“T” here.
I am an avid reader, and have been for my entire life. I read across genres, across periods, but I am often most strongly drawn to science fiction and fantasy, so I’ll mostly use that as the canvas against which I’m going to paint the current discussion.
What I want to discuss today is human nature – particularly, the notion that some people are evil.
We see it in fiction, a lot. There’s an entire sub-genre of fantasy that involves the protagonist(s) battling against Dark Lords, or cackling wicked mages, or Evil Empires – antagonists that do horrible things because, well… because it’s just so much fun, darn it! Or because they were made that way. Or someone forced them to become that way.
This is a trope that we see in many genres. Horror, mystery, comics – all have examples of antagonists that are mean and nasty and horrible, who do horrible things to people because they’re inhuman (see: demons), or because they’re insane, perhaps scarred by horrific abuse as a child, or maybe just because it’s so much darned fun to be Evil.
(From Dark Knight: Alfred says, “Some people just like to watch the world burn.”)
The world is full of horrible, terrifying things. Murder, sexual assault, torture, abuse… these things go on in the world around us, every day. But who commits these horrifying acts? We know that in the world we live in, there really aren’t Dark Lords, or demons (fundamentalist religious types who believe in an underworld excepted, here), but that it is other people, other humans, and that many times those humans look Just Like Us. This thought can be really threatening, of course. If some people are capable of such things, aren’t all people capable of them?
The notion that some people are “just evil” is something that lets us rest safely at night, knowing that of course we are not. We couldn’t do those things. Not us. Just Them.
But we are. Humans are all capable of these things. In fact, put into the proper circumstances, humans are likely to do them. In the 1950s, researchers were interested in just what made German citizens go along with the Reich in their programme of extermination. Millions of individuals were slaughtered in the midst of ‘civilized’ Europe, and not only did most people look the other way, many of them actually assisted the Nazis. Why? What aspect of the German character made citizens capable of doing such horrific acts?
The underlying assumption here, of course, is that Americans would not be capable of such atrocities, and the researchers started out with that assumption. In 1957, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, started a series of experiments intended to explore the factors that caused people to commit atrocities. He needed a control group against which to measure Germanic subjects, so he first ran his paradigm with local ‘everyman’ participants, in the full expectation that Americans would refuse to obey when someone told them to do something that was obviously causing harm to another person.
The results of Milgram’s experiments in obedience are well-known, and I shan’t rehash them here, but suffice it to say that the end result, after decades of research (including modern recreations of the experimental paradigm, for those of you who would like to say that people in the 50’s were just more obedient than people are now), was that it wasn’t some facet of Germanic nature, but in fact that most people, regardless of nationality or location or age or pretty much any other factor tested, most people would cause harm to another person because someone in authority told them to do so.
This is an idea that is immensely threatening to most people’s self-concept. We like to think that we are good people, decent people, and that harming others is something we would refuse to do, or at least that it would take more than someone just telling us to do it! Even today, after such an overwhelming demonstration of the phenomena, whenever I teach this experiment (or have seen it taught), students will argue, quite emotionally, that they wouldn’t do that, that people today wouldn’t react the same way. They’re wrong, but they’ll argue with you about it until the cows come home.
Easier, to think that only someone who is evil can commit evil acts. That there’s something, some force, some characteristic, something genetic, maybe, that causes people to be evil.
I think, however, that the notion that people who do evil are somehow different than the rest of us is one that is destructive of the health and well-being of human society, in two ways.
I think it’s destructive from the perspective of those who deplore what happens but feel helpless to change it (‘well, some people are just born bad’). It gives us permission to refuse to address the situation, the factors that are contributing to the horrific acts. Abu Ghraib didn’t happen because the military created a situation in which it was almost impossible that anything else could happen, it happened because there were “a few bad apples”. We don’t need to change the military, or the way we treat prisoners, we just need to get better at finding the bad apples.
I think it’s also destructive from the perspective of those who end up doing bad things and then feel helpless to change themselves (‘I must just be bad’). It creates an atmosphere where you’re either good or bad, so that once you do something bad (hit your kid, maybe, or get high, or steal from work), it automatically becomes about you, rather than about what you’ve done, and it’s a lot easier to then slide down the slippery slope of finding ways to rationalize those actions, rather than finding ways to not do them again (self-concept, remember?).
I’ll admit that I have some hesitation about presenting the second part of my argument, here. I’m a firm believer in personal responsibility – you decide to do what you do, and you’re responsible for those decisions, regardless of the situation you found yourself in when you made them. I’m not arguing that people shouldn’t be responsible for their actions – I am attempting to focus on our understanding of why people engage in their actions, because I think that understanding that has an effect on our ability to prevent other people from doing things that cause harm to others.
For example, research into morality has found that people tend to have fairly fluid notions of responsibility. Consider the following:
A pharmacy is broken into, and drugs are stolen. The perpetrator is caught. Should this person go to jail?
What if the perpetrator is a parent, who was unable to afford the medicine that would save his dying child’s life? Should he or she still go to jail for stealing it?
What if the perpetrator is a drug addict who desperately needed a fix? Should they go to jail, and if so, for more or less time than the parent?
Most people, considering this scenario, say that the parent should do less jail time than the drug addict (if, in fact, they think they should do any jail time at all). But the facts of the case are the same either way. We’ve only become aware that our initial assessment (‘people who steal drugs are bad people’) might have had some mitigating situational factors.
You could argue that, rather than threatening to throw anyone who steals drugs into jail, the best way to prevent that type of crime from happening again might be to do something like, say, fix the healthcare system that denies a child life-saving drugs; or to fix the societal factors that make drug abuse more likely to occur. But it’s easier to just ‘look at the facts’ and determine that anyone who breaks the law should go to jail. I would just argue that it’s not right.
I would argue that there are always situational factors that influence why people do the things they do, even if we wouldn’t necessarily agree that they were mitigating responsibility for their actions. I would argue that most people who commit horrific crimes, who do horrible things, have perfectly good reasons (to them) for doing these things, and felt that they had no other choice but to do them. I think that we have a responsibility to recognize this, and to not accept the glib explanation that some people are “just evil” when it comes to trying to figure out why bad things happen; that instead, we should be trying to figure out what it was that led this person to believe that doing this bad thing was the right thing to do at the time, and address that.
And that is why I think that our constant exposure to the “some people are just evil” argument is one that is not only not realistic, but one that is actively detrimental to accepting that we have the agency to build a better world.
Your thoughts?
