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‘the flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth’.
This is how myths are born.
And foreign visitors to the island didn’t discover a dying civilisation–they pushed it off the cliff.
Psychologist Roy Baumeister calls the fallacious assumption that our enemies are malicious sadists ‘the myth of pure evil’. In reality, our enemies are just like us.
Notice anything? If there’s one thing that ties these victims together, it’s that most were eliminated remotely. The overwhelming majority of soldiers were killed by someone who pushed a button, dropped a bomb, or planted a mine. By someone who never saw them, certainly not while they were half-naked and trying to hold up their trousers.
Over the course of history, weaponry has got ever better at overcoming the central problem of all warfare: our fundamental aversion to violence.
If you can dehumanise the other–say, by portraying them as vermin–it makes it easier to treat the other as if they are indeed inhuman.
This.
Shooting a firearm becomes an automated, Pavlovian reaction you can perform without thinking. For snipers, the training’s even more radical.
If you brainwash millions of young soldiers in training, it should come as no surprise when they return with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as so many did after Vietnam.
people in positions of power have distinct psychological profiles. War criminals like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels are classic examples of power-hungry, paranoid narcissists.50 Al-Qaeda and IS leaders have been similarly manipulative and egocentric, rarely troubled by feelings of compassion or doubt.51
The individuals who rise to positions of power, Keltner found, are the friendliest and the most empathic.4 It’s survival of the friendliest.
The medical term is ‘acquired sociopathy’: a non-hereditary antisocial personality disorder, first diagnosed by psychologists in the nineteenth century. It arises after a blow to the head that damages key regions of the brain and can turn the nicest people into the worst kind of Machiavellian.
failing to manifest that one facial phenomenon that makes human beings unique among primates. They don’t blush.
Power appears to work like an anaesthetic that makes you insensate to other people.
They discovered that a sense of power disrupts what is known as mirroring, a mental process which plays a key role in empathy.
Of course, the propaganda of power is more subtle these days, but that’s not to say we no longer design ingenious ideologies to justify why some individuals ‘deserve’ more authority, status, or wealth than others. We do. In capitalist societies, we tend to use arguments of merit. But how does society decide who has the most merit? How do you determine who contributes most to society? Bankers or bin men? Nurses or the so-called disruptors who’re always thinking outside the box? The better the story you spin about yourself, the bigger your piece of the pie. In fact, you could look at the entire
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We’ve always spun ingenious myths that we passed down to each other and that greased the wheels of cooperation among multitudes.
It wasn’t until the emergence of armies and their commanders that all this changed. Just try standing up to a strongman who has all opposition skinned, burned alive, or drawn and quartered. Your criticisms suddenly won’t seem so urgent. ‘This is the reason,’ Machiavelli wrote, ‘why all armed prophets have triumphed and all unarmed prophets have fallen.’
‘It is useful,’ advised Machiavelli, ‘to arrange matters so that when they no longer believe, they can be made to believe by force.31
Money may be a fiction, but it’s enforced by the threat of very real violence.33
One obvious method is revolution. Every revolution, whether the French (1789), the Russian (1917), or the Arab Spring (2011), is fuelled by the same dynamic. The masses try to overthrow a tyrant.
Rousseau already observed that this form of government is more accurately an ‘elective aristocracy’ because in practice the people are not in power at all. Instead we’re allowed to decide who holds power over us.
It was never the American Founding Fathers’ intention for the general populace to play an active role in politics. Even now, though any citizen can run for public office, it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic network of donors and lobbyists. It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies–think of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes.
The reason, says Professor Keltner, is that power causes people to lose the kindness and modesty that got them elected, or they never possessed those sterling qualities in the first place.
In a hierarchically organised society, the Machiavellis are one step ahead. They have the ultimate secret weapon to defeat their competition. They’re shameless.
Studies show that between 4 and 8 per cent of CEOs have a diagnosable sociopathy, compared to 1 per cent among the general population.37
The tragedy of war is that it’s the best facets of human nature–loyalty, camaraderie, solidarity–that inspire Homo puppy to take up arms.
For most of our past, we inhabited an egalitarian world without kings or aristocrats, presidents or CEOs.
inspired by fellowship and incited by cynical strongmen, people will do the most horrific things to each other.
We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.’
Much as mass production once sidelined traditional craftspeople, God lost his job to bureaucrats.
Historians point out that if the Enlightenment gave us equality, it also invented racism.
Things like friendship, love, trust and loyalty become true precisely because we believe in them.
The Golem Effect is a kind of nocebo: a nocebo that causes poor pupils to fall further behind, the homeless to lose hope and isolated teenagers to radicalise. It’s also one of the insidious mechanisms behind racism, because when you’re subjected to low expectations, you won’t perform at your best, which further diminishes others’ expectations and thus further undermines your performance. There’s also evidence to suggest that the Golem Effect and its vicious cycle of mounting negative expectations can run entire organisations into the ground.8
people go around doing all kinds of nutty things that don’t fit the behaviourist view. Like climbing mountains (hard!), volunteering (free!) and having babies (intense!). In fact, we’re continually engaging in activities–of our own free will–that don’t earn us a penny and are downright exhausting. Why?
‘Money may work’, Deci later explained, ‘to buy off one’s intrinsic motivation for an activity.’9
Communist or capitalist, in both systems the tyranny of numbers drowns out our intrinsic motivation.
He sees his employees as intrinsically motivated professionals and experts on how their jobs ought to be done.
It’s like the philosopher Ivan Illich said decades ago: ‘School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.’39
‘The opposite of play is depression.’41
‘We have been building institutions that are focused on long-term cooperation for a long time now, in particular after periods of accelerated market development and privatisation.’
Our natural inclination is for solidarity, whereas the market is imposed from on high. Take the billions of dollars pumped in recent decades into frenzied efforts to turn healthcare into an artificial marketplace. Why? Because we have to be taught to be selfish.
All too often, the sharing economy turns out to be more like a shearing economy–we all get fleeced.
Normally, you first have to prove you’re sick enough, disabled enough, or otherwise needy enough to merit assistance, and not until you file dozens of forms testifying that you are past all hope do you get a scant amount of money.
That kind of system is primed to make people sad, listless and dependent, while an unconditional dividend does something else entirely. It fosters trust.
According to this ‘principle of normality’, life inside the walls should resemble as closely as possible life on the outside.
Norway’s approach isn’t some naive, socialist aberration. It’s a system that’s better, more humane and less expensive.
In reality, the results of 48 per cent of the studies analysed had been positive, showing rehabilitation can work.13
Neighbourhoods aren’t made safer by issuing parking tickets, just as you couldn’t have saved the Titanic by scrubbing the deck.
Whose ‘order’ are we talking about? Because as arrests in the Big Apple skyrocketed, so did the reports of police misconduct.
