are especially dangerous as they can become deeply embedded into status competition allowing those who partake to enjoy immediate benefits.
If you haven't read *Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist* , Richard Rhodes popular science book on the discoveries of Lonny Athens, you may find it very interesting. It was the book that for me overturned the idea that people who commit violent evil must be crazy. Or impoverished. Or loved evil for its own sake.
Lonny Athens thinks there are distinct steps towards what he calls 'Violentization', and you have to pass through all of them in order to end up as a dangerously violent person. And, frighteningly, the steps seem to be one-way .... you cannot go back to being a non-violent person, though you may develop the self-restraint to never act on these violent desires you continue to have.
Most people, of course, are not interested in this sort of research, but I have always asked those who are to read the book and then report on whether they think that these steps are mandatory, or merely very, very common.
Another phenomenal article. This gives me a lot of food for thought as a lawyer about the matters I deal with every day. Lots to think about here regarding civil rights, criminal justice, and the importance of the rule of law and our justice system more generally.
Thanks for these comprehensive summaries. To the extent that people who commit acts that are evil, it is important to understand why, particularly if they are our adversaries. For a long time after WW2, it was convenient for everyone to ascribe all evil done by Nazi Germany to Hitler as some non human demon, without understanding all of the conditions and cooperation that led to his ability to conduct a world war and the Holocaust. As your essay makes clear, too often we confuse understanding evil with excusing evil.
I think one brilliant analyst of evil was Max Weber. In his lecture Politics as a Vocation, he distinguished between an Absolute Ethic and an Ethic of Responsibility.
I wrote a post on it that looked at how we can apply the two Ethics, or behaviors, to out own lives and why some of both is necessary.
Any decent stint as a criminal defense attorney is a graduate course in evil and human psychology, particularly the justification of bad acts.
Think about what you have to do to get someone to plead guilty (providently) in front of a judge, while they're constantly in full rationalization and excuse mode, even though there's no question they did what's alleged and harmed someone else in doing it.
You see ALL of the aforementioned kinds of "evil," many times as an admixture of character flaws and past trauma. Somewho, you try to get them through it.
Ambrose Bierce. (Possibly the most underrated quote on the subject):
“Sin is not at all dangerous to society; it is the sinner that does all the mischief. Sin has no arms to thrust into the public treasury and the private; no hands with which to cut a throat; no tongue to wreck a reputation withal. I would no more attack it than I would attack an isosceles triangle, a vacuum, or Hume's "phantasm floating in a void." My chosen enemy must be something that has a skin for my switch, a head for my cudgel—something that can smart and ache and, if so minded, fight back. I have no quarrel with abstractions; so far as I know they are all good citizens.”
I read this before I knew about the atrocities unfolding in Israel. Then when I found out, suddenly I went back to Rob’s thoughts. I still just feel sick about it though. I thought it might help to read it again. Nothing helps.
My simplified definition of evil is a human that knowingly materially harms another for their own selfish gain. Now, the act is evil, but the human may not be as sometime in a moment of weakness... in a transaction of bad judgement, a person is responsible for an evil act. But on reflection the person absolutes owns responsibility for the harm caused and grows in self-awareness to control destructive impulses and make better choices going forward.
Acts can be evil. People that routinely do evil acts are evil.
My liberal friends don't agree with this, and frankly their perspective, I think, makes them prone to evil (harming others for their personal gain). My liberal friends, I think, are people that tend to be below some line of personal emotional control themselves. So they categorize people in victim categories and demand that they are not held responsible for their actions that harm others. They explain away evil as being just desperation for being poor and having so many of their needs unsatisfied. But I think there is also some sympathy for lack of personal control.
The problem is that they mainstream bad behavior... they in fact allow evil to perpetrate and promulgate. They erase the foundation moral principle of people not being harmed by the actions of others. They assign some greater moral justification to the harm (for example, the decisions to shutdown public schools during the pandemic thus harming the lives of millions of mostly poor children).
The current gender dysphoria explosion in young girls is another example. The adult forces involved in encouraging this type of behavior that causes profound harm in young people are doing it for selfish reasons... to promote their Theory and woke ideology that has a defined goal of societal deconstruction and power shifting to their benefit. It is evil.
We all want... more power, more money, more advancement on the social dominance hierarchy. If we pursue those things in ways that materially harm others, then we are evil.
Great read Rob. We all work with the occasional narcissistic with the dark triad. I think I understand them a bit better and I understand myself better when I have to deal with these characters .
Thank you for the book recommendation. I will add it to my reading list (which never seems to shrink). I was fortunate in that I had parents who were capable of “tough love” (I was kicked out of the house when I was 19, I was very immature emotionally and socially). That allowed me to confront my demons in a way that did not harm myself or others.
The majority of the political extremes seems to be populated with people who are convinced they are on the side of the angels and do not seem to have come to grips with their own demons.
I think you should really work into the work of the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers , he essentially stated that the first people that deceptive people have to fool is themselves if they believe their own lies then it’s easier to convince others. A lot of narcissists have cognitive dissonance, one thing I’ve noticed.
In regards to so called good people , I think there have been multiple efforts to explain it Milgram’s experiments I feel were one such attempt and when they recently replicated recently it, they scored the participants on a big 5 personality test and they found more agreeable people are more likely to deliver a shock, and agreeableness is associated with being kind and empathetic.
Excellent piece Rob. I feel my understanding growing every time I read your articles. I wonder if you could cover religion at some stage? At various times it has been a force for great good, and at others a force for great evil.
Today is maybe a particularly difficult day to write and/or comment about this topic -- given how fresh the attack on Israel still is... I want to start by saying: whatever "evil" is (its essence), it causes pain and suffering for people, and that one fundamental impulse of my (and, so I hope, most people's) morality is to live in a world in which suffering is reduced, not to zero but to whatever minimum we can find that allows life to thrive and grow.
That being said, I suspect that one particularly difficult cause of evil to "uproot" lies in our built-in and almost impossible to overcome urge to leap from a (linear) causal understanding (X leads to Y) paired with a labeling of the outcome (Y) as "morally bad" to an application of "modus tollens". We correctly infer if X then Y ergo if not Y then not X. And so we seem to be thinking if I run into a wall and it hurts (and hurting is bad), then I shouldn't run into walls.
We unfortunately then extend this (limited context, linear causality) thinking to all kinds of complexly interwoven situations. Such as "if I have a fever my body aches (which is bad)," and consequently decide to do whatever we can to "eradicate fever." That the fever might serve a purpose (an important signaling function for other parts of the body to respond to a threat) for some other reason, and that by eliminating it we are causing lots of other unintended side effects is something that our intentional, conscious mind is slow to catch up on.
When we see people who commit "crimes" (cause pain), it is a very natural impulse to then having a desire to "eliminate the cause" (of the pain), which could simply be to "lock away the criminals." And in the absence of a better solution, this may (or may not) be the proximally optimal choice. What we forget, however, is that everything is "connected" on the backend of reality.
If I imagine that someone yells at me in a profanity-laced way (which happened the other day as I was waiting for the subway -- someone who was in clear distress shouted at me that I am a racist and many other verbal "attacking" statements), I can interpret that as a "personal attack". If I then act out a shallow morality (maybe I feel "strong enough" to take on the cause as start a counter-attack), I at least need to be mindful that whatever "caused" the other person to yell at me may or may not be truly aimed at *ME*. It is very difficult to discern... In that particular instance, I decided to do absolutely nothing at all, and averted my gaze (without losing track of the person yelling), and the verbal "attack" subsided after maybe half a minute or so...
For me (personally, I do not wish to push that as a moral intuition on others), the most obvious "thought" (belief and target of faith) that has prevented me from experiencing more than just a momentarily impulse of "moral pushback" (righteous anger and violence) has been a mental image: all (human) life comes, like branches and leaves, out of the same tree. At times, these branches and leaves get "in each others' way", they block the sunlight and do all kinds of things I could interpret as "conflict." If I then imagine that these branches started attacking one another, it would come as little surprise that the tree will take additional, *unnecessary* damage. That is, some amount of pain and hurt is a simple consequence of the tree growing as it does -- initially each branch may be unaware of how it interferes with other branches. That is painful and can, indeed, hurt the tree. However, if the consequence of that pain is to add further, unnecessary pain (particularly with the feedback loop of one-up you described, which in my mind Stephen Fleming described very well on the mechanistic level in "Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness" as the consequence of greater surprise about the pain one experiences based on the actions of others than the pain of others one anticipates based on one's own actions), then that seems a pretty good candidate for a place to "uproot evil" in myself...
There is nothing more instrumental to large scale deployment of ideological evil than fostering victim and oppressor narratives. Such narratives are especially dangerous as they can become deeply embedded into status competition allowing those who partake to enjoy immediate benefits.
Thank you for writing this, Rob.
If you haven't read *Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist* , Richard Rhodes popular science book on the discoveries of Lonny Athens, you may find it very interesting. It was the book that for me overturned the idea that people who commit violent evil must be crazy. Or impoverished. Or loved evil for its own sake.
Lonny Athens thinks there are distinct steps towards what he calls 'Violentization', and you have to pass through all of them in order to end up as a dangerously violent person. And, frighteningly, the steps seem to be one-way .... you cannot go back to being a non-violent person, though you may develop the self-restraint to never act on these violent desires you continue to have.
Most people, of course, are not interested in this sort of research, but I have always asked those who are to read the book and then report on whether they think that these steps are mandatory, or merely very, very common.
Another phenomenal article. This gives me a lot of food for thought as a lawyer about the matters I deal with every day. Lots to think about here regarding civil rights, criminal justice, and the importance of the rule of law and our justice system more generally.
Thanks for these comprehensive summaries. To the extent that people who commit acts that are evil, it is important to understand why, particularly if they are our adversaries. For a long time after WW2, it was convenient for everyone to ascribe all evil done by Nazi Germany to Hitler as some non human demon, without understanding all of the conditions and cooperation that led to his ability to conduct a world war and the Holocaust. As your essay makes clear, too often we confuse understanding evil with excusing evil.
I think one brilliant analyst of evil was Max Weber. In his lecture Politics as a Vocation, he distinguished between an Absolute Ethic and an Ethic of Responsibility.
I wrote a post on it that looked at how we can apply the two Ethics, or behaviors, to out own lives and why some of both is necessary.
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/what-max-weber-can-teach-us-about
robertsdavidn.subsyack.com/about (free)
Any decent stint as a criminal defense attorney is a graduate course in evil and human psychology, particularly the justification of bad acts.
Think about what you have to do to get someone to plead guilty (providently) in front of a judge, while they're constantly in full rationalization and excuse mode, even though there's no question they did what's alleged and harmed someone else in doing it.
You see ALL of the aforementioned kinds of "evil," many times as an admixture of character flaws and past trauma. Somewho, you try to get them through it.
Re “Love the sinner, hate the sin”:
Ambrose Bierce. (Possibly the most underrated quote on the subject):
“Sin is not at all dangerous to society; it is the sinner that does all the mischief. Sin has no arms to thrust into the public treasury and the private; no hands with which to cut a throat; no tongue to wreck a reputation withal. I would no more attack it than I would attack an isosceles triangle, a vacuum, or Hume's "phantasm floating in a void." My chosen enemy must be something that has a skin for my switch, a head for my cudgel—something that can smart and ache and, if so minded, fight back. I have no quarrel with abstractions; so far as I know they are all good citizens.”
I read this before I knew about the atrocities unfolding in Israel. Then when I found out, suddenly I went back to Rob’s thoughts. I still just feel sick about it though. I thought it might help to read it again. Nothing helps.
My simplified definition of evil is a human that knowingly materially harms another for their own selfish gain. Now, the act is evil, but the human may not be as sometime in a moment of weakness... in a transaction of bad judgement, a person is responsible for an evil act. But on reflection the person absolutes owns responsibility for the harm caused and grows in self-awareness to control destructive impulses and make better choices going forward.
Acts can be evil. People that routinely do evil acts are evil.
My liberal friends don't agree with this, and frankly their perspective, I think, makes them prone to evil (harming others for their personal gain). My liberal friends, I think, are people that tend to be below some line of personal emotional control themselves. So they categorize people in victim categories and demand that they are not held responsible for their actions that harm others. They explain away evil as being just desperation for being poor and having so many of their needs unsatisfied. But I think there is also some sympathy for lack of personal control.
The problem is that they mainstream bad behavior... they in fact allow evil to perpetrate and promulgate. They erase the foundation moral principle of people not being harmed by the actions of others. They assign some greater moral justification to the harm (for example, the decisions to shutdown public schools during the pandemic thus harming the lives of millions of mostly poor children).
The current gender dysphoria explosion in young girls is another example. The adult forces involved in encouraging this type of behavior that causes profound harm in young people are doing it for selfish reasons... to promote their Theory and woke ideology that has a defined goal of societal deconstruction and power shifting to their benefit. It is evil.
We all want... more power, more money, more advancement on the social dominance hierarchy. If we pursue those things in ways that materially harm others, then we are evil.
Great read Rob. We all work with the occasional narcissistic with the dark triad. I think I understand them a bit better and I understand myself better when I have to deal with these characters .
Thank you for the book recommendation. I will add it to my reading list (which never seems to shrink). I was fortunate in that I had parents who were capable of “tough love” (I was kicked out of the house when I was 19, I was very immature emotionally and socially). That allowed me to confront my demons in a way that did not harm myself or others.
The majority of the political extremes seems to be populated with people who are convinced they are on the side of the angels and do not seem to have come to grips with their own demons.
I think you should really work into the work of the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers , he essentially stated that the first people that deceptive people have to fool is themselves if they believe their own lies then it’s easier to convince others. A lot of narcissists have cognitive dissonance, one thing I’ve noticed.
In regards to so called good people , I think there have been multiple efforts to explain it Milgram’s experiments I feel were one such attempt and when they recently replicated recently it, they scored the participants on a big 5 personality test and they found more agreeable people are more likely to deliver a shock, and agreeableness is associated with being kind and empathetic.
Excellent piece Rob. I feel my understanding growing every time I read your articles. I wonder if you could cover religion at some stage? At various times it has been a force for great good, and at others a force for great evil.
Today is maybe a particularly difficult day to write and/or comment about this topic -- given how fresh the attack on Israel still is... I want to start by saying: whatever "evil" is (its essence), it causes pain and suffering for people, and that one fundamental impulse of my (and, so I hope, most people's) morality is to live in a world in which suffering is reduced, not to zero but to whatever minimum we can find that allows life to thrive and grow.
That being said, I suspect that one particularly difficult cause of evil to "uproot" lies in our built-in and almost impossible to overcome urge to leap from a (linear) causal understanding (X leads to Y) paired with a labeling of the outcome (Y) as "morally bad" to an application of "modus tollens". We correctly infer if X then Y ergo if not Y then not X. And so we seem to be thinking if I run into a wall and it hurts (and hurting is bad), then I shouldn't run into walls.
We unfortunately then extend this (limited context, linear causality) thinking to all kinds of complexly interwoven situations. Such as "if I have a fever my body aches (which is bad)," and consequently decide to do whatever we can to "eradicate fever." That the fever might serve a purpose (an important signaling function for other parts of the body to respond to a threat) for some other reason, and that by eliminating it we are causing lots of other unintended side effects is something that our intentional, conscious mind is slow to catch up on.
When we see people who commit "crimes" (cause pain), it is a very natural impulse to then having a desire to "eliminate the cause" (of the pain), which could simply be to "lock away the criminals." And in the absence of a better solution, this may (or may not) be the proximally optimal choice. What we forget, however, is that everything is "connected" on the backend of reality.
If I imagine that someone yells at me in a profanity-laced way (which happened the other day as I was waiting for the subway -- someone who was in clear distress shouted at me that I am a racist and many other verbal "attacking" statements), I can interpret that as a "personal attack". If I then act out a shallow morality (maybe I feel "strong enough" to take on the cause as start a counter-attack), I at least need to be mindful that whatever "caused" the other person to yell at me may or may not be truly aimed at *ME*. It is very difficult to discern... In that particular instance, I decided to do absolutely nothing at all, and averted my gaze (without losing track of the person yelling), and the verbal "attack" subsided after maybe half a minute or so...
For me (personally, I do not wish to push that as a moral intuition on others), the most obvious "thought" (belief and target of faith) that has prevented me from experiencing more than just a momentarily impulse of "moral pushback" (righteous anger and violence) has been a mental image: all (human) life comes, like branches and leaves, out of the same tree. At times, these branches and leaves get "in each others' way", they block the sunlight and do all kinds of things I could interpret as "conflict." If I then imagine that these branches started attacking one another, it would come as little surprise that the tree will take additional, *unnecessary* damage. That is, some amount of pain and hurt is a simple consequence of the tree growing as it does -- initially each branch may be unaware of how it interferes with other branches. That is painful and can, indeed, hurt the tree. However, if the consequence of that pain is to add further, unnecessary pain (particularly with the feedback loop of one-up you described, which in my mind Stephen Fleming described very well on the mechanistic level in "Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness" as the consequence of greater surprise about the pain one experiences based on the actions of others than the pain of others one anticipates based on one's own actions), then that seems a pretty good candidate for a place to "uproot evil" in myself...