James Waller > Quotes

“Adorno and his colleagues identified nine a priori clusters of personality dimensions—many surprisingly similar to Dicks’s “High F Syndrome”—that made up the authoritarian personality: 1. Conventionalism: Rigid adherence to conventional middle-class values. 2. Authoritarian Submission: Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the in-group. 3. Authoritarian Aggression: Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish, people who violate conventional values. 4. Anti-Intraception: Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded. 5. Superstition and Stereotypy: The belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories. 6. Power and “Toughness”: Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis on the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness. 7. Destructiveness and Cynicism: Generalized hostility, vilification of the human. 8. Projectivity: The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outward of unconscious emotional impulses. 9. Sex: Exaggerated concern with sexual “goings-on.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“A myopic focus on the proposed psychopathology of perpetrators, or on their alleged extraordinary personalities, tells us more about our own personal dreams of how we wish the world to work than it does about the reality of perpetrator behavior. In that role, such explanations satisfy an important emotional demand of distancing us from them.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“Prejudiced individuals, according to the four researchers, were the children of domineering fathers and punitive mothers who engaged in unusually harsh child-rearing practices. These practices involved a combination of threats, coercion, and the deliberate use of parental love and its withdrawal to promote obedience. In other words, authoritarian parents are not able to show their children affection without reservation; it is contingent on the child’s good behavior. The result is children who are decidedly insecure and, paradoxically, extremely dependent on their parents. Moreover, such children fear their parents and experience unconscious hostility toward them.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is not a problem of physics but of ethics. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man. Albert Einstein”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“A myopic focus on the proposed psychopathology of perpetrators, or on their alleged extraordinary personalities, tells us more about our own personal dreams of how we wish the world to work than it does about the reality of perpetrator behavior.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“Despite their continuing efforts of denial and revisionist interpretation, however, there is now widespread recognition that the Turkish destruction of the Armenians between 1915 and 1923 stands as the first “total genocide” of the twentieth century.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“There is a dark side to religious belief systems, which are often fused with ethnic and national identities. In this sense, religion is epiphenomenal—attached to and living off other phenomena. As such, religious belief systems do not always liberate humanity from extraordinary evil. Rather, they are often part of the problem—if not as a primary cause, certainly as something that worsens rather than mitigates conflict.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“There is no gene for genocide. Ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and our desire for social dominance are tendencies, not triggers that lead to mechanical causation or reflex action.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“Three times more peace agreements were negotiated and signed during the first decade of the post-Cold War era (1990–2000) than in the previous three decades combined. At the United Nations (UN), more peace operations were mounted in the decade of the 1990s than in the previous four decades combined.25 In spite of these global peace dividends, we witnessed in the 1990s some of the most egregious cases of civilian populations being “done to death.” Although fewer borders were violated, more people were. In 1994, in Rwanda, more than 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slaughtered by Hutu extremists in the space of just 100 days. Three hundred and thirty-three and a third murders occurred per hour. Five and a half lives terminated every minute, a rate of death nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust.”
― James Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide

“In short, the scale encouraged a response set of positive answers. Instead of identifying genuine authoritarians, perhaps the F scale simply singled out some very agreeable persons without strong opinions.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“But EP also warns us that self-congratulation about our human nature is premature. In Ridley’s words: “We have as many darker as lighter instincts. The tendency of human societies to fragment into competing groups has left us with minds all too ready to adopt prejudices and pursue genocidal feuds.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“Thus, we are wise to at least consider orientation to authority as one of several factors—including low intelligence, low education, lack of political sophistication, and external threats of specific kinds (for example, economic threat)—predisposing people to accept fascist ideology.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“Apparently, according to the criterion of consistency across targets, a prejudiced personality does indeed exist. Prejudice appeared to be less an attitude specific to one group than a general way of thinking about those who are different.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“At its root, genocide happens because we choose to see a people rather than individual people and then we choose to kill those people in large numbers and over an extended period of time.”
― James Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide

“As one example, David Norman Smith, a sociologist at the University of Kansas, points out that exceptionally intense violence occurs with significantly greater frequency in cultures where children are routinely physically or emotionally abused or denied affection.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“In Cosmides and Tooby’s words, “Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.”20 They continue: “In many cases, our brains are better at solving the kinds of problems our ancestors faced on the African savannahs than they are at solving the more familiar tasks we face in a college classroom or a modern city.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“These observations verify that chimpanzees are a second species—in addition to humans—that deliberately seek out and kill members of their own species. The remarkable violence of humanity is not uniquely ours. The species most closely related to us genetically—chimpanzees, with whom we share 98.4 percent of our DNA—also have a dark side to their nature.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“For example, automobiles kill far more people today than do spiders or snakes. But people are far more averse to spiders and snakes than they are to automobiles. Why? Because in our EEA spiders and snakes were a serious threat to our survival and reproduction, whereas automobiles did not exist. Thus, it was possible—not to mention advantageous for our survival and reproduction—for us to evolve an innate aversion to spiders and snakes, but not to automobiles.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“In the particular study reviewed by Blass that focused on religious dispositional variables, those that scored high on many of the religious variables were more accepting of the commands of an authority than were those who scored lower or were indiscriminately antireligious.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“As historian Dick de Mildt argues, “By converting the criminal actors of the story into demon-like lunatics, we distance ourselves from them in a radical fashion, assuming them to belong to a different species which only remotely resembles us in physiognomy.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“Hohne concludes: “The system and the rhythm of mass extermination were directed not by sadists . . . [but by] worthy family men brought up in the belief that anti-semitism was a form of pest control, harnessed into an impersonal mechanical system working with the precision of militarised industry and relieving the individual of any sense of personal responsibility.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“Arendt reasoned that anyone could have filled Eichmann’s role and that his evil was “banal” precisely because insertion into a social hierarchy committed to such evil made it normal and legitimate. This is why, in her view, Eichmann was not a madman. His deeds were monstrous, but Eichmann himself was thoroughly ordinary. In Arendt’s words: “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“Further evidence of perpetrators’ lack of overt psychopathology is found in reports of their early reactions to the human suffering caused by their extraordinary evil. A wide range of perpetrator accounts reveal that initial involvement in killing often led to nightmares, anxiety attacks, debilitating guilt, depression, gastrointestinal problems, temporary impotence, hallucinations, substance abuse, numerous bodily complaints, and many other signs of stress reactions.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“To bluntly suggest that all Nazis had a common, homogenous extraordinary personality that predisposed them to the commission of extraordinary evil is an obvious oversimplification.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“In short, self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection—or compassionate action.”
― James Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide

“The finding that enduring religious belief systems make us more amenable to the commands of authority also is affirmed by the historical realities surrounding many cases of mass killing and genocide.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us—neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be.”
― James Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide

“Journalist Philip Gourevitch reports an interview with a Rwandan lawyer who said: “Conformity is very deep, very developed here. In Rwandan history, everyone obeys authority. People revere power, and there isn’t enough education. You take a poor, ignorant population, and give them arms, and say, ‘It’s yours. Kill.’ They’ll obey.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“Being in a group reveals who individuals are just as much, if not more, than being in a group alters who they are. In this way, groups can reflect some of the baser characteristics of the individuals within them as well as some of the more noble.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

“The “necessary personnel” sought for this duty were not sadists and psychopaths. As a matter of fact, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who might derive pleasure from what had to be done. There was a fear that they would not be as efficient, effective, and dependable as killers for this special operation. “Ordinary” and “sane” people, whose loyalty was to a worthy cause and who could be bent to the commission of extraordinary evil in support of that cause, were thought to be much better candidates.”
― James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing