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

by Ervin Staub

  The defense of the physical and psychological self are basic goals, but they can be dormant for a person with a strong feeling of personal adequacy who lives under normal (nonthreatening) conditions. People with a weaker sense of their physical safety or weak self-esteem are easily threatened. Those with less faith in their own efficacy and less expectation of fulfilling their goals are easily frustrated. But even people with a strong individual or collective sense of physical and psychological safety will feel threatened when they face intense and persistent difficulties in life, and their primary motive can become defense of the individual or collective self.

  Motivations for aggression: psychological states and processes that promote aggression

  A variety of motives result from threat, attack, the perception of danger, and interference with the fulfillment of goals. Self-protective personal goals can become so intense that they develop the imperative, forceful quality of needs. Aggression is a likely response.

  Proponents of the original “frustration-aggression” hypothesis, the first widely used theory of aggression in psychology, might regard all the motives that I specify below as the result of frustration. But I prefer a differentiated view, identifying a variety of motives that may generate aggression.

  1. Instigation can give rise to anger, rage, and the desire for retaliation and harm-doing. Aggression as a means to serve this motive has been called hostile aggression. Anger, rage, and the desire to retaliate or harm can also be useful for mobilizing a person to remove the attack or threat, that is, for self-defense.

  2. Instigating conditions can also directly give rise to the motivation for self-defense. Escape is one mode of self-defense, but it is often impossible or inconsistent with a person’s self-conception and values or imposes further frustration by requiring extreme effort, such as moving away. Aggression is an effective self-defense, since it communicates that instigation does not pay and makes renewed instigation less likely.12 It can also serve self-defense by reestablishing a balance of power with the instigators,13 which reduces the likelihood of further harm-doing, reestablishes self-esteem and public esteem, and makes a cooperative relationship possible. In this way reciprocity or retaliation can serve the motivation for self-defense rather than the desire to harm. Other means of self-defense are subordination and attempts to initiate a positive, cooperative relationship with instigators.

  3. Instigating conditions also give rise to the motive to protect the psychological self: one’s self-concept, identity, self-esteem. Threat to values, beliefs, and ways of life can also give rise to this motive. For some people the experience of threat does not even require an external source; the insecurity, weakness, and incapacity can come from within. Whatever its source, the need to defend the psychological self can be extraordinarily powerful. Often it employs such “internal,” psychological means as scapegoating or devaluation of others, which eventually provides a basis for violence against them.

  A related goal is to elevate the self. Social comparison, the desire for a favorable comparison of the self to others – in material or psychological well-being, status and power, character and personality – is an important and perhaps universal human motive.14 Like all human motives, it differs among persons and cultures in its strength and nature.a This desire is more intense when the self-concept is under attack.

  Interviews with violent criminals show that many of them have poor self-esteem. Their violence is aimed at protecting their self-image or their image in others’ eyes in response to a provocation that is often mild or even imagined.15 Other criminals are violent because they think a “real man” must be strong and forceful. They seek violent encounters to experience this sense of their maleness and to create an image in others’ eyes of a powerfully masculine individual.

  4. A sense of injustice that arises from unfavourable comparison of one’s relative well-being and of the balance between one’s efforts and rewards or between one’s own or one’s group’s rights and privileges and those of other people or groups can give rise to resentment, anger, and violence. The experience of injustice motivates aggression of many kinds: revolutions and other social movements, criminal and other violence.16 In hard times, if others are unaffected, feelings of injustice or unfairness can be especially intense. It is not the actual injustice that is the source of resentment, but the perception of injustice. Those identified as responsible will often be perceived as evil and deserving punishment.

  5. A related motivation is to enhance a sense of personal efficacy and to gain a feeling of personal power. A feeling of inefficacy may result from frustration or it may be a personality characteristic. Aggressive persons are often unsuccessful. For example, aggressive children are often low academic achievers and aggressive adults often did poorly in school as children.17 Aggressive children tend to be socially unsuccessful, unpopular among their peers.18 Unable to satisfy their affiliation needs and social goals, they feel powerless. Aggression can give a sense of power or efficacy. In one study, frustrated boys were led to subject others to loud, noxious noise. When the victims denied feeling discomfort, previously aggressive boys turned up the sound, but nonaggressive boys did not.19 The escalating aggression of some Nazi concentration camp guards in the face of the powerlessness and resulting passivity of victims suggests a desire for efficacy or impact.20 Over time, the association of efficacy with aggression makes aggressive behavior self-reinforcing.

  Clinical experience with a group of incestuous fathers suggests that one of their motives was to gain a feeling of power. These men are weak and ineffectual and have low self-esteem. They often have sexual and emotional problems with sick or rejecting wives and are unable either to take steps to improve their marital situation or to seek sexual and emotional gratification from women outside the home.21 The capacity to make a daughter into a sexual partner may give them a feeling of power.

  Otto Rank and, following him, Ernest Becker proposed an extreme form of the idea that aggression serves a desire for power.22 Becker maintained that human beings cannot come to terms with death. Killing, including human sacrifice ritualized in some cultures in earlier times, may give the killer a feeling of invulnerability and power over death.

  In my view, however, it is the feeling of present insecurity, incomprehension, and lack of control due to cultural background and personality together with life problems that lead people to seek strength and control through the exercise of power over others, including the ultimate power, killing. People who feel valued and significant and who find life comprehensible and their circumstances controllable will not kill out of a need for invulnerability and immortality.

  The feeling of vulnerability and the need for aggression to overcome it and the desire for power for its own sake can become persistent characteristics of individuals and groups.

  6. Chaos, disorder, and sudden profound changes, especially when accompanied by frustration, threat, and attack, invalidate the conceptions of self and world that serve as guides by which new experience acquires meaning and life gains coherence. (Seymour Epstein has suggested that schizophrenia is an extreme manifestation of the loss of an organizing conception of the self and reality.)23 The motivation to gain a renewed comprehension will be powerful. Ideologies are attractive because they offer renewed comprehension and a renewed self-definition.b

  7. In the face of persistent frustrations or threats, an important motive is gaining hope for control over events and renewed faith in the future goodness or benevolence of life itself. Ideologies can offer this renewed hope and faith. Being part of a movement to fulfill an ideology offers both hope and a feeling of significance.

  8. Humans have a profound need for connectedness to others, belongingness, and community. This need coexists with a need for independence and self-sufficiency. Socialization and experience determine the relative importance of these two motives and decide to what extent they are consciously acknowledged and accepted. Under stressful conditions, the desire for belonging grows in intensity,
yet is constantly frustrated.

  Research shows that after a positive experience (success in a task, material gain through luck, a friendly act by another person, even thinking about positive past experiences) people are more helpful to others. Positive experiences diminish self-concern and self-preoccupation and increase attention and sensitivity to others.25 After negative experiences, helpfulness may be unaffected or may increase, but more often it declines. The effect of the experience depends on its nature and on circumstances. For example, when a child fails in the presence of others on a task, he or she will later be more helpful in their presence, as if to improve his or her tarnished image.26

  When goals are unfulfilled and people feel frustrated and threatened, it is likely (though not inevitable) that they will become preoccupied with their own needs. When resources are scarce, competition for them increases. As a result, connection to others, community support, and the experience of a shared identity will diminish. Just as importantly, difficult life conditions are often seen as a personal as well as a collective failure that threatens a collective or national self-concept. When the difficulties are severe and persistent, the feeling of identification with the group may lessen.

  This need for belonging and community is frustrated just when it is greatest. Shared antagonism to a subgroup of society or an external enemy can create or enhance a sense of community. Erich Fromm’s idea of “escape from freedom” in Nazi followers implies both a search for guidance and leadership and a desire for attachment and belonging.27 By giving up the self to a leader and a group, the need for community was fulfilled and a burdensome identity was relinquished for a new group identity.

  9. These considerations suggest that the motivation for a positive social identity can also be served by joining groups and adopting ideologies. Human beings gain much of their identity from groups and incorporate the systems they are part of into their self-conceptions. That is why changes in society, and in smaller groups such as the family (e.g., divorce) are so wrenching. As the primary group fails economically or loses status and power or moral influence, as it is diminished in its members’ eyes, it loses the power to confer a positive social identity.c

  10. The aim of instrumental aggression is not to harm but to serve other goals. When goals are persistently frustrated, it becomes more likely that people will try to fulfill them by aggressive means.

  11. Obedience to authority is another important source of aggression. Stanley Milgram’s research demonstrated that many people were willing to obey an experimenter and administer what they believed were life-threatening electric shocks to another person. Each participant acted as a teacher who was supposedly punishing a learner’s mistakes. College students at Yale and people living in New Haven administered what they believed to be increasing levels of electric shocks, including extremely intense and dangerous ones, to a person who worked on a task in an adjoining room. They did so simply in response to the demands and insistence of the person in charge of the experiment. A substantial number (62.5 percent) administered the highest levels of shock, even though they could hear the victim’s distress and intense complaints. Many did so even when the victim was with them and they had to place his hand on the shock apparatus (30 percent).29

  Milgram noted that under the influence of authority people can enter an agentic mode. When this happens they no longer evaluate the morality of an action independently, but see themselves as agents carrying out the commands of superiors. However, as I noted in Chapter 2, obedience to authority involves more than the desire to be rewarded and not punished. Often people obey because, starting with shared motives, they join leaders; they identify with them and adopt their views and wishes.

  From the perspective of my theory of personal goals, we can say that conflicting moral considerations may not arise when the motive to obey is dominant. As “agents” people will accept the reasons for violence provided by authority, especially if they share with those in authority life problems and culture and therefore also share the motivations underlying violence. One of the followers’ motivations may be to receive the guidance of authority. Since human beings tend to strive for goal or motive integration, other motives will join or be integrated with the motive for obedience; for example, Nazi doctors took pride in the professional skills they displayed during inhuman medical experiments conducted in concentration camps.30

  Difficult life conditions and aggression

  Difficult life conditions affect both individuals and groups. For example, the loss of World War I and what many saw as a humiliating peace treaty profoundly threatened the Germans’ collective self-concept as a strong, superior, proud nation. The war was followed by a revolution and then by a devastating inflation, depression and joblessness, and political chaos and violence. There was a breakdown of sexual and social mores.31 People felt their physical survival, their ability to support a family, their way of life and values, and their conception of themselves as individuals and as a nation to be profoundly threatened.

  There is some formal evidence that difficult life conditions increase violence. In economically difficult times there were more lynchings in the South.32 Economic hardship (resulting from low cotton prices) was associated with lynchings of black people and to a slight degree with lynchings of white “ingroup” members. In addition, the degree of decline in economic well-being was associated with the frequency of lynchings.33 Economic problems are associated with an increased rate of murder and other violent crime or, in societies where social taboos against violence are strong, such as Japan, an increased rate of suicide.34 Associated with higher rates of unemployment are more reports of child abuse.

  If difficult life conditions are to result in the mistreatment of groups, a substantial number of people, including a potentially dominant group, must be affected. The problems must be persistent, with cumulative psychological effects. Hitler’s rise to power was the result of difficult life conditions, and the Nazi genocide was perpetrated at a time when the fortunes of Germany on the battlefields of World War II took a turn for the worse. In Cambodia, the evacuation of cities and murder of millions of city dwellers occurred after years of civil war, hunger, and misery. Turkey suffered losses of territory, power, and status for many years before and during World War I before murdering the Armenians. In Argentina, severe economic problems and political terrorism preceded the disappearances.

  The effect of stress and danger on psychological experience

  Scott Peck’s account of the My Lai massacre shows how stress and distress, which are among the usual consequences of difficult conditions, affect human behavior.35

  The life of a soldier in a combat zone is one of chronic stress.... The troops of Task Force Barker.. .were at the other end of the world from their homes. The food was poor, the insects thick, the heat enervating, the sleeping quarters uncomfortable. Then there was the danger, usually not as severe as in other wars, yet probably even more stressful in Vietnam because it was so unpredictable. It came in the form of mortar rounds in the night when the soldiers thought they were safe, booby traps tripped on the way to the latrine, mines that blew a solder’s legs off as he strolled down a pretty lane.... the enemy appeared when and where it was unexpected. (Pp. 220-1)

  In the previous month they had achieved no military success. Unable to engage the enemy, they had themselves sustained a number of casualties from mines and booby traps. The province was considered to be a Vietcong stronghold, one in which the civilian population was largely controlled and influenced by the Communist guerrillas. It was generally felt that the civilians aided and abetted the guerillas to such a degree that it was often difficult to distinguish the combatants from the noncombatants. Hence the Americans tended to hate and distrust all Vietnamese in the area. (P. 213)

  On the eve of the operation there seemed to be a mood of anticipation; finally they would engage the enemy and succeed in doing what they were there for. (P. 213) When “Charlie” Company moved into the hamlets of My Lai they disco
vered not a single combatant. None of the Vietnamese was armed. No one fired on them. They found only unarmed women, children, and old men.

  Some of the things that then happened are unclear. What is clear, however, is that the troops of C Company killed at least somewhere between five and six hundred of those unarmed villagers.... These people were killed in a variety of ways. The most large-scale killings occurred in the particular hamlet of My Lai 4. There the first platoon of Charlie Company, under the command of Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., herded villagers into groups of twenty to forty or more, who were then slaughtered by rifle fire, machine gun fire, or grenades. (P. 214)

  Peck suggested that humans regress under prolonged stress or discomfort; they become more primitive, childish. I believe this happens mainly when basic needs for safety, control, predictability, and self-respect are frustrated. Another response to stress is the mechanism of defense that Robert Jay Lifton called “psychic numbing.” When our emotions are overwhelmingly unpleasant or painful, we anesthetize ourselves; soldiers become able to tolerate mangled bodies, and the capacity for horror becomes blunted. While this diminishes suffering, it also makes us insensitive to the suffering of others, especially when the other is defined as different, the member of an outgroup, or an enemy bent on our destruction.

  This analysis applies not only to the stress of soldiers in combat, but also to stress created by difficult life conditions. Starvation, homelessness, and even others’ deaths can become less worthy of notice as habituation and psychic numbing diminish our capacity for empathy.