“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” __Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
Eric Hoffer points out that when individuals join a cause, however noble, the free themselves from personal responsibility and become “estranged from the self”, which allows them to disavow personal responsibility for actions performed by the collective. The “corporateness” of a mass movement gives them freedom to lie, bully, torture, and murder those not like themselves.
Roy Baumeister, PhD, who authored the book titled Evil has written that people can commit evil acts when their self esteem is high, because they are resistant to criticisms that might devalue their self image. “Ego” having become “immune” to feedback from others that might deter them from following their “internal circuitry”. Baumeister writes:
“Suppose on a scale of 1 to 10 you rate yourself a 9. Then any time someone tells you anything else, from 1 to 8, it will be an ego threat, because the evaluation is lower than your self appraisal.”
Obviously if you rate yourself much lower on the scale, ego threats are less bothersome and more tolerable. By that reasoning, writes Baumeister, the higher your opinion of yourself, the more likely to interpret comments as ego threats, and the more prone to violence you would be. Slater’s “internal circuitry” corresponds to “self righteousness”, “narcissism”, “pride”, “arrogance”, or even as Baumeister writes, high self esteem, all of which reduce our responsiveness to our external environment.
As Dawkins points out, “you” are a “colony” of a ‘cartel’ of genes that have managed to work cooperatively to produce “you”. As a result, “you” have a brain which is also designed to work according to the algorithm of the “purpose machine”, driven to respond to negative feedback, and seek equilibrium.
However, as Hoffer points out, if you are part of a larger system driven by the ego of another person or group of persons, your personal ego becomes subject to their goals and needs, and you will tend to release yourself from any personal responsibility as part of their “ego”.
Steven Pinker points out in The Blank Slate that:
“Recall that even Hitler thought he was carrying out the will of God. The recurrence of evil acts committed in the name of God shows that they are not random perversions. An omnipotent authority that no one can see is a useful backer for malevolent leaders hoping to enlist holy warriors….the doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live here on earth”.
What is most interesting about the strategies listed is that they are not only similar, but they can be traced to the strategy of negative feedback used by the genes for its “purpose machine”. Pinker further writes:
“..if the brain is equipped with strategies for violence, they are contingent strategies, connected to complicated circuitry that compute when and where they should be deployed. Animals display aggression in highly selective ways, and humans, whose limbic systems are enmeshed with outsized frontal lobes, are of course even more calculating….aggression is an organized, goal directed activity, not the kind of event that could come from a random malfunction…the presence of deliberate chimpicide in our chimpanzee cousins raises the possibility that the forces of evolution, not just the idiosyncrasies of a particular human culture, prepared us for violence.. And the ubiquity of violence in human societies throughout history and prehistory is a stronger hint that we are so prepared.”
Howard Bloom, author of a book called The Lucifer Principle, not a religious book but an exploration of evolutionary beginnings, starts off his book with the question, “Who Is Lucifer?”
“He was an organizer, a would- be crafter of new orders, a creature bent on putting together forces in his own manner….evil is a by-product, a component, of creation. In a world evolving into higher forms, hatred, violence, aggression, and war are a part of the evolutionary plan…Nature does not abhor evil, she embraces it. She uses it to build. With it, she moves the human world to greater heights of organization, intricacy, and power…One result: from our best qualities come our worst. From our urge to pull together comes our tendency to tear each other apart. From our devotion to a higher good comes our propensity to the foulest atrocities….From the beginning of our history, we have been blinded by evil’s ability to don a selfless disguise. We have failed to see that our finest qualities often leads us to the actions we most abhor–murder, torture, genocide, and war….Lucifer…is ambitious, an organizer, a force reaching out eve n to master the stars of heaven. But he is not a demon separate from nature’s benevolence. He is part of the creative force itself. Lucifer, in fact, is Mother Nature’s alter ego”.
From this statement, Bloom, as I have done, builds on five basic
concepts that drive the evolution of not only human, but all species. He
begins with the replicators of which Dawkins wrote.
1 “replicators–bits of structure that functions as
minifactories, assembling raw materials, the churning out intricate
products. These natural assembly units(genes are one example) crank out
their goods so cheaply that the end results are apallingly expendable.
2.”The superorganism- We are not the rugged individuals we would
like to be. We are, instead, disposable parts of a being much larger
than our selves.”
3. “The meme–a self replicating cluster of ideas…these visions
become the glue that holds together civilizations, giving each culture
its distinctive shape…our dreams bestow the vision of peace, but they
also turn us into killers.”
4. “The neural net–The group mind whose eccentric mode of
operation manipulates our emotions and turns us into components of a
massive learning machine.”
5. “The pecking order–Pecking orders exist among men, monkeys, wasps, and even nations….”
That is the hierarchical order of forces that make us as humans part
of a “superorganism” composed of a neural net that contributes to our
part as a “massive learning machine”. But as Bloom illustrates, both
good and evil go into this process, and we are wrong to assume that we
can “amputate” evil by organizing into larger units that represent
ideals. It is these ideals, in fact, as shown from several sources that
contribute to the greatest evils. I will explore that more next essay.The study of “good and evil” so far leads me to a consensus of different minds who also studied the problem.
Philip Slater point out that people tend to be destructive when they
respond more to their “internal circuitry” than to the external
envrionment.
