The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence

by Ervin Staub

  The role of victims. That the victims played a part in their own destruction has been suggested, mainly by Arendt but also by Hilberg, Dawidowicz, Bettelheim, and others. The Germans set up Jewish councils, which maintained order and helped organize the transportation of Jews for “resettlement,” which really meant murder or slave labor ending in death. There was some resistance, but most Jews did as they were told. Victims were also mostly passive in the other three cases we shall consider. There are many reasons for this. Sometimes victims deny the reality to defend themselves against the intense anxiety that would result from seeing the intentions of the harm-doers. More importantly, the victims face overwhelming, brutal force. Often, the population is also antagonistic, and they stand alone. As the continuum of destruction progresses, there is a parallel progression of psychological changes in victims. They give up hope, moving along a continuum of victimization.

  The behavior of victims affects the perpetrators’ resolve. It can make the devaluation of victims, the evolution of a genocidal ideology, and its expression in action easier or more difficult. But it is not the origin of the motivations that lead to mass killing or the cause of victimization.

  Complex analyses of the origins of the Holocaust. Especially in the last decade historians have offered increasingly complex analyses of economic and political forces that preceded the Holocaust and presumably contributed to it. They have examined the role of elites, the relationship between big business and Hitler, the nature and impact of mass politics, the circumstances of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the unification of Germany under Bismarck within a highly authoritarian political framework, the rapid industrialization of Germany, and so on.25I believe, however, that the basic sources of genocide are cultural characteristics, difficult life conditions, and the needs and motives that arise from them. Many economic and political processes are affected by, or arise from, and in turn serve these needs. Leaders who consciously manipulate the people to serve their political purposes are likely to share these needs. Channeling frustration, offering scapegoats, and creating ideologies may help both members of the group and leaders to deal with their needs. Thus psychological needs and political purpose coincide. This integration of different motives is itself satisfying and may become a motive in its own right.26

  Some further comparisons: (a) Continuity and discontinuity. In explaining genocide, some authors stress discontinuity between past and present. Dekmejian suggests that in situations of social turmoil new elites arise, who are usually highly marginal groups.27 They respond to social conditions with a pervasive identity crisis, which leads them to adopt an extreme and rigid identity. Hartt stresses the importance of structural change “as exemplified in the concept of national upheaval – an abrupt change in the political community, caused, for example, by the formation of a state through violent conflict.”28

  In all four cases I discuss, a new government had come to power not more than eight years before the genocide or mass killing began, with new leadership groups except in Argentina. However, only in Cambodia did a violent civil war bring the new elite to power.

  Changes in the form of government and the associated changes in society contribute to the likelihood of genocide by creating or intensifying difficult life conditions. Turkey and Germany changed from monarchy to some form of electoral system (followed in Germany by totalitarian rule), which required changes in the populations’ societal self-concepts and world views. In Cambodia many changes took place in the preceding forty years, with the change just before the genocide the most wrenching. Lack of experience and of a tradition of rule would make new leaders insecure and threaten their identity as they face intense difficulties of life, which in part they have created. Their need to form their own identity and separate themselves from the traditions of the past may increase their readiness for violence. Nonetheless, the new leaders and their followers are rooted in the culture, frequently a homogeneous one with a limited set of dominant values. I see the shared needs and dispositions of the whole group and a cultural continuity as especially important in understanding the roots of genocide.

  (b) The role of the state and social structure. Some authors touch on the role of state structure in genocide. The state is an organization with interests of its own. It needs to survive in a world of competing and often hostile (or perceived as hostile) nation-states. In this view, to maintain its power, to bring about obedience, and to unite the group, some states commit genocide.

  But not all states do. Different organizations, including states, have different perspectives on reality, methods of operation, and motives. We must come to understand the origins of motives and the evolution of destructive tendencies as exemplified by elements of culture, ideologies, societal and institutional norms that allow destruction, and institutions that come to serve destruction and whose very nature may in extreme cases require violence.

  Summary: a conception of motivation and evolution

  Although genocide results from a number of influences working together, these influences (see Table 1) can be divided into a few important classes.

  My focus is motivation, its origins and consequences. Individuals and groups have many needs, goals, and desires. Which ones will become active and exert influence at any given time? I will describe and employ personal goal theory to specify how an active motivation to harm a subgroup of society arises and how it intensifies in the course of a social evolution that ends in genocide. I will also discuss how the normal inhibitions against harming and killing people decline, partly by excluding victims from the moral universe.

  The conception and its elaboration in the analyses of specific cases give us ways of identifying conditions under which genocide and mass killing are more or less probable. The conception may help us predict the occurrence of genocide and specify interventions by other nations that would inhibit mistreatment with genocidal potential. It provides a basis for a long-term agenda: the creation of caring, nonaggressive people and societies. In the next four chapters I discuss in detail different components of this conception of the origins of genocide.

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  a Psychological processes include the thoughts and feelings of individuals, the meanings they perceive in events. Culture includes the thoughts, feelings, and ways of perceiving and evaluating events and people shared by members of a group – the shared meanings. Specific aspects of culture are shared rules, norms, values, customs, and life-styles. Culture is coded, maintained, and expressed in the “products” of a group: its literature, art, rituals, the contents of its mass media, and the behavior of its members. A result of shared culture is similarity in psychological reactions to culturally relevant events. Society, as I use the term, means the institutions and organizations of the group. These express the culture, embodying shared meanings that guide the life of the group. Thus, while devaluation of a group is a cultural characteristic, discrimination is embodied in social institutions such as schools or a military that segregates members of a group or uses them only for labor and does not give them weapons (as was the case with the Armenians in Turkey before the genocide). Society also includes political organizations and institutions. Occasionally culture and social organization can be discrepant, as when a repressive dictatorial system emerges in a democratic culture. But a truly great discrepancy of this kind is probably rare. In both Germany and the Soviet Union, the two great totalitarian states, the culture supported authoritarian rule or at least made it acceptable.

  b I will use several motivational concepts, some in part interchangeably. Motivation designates an active psychological state that makes an outcome or end desirable, whether eating to diminish hunger or killing to feel powerful or avenge real or imagined harm. A motive is a characteristic of the individual or culture out of which active motivation arises. There are different kinds of motives. Needs are more intense and have a more imperative quality. They push an organism to action, either because they are required for survival or because they are essential to the
wholeness and functioning of an individual or culture. Goals have desired outcomes that are self-enhancing and are sources of satisfaction. The more deeply a goal (acquisition of wealth, writing a great book, making a contribution to humanity) comes to be an important aspect of self-definition, the more imperative it becomes. Essential, unfilled goals thus become needlike in character. I will sometimes use the word aim to designate the outcomes that individuals desire as a result of the active motivation arising from their needs and characteristic (personal) goals.

  Frustration is an emotion that results from interference with fulfilling a motive or from the failure to fulfill it. The emotional consequences are greater when the motive is more important. Difficult life conditions often frustrate basic goals, and needs.

  c In 1985, during the trials of the Argentine military leaders for their role in the disappearances, many voices expressed dismay about the silence in Argentina at the time of the disappearances – a silence that expressed not just fear but acceptance.

  3 The psychology of hard times: the effects of difficult life conditions

  Psychologists have identified two primary conditions that instigate aggression: (1) frustration, which results from interference with goal-directed behavior or the failure to fulfill goals, and (2) attack on or threat to life, material well-being, or self-concept and self-esteem.1 Other conditions have also been shown to increase aggression: heat, noise, crowding, the general level of arousal, and specifically sexual arousal.2 These conditions and bodily states are most likely to intensify aggression if an inclination for it already exists because of prior frustration or attack or for other reasons. It is noteworthy that at least some of the physical conditions, such as crowding, and some of the bodily states, such as arousal due to stress, can be the result of difficult life conditions.3

  Why do certain conditions make aggression probable? According to the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, human beings have a genetic predisposition to respond aggressively when their survival and thereby the transmission of their genes are threatened.4 Although no particular mode of aggression is genetically based, the probability increases that some aggressive response will result. Whereas a genetic potential for aggression obviously exists and probably a genetic predisposition as well, the great individual and group variation in aggressiveness suggests that environment and experience are more important.5 In humans, feeling threatened is a psychological experience that results from the way events are construed. The meaning given to events by people can be partly based on their objective nature (e.g., lions attack, fires burn) but is mostly based on past experience, world views, personality, and views handed down by society. Research showing the relationship of aggression to parental socialization and family experience (see Chapter 4) supports this view.

  In the psychological laboratory frustration and attack are normally limited in magnitude and duration and involve no real threat to survival.6 Under these conditions instigation, particularly frustration, has less potency. Intense, persistent frustration of goals and expectations resulting from difficult conditions of life can be expected to have greater impact.

  In psychological experiments, an aggressive response to instigation is most likely when (1) the subject is physically attacked, that is, pain is inflicted, usually by electric shocks; and (2) the subject’s self-concept, self-esteem, or social image is threatened. Insult, verbal abuse, and criticism give rise to anger and aggression. Aggression is more likely when the actions of a frustrator seem to arise out of ill-will. Frustrating people by apparent carelessness or stupidity induces less aggression than frustrating them arbitrarily, presumably with a desire to harm.7 It is in the latter case that victims can expect future attacks and self-defense is essential.

  Motivations arising from threat, frustration, or difficult life conditions

  Motives due to threat, frustration, or difficult life conditions depend both on the nature of instigation and the characteristics of individuals (and cultures). Are certain of these motives better served by aggression than by other means?

  Motivational sources of human behavior

  According to my theory of personal goals, there are four major sources of motivation.8 First, in the course of their lives, people develop personal goals, desires that they want to fulfill, outcomes that they want to produce. Groups of outcomes that satisfy the desires – for example, for achievement, approval, or friendship – define personal goals. In most cases a “network of cognitions” – thoughts, beliefs, relevant knowledge – accompanies the desired outcomes and in part defines the goal.

  Human beings are purposive creatures, who set aims for themselves and strive to fulfill them. The desire for certain outcomes is incorporated into our personalities. Each of us has a variety of personal goals, which can be arranged in a hierarchy according to their importance. Each may in certain circumstances become an active desire. Under normal conditions, in psychologically well-functioning people, personal goals are the most important sources of motivation.

  Our biological needs, which include hunger, thirst, freedom from pain, survival, are another important type of motivation. When they are regularly satisfied, these needs are apparent only in the modulated form of personal goals. (A gourmet, for example, seeks food for pleasure, not survival). Deprivation makes biological needs a strong motive. Prior deprivation causes some people to be strongly motivated by the psychological presence of biological needs, even when they are currently fulfilled.

  Goals involve a desire for outcomes; biological needs push for satisfaction. When important goals are persistently frustrated, they may come to resemble needs and exert a push for satisfaction. While personal goals can be internally activated, by thoughts and images, frequently conditions in the environment elicit or activate them: a task activates the goal to achieve; another’s need activates the goal to benefit people. In contrast, needs tend to press for satisfaction even in the absence of relevant environmental conditions.

  Social customs, rules, and standards also give rise to action or determine its direction and aim. Many customs and rules are second nature to us, we “automatically” follow them, without awareness. They may even define for us when to become angry and how to express our anger. They define our modes of interaction with others, including the respect (or lack of respect) we show to people who fill certain positions in society. When a custom or rule is strongly established, people will deviate from it only when another strong motivation requires deviation. Often we become aware of the influence of rules and customs only when there are compelling reasons to deviate from them. Whether we follow them automatically or consciously, adherence usually gives rise to good feelings and deviation to guilt, anxiety, or the fear of disapproval and punishment. This is especially true of norms that identify mutual social obligations.

  Finally, unconscious motivation can guide the choice of our aims. In this case, we do not know why we choose the aim, and sometimes do not know the real aim. A motivation to fail may result from unconscious hostility to parents. Anger may be displaced from parents or people in authority to more acceptable objects.

  All of us have certain motives: protection of our physical self from danger, attack, and deprivation; protection and enhancement of our self-image or self-concept and the associated values and ways of life. In people (or groups) whose self-concept is poor, negative, or under attack, the desire to protect the self-image will become a highly important motive; it may come to resemble a need pushing for satisfaction.

  How do people select aims to act on?9 Their personal goals and other motives form a hierarchy. The aims of individuals or groups at a particular time depend on the relative importance of their motives and the degree to which circumstances allow or call for the expression and fulfillment of each motive. Persistent life problems “activate” motives for self-protection, make them dominant, and over time needlike. Ordinary self-related goals, such as the desire for satisfying work or friendship, are replaced by self-protective goals, the desire to defend the physical o
r psychological self; other-related goals, the desire to benefit people or fulfill moral values, are less likely to become active.

  Other-related goals arise from personal values; they resemble personal goals, except that their desired outcome is human welfare. At least two kinds of personal values are important. A prosocial value orientation involves concern about others and the desire to benefit them. Research shows that people with a stronger prosocial orientation give more help to others in need. A moral rule orientation embodies the desire to maintain or fulfill moral principles, norms, and rules.10 When other-related goals are low in the hierarchy of motives, the environmental press must be greater if they are to become active; for example, the other person’s distress must be more intense.

  Under persistently difficult life conditions, lasting changes often occur in motive hierarchies. Self-protective and self-related goals become more important, and people become less open to others’ need.

  People judge others’ need for help relative to their own well-being. They engage in hedonic balancing; they compare their “relative wellbeing,” the discrepancy between their current welfare and their normal or usual well-being, with others’ relative well-being, the discrepancy between others’ current welfare and what they regard as others’ normal, or usual, or customary well-being.11 If their own relative well-being is worse, people are unlikely to help, even if they are in an absolute sense better off than a person in need. Even apart from comparisons, when people’s own well-being is low, the need of others has to be great to gain their attention. The main exceptions are people with strong prosocial or moral values.