More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 28 - September 24, 2020
In the social sciences, ideas are cheap but facts are precious.
But as long as we continue to regard evildoers as a separate species, an alien category, or a wholly different type of human being, we cannot really claim to understand them.
Most people who perpetrate evil do not see what they are doing as evil. Evil exists primarily in the eye of the beholder, especially in the eye of the victim. If there were no victims, there would be no evil.
As a general pattern, suffering stimulates a quest for meaningful explanation.
evil strikes at people’s fundamental beliefs.
Despite the recent surge in stranger violence, people are most likely to suffer murder, beatings, and rape at the hands of acquaintances, relatives, and even family members.
Violent acts follow from high self-esteem, not from low self-esteem. This is true across a broad spectrum of violence, from playground bullying to national tyranny, from domestic abuse to genocide, from warfare to murder and rape. Perpetrators of violence are typically people who think very highly of themselves.
Actually, it is more precise to say that violence ensues when people feel that their favorable views of themselves are threatened or disputed by others. As a result, people whose self-esteem is high but lacks a firm basis in genuine accomplishment are especially prone to be violent, because they are most likely to have their narcissistic bubble burst.
many especially evil acts are performed by people who believe they are doing something supremely good.
“Enjoying being evil is the key to any successful villain.”
people automatically and inevitably begin to think that their group is good. But if we are good, and you are our opponents, and evil is the opponent of the good, then you must be evil.
Crime may bring short-term gains, but in the long run most criminals do not end up wealthy.
it seems reasonable to propose that internal opposition can be silenced but not eliminated by repression and terror.
Terror seems to increase public compliance with the government, but not genuine support.
To believe that anyone can resist torture indefinitely is naive: Almost inevitably the body breaks down under the relentless onslaught of pain and harm,
The victim ends up trying to guess what false confession is wanted and starts to invent all sorts of crimes, which the torturers dutifully record.
Numerous separate studies of murder, rape, and assault have repeatedly found that the majority of violent crimes are committed by people who have been drinking.19
It is injustice, not inequality, that breeds riots. It is mainly when poor people come to think that their poverty is unfair that they burst into violence.
People who think they’re better than they really are will be the dangerous ones.
Several important and carefully conducted studies have found that status inconsistency is a typical part of the picture of the violent, abusive husband.
“Ancient history—and later history as well—suggests that official terror is usually the mark of a regime that may appear brutally self-confident but is in fact insecure.”
Yet the record suggests that holy wars are often dirtier, more brutal, and fuller of cruelty and atrocity than ordinary wars. The usual effect of religiosity is to make war more brutal, not less.
Evil is not likely to result when people firmly believe that ends do not justify means.
Thus, idealism usually ends up conferring a right, a license, to hate.
The members with the firmest sense of hatred will end up being the ones that the others look to for support and guidance.
The group dispute will be harder to resolve.
The implication is that people who leave the group represent an even greater threat than its enemies. If other members were to interact with them, perhaps they would leave too, and the solidarity of the group would be undermined. Keeping the group together with a strong sense of separateness and commitment is in many cases a more fundamental and urgent goal than accomplishing its stated purposes or defeating its actual external enemies.
In the absence of reliable information, people often resort to rumor and guesswork—and the chance for false information to dictate events increases.
By attending to the how, they may fail to think about the why—and especially the why not.
Ervin Staub has emphasized that the silence of bystanders is often a crucial contribution to evil, even though they may think that being silent is not any form of encouragement or action.
When the rules and meanings are all precisely clear, there is less chance for such divergent interpretations, and hence less room for one person to do something he thinks is right but that someone else will judge as radically wrong.
Harsh but vague laws were a centerpiece of the French Terror,15 which in many ways was the first modern episode of murderous governmental repression.
Indeed, the very fact that “everyone else is doing it” (in the standard phrase that people offer in moral defense of their questionable actions)
