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

by Ervin Staub

  Related sources of ingroup-outgroup differentiation are fear as a common human response to the unusual, unknown, and different and the tendency to like and prefer what is familiar – even among nonsense syllables.40

  Psychologically, the crux of the matter is that the familiar provides the indispensable basis of our existence. Since existence is good, its accompanying groundwork seems good and desirable. A child’s parents, neighborhood, region, nation are given to him – so too his religion, race, and social traditions. To him all these affiliations are taken for granted. Since he is part of them, and they are part of him, they are good.41

  A further source of ethnocentrism is the fact that the human mind works by categorization. We see and remember objects and people as green or red, tall or short. We would be overwhelmed by uncertainty and anxiety if we approached each person (or event) without using past learning as a guide. Categorization, however, is a basis of stereotypes, exaggerated beliefs about groups that are often negative.

  Because of attachment and stranger anxiety, children automatically tend to differentiate between their primary group, the family, and the rest of the world. Socialization may intensify this. Children are often taught to mistrust those outside the family and are often indoctrinated against religious, ethnic, national, or political outsiders. At a very early age they come to evaluate their own nation positively and express stereotypic and negative views of other nations. A nine-year-old Swiss boy, when asked where he learned such opinions as “The French are not very serious,... and it is dirty there,” and “Russians always want war,” answered: “I don’t know. I’ve heard it... .that’s what people say.”42

  Having learned such differentiations, people constantly create new ingroup-outgroup distinctions, which are reinforced by feelings of group harmony and other gratifications. One function of warfare may be to redirect aggression away from the ingroup and thereby protect genetically related ingroup members.43 Leaders also create divisions to rally a dissatisfied population.44

  The preparation of official or sanctioned torturers and murderers often includes creation of a strong ingroup bond and differentiation from the rest of the world. The Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) (see Part II) and Greek torturers had rituals of group identification, special nicknames, and a special language.45

  Just defining people as “them” results in devaluating them.46 Conversely, devaluation makes it more likely that a person is seen as belonging to an outgroup. Distinctions in race, religion, status, wealth, power, and political views are the main sources of ingroup-outgroup differentiations. They produce stable devaluations: of slaves by slave owners, of the uneducated by the educated.

  Sometimes the ingroup devalues most strongly another group that is highly similar: this serves to protect the identity, integrity, and purity of the ingroup. The communist hatred of “revisionist” social democrats was often greater than their hatred for capitalist enemies. Small differences in dogma often resulted in the persecution of religious heretics. The intense anti-Semitism of the early church fathers probably served their need to create an independent identity for Christianity.

  How a culture or society shapes its members’ evaluation of other people is profoundly important. We rarely harm people we greatly value. When members of an outgroup are highly valued, they are probably regarded as being in a more fundamental sense members of the ingroup. For example, we recognize our shared humanity with the Polish people. We admire their bravery in creating the Solidarity movement and see them as similar to us in their desire for freedom.

  Devaluation makes mistreatment likely. In one experiment each participant was to be a teacher and administer electric shocks to a learner who made mistakes on a task. When teachers “overheard” a conversation in which the learner was described as one of a rotten bunch of people, they administered much stronger electric shocks. Learners described positively received the weakest shocks.47 Derogatory labels are often used to create antagonism and prepare people for action against an outgroup. One writer described the psychological conditions for guilt-free massacre in the following way:

  The most general condition for guilt-free massacre is the denial of humanity to the victim. You call the victims names like gooks, dinks, niggers, pinkos, and japs. The more you can get high officials in government to use these names and others like yellow dwarfs with daggers and rotten apples, the more your success. In addition you allow no human contact. You prevent travel or you oversee the nature of contact where travel is allowed. You prevent citizens from going to places like China, Cuba, and North Vietnam, so that men cannot confront other men. Or on the homefront, if contact is allowed, or if it cannot be prevented, you indicate that the contact is not between equals; you talk about the disadvantaged, the deprived.48

  Societies differ in their tendency to devalue outgroups. These devaluations may be present in stereotypes or negative images of a group in literature, art, folklore, theater, television, and shared beliefs. They can also be expressed in discriminatory social institutions. In general, the Nazis were able to kill more Jews in those countries where anti-Semitism and discrimination against Jews were already strong.49 This was especially the case in countries allied to but not occupied by the Germans. In countries where Jews were less the objects of social differentiation, the government was less likely to hand over the Jewish population to the Nazis.

  Sometimes enemy groups are selected or “created” by an emerging ideology, usually on the basis of cultural devaluation, societal rifts, or real conflict. In Argentina an anticommunist ideology was used to define people with liberal views and “leftist” connections as the enemy. In Cambodia their ideology led the Khmer Rouge to kill, starve, or work to death as many as two million people who were thought either opposed to or incapable of a new way of life. What happened in these cases was a result of real conflicts of interest and violent confrontation, speedily emerging devaluation, and overgeneralization in which the definition of the enemy was extended to include large groups of people.

  Sometimes a group is identified for the purpose of assigning blame to it. Consider the ill-defined “secular humanists,” who have been the object of attack by the Moral Majority and other fundamentalists since the 1970s. As Leo Wine of Oregon said in a series of radio programs on humanism:

  Why are the humanists promoting sexual perversion? Because they want to create such an obsession with sex among our young people that they will have no time or interest for spiritual pursuits.... So what do we have? Humanist obsessions: sex, pornography, marijuana, drugs, self-indulgence, rights without responsibility.

  Humanists control America. America is supposed to be a free country, but are we really free?.. .Now the humanist organizations – ACLU, AHA (American Humanist Association) – control the television, the radio, the newspapers, the Hollywood movies, magazines, porno magazines, and the unions, the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation... .They, 275,000 humanists, have infiltrated until every department of our country is controlled by the humanists.

  Humanists will continue leading us toward the chaos of the French Revolution. After all, it is the same philosophy that destroyed France and paved the way for the dictator Napoleon Bonaparte. This time the humanists hope to name their own dictator who will create out of the ashes of our pro-moral republic a humanist Utopia, an atheistic, socialistic, amoral humanist society for America and the rest of the world. In fact, their goal is to accomplish that takeover by or before the year 2,000.5°

  Changes in American values and ways of life are a source of confusion and threat to many people. An ancient way of coping with such threat is to find or create a group to blame. Wine’s language is like the language Nazis applied to Jews. The Nazis found the Jews; the Moral Majority has created the conspiratorial “secular humanists,” the enemy within, the source of corruption.

  When people are devalued, they may be seen as objects rather than human beings with feelings and suffering like our own. As we shall see, certain culturally accepted ways of raising
children diminish their awareness of their own human frailty and therefore make them less likely to appreciate the humanity of others. As a result empathy (the capacity to feel with others) and sympathy (a responsiveness to others’ needs and suffering) are undeveloped.

  Groups that become the object of mistreatment are seen as unworthy and morally inferior, with many undesirable characteristics. They are also seen as threats, as interfering by their very existence with important ideals, economically exploiting members of the dominant group, and striving for or plotting to gain power, which they will use to harm the dominant group. Identifying them as “evil” deepens the threat and calls moral outrage and the desire to punish evildoers into play.

  Pluralistic and monolithic cultures

  In a monolithic culture social agents and entities are organized around a single set of goals. In a pluralistic culture, “social agents and entities represent somewhat different expectations, sanctions and rewards for members of the society. These differences generate intergroup conflict which is largely regulated by a set of ‘ground rules’ (such as constitution) and a common commitment to integrative principles or goals.”51

  Today there are few totally homogeneous societies with common goals and values and lacking all religious, ethnic, or class differences. In a pluralistic society, with a balance of diversity and consensus, greater tolerance for differences among groups of people can be expected. Counterreactions to initial steps along a continuum of destruction are more probable. Democratic societies with different racial and ethnic and religious groups free to express their differences are necessarily pluralistic, especially when these ethnic subcultures enter the mainstream. As a result, children conform less to authority.52 Moral development is advanced by cultural pluralism, because it requires people to resolve conflicting standards and expectations.

  Orientation to authority

  Most societies place value on obedience to leaders, institutions, and rules. Some obedience is essential for collective functioning. In some societies, obedience is a major cultural value; child rearing, schools, and other institutions are authoritarian. In other societies (although this is rare) questioning authority might be highly valued.

  In the experiments of Milgram, as I noted earlier, certain kinds of moral reasoning reduced obedience, and an authoritarian orientation enhanced it (see the next chapter).53 If a culture inculcates strong respect for authority and places strong value on obedience,54 it is less likely that individuals will oppose leaders who scapegoat or advocate violence.

  Unconscious motivation – individual and cultural

  The unconscious is another source of motivation for harming others. Self-doubt, sexual feelings, anger and the desire to hurt, and even the experience of suffering can become unacceptable to people because of messages from their environment, especially their parents. These desires and feelings cause anxiety and must be defended against. The feelings and related thoughts are repressed, or denied. They become unavailable to consciousness. Later they may be projected onto other people. Anger may be displaced from parents onto people who are acceptable targets of anger. One characteristic of the authoritarian personality is such displacement and projection.55

  While unconscious processes are recognized, the experimental evidence for the notion of psychological defense, displacement, and projection (originally proposed by psychoanalysts) has remained a subject of debate.56 Recent research shows individual differences in “defensiveness.” Some people are unaware of or deny having a high level of anxiety, but it shows in psychophysiological responses.57 Others suppress negative emotional memories and emotional experience in general.58

  People repress anger if they were punished for expressing it. As a vivid example of repression and scapegoating, consider the following case presented by the German psychiatrist Alice Miller:

  I know a woman who never happened to have any contact with a Jew up to the time she joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth. She had been brought up very strictly. Her parents needed her to help out in the household after her siblings (two brothers and a sister) had left home. For this reason she was not allowed to prepare for a career even though she very much wanted to and even though she had the necessary qualifications. Much later she told me with what enthusiasm she had read about “the crimes of the Jews” in Mein Kampf and what a sense of relief it had given her to find out that it was permissible to hate someone so unequivocally. She had never been allowed to envy her siblings openly for being able to pursue their careers. But the Jewish banker to whom her uncle had to pay interest on a loan – he was an exploiter of her poor uncle, with whom she identified. She herself was actually being exploited by her parents and was envious of her siblings, but a well-behaved girl was not permitted to have these feelings. And now, quite unexpectedly, there was such a simple solution: it was all right to hate as much as she wanted; she still remained (and perhaps for this very reason was) her parents’ good girl and a useful daughter of the fatherland. Moreover, she could project the “bad” and weak child she had always learned to despise in herself onto the weak and helpless Jews and experience herself as exclusively strong, exclusively pure (Aryan), exclusively good.59

  Discrepancies between reality and what is valued occur in most cultures.60 An important motivation for change arises when individuals become aware of such discrepancies.61 It is thereforee important to look for aspects of the culture that are not acknowledged and are not incorporated into the cultural self-concept, and to analyze how discrepancies are dealt with. Deep-seated hostilities may be maintained by ongoing cultural arrangements that conflict with conscious values. Sometimes social movements arise when discrepancies come to the surface. In America, the civil rights movement of the 1960s arose when discrepancies between long-held ideals and national reality became a powerful motivation for change.

  Recent thinking about family systems and the transmission of family patterns across generations helps us expand our understanding of unconscious motivations. Not only explict family rules but also powerful implicit rules allow the expression of certain feelings and inhibit others.

  The influence of sociopolitical organization

  Governmental system

  The more repressive and dictatorial a government, the more will fear inhibit opposition. Opposition to early steps along a continuum of destruction also decreases when free expression is inhibited, because of a uniform definition of reality: the government propagates its views and no others are heard. (Even in a democratic system, ideology, government information management, and lack of press vigilance may result in a relatively uniform definition of reality; see Chapter 17.) If everyone seems to be thinking the same way, it may stifle doubt or resistance, even inner resistance. Many people report seeing two lines of clearly different length as equal when a number of other people before them report seeing the lines as equal.62 Social reality can be even more strongly affected by the views of others. The way some people define the meaning of events powerfully influences other bystanders’ reactions to emergencies. Even what people regard as sounds of distress and how they react to distress depends on what other people say.63 A culturally induced respect for authority can join with governmental propaganda and repression in creating uniform views of events. Eichmann noted at his trial that there were no voices raising questions about the Nazi exterminations, nothing to implant doubt.64

  Authorities also create facts. Hitler used the pretext of a Polish attack to invade Poland; actually the attackers were SS members dressed in Polish uniforms. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, used to extend American involvement in Vietnam, may have been intentionally created and falsely reported.

  Even in a democratic system leaders are often isolated. Surrounded by a small group of decision makers, they lack direct contact with citizens. Moreover, their power can be enormous even in a system of government purportedly based on checks and balances. Inherent in the leadership role, unfortunately, is a tendency to view people as instruments
and devalue opposition. This is more likely when the leader’s power is great and his accountability low, and when the leader is guided by a coherent ideology, which offers certainty of goals. Institutions that expose leaders to varied views and increase their accountability may counteract this process (see Chapter 17).

  Social institutions

  Social institutions affect the likelihood of group mistreatment in several ways.

  Discrimination. Discrimination against subgroups combines with cultural images and stereotypes to further ingroup-outgroup distinctions and devaluation. Segregation in housing, movements like the Ku Klux Klan or anti-Semitic political parties in Europe, and discriminatory quotas in education and jobs are among institutions and policies that contribute to this. Discrimination is also served by poverty and persistent differences in social status, together with institutions that limit social mobility.

  Organizations capable of carrying out mistreatment. Motivation for mistreating a group is not enough; the capacity to fulfill it must be present. Often the motivation does not even fully arise until there is belief in the capacity to fulfill it.65 A monolithic central party, a powerful military, and other organized groups loyal to the government are often necessary conditions. A machinery of destruction has to be created.66 In Germany the SS and prior experience with “euthanasia” provided the instruments and techniques for extermination. In Turkey, Argentina, and elsewhere organized groups either existed or were created.