Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

by Roy F. Baumeister

Therefore, regardless of the root causes of violence, the immediate cause is often a breakdown of self-control.

You do not have to give people reasons to be violent, because they already have plenty of reasons. All you have to do is take away their reasons to restrain themselves.

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.

Why does the public prefer to hear that drugs are the source of most violence, even if this is not really true?

The answer is that drugs support people’s beliefs in the myth of pure evil. Drugs are an alien force, an other, an outside entity that forces itself into our world of normality and brings chaos and destruction.

a woman can beat a child without fear of consequences, whereas she does not have the physical superiority to impose the same kind of physical dominance over a large teenager.

the higher your opinion of yourself, the more likely you are to get ego threats, and hence the more prone to violence you would be.

A person with a firm, unshakably high opinion of himself is not going to be threatened by anything.

Romantic jealousy is another experience in which people become irrationally oversensitive because of implicit blows to their pride.

Someone tells you that you are not very competent at something. If you are a shame-prone person, you start to experience that sinking feeling that the other person may be right and that maybe this is not the only thing you are bad at, and maybe you are just a worthless loser in general. You start to feel panic, anxiety, and misery, and your heart beats faster. To break free of those feelings, you reject the premise.

insecurity carries a connotation of lack of self-esteem.

People with low self-esteem tend to blame themselves when things go wrong. People with high self-esteem tend to blame external factors, such as other people, the situation, or various obstacles.

Imagining something is an important step toward actually doing it.

“Guilt? It’s this mechanism we use to control people. It’s an illusion. It’s a kind of social control mechanism—and it’s very unhealthy.