What do you think?
Rate this book
Evilicious: Cruelty = Desire + Denial
It is a fact that humans destroy the lives of other humans—strangers, friends, lovers, and kin—and have been doing so for a long time. Most of these cases are unsurprising and easily explained: We harm others when it benefits us directly, fighting to win resources or wipe out the competition. In this sense we are no different from any other social animal. The mystery is why seemingly normal people torture, mutilate, and kill others for the fun of it—or for no apparent benefit at all. Why did we, alone among the social animals, develop an appetite for gratuitous cruelty? This is the core problem of evil. It is a problem that has engaged scholars for centuries and is the central topic of this book.
The idea I develop is that evildoers are made in much the same way that addicts are made. Both processes start with unsatisfied desires. Whether it is a taste for violence or a taste for alcohol, drugs, food, or gambling, individuals develop cravings but find the desired experience less and less rewarding, a separation between desire and reward that leads to excess. To justify the excess, the psychology of desire recruits the psychology of denial, enabling individuals to immerse themselves in a new reality that feels right. Whereas addicts cause great harm to themselves by indulging in excessive consumption or expenditures, evildoers cause great harm to others by indulging in excessive or gratuitous cruelty. Whereas addicts deny their drug dependency or their obesity, evildoers deny the moral worth of their victims or invent a reality that presents them as dangerous threats. The cruelty carries no moral weight because the victims have been dehumanized or conceived as dangerous. The combination of unsatisfied desire and denial is a recipe for evil. Like the addict’s search for ever more satisfying means of consuming or spending, evildoers search for ever more satisfying and creative ways of harming others.
This perspective, I suggest, explains not just the pathology of the sadist or the sexual predator but the actions of “ordinary” individuals who perpetrate unimaginable cruelties. It also illuminates the evolution of our capacity for evil, which, I will argue, evolved as an incidental consequence of our brain’s unique design.
To understand evil is neither to justify nor excuse it, reflexively converting inhumane acts into mere accidents of biology or the unfortunate consequences of bad environments. To understand evil is to clarify its causes: In some cases, understanding entails recognizing that a perpetrator suffers from brain damage or a developmental disorder and thus lacks self-control or awareness of others’ pain—mitigating factors that influence legal decisions and should influence public perception as well. In other cases, it entails recognizing that a perpetrator was sound of mind yet knowingly caused harm to innocent others and relished the act. By describing and understanding an individual’s character with the tools of science, we are more likely to make appropriate assignments of responsibility, blame, punishment, and future risk to society.
The idea I develop is that evildoers are made in much the same way that addicts are made. Both processes start with unsatisfied desires. Whether it is a taste for violence or a taste for alcohol, drugs, food, or gambling, individuals develop cravings but find the desired experience less and less rewarding, a separation between desire and reward that leads to excess. To justify the excess, the psychology of desire recruits the psychology of denial, enabling individuals to immerse themselves in a new reality that feels right. Whereas addicts cause great harm to themselves by indulging in excessive consumption or expenditures, evildoers cause great harm to others by indulging in excessive or gratuitous cruelty. Whereas addicts deny their drug dependency or their obesity, evildoers deny the moral worth of their victims or invent a reality that presents them as dangerous threats. The cruelty carries no moral weight because the victims have been dehumanized or conceived as dangerous. The combination of unsatisfied desire and denial is a recipe for evil. Like the addict’s search for ever more satisfying means of consuming or spending, evildoers search for ever more satisfying and creative ways of harming others.
This perspective, I suggest, explains not just the pathology of the sadist or the sexual predator but the actions of “ordinary” individuals who perpetrate unimaginable cruelties. It also illuminates the evolution of our capacity for evil, which, I will argue, evolved as an incidental consequence of our brain’s unique design.
To understand evil is neither to justify nor excuse it, reflexively converting inhumane acts into mere accidents of biology or the unfortunate consequences of bad environments. To understand evil is to clarify its causes: In some cases, understanding entails recognizing that a perpetrator suffers from brain damage or a developmental disorder and thus lacks self-control or awareness of others’ pain—mitigating factors that influence legal decisions and should influence public perception as well. In other cases, it entails recognizing that a perpetrator was sound of mind yet knowingly caused harm to innocent others and relished the act. By describing and understanding an individual’s character with the tools of science, we are more likely to make appropriate assignments of responsibility, blame, punishment, and future risk to society.
316 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 10, 2013
1 person is currently reading
134 people want to read
About the author
Marc Hauser
19 books42 followersMy training is the biological sciences, but with broad interests in human nature, including its evolution. My writings, including academic and trade books, as well as over 200 scientific papers, cover the disciplines of animal behavior, evolutionary biology, neurobiology, cognitive neuroscience, biological anthropology, evolutionary psychology, linguistics, economics, cognitive development, and philosophy. From 1992-2010 I was a professor at Harvard University. From 2010 and ongoing, I am working with at-risk youths, harnessing the discoveries of the mind and brain sciences to both bring new tools to this important are of education and human welfare, and to help ameliorate the lives of these children. I continue to work on scientific papers, teach, and write for the general public.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Read
October 15, 2013This is opening from my Prologue: "It is a fact that humans destroy the lives of other humans — strangers, friends, lovers, and kin — and have been doing so for a long time. These cases are unsurprising and easily explained: we harm others when it benefits us directly, fighting to win resources or wipe out the competition. In this sense we are no different from any other social animal. The mystery is why seemingly normal people torture, mutilate, and kill others for the fun of it — or for no apparent benefit at all. Why did we, alone among the social animals, develop an appetite for gratuitous cruelty? This is the core problem of evil. It is a problem that has engaged scholars for centuries and is the central topic of this book.
Evildoers have many personalities. Some are cruel for cruelty’s sake. Some believe that extreme violence is the only way to secure resources or defend sacred values. Some inspire others to do their dirty work. And some stand by and watch as others carry out horrific acts of violence, unwilling —though not unable — to intervene. You might think that these different behaviors require different explanations. I suggest that they all stem from a single psychological recipe that is part of every human mind but of no other mind in the animal kingdom. This is a stripped-down account of evil, one that explains how it grows within some individuals and how it uniquely evolved in our species.
The idea I develop is that evildoers are made in much the same way that addicts are made. Both processes start with unsatisfied desires. Whether it is a taste for violence or a taste for alcohol, drugs, food, or gambling, individuals develop cravings but find the desired experience less and less rewarding ⎯ a separation between desire and reward that leads to excess. To justify the excess, the psychology of desire recruits the psychology of denial, enabling individuals to immerse themselves in a new reality that feels right. Whereas addicts cause great harm to themselves by indulging in excessive consumption or expenditures, evildoers cause great harm to others by indulging in excessive or gratuitous cruelty. Whereas addicts deny their drug dependency or their obesity, evildoers deny the moral worth of their victims or invent a reality that presents them as dangerous threats. The cruelty carries no moral weight because the victims have been dehumanized or conceived as dangerous. The combination of unsatisfied desire and denial is a recipe for evil. Like the addict’s search for ever more satisfying means of consuming or spending, evildoers search for ever more satisfying and creative ways of harming others.
This perspective, I suggest, explains not just the pathology of the sadist or the sexual predator but the actions of “ordinary” individuals who perpetrate unimaginable cruelties. It also illuminates the evolution of our capacity for evil, which, I will argue, evolved as an incidental consequence of our brain’s unique design. This is an idea developed in somewhat similar ways by the philosopher David Livingstone Smith in his book Less than Human, and by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister in his book Evil. Unlike the brains of other animals, where circuitry specialized for one function slavishly serves that function, our brain circuitry works in harmony to serve a variety of novel functions. Thus, when we dehumanize other human beings — thinking of them, say, as vermin or parasites — and then torture them without guilt, we have connected brain areas involved in recognizing objects, determining moral standards, and justifying actions with brain areas involved in emotion, reward, motivation, and aggression. This is just one of many ways we can combine and recombine thoughts and emotions to create new ways of seeing the world. The point here is that this mental flexibility did not evolve to serve evil; rather, evil was enabled as an incidental consequence of our brain’s unique design.
Once the capacity for evil was in place in the human brain, it could be harnessed to serve a useful and adaptive function. By carrying out costly, over-the-top acts of violence, individuals signaled their ability to waste resources simply because they could — because they had the power or the wealth to do so. These displays sent credible messages of ongoing and impending terror to victims, freezing them in their own fear. This explanation for costly signaling, proposed by the evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi and developed in interesting ways by others, is one way of interpreting the paradoxical, gob-smacking episodes of gratuitous cruelty carried out by otherwise civilized people. It is an idea I develop further in chapter 3.
If my explanation for how evil develops in individuals and how it evolved is correct, it suggests that each of us has the potential to engage in cruel acts against innocent others. Equipped with the gift of imagination, we all entertain goals that are out of reach either because of personal limitations or because of constraints imposed by our own and others’ moral standards. Tempted to achieve such goals, we may morally disengage, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. When we morally disengage, we enable a process of false justification for our actions, including self-deception and the dehumanization of others. On this view, everyone is capable of engaging in gratuitous cruelty because the ingredients that make up the recipe for evil are part of human nature, part of our uniquely evolved brains.
Evildoers have many personalities. Some are cruel for cruelty’s sake. Some believe that extreme violence is the only way to secure resources or defend sacred values. Some inspire others to do their dirty work. And some stand by and watch as others carry out horrific acts of violence, unwilling —though not unable — to intervene. You might think that these different behaviors require different explanations. I suggest that they all stem from a single psychological recipe that is part of every human mind but of no other mind in the animal kingdom. This is a stripped-down account of evil, one that explains how it grows within some individuals and how it uniquely evolved in our species.
The idea I develop is that evildoers are made in much the same way that addicts are made. Both processes start with unsatisfied desires. Whether it is a taste for violence or a taste for alcohol, drugs, food, or gambling, individuals develop cravings but find the desired experience less and less rewarding ⎯ a separation between desire and reward that leads to excess. To justify the excess, the psychology of desire recruits the psychology of denial, enabling individuals to immerse themselves in a new reality that feels right. Whereas addicts cause great harm to themselves by indulging in excessive consumption or expenditures, evildoers cause great harm to others by indulging in excessive or gratuitous cruelty. Whereas addicts deny their drug dependency or their obesity, evildoers deny the moral worth of their victims or invent a reality that presents them as dangerous threats. The cruelty carries no moral weight because the victims have been dehumanized or conceived as dangerous. The combination of unsatisfied desire and denial is a recipe for evil. Like the addict’s search for ever more satisfying means of consuming or spending, evildoers search for ever more satisfying and creative ways of harming others.
This perspective, I suggest, explains not just the pathology of the sadist or the sexual predator but the actions of “ordinary” individuals who perpetrate unimaginable cruelties. It also illuminates the evolution of our capacity for evil, which, I will argue, evolved as an incidental consequence of our brain’s unique design. This is an idea developed in somewhat similar ways by the philosopher David Livingstone Smith in his book Less than Human, and by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister in his book Evil. Unlike the brains of other animals, where circuitry specialized for one function slavishly serves that function, our brain circuitry works in harmony to serve a variety of novel functions. Thus, when we dehumanize other human beings — thinking of them, say, as vermin or parasites — and then torture them without guilt, we have connected brain areas involved in recognizing objects, determining moral standards, and justifying actions with brain areas involved in emotion, reward, motivation, and aggression. This is just one of many ways we can combine and recombine thoughts and emotions to create new ways of seeing the world. The point here is that this mental flexibility did not evolve to serve evil; rather, evil was enabled as an incidental consequence of our brain’s unique design.
Once the capacity for evil was in place in the human brain, it could be harnessed to serve a useful and adaptive function. By carrying out costly, over-the-top acts of violence, individuals signaled their ability to waste resources simply because they could — because they had the power or the wealth to do so. These displays sent credible messages of ongoing and impending terror to victims, freezing them in their own fear. This explanation for costly signaling, proposed by the evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi and developed in interesting ways by others, is one way of interpreting the paradoxical, gob-smacking episodes of gratuitous cruelty carried out by otherwise civilized people. It is an idea I develop further in chapter 3.
If my explanation for how evil develops in individuals and how it evolved is correct, it suggests that each of us has the potential to engage in cruel acts against innocent others. Equipped with the gift of imagination, we all entertain goals that are out of reach either because of personal limitations or because of constraints imposed by our own and others’ moral standards. Tempted to achieve such goals, we may morally disengage, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. When we morally disengage, we enable a process of false justification for our actions, including self-deception and the dehumanization of others. On this view, everyone is capable of engaging in gratuitous cruelty because the ingredients that make up the recipe for evil are part of human nature, part of our uniquely evolved brains.
May 4, 2020
I honestly really enjoyed this book. It showed me a better perspective with a little unwanted graphics but otherwise, it was a good book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews