EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (3 page)

Every one of us engages in denial, negating certain aspects of reality in order to manage painful experiences, project a more powerful image, or justify a particular action. But like desire, denial has consequences both beneficial and costly for self and others, a point powerfully developed by the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers in his book
The Folly of Fools
. When we listen to the news and hear of human-rights violations, we often shut off our emotions to create an illusion of peace. When surgeons slice into human flesh, they turn off their natural human empathy, treating their patient’s body as a mechanical device. Before we confront a challenging opponent in an athletic competition or in war, we pump ourselves up, tricking ourselves into believing that we’re tougher than we are and our opponents weaker. Denial enables us to motivate and justify actions in cases where we are conflicted. So doctors who deny the moral worth of others can be persuaded to carry out heinous operations for “the good of science” or the preservation of “racial purity.” Military commanders in denial of an opponent’s strength can lead their troops to annihilation. Soldiers who deny their enemies’ moral worth, thinking of them as less than human, can hack into their flesh, not only deaf to the screaming but exhilarated by it. Political leaders can deceive their followers and themselves into seeing the members of another ethnic or cultural group as dangerous to the society’s sacred values, thereby justifying a purge. Individuals in denial can reject various other aspects of reality to enable acts of enormous cruelty.

Seen in this way, our capacity for evil is potentially as great as our capacity for love and compassion. Evil is part of human nature, a point noted long ago by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his treatise
Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason
. The idea that evil is part of human nature, or “innate” as Kant described it, doesn’t mean that there is a gene for evil or an evil organ. It also doesn’t mean that each of us will exercise the capacity for evil, combining unsatisfied desires with denial to cause excessive harm. Individual differences, arising both from our biology and our experiences, will make some of us more likely to do so. This leads us to the second
how
question: How did the human capacity for evil evolve?

The capacity for evil originally evolved as an incidental consequence of our unique intelligence, but once in place provided significant benefits to those who expressed it as a display of power.
Like the brains of other animals, our brains consist of circuits that evolved to perform specific functions, such as recognizing objects, quantifying the value of an experience, and feeling pleasure or pain. Unlike those of other animals, our brains freely combine these single-purpose circuits to create multipurpose systems. For example, we combine the systems for object recognition, value, and emotion, allowing us to perceive other humans as objects (and thus tradable as commodities or dispensable as waste) while feeling good about making others feel bad. But to say that our capacity for evil originally evolved as a by-product of the brain’s combining power is not to say that the capacity for evil lacks utility for human survival. On the contrary, and as I develop in
chapter 3
, once the capacity for evil evolved, it enabled individuals to display costly and gratuitous acts of violence as a means of intentionally intimidating others. These intentional acts are different from the uncontrollable, involuntary acts arising from disordered minds, though the consequences are the same — the torturous destruction of others.

These ideas about the evolution of evil distinguish questions of origin from questions of current function. They are questions I will address using different kinds of evidence. To assess origins, and in particular the claim that human brains are unique in some way, we look to comparative studies of other animals. To assess current function, and in particular the idea that cruelty results in evolutionary payoffs, we look to comparative studies of human cultures and the survival consequences of intimidating others.

All animals show highly specialized abilities to solve problems linked to survival. Honeybees perform dances to tell others about the precise location of nutritious nectar, providing an information highway that lowers the costs of individual foraging challenges. Meerkats teach their young how to hunt dangerous but energy-rich scorpion prey, providing an education that bypasses the risks of trial-and-error learning. Each of these extraordinary behaviors is used for solving one and only one problem — except in humans. Animal thoughts and emotions are single-purposed, focused on a single functional problem, deploying what the biologists Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth call “laser beam intelligence.”
⁷
Human thoughts and emotions are multi-purposed, even though many originally evolved to solve one specific problem. Thus, humans unconsciously wrinkle their noses and pull back their lips into an expression of disgust that communicates information about disease-ridden and toxic substances, thereby lowering the costs of sickness to others who might be exposed. But this same expression also appears when we witness morally abhorrent actions, such as sodomy, bestiality, or various forms of torture. Thus, an emotional expression that originally evolved to signal a physically toxic and dangerous object is connected to our moral sense, in order to signal toxic and dangerous individuals or even abstract concepts such as racism or religious intolerance. Combining thoughts and emotions is what enables a brain capable of evil. It enables individuals with unsatisfied desires to deny aspects of reality in the service of destroying innocent lives.

What the sciences reveal is that our brain’s capacity for combination was realized by evolutionary changes in the number of wired-up brain areas. As these connections increased, our brains were able to move beyond the narrow and specialized functions of particular areas and thereby solve a broader range of problems. Though we don’t know precisely when these changes occurred, we do know they occurred after our split from the other great apes — orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees. We know this from looking at the brains of these species and also from examining how they use tools, communicate, cooperate with, and attack one another. Not only are there fewer connections between regions of the brain in these primates, their thinking in various contexts is single-purposed, faithfully dedicated to the solving of one specific problem.

Empowered by our new, massively connected brain, we alone migrated into and inhabited virtually every known environment on Earth and some beyond, inventing abstract mathematical concepts, conceiving grammatically structured languages, and creating glorious civilizations rich in rituals, laws, and philosophies. Our massively connected brain also equipped us for evil, but only as an incidental consequence of other adaptive capacities, including the ability to harm others for the purpose of surviving and reproducing.

Many social animals fight over resources using ritualized behaviors to assess their opponents and minimize the personal costs of injury. Most of this fighting involves nonlethal aggression, with losers intimidated or injured but able to walk away. There are, however, three situations in which individuals deploy lethal aggression, and in each case, as noted by the psychologist Victor Nell and the anthropologist Richard Wrangham, there are significant asymmetries in power and significant survival benefits.
⁸
First, predators kill prey, enabled by substantial asymmetries in their weaponry, designed for killing (think viper venom, cheetah canines and hawk talons). Second, in a wide variety of species, adults kill vulnerable infants. Adult males kill infants sired by other males in the group, a strategy designed to wipe out the competition and bring adult females back to a cycle in which they can conceive again. Adult females kill infants when times are tough and parenting is too costly. Third, in only four animal groups — ants, wolves, lions, and chimpanzees — adults regularly form coalitions to kill adults from a neighboring competitor if, and only if, the attacking coalition outnumbers the competitor by a considerable margin. The apparent rarity of lethal aggression in the animal kingdom, and especially its restricted context, is indicative of single-minded thinking. This pattern stands in striking contrast to the pattern of killing seen in human societies.

Like other animals, humans kill when there are imbalances of power, including asymmetries in weaponry, physical size, and numbers. As Wrangham has noted, we see such imbalances in youth gangs who, like chimpanzees, form stealth coalitions to sneak up and attack lone victims.
⁹
Unlike other animals, however, our own species kills in fundamentally different ways. We kill not only on massive scales but also in a wide variety of contexts, attacking strangers, friends, lovers, kin, the old and the young — and not just when there is an imbalance of power but also when power is matched. We kill with and without immediate provocation, for personal gain or no reason at all. We have invented methods to kill painlessly and to inflict prolonged, excruciating pain. Only
we
are known to be repeatedly cruel for cruelty’s sake. These differences suggest that something changed over the course of evolution, both in the ability to carry out lethal aggression and the advantages of doing so. What changed, I suggest, is our brain’s ability to combine thoughts and emotions to create new ways of solving old problems. This change enabled us to overwhelm our competitors by impressing them with excessive violence. As Zahavi explains in his theory of costly signaling, only those individuals who can afford to waste resources will display with such exuberance. By extension, individuals with enough wealth and power can readily afford to exhibit gratuitous acts of cruelty. These costly signals empower the perpetrator by striking fear and trembling in the victims. Seen in this way, gratuitous cruelty is strategic, and
anything but
the outcome of a disordered mind. It is this kind of healthy evildoer who represents the central puzzle I explore in this book.

• • •

In
Part I
, we will focus on the recipe for evil, examining both the psychology of desire (
chapter 1
) and the psychology of denial (
chapter 2
). In
Part II
, we will look at the evolutionary history of evil.
Chapter 3
examines what makes us unique relative to other animals and assesses the possible adaptive function of seemingly wasteful acts of extreme violence.
Chapter 4
explains why some people are more likely to develop into evildoers than others, based on a combination of nature and nurture.

My goal is to guide you on a journey into evil. It is a journey that describes our evolutionary past, our present state of affairs, and the prospects for our future. It is as much a story about you and me, here and now, as it is about our long-ago ancestors and our descendants to come. It is an account of the nature of moral decay and the prospects for moral growth. It is not an account that will teach us how to banish evil from the world; I don’t believe that’s possible. Rather, it is an account that will help us understand why some individuals acquire an addiction to feeling good by making others feel bad, often while destroying blameless lives under the banner of virtue. It may well prompt us to recognize our own vulnerabilities and monitor the variety of ways in which desire and denial combine to create an evilicious mindset.

Recommended reading

• There are numerous books about evil, most written by philosophers, theologians, historians, political scientists, and legal scholars. The following are books about evil written by scientists. I have learned a great deal from them, and many of their ideas powerfully enrich the pages between these covers:

Baumeister, R. F. (1997).
Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty
. New York: W. H. Freeman.

Baron-Cohen, S. (2011).
The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty
. New York: Basic Books.

Oakley, B. (2007).
Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend
. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Staub, E. (2010).
Overcoming Evil: Genocide, Violent Conflict, and Terrorism.
New York: Oxford University Press.

Stone, M. H. (2009).
The Anatomy of Evil
. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Zimbardo, P. (2007).
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
. New York: Random House.

• For a comprehensive discussion of evil by philosophers and historians, with an eye to the relevant science, see:

Kekes, J. (2007).
The Roots of Evil
. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

Livingstone Smith, D. (2011)
Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others.
New York: St. Martin’s Press.

McGinn, C. (1999).
Ethics, Evil and Fiction
. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shermer, M. (2004).
The Science of Good and Evil.
New York: Henry Holt Inc.

• On killing throughout history, see:

Grossman, Lt. Col. D. (1995).
On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society.
New York: Little, Brown.

Wrangham, R.W. & Peterson, D. (1996).
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence.
Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Part I

ONE RECIPE

Chapter 1:

Runaway desire

The desire of being believed, or the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all of our desires.

– Adam Smith

In 2003, Marwan Abu Ubeida (his pseudonym) started preparing for what he believed would be the happiest day of his life. He couldn’t imagine wanting or desiring anything else. His preparations involved intense physical and psychological training, including frequent prayers. When Marwan prayed, he asked for a blessing of his mission, purification of his soul, and the ability to reunite with his brothers in the afterlife. He also read historical accounts of the great martyrs of the past. These readings, he believed, would give him the strength to patiently wait for the day when he could act and satisfy his ultimate desire to die.

Marwan was a Sunni Muslim jihadi in waiting, waiting for the green light to transform himself into a suicide bomber. All facets of his desire to die were clear. As captured by
Time
magazine correspondent Bobby Ghosh
¹⁰
, Marwan wanted to achieve his mission with perfection: “If I am lucky, my body will be vaporized. There won’t be anything left of me to bury.” He wanted to meet other suicide bombers in his afterlife: “We made a pact that we would meet in heaven.” He only wanted to harm Iraqi infidels and American soldiers: “I pray no innocent people are killed in my mission.” And he had no interest in being recognized by his fellow Iraqis: “The only person who matters is Allah.”

Marwan is one of thousands of martyrs who, over the course of history, have sacrificed their lives in the name of a great cause. Their desires seem, in one way, pure: to support a set of sacred beliefs and values. And yet, the consequence of their selfless action is often excessive harm to innocent others. Because most of us can’t imagine decorating our bodies with dynamite, and then pressing the self-destruct button, we tend to think that suicide bombers are either uneducated, mentally deranged, or religious fanatics. Though some suicide bombers carry such resumes, many, including past and present members of al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas are college educated, mentally healthy, and have no religious education. As summarized by the anthropologist Scott Atran and his colleagues, suicide martyrs often come to religious fanaticism late in life, but such fanaticism is not what pushed them into a life of extreme violence. Instead, the best predictors of who will turn to this kind of terrorism as a way of life are social networks of family and friends, concern over national humiliation, and the perception of inappropriate interventions by foreigners. What is important here is the powerful role that sacred values have on some individuals, and how such values can drive a deep desire to harm others, even if this means harming oneself. For many, this is an example of desire run amuck. For others, it is an example of self-sacrifice for the good of the group. Whichever way one leans, suicide bombing is a clear case where an individual’s desire leads to horrific consequences for innocent others.

Desire is the first ingredient in the recipe for evil. In this chapter I lay the foundation for understanding how desire works, explaining how it arises as a thought or feeling, how it motivates action, and how it spins out of control leading to addictions. I will explain how we acquire and nurture the desire to obtain valuable resources such as food, water, money, and mates, but along the way often harm other individuals or allow harm to happen. The puzzle that I will explain is how a benign process that shapes our aesthetic preferences and motivates our capacity to acquire beautiful paintings, delicious food, and attractive partners can turn into a process that motivates us to kill, using excessive means to reach excessive ends, sometimes for personal pleasure and sometimes with no feeling at all.

The desire for pleasure

Imagine that scientists have just announced the discovery of a center in the brain that manages our experience of pleasure. Imagine further that they have invented a consumer device called
Bliss
that, for only $49.99, enables you to ramp up or down the activity in this pleasure center. Want more out of your dinner, movie, tennis stroke, work, or sex? Flip the
Bliss
switch. Want to buffer yourself from the pain of ostracism, a romantic breakup, or a colonoscopy? Flip the
Bliss
switch. Would you buy
Bliss
? Before you answer this question, think about potential side effects. Did you think about the possibility that you might become addicted to
Bliss
or worse, either destroy the feeling of pleasure altogether or end up in a never-ending quest for satisfaction, each dollop of pleasure leaving you wanting a bigger dollop next time around. This may seem like science fiction, but it’s closer to non-fiction.

Over fifty years ago, scientists implanted electrodes into a region of the rat’s brain called the
nucleus accumbens
. The electrodes were connected to a switch. If the rat pressed the switch, the electrode turned on and so too did the nucleus accumbens. The rats indeed pressed, over and over again, some at a rate of two thousand presses per hour, with no external reward or threat of punishment. Pressing the switch was the reward, or at least the vehicle to a rewarding experience. Pressing the switch was addictive.

Soon after this discovery, clinicians started using the same brain stimulation technique to treat individuals with neurological complications, including Parkinson’s patients suffering from loss of motor control, patients experiencing sustained pain, Tourette’s patients suffering from motor tics and obsessive-compulsive problems, and even a patient in a coma who had lost, but then slowly recovered the capacity to name and grasp objects. As in the rat work, a clinician implanted an electrical pulse generator within a targeted brain region. When the generator turned on, it stimulated activity in previously malfunctioning regions. But sometimes it stimulated much more than the doctor planned.

Two patients suffering from chronic pain developed profound
addictions
to the stimulation. In addition to relatively successful pain reduction, both patients also experienced an enhanced desire for sex, including erotic feelings. One of these patients self-stimulated so often that she forgot to wash, change clothes, and adhere to family commitments. Though it is unclear why damping down pain resulted in ramping up the desire for sex — as opposed to other rewarding experiences such as eating food — it is clear that certain brain areas control how much we want particular rewarding experiences. This work also suggests that specific brain regions figure prominently in the pathway to addiction, uncontrollable cravings that are toxic to self and others. This work suggests that brain areas associated with desire can run out of control. We need to understand this process as it is a critical step in the path to causing gratuitous cruelty.

To understand how the brain motivates us to
want
some things but not others, how it creates the experience of
liking
, and how it enables us to want things we like by
learning
about the world, we turn to experiments on nonhuman animals, brain scans of healthy humans, the mechanics of mind-altering drugs, conscious and unconscious influences on our choices, and the forces that lead individuals to develop uncontrollable urges to eat, drink, snort, shoot up, and gamble
¹¹
. This is the evidence that scientists have gathered to explain the nature of wanting, liking, and learning.

In both humans and other animals, we can understand how the wanting system works by measuring what individuals approach when given a choice, as well as how much effort they are willing to exert while approaching and gaining access to a particular object or experience. For example, in studies that explore whether captive animals have sufficient housing conditions, an experimenter presents a choice of rooms, one consisting of the typical housing environment and the others with additional goods believed to be of interest. To enter a given room requires opening a door. To determine how much an individual really wants what is in another room, the experimenter makes it extremely difficult to open each door by adding a tight spring. In studies of captive hens and mongoose, individuals exerted considerable effort to open some doors but not others: hens rammed into doors opening onto a chipped wood floor, whereas mongoose did the same for a swimming pool of water. These are items they want, but are deprived of in captivity. Humans deprived of basic rights — food, water, living space — exert similar efforts to obtain these goods. Effort exerted is a measure of wanting, whether in hens, mongoose, or humans.

What about liking? It may seem that there are no clear objective ways to measure liking because it is a subjective experience. My likes are my own. You can’t possibly know how intensely I like French cheese or reading George Eliot novels or teaching children who want to learn. And if you can’t know what it is like for me to like things, then we can’t possibly know what it is like for a hen or mongoose to like things. There are, however, ways of measuring liking and disliking that are reliable, objective, and consistent across species. In many animals, including human babies who can’t speak and human adults who have lost this capacity due to brain injury, there are distinctive behaviors that are consistently linked to positive experiences and others linked to negative ones. For example, in mice, monkeys, and human babies, tasting something sweet like sugar causes a lot of lip licking, whereas tasting something bitter such as quinine causes mouth gaping, nose twitching, and arm flailing. These similarities suggest that evolution has been conservative, preserving the same means of expressing likes and dislikes in different species. These similarities have enabled scientists to understand how the brain systems involved in wanting and liking can change together or separately, even though they can’t help us understand the harder problem of what, subjectively, it is like for a given mouse, monkey or man to like something.

Understanding which components of a system are necessary or sufficient for it to operate requires isolating the components, turning some on and others off. Take the batteries out of a portable radio and it doesn’t work. Are batteries necessary? Yes, unless one has an electrical cord to plug in the wall. Are batteries sufficient? No, because without a transistor, antenna, and speaker, the batteries have nothing to drive. The same logic applies when we look at brain systems and specifically, the engine behind wanting and desiring. If, following damage or a lesion to a specific brain area, an individual no longer executes a specific behavior, say eating and enjoying the food consumed, it is reasonable to infer that this area is necessary for eating and enjoying food consumption; it may or may not be sufficient. The same logic applies to molecular manipulations in which scientists silence or turn on specific genes with known functions.

The cognitive neuroscientists Susana Peciña and Kent Berridge took a population of mice and silenced a gene that controls the neurochemical dopamine, causing the circulating levels in the brain to increase
¹²
. The reason they targeted dopamine is because it plays a central role in regulating both the anticipation and experience of reward in invertebrates and vertebrates, revealing the signature of an evolutionarily ancient system. Compared with normal mice, these dopamine-plus mice consumed twice as much food and water, and learned much faster where food was located within a maze. But when it came to measuring licking as liking, the dopamine-plus mice were no different from normal mice. Dopamine is, therefore, essential for the wanting system but not the liking system. This conclusion has been supported by many other studies, of mice and men, in the context of eating and drug addiction — two topics that I will discuss momentarily.

To understand what rodents like, Peciña and Berridge injected an opioid drug — similar to opium from poppy plants — into two brain regions associated with reward — the nucleus accumbens and the ventral pallidum. More precisely, they injected the drug into areas called
hedonic hotspots
— zones tuned like pitchforks to particular kinds of stimulation, designed to jazz up liking. Following injection, individuals licked four times more often in response to sugar as the non-injected individuals, but showed no difference in wanting. They also showed less of a gag response to the nastiness of bitter quinine. Turning on these hedonic hotspots ramped up the pleasure of sweets and diminished the displeasure from bitters. Together, the Peciña and Berridge studies highlight the independence of wanting and liking, and the ways in which the brain — or a clever experimenter playing with it — regulates them.

How does the brain figure out what’s hot and what’s not, delicious or disgusting? It’s one thing to desire a particular experience and another to derive a rewarding or pleasurable experience. But the world is not set up with labels that indicate which objects and events are delicious and which disgusting. Labeling is an active process, carried out by the organism, and constrained by initial biases that are part of every sensory ability, as well as experiences accumulated over a lifetime. All organisms start off life with biases that cause them to hear, smell, see, and taste some things better than others. These biases propel them toward some objects and away from others. This is why no human baby has to be taught to dislike bitter things and like sweet things. From the very first encounter, sugary solutions trigger tongue protrusions and licking, whereas bitter solutions trigger a gaping mouth. We have evolved, as have other animals, sensory systems that are tuned to prefer some things and dislike others right from the start. These initial biases guide learning, facilitating acquisition of new knowledge in some cases and making it almost impossible in others. This is where scientific evidence gains considerable interest, helping us understand how we develop anticipatory pleasures and past-oriented regrets, struggle to change from habitual rewards, and acquire irrational desires for experiences we no longer enjoy. It is the power and pull of these desires that lead us to seek their satisfaction.