born with inherent differences in the availability of key resources guiding self-restraint. Some of us start
off life better equipped to control our frustrations, wait for future gains, and moderate our temper. These
early differences can have long lasting and disastrous effects later in life, a point supported by a study that
began forty years ago with four year-old children presented with a marshmallow.
The American social psychologist Walter Mischel recruited four year old children to his
laboratory and sat them down at a table with two objects: a marshmallow and a bell. He then told each
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child that he was going to leave the room. If they wanted to eat the marshmallow, they only had to ring
the bell. But, as Mischel informed them, if they waited for his return, he would bring them more
marshmallows. Mischel took out his stopwatch and recorded how long each child waited before ringing
the bell.
Some children rang the bell almost immediately, leaving Mischel no time to leave the room.
Others waited. This isn’t surprising. Some children are impulsive, others are impatient, and this shows up
early in life. What is surprising is that these early appearing personality types held steadfast, impacting
later life decisions and actions. The more impatient types were more likely to be involved in juvenile
delinquency, have poor grades, abuse drugs, get divorced, and lose their jobs. For women who developed
eating disorders, those who were more patient were more likely to be anorexic, whereas those who were
more impulsive were more likely to be bulimic. When the American developmental psychologist B.J.
Casey put these now 40-somethings inside a brain scanner, the patient ones showed stronger activation in
the prefrontal areas of the brain when viewing happy and fearful faces, revealing stronger self-control
over their feelings. In contrast, when the impatient ones viewed the same stimuli, not only was there a
weaker response in the prefrontal region but a stronger response in the ventral striatum when viewing
happy faces. The striatum, as noted earlier, is involved in the experience of reward. For the impatient
types, seeing something positive is like eating candy, something that is hard to ignore. The patient types
regulate this feeling, transforming the heat of the moment into a cool experience. The impatient types are
overwhelmed by this feeling, giving into temptation. This work adds to the genetic evidence reviewed
earlier, showcasing both the importance of individual differences in self-control, and the stability of these
differences as distinctive personality types.
Individual differences in self-control are also relevant to levels of recidivism in youths who have
committed a crime, and thus tie us back to the beginning of this chapter and the costs of a career criminal.
Career criminals are individuals who repeatedly commit crimes. They lack self-control. This is important
for judges, juries and society as we want to know in advance who is most likely to commit another crime
if we release them back out onto the streets. The American sociologist Matt DeLisi presented a selfcontrol
survey to approximately 800 juvenile youths, ages 12-17 years, each with a criminal record.
Those who scored one standard deviation from the mean on this survey, and thus were more impulsive
than most, were five times more likely to become career criminals. Five times. Self-control on its own
accounted for about 80% of the variation in recidivism among these delinquents; the remaining 20% was
accounted for by factors that one might think would be much more important, including mental health,
education, gender, and socioeconomic background. As DeLisi concludes, these results suggest that
measures of self-control provide a reliable predictor of the likelihood of repeating a crime. They provide a
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measure of risk, a factor that both juvenile and adult courts should be using to determine their sentencing,
especially the individual’s future dangerousness.
Individual differences in glucose metabolism, together with relative differences in brain activity,
lead to stable differences in self-control. But there’s more, both luck of the draw genetic effects and
clinical distortions. Recall that the low expressing form of the MAOA gene results in lower levels of
serotonin which, in turn, leverages less control over aggressive impulses. There is another gene ⎯⎯
SLC6A4 ⎯⎯ that also comes in two forms and regulates the level of serotonin. The short form of this gene
gives you less serotonin, is commonly found in pathological gamblers and psychopaths ⎯⎯ two heavily
male-biased disorders that are associated with impoverished impulse control. Psychopaths also have
relatively smaller frontal lobes , especially within a region that has a high density of serotonin neurons.
Psychopathy is joined by a family of impulse control disorders that also implicate dysfunction of the
serotonin system, including kleptomania (stealing), pyromania (burning), trichotillomania (hair pulling),
and oniomania (shopping). Like glucose, serotonin plays a lead role in our capacity for self-control.
When serotonin is sidelined from the performance, any number of impulsivity problems may emerge.
What I have said thus far is only a partial accounting of the biological ingredients that figure into
our capacity for self-control. What this partial recipe tell us is that regardless of the situation, some
individuals are inoculated against the pull of authority and group ideology and others are susceptible. If
you missed the inoculation clinic in utero, you are more susceptible to temptations and excesses,
including excessive violence. This is important for our interpretation of the real world and of the famous
psychological experiments by Milgram, Zimbardo, and others in which seemingly good people carried
out unambiguously horrid things. Some individuals carry a genetic skeleton that resists the push and pull
of charismatic leaders and powerful isms. These people will not be pushed into doing bad things. Others,
faced with the exact same situation, will find their skeleton buckling, tempted to take risks and lash out
when the going gets tough.
Invisible risks
Several years ago, Ira Glass, the brilliant radio show host of This American Life, delved into the topic of
superheroes. One episode focused on a question that has become part of my repertoire for dinner parties,
especially those in need of a conversational catalyst: if you could become a superhero with one power,
which would you take ⎯⎯ the ability to fly or to be invisible? Most people have a rapid-fire, confident
response to this question, while others reflect a bit, often engaging themselves in a public debate over
their conflicted views. What is interesting about people’s answer to this question, independently of
whether they pick flying or invisibility, is that they rarely talk about using their power to do good in the
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world! The flyers talk about how cool it would be to vacation anywhere in the world, zip to work or
school, or have fun soaring like an eagle. The invisibility types talk about sneaking into stores and taking
clothes or music they like, eavesdropping on conversations, and playing tricks on family members and
friends. What is even more interesting about these particular answers is how they divide into pure
hedonism ⎯⎯ flying ⎯⎯ and pure vice ⎯⎯ invisibility. With invisibility you can take risks at no cost, except
for the cost that soon becomes apparent to many of these newly donned superheroes: even if they don’t
get caught, they still did something bad, morally bad. This ratchets up their guilt. With this realization,
and a dip into the dark side, comes an about face, with some picking flying instead of invisibility. Rarely
do people stick with invisibility, but see how they might deploy their power for virtuous purposes. Rarely
do these superheroes realize that they can be real heroes, using their invisibility to gain covert information
about terrorist organizations, elicit drug traders, pedophilic priests, or abusive parents ⎯⎯ minus the risks.
In real life, there are risks associated with every decision, some clear from the start and others
only clear in hindsight. As with self-control, a growing body of evidence shows that there are individual
differences in risk-taking: some are risk-averse, some risk-prone, and some seemingly risk-blind, unaware
that they are taking risks at all. Some of these differences are evident early in life. Some of these
differences are strongly associated with crime later in life. Some of these differences provide insights into
the invisible risks that individuals and societies confront, risks that can cause great harms.
Research on clinical populations with antisocial disorders, most notably those with a clinical
diagnosis of psychopathy, reveals a major cause of their high risk, costly, and violent behavior: a failure
to experience fear, anxiety, or stress in response to highly evocative images and sounds. In contrast with
healthy populations, psychopaths are emotionally blasé about the things in the world that can cause harm
or result in punishment. The problem lies in the fact that psychopaths, both adults and those identified as
candidates early in childhood, fail to learn about the dangers in life. Their failure to learn is caused by a
reduction in size and activity of two critical and connected brain areas: a region of the frontal cortex and
the amygdala. When this system works efficiently, it allows individuals to learn about the sounds, smells,
and sights that are associated with bad things in the world. When this system works well, individuals
learn to avoid antisocial, immoral, and illegal acts by developing anxiety and fear over the possibility of
punishment and personal injury. When this system works poorly, as is the case in psychopaths,
individuals act as if there are no dangers or risks of punishment ⎯⎯ a disposition that enables inappropriate
actions. But psychopathy covers a broad spectrum, with problems that all of us confront at some point in
our lives, some of us even repeatedly. This is important as it forces us to look at non-clinical populations
for the causes of individual differences in risk-taking, especially our reactivity to dangerous events.
Studies carried out over several decades, in a wide variety of cultures, reveal that children begin
life with distinctive temperaments. Some are mellow, blasé about events that are startling to many.
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Others are high strung and reactive, responding with heightened fear to the same startling events. Others
fall somewhere in between these two poles. What is surprising is the fact those with the flattest response
to evocative images and sounds are the most likely to become violent delinquents in young adulthood.
In a remarkable study, Adrian Raine and his colleagues presented 1,795 three year olds with two
different sounds while recording the sweatiness of their palms; the sweatier the palms, the greater the
stress and fear. One sound was always associated with a second and highly aversive noise, while the
second sound was always played alone. When you pair a neutral sound, such as a pure tone, with a nasty
sound, simply hearing the pure tone will make your skin crawl; the pure tone predicts what is coming, and
what is coming is not pleasant. When Raine revisited these same individuals twenty years later, those with
serious criminal records involving drug abuse, dangerous driving violations, or violence, had the driest
palms at the age of three years. In another study, focusing specifically on violence, Raine measured the
sweatiness of a different group of three year olds and then looked at their aggressiveness five years later.
Once again, those with the driest palms at three years were the most aggressive at eight years. In the
absence of a system that enables individuals to learn about danger, the brain and body act as if they were
shrouded in an invisibility cloak, blind to the risks of crossing either moral or legal lines.
Raine’s findings fit well with the marshmallow study. In the same way that those who were
most impatient in the pre-school years were also most likely to exhibit signs of delinquency in early
adulthood, so too were those who were most blasé about fearful stimuli as children most likely to exhibit
delinquency in adulthood. Both studies reveal the stability of personality traits. Both studies suggest that
at the level of groups of individuals, as opposed to specific individuals, the blasé-impatient types
represent a greater threat to our welfare. The point about groups is important. These studies do not allow
us to look at an individual’s record and conclude that because he could only wait for 3 seconds before
eating the lone marshmallow, and almost fell asleep when presented with loud banging noises, that he is
without doubt headed for a life of crime. We also can’t conclude that because patience and reactivity to
fearful stimuli can be measured as early as three years old, that these personality traits are entirely genetic
and fixed. In fact, other studies carried out by Raine show that if you ramp up the nutrition, exercise, and
mental stimulation of children between the ages of 3-5 years, you can reduce adult criminal offenses by
35%. What we can conclude from these findings is that there are significant individual differences that
affect who is willing to take risks and who isn’t. We can conclude that there is a strong biological
component that constrains the individual’s options. We can conclude that those who start early in life
without an understanding of the dangers in the world, act as if they live in a risk-free world. Molecular
biologists provide an increasingly precise understanding of how these individual differences start,
pointing to genes that bias some individuals to take extreme risks, including the risk of violating social
norms and laws by violently attacking another human being.
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There are many situations where taking a risk pays off, whether we think of stealth military
operations, chancy shots in the final seconds of a basketball game, or significant investments in an up and
coming stock option. Playing it safe pays off. But those who stick their necks out and take a chance, may
bring home significant gains. It is because of these competing strategies and potential payoffs that
evolutionary biologists have imagined that selection could maintain both personality types within a
population ⎯⎯ a point noted earlier for the MAOA and glucose-related genes. If selection has worked in
this way, then there must be genetic variation that allows for both strategies. To date, the strongest
evidence comes from a family of genes associated with the regulation of dopamine, with the memorable
acronyms of DAT1, DRD2 and DRD4; each of these genes is associated with different forms, each form
associated with different levels of dopamine. Recall from chapter 2 that dopamine plays an essential role
in our experience of reward, including how motivated we are to get it and what we anticipate based on our
understanding of the situation ⎯⎯ have we been rewarded in the past, how often, and how much? The idea
here is that those who carry genes that output a higher level of dopamine may weight rewards more
heavily and thus, show risk-blindness; for these individuals, the eye is on the prize, not the path or
obstacles to this prize.
Across a number of studies, results show that variation in the expression of these genes is
associated with high-risk, low self-control behaviors, including pathological gambling, substance abuse,
sensation seeking, and financial investments. For example, in two separate studies, individuals with
different variants of the DRD4 gene played a financial investment game involving real money. In one,
designed by Joan Chiao, subjects decided to invest in either a risky asset with variable returns or a riskless
asset with consistent returns. In the second study, the Swedish economist Ana Dreber and the American
anthropologist Corin Apicella allowed subjects to either walk away with an initial starting pot of money,
or to invest some of it in a risky asset. Those with the DRD4 variant that expresses higher levels of
dopamine were more likely to pursue the risky investment. What this work reveals is that part of the
variation we observe among people who make risky investments, drink too much alcohol, and gamble
with their income, is due to variation in the dopamine family of genes. These are hidden risks that come
to life thanks to molecular biologist’s microscope. What also comes to life is the fact that these same
genes are relevant to violence, causing some to strike out even though there are significant risks and
terrible consequences.
In several studies, using an American health data base of several thousand adolescents, results
consistently show a relationship between particular variants of the dopamine genes and violence. For
example, the sociologist Guang Guo examined the relationship between violent delinquency ⎯⎯ involving
use of guns and knives ⎯⎯ and variation in DRD2 and DAT1 among 2,5000 individuals ages 12-23 years.
DRD2 was of particular interest because medical records and clinical trials reveal that administering
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haloperidol ⎯⎯ a DRD2 dopamine antagonist ⎯⎯ helps control aggression in psychotic patients. Guo found
that levels of violence were about twice as high for one variant of the DRD2 gene than others, and about
20% higher for a particular variant of the DAT1 gene. These genetic variants cause differences in
dopamine, which cause differences in expected and experienced reward, which cause differences in
perceived risk, which cause differences in the odds of getting in a fight and harming others. These are not
genes for aggression, violence or evil. There are no such genes. Rather, they are genes that change our
perception of risk. Because risk is related to all sorts of decisions, these genes can affect the odds that we
directly harm others. They are part of the story of individual differences, and part of the story of why
some are more likely to engage in evildoing.
Everything I have discussed thus far focuses on actions, on how the psychology of desire and
denial combine to fuel behaviors that lead, directly or indirectly, to excessive harms. I have also explained
how different biological ingredients predispose us toward different degrees of self-control, and thus,
differences in our ability to omit particular actions. This sense of omission is a virtue, a sign of resisting
temptation. But can omissions be a sign of vice, of resisting an action that is called for? Can omissions
ever reach such a scale that we would consider individuals or societies as evil omitters?
The sin of sloth.
What’s worse: 1) giving a lethal overdose to someone suffering from an incurable disease or allowing this
person to die by removing life support? 2) pushing someone in front of a runaway truck to stop the truck
and save the lives of five others or allowing someone to walk in front of the truck instead of warning
them? 3) pouring a toxic chemical into your competitor’s drink in order to make him sick or allowing
your competitor to drink the toxic chemical that was placed on the table by someone else? Even though
all of these situations seem quite bad, most people have a gut feeling that the actions are worse than the
omissions. They also feel that when we omit life support, fail to warn someone of a runaway truck, or
remain silent about a toxic drink, that we are less responsible for the consequences that unfold. Dozens of
studies, using hundreds of different examples, and thousands of subjects, support what our gut expresses:
we are captive to an omission effect. Even when we understand that the consequences are precisely the
same ⎯⎯ the suffering patient dies, the truck kills the person, the toxic chemical makes the competitor sick
⎯⎯ and so too are the person’s goals and intentions ⎯⎯ eliminate suffering, save five people, take out the
competitor ⎯⎯ we are seduced to believe that action is worse than omission or that doing harm to another
is worse than allowing harm to occur.
The omission effect lays bare a tension between unconscious, spontaneous intuition and
conscious, reflective thought. On the one hand, there are potentially good reasons why we evolved this
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intuition. It is a heuristic or rule of thumb that may be right much of the time. When I do something, as
long as it is not by accident, my intentions and goals are more clear cut than when I fail to do something
or allow it to happen. If I punch you and your arm bruises, the causality is clear: I caused your arm to
bruise. I am responsible for this harm. I should be punished. If I stand by as someone is about to punch
you, but don’t deflect the punch when I easily could have, it feels odd to say that I caused your arm to
bruise. It also seems strange to say that I am responsible and should be punished. By not deflecting the
punch, I allowed the harm to occur. I could have prevented it from happening, but I am not obliged to. As
social creatures, we have been designed to pick up on cues that reliably classify people into friends and
enemies. Friends intentionally help us while enemies intentionally harm us. Actions showcase our
intentions better than omissions.
The omission effect also makes sense in terms of personal responsibility. Not only do our guts tell
us that actors are more responsible for outcomes than omitters, but our guts also tell us that it is hard to
hold others responsible for their omissions. As I sit and write these words, I am committing heinous acts
of omission: I am not currently giving money to any charities, am not scheduled to teach in the dozens of
refugee camps around the world, and am not volunteering for any of the peace keeping armies sponsored
by the UN. I am also guilty of many other minor crimes of omission, including the failure to consistently
give my change to homeless individuals, and the failure to spend time in homes for the elderly and
mentally handicapped. As I sit, I rack up countless harms of omission. It is hopefully the absurdity of this
comment that shows why there is a fracture in the arm that connects omissions to responsibility. In a large
scale society, it is impossible for us to hold people responsible for their omissions. There are far too many
reasons, often good ones, why people don’t act. The universe of reasons for acting is smaller.
If the omission effect arises because it is virtually impossible to hold omitters responsible in a
large scale society, than what about small scale societies including the hunter-gathers of our past, and the
tiny hamlets and villages that dot many countries, both developed and developing? When the number of
people that you know and interact with is small, does the omission effect vanish? In a fish bowl
community, you should be able to hold all of the other fish responsible for their actions and omissions
because you know what they are up to. To explore this idea, the psychologist Linda Abarbanell and I ran
a study with a rural, small scale Mayan population, living in the Chiapas region of Mexico. Every
individual listened to a reading of a moral dilemma. Each dilemma described an action or an omission
that resulted in harming one person, but saving the lives of many. Subjects judged the moral
permissibility of the action or omission.
Unlike thousands of adults on the internet who judged similar dilemmas, as well as other Mayans
living in a city, individuals in this small scale Mayan population perceived no moral difference between
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 137
actions and omissions. The omission effect evaporated, with the moral weight of an action perceived to
be on a par with an omission.
The Mayan study is but one example. It suggests some flexibility in our perception of actions and
omissions, and shows how cultural differences can create individual differences. When our social world is
relatively small and circumscribed, we can keep tabs on everyone. By keeping tabs, we can hold others
responsible for their actions and their omissions. As the American psychologists Jon Haidt and Jonathan
Baron have shown, this psychology can be recreated in the laboratory by creating scenarios in which the
individuals are either unfamiliar or familiar. When there is a relationship between the individuals ⎯⎯
family, friends, team members ⎯⎯ and thus, some degree of familiarity, the omission effect weakens.
The omission effect is not an obligatory state of the human mind. It is a common tendency, a way
that our brains lean, especially in unfamiliar contexts. In patients with obsessive compulsive disorder, the
omission effect is as strong as it is in healthy subjects, except for familiar cases of harm that are directly
relevant to them, such as the excessive washing behavior that is the trademark of this clinical disorder.
The fact that certain situations can cause us to lean in different directions has important policy
implications: even when corporations, institutions, or other organizations grow large, we should always
segregate these masses into smaller divisions, and make the issues personally relevant. Every member of
one division should hold all others within its division responsible or accountable. Further, efforts should
be made to foster familiarity across divisions, enabling not only a level of responsibility but of respect
and trust. By recreating the psychology of small scale societies, and making potential harms relevant, we
may help bypass the omission effect, allowing us to hold people responsible for their omissions. This, in
turn, may reduce the number of individuals who live as passive bystanders. Familiarity and relevance
may well be the necessary catalysts for converting bystanders into active whistle blowers, defenders, and
rescuers.
When bystanders remain passive, watching the world go by, it is often because they believe that
their actions won’t make a difference or think that the costs of heroism are too high. This is, again, an
issue of responsibility. It raises the question of when we ought to act. The distinguished Australian
philosopher Peter Singer has spent a lifetime pushing this issue in the context of charitable donations,
culminating most recently in his book The Life You Can Save. The key idea, taken from a utilitarian
perspective where outcomes as opposed to rules or principles motivate our moral actions, is that we ought
to give a fraction of our incomes to those lacking basic access to food, shelter and health care. Standing
by as bystanders when there are 1.4 billion people in a state of abject poverty is morally wrong. The logic
seems perfectly reasonable, especially given the fact that humanitarian organizations have helped reduce
the number of people living in poverty by .5 billion within the last 20 years. But then we learn of another
Peter Singer idea: if the three richest men alive today ⎯⎯ Carlos Slim Helu, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 138
⎯⎯ worth a total of 153.5 billion dollars, were to give up one third of their net worth, they could solve
world hunger. On a personal level, they would barely notice this donation. With this knowledge, why
should I bother to give a penny? This is one example of apathy regarding our motivation to help others.
What propels individuals to shift from passive bystanders who can allow harm to occur to active
contributors?
Classic studies by the American psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latane reveal the
ingredients for bystander action. Whether it is helping someone having a seizure, being molested, or in
danger of suffocation from smoke, we are more likely to help when alone than when in a group. We are
also more likely to help when we recognize the situation as a crisis and think that there are plausible
solutions. These are all characteristics of the situation. There are also characteristics of the individual
bystander, including their level of compassion and empathy toward others, their capacity to identify with
the victim, and their self-control. For example, people who intervene in cases of child abuse, as opposed
to the passive bystanders, are more likely to have been abused as children, more likely to perceive a
solution, more likely to feel responsibility to intervene, and more likely to experience the weight of guilt
for not intervening. We are back to individuals differences. We are back to the egg and coop, and their
joint contribution to helping or harming others. We are back to the established genetic differences in
compassion, risk-taking, and self-control that combine with a history of experience to create some who sit
and watch and others who actively participate.
We are more likely to pardon bystanders because we tend to see omissions as less bad than
actions, and omitters as less responsible for the consequences than actors. This is a dangerous effect.
Bystanders are part of the equation of evil. As noted by the American genocide scholar and psychologist,
Ervin Staub, bystanders start out as passive players on the side lines, but are rapidly transformed into
perpetrators. The transformation starts with the challenge of maintaining passivity while watching other
humans suffer; to maintain this observer status requires suppressing empathy for the sufferers, while
recognizing that they are in the minority and you, the bystander, are with the majority. To avoid feeling
guilty for not feeling empathy, bystanders distance themselves even further from the victims. Distancing
is an adaptive response as any association with the victims could put a bystander in harm’s way. But like
so many other psychological states discussed in this book, distancing leads to dehumanization.
Dehumanization leads to moral disengagement and greater justification for the perpetrators. Justification
lends cheering support for violence. This is the final transforming step, from passive bystander to active
participant.
Recall that on my account of evil, evildoers either have a desire to cause harm directly or desire
something good, recognizing that it will cause harm indirectly. This is true of actions and omissions. For
example, keeping a secret, even if pressured into spilling the beans, is a good thing because it upholds a
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 139
promise, and thus, the relationship. But if keeping the secret results in innocent lives lost or ruined, then
this is a bad thing. Not telling ⎯⎯ an omission ⎯⎯ indirectly can cause harm. This is the situation that has
confronted the Catholic Church over the past twenty years.
During the tenures of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, some 4,000 priests sexually abused
some 10,000 innocent children. This is unquestionably an underestimate. This is excessive harm. Popes
John Paul II and Benedict XVI , together with their cardinals and bishops, assumed the role of bystanders.
They were aware of the rampant cases of child rape among the clergy. They could have acted. Their
omissions are archetypal examples of the sin of sloth. By omission, they are responsible for excessive
harm and should be held legally accountable. This process has begun as evidenced by the decision in
October of 2011 to indict Bishop Robert Finn for failing to report a priest who took pornographic
photographs of young girls. Though Finn was only charged with a misdemeanor, this case opens opens a
legal floodgate. It is an opening that should allow prosecutors, around the globe, to indict bishops,
cardinals, and the Pope for evil omissions. It should empower the parents and children who have suffered
to rise up and demand justice for allowing excessive harm to occur. It should cause everyone to express
outrage over the fact that allowing priests to rape innocent children perpetuates a cycle of pedophiles as
those who have been abused are likely to abuse others. The leaders of the church have not only commited
a crime of omission, but have helped perpetuate a culture of harm.
Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 140
Endnotes: Chapter 4
Recommended Books
Chagnon, N. (1996). Yanomamo. 5th Edition. Harcourt Brace.
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. (2009). Worse Than War. New York: Public Affairs.
Jones, A. (2010). Genocide: a comprehensive introduction. New York: Routledge.
Kiernan, B. (2007). Blood and Soil: A world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to
Darfur. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An experimental view. New York: Harper & Row
Publishers, Inc.
McCullough, M. (2008). Beyond Revenge: The evolution of the forgiveness instinct. Jossey-Bass, New
York
Singer, P. (2010). The Life You Can Save. New York: Random House.
Wittenbrink, B. & Schwarz, B. (2007). Implicit Measures of Attitudes. Guilford Press.
Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York: Random
House.
Key references
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genotypes Clinical genetics, 79(4), 355–362.
• Eggs and coops: Alia-Klein, N, Goldstein, R, Kriplani, A, & Logan, J. (2008). Brain Monoamine
Oxidase A Activity Predicts Trait Aggression. Journal of Neuroscience, 28(19), 5099-5104;
Baler, Ruben D., Volkow, N.D., Fowler, J.S., & Benveniste, H. (2008). Is fetal brain monoamine
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Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 143
Epilogue:
Evilightenment
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and
evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to
abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.
— Benjamin Franklin
Charles Darwin observed that of all the differences between humans and other animals, one capacity
reigns supreme: we alone have the ability to contemplate what others ought to do. We alone are endowed
with a moral imperative to reflect, consider, and imagine alternatives. We alone are impelled to be
dissatisfied with the status quo, urged to contemplate what could be and ultimately what must be. This
capacity creates a fundamental principle of human existence and enlightenment: we alone invest in the
survival of the least fit. We give money to those in abject poverty, risk our lives to help others in areas of
conflict, adopt abandoned children, nurture individuals with extreme disabilities, and care for the elderly.
This principle fuels our humanitarian efforts. Sadly, it is a necessary response to another unique
difference between humans and other animals: we alone have the ability to inflict great harms on our own
species and many others. We alone are responsible for creating work for those in the humanitarian sector.
We alone are evil.
We also have an opportunity to begin a new volume of humane history. We have the chance to
harness our understanding of the past in order to present our children with the gift of knowledge and the
prospects of a healthier future. We should ⎯⎯ no, we must ⎯⎯ teach our children what we have learned
about the causes of corporate corruption, the desire for ethnic cleansing, and the combined forces of
nature and nurture to create excessive suffering and lifeless flesh. These are topics that should be
presented early on in education rather than waiting for heady discussions at the university. We owe the
next generation the best education from our generation. The best education will come from confronting
history, exposing human nature, and supporting cultural variation while fighting to demolish totalitarian
regimes that limit or eliminate basic human rights. I write this sentence following on the eve of Egypt's
inspiring revolution, a revolution led by educated people who refused to allow the dictator Hosni
Mubarak to ruin their country and their children's future. The people of Egypt, like the people of many
countries who rallied in the Arab spring of 2011, refused to be eternal victims. This is a lesson that must
spread to every corner of the globe. It is a lesson of hope. It is a lesson to all evildoers to beware.
I have taken you on a journey into evil’s core, penetrating with scientific evidence and
explanation. Though we have traveled to distant lands, traversed vast spans of time, and encountered
wildly different cultures, the key idea is that this richness was generated from a few essential ingredients.
This is a minimalist approach to a difficult and highly variegated problem. I end our journey by taking
stock of the essential ideas and reflect on some of the broader implications.
Retracing our steps
In the beginning, before there were bald, bipedal, big-brained, babbling humans, there were hairy,
quadrupedal, bitsy-brained, barking bonobos. These animals, clearly clever, have survived for over 6-7
million years, despite attempts by our species to demolish their habitat. But ⎯⎯ and this is a significant
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 144
but ⎯⎯ in the millions of years that encompass their evolutionary history, bonobos have remained virtually
unchanged. They are still hairy, quadrupedal, bitsy-brained and barking. They still live in the jungles of
Africa. Not a single bonobo, or its close relative the chimpanzee, has ever taken a step out of Africa the
way that members of our species did some 60-100,000 years ago. In fact, not a single bonobo or
chimpanzee has ever ventured across national borders within the continent to explore new opportunities
or develop new cultures. Not a single bonobo or chimpanzee has even moved out of the forests and on to
the beaches or deserts or alpine environments of Africa. Not one. When we took our steps out of Africa,
we did so with confidence, ready to tackle new environments, create novel tools, engage in rituals to
commemorate the dead, build fires to cook food and keep warm, join hands with unrelated strangers in
the service of cooperation, and create oral histories that could be passed on to generations of children.
What enabled this celebratory migration was a cerebral migration. Not only did our brain get much
bigger than the one housed within bonobo and chimpanzee skulls, it evolved into an engine that generates
an unlimited combination of thoughts and feelings. We uniquely evolved a promiscuous brain.
What does promiscuity buy? In a word: “creativity.” It enables regions of the brain that evolved
for highly specialized functions to intermingle with other regions of the brain to create new ways of
thinking and new ways of experiencing what we see, hear, touch, taste and feel. A promiscuous brain
paved the way for awe-inspiring bursts of creativity in art, music, literature and science. A promiscuous
brain enabled Bach and Bono, Picasso and Pollock, Shakespeare and Shaw, and Descartes and Darwin. A
promiscuous brain enables us to imagine things we have never directly experienced, to create once
unimaginable worlds, including blissful heavens and living hells. My focus in this book has been the
infernos we create for other human beings, here on this earth. What I have argued is that we got here by
accident.
When our brains allowed us to combine familiar thoughts and feelings to create virgin ideas, it
enabled us to feel good about doing bad. It enabled us to incur the costs of punishing others while reaping
the rewards of marching to the moral high ground. It enabled us to solve the problem of large scale
cooperation with unrelated strangers. This was a fundamental breakthrough in mental life, a spectacular
benefit, and the target of strong selection. But benefits often carry hidden costs. When punishment
triggered a honey hit to the brain, violence and reward formed an eternal bond. We now carry the burden
of a brain that engages in denial in order to satisfy our desires. When these concepts couple, the odds of
conceiving excessive harms is virtually guaranteed. Sometimes this malicious offspring is intended and
at other times it is foreseen. Either way, the world has been populated with evildoers in waiting. Either
way, our world hosts a species that has the creative capacity to financially ruin, mutilate, rape, burn,
torture, and extinguish millions of lives. Often, this potential is realized.
My aim in this book has been to explain evil to better understand its origins, not to justify or
promote it. My aim has been to explain evil to clarify its root cause, to alert others to its early warning
signs, and to pave the way to a more humane existence. I have suggested that evil, expressed in the form
of excessive harms, is caused by two ingredients: desire and denial. These are psychological states. On
their own, they are often inert. When combined, they are often explosive.
Desires. We all have them, from birth till death, from a desire for perpetual maternal warmth to a
desire for eternal life. Some of our desires change over the course of our lives while others stay the same.
We all desire good health and happiness. We differ, however, in what counts as good health and
happiness. Many of us experience, at least once in our life, the desire to harm another. Our desire to harm
ranges from the mundane ⎯⎯ uttering a sarcastic comment about someone’s looks or telling a racist joke
⎯⎯ to the horrific ⎯⎯ creating corrupt corporate schemes or policies of ethnic cleansing. Sometimes what
we desire is rather benign, but linked to foreseeable atrocities. Sometimes our desires are toxic, as when
we plot to extinguish a culturally distinctive group. On one reading, President George W. Bush may well
have initiated the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as retaliatory attacks on terrorists, designed to protect
American interests and well-being. But he brought much of our nation on board by weaving a web of lies
and feeding a cowboy mentality of revenge rather than nurturing compassion and understanding. The
consequences, clearly foreseen at the time, have been excessive. As a nation, we did not pursue an eyefor-an-eye
revenge. We had a different algorithm in mind, on the order of 30,000 eyes for an eye.
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 145
Approximately 3,000 innocent victims died in the 9-11 attacks. As of early 2011, some where between
900,000 to over a million soldiers and civilians have died in Afghanistan and Iraq due to the war. This is
excessive. This is no longer revenge. This is senseless brutality.
On one reading, Pope Benedict XVI kept his knowledge of pedophilic priests quiet and
confidential in order to forgive them and protect the church. But this seemingly benign desire led to a
disaster, one that was foreseeable: continued sexual assault on thousands of innocent children and for
many, a loss of trust in the church and their moral and spiritual leader.
Discoveries by molecular biologists, neuroscientists, and psychologists reveal important
individual differences in our capacity to fuel desire, differences that constrain the paths we take from birth
until our last breath. Some individuals are more risk-prone, some are impatient, and some gain a greater
hit of dopamine in anticipation of reward, thereby doping themselves on the brain’s pharmaceutical
offerings. Some are born with a set of genes that diminish the capacity for self-control. These individuals
start with lower levels of serotonin. These individuals, if raised by abusive parents, have a higher
probability of taking someone’s head off if they are challenged. Some individuals are born with low
stress levels. These individuals are more likely to be sensation-seekers, voracious desirers who will stop
at nothing less than the spectacular, even if this means the spectacularly violent. None of these biological
catalysts operate in a vacuum. All of these biological catalysts feed off of particular environments that we
create. Geological and climatic factors create savannahs, oceans, and mountains. We create slums,
refugee camps, and totalitarian regimes. We are responsible for creating toxic environments and equally
responsible for cleaning them up. How we think about individual responsibility in cases of brain damage,
developmental disorders or innate differences in the starting state of our neurochemistry is a different
problem, one that I will touch upon in the last section.
Denial. We all engage in it, at least some of the time. Like the psychology of desire, our
engagement with denial is sometimes benign and often beneficial as a coping mechanism. We
dehumanize in order to buffer ourselves from the pain of another’s pain. We self-deceive in the service of
boosting self-confidence and self-esteem. When doctors turn their patients into machines that require
repair, they have deployed an adaptive mechanism that keeps empathy at bay when it is unnecessary.
Good doctors, the ones that we all want, turn empathy back on when their patients awake from surgery,
flesh and blood pulsating, thoughts and emotions humming. Bad doctors never turn empathy back on.
Evil doctors, such as Carl Clauberg who injected liquid acid in the uterus of Jewish prisoners as part of a
Nazi inspired sterilization program, not only lack empathy for their patients, but see them as vermin or
parasites that require extermination in the name of science and the preservation of our species. Denial has
transformed other human beings into nonhuman forms, from inert objects to wild animals and parasites.
Denial has allowed military leaders and airplane pilots to ignore clear signs of trouble, marching
thousands to their death. When this happens, moral responsibility checks out. Denial provides individuals
and nations with a certified license to maim, rape, burn, mutilate and kill without feeling guilt, shame or
remorse.
As with desire, the sciences provide a rich offering of evidence to explain how and why we
engage in denial, either by means of dehumanizing others or self-deceiving ourselves. Both
dehumanization and self-deception have a clear evolutionary logic. Dehumanization is a mechanism that
enhances an individual’s competitive edge by making hatred and killing easier. Hatred and killing are the
essential and ancient ingredients for defending the in-group and effacing the out-group. Sometimes,
soldiers would rather avoid killing the enemy. But when dehumanization of the enemy takes hold in the
mind of a soldier or civilian, killing is not only easy, but addictive. The brain’s inhibitory mechanisms,
processed by circuitry in the frontal lobes, shut down. Other brain regions involved in working out what
people believe and intend, enter into hibernation. With these circuits on leave, so too is our moral
conscience. When the mind runs its dehumanization software, abstinence from killing is like withdrawal
from a drug. Killing is satisfying. Killing is delicious.
Self-deception evolved in the service of deception. By functionally fooling ourselves into
believing that we are stronger, wiser, and more competent, we can convince others to go along for the
ride, to work for us or work against a fictional enemy. Like dehumanization, this has both adaptive and
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 146
maladaptive consequences. Brain imaging studies show that different circuits turn on when we lie about
long held personal stories as opposed to lies about in-the-moment situations. When we distort reality,
either omitting information or twisting it to create a false belief, we have to inhibit the way things are to
create an illusion of the way we wish them to be. In each case, there is conflict between one version of
reality and another. In each case, the electrical and chemical choreography of the brain recruits its
braking mechanism, stifling one piece of knowledge in the service of lifting another to the surface of our
lips. We perfect this capacity over the course of development. Some are born lacking this capacity.
Others have a system that is out of control, unable to distinguish truths from falsehoods. Somewhere
along this spectrum are healthy members of society who have the potential to justify themselves and a
society of willing listeners about the importance of becoming willing executioners, a phrase coined by the
historian Daniel Goldhagen to describe Germans involved in the Holocaust.
Desire + Denial. We all carry out this sum easily, often automatically and unconsciously. When
we are pushed by a desire to eliminate others or to achieve some other goal, we call on denial to justify
both extraordinary means and exceptional ends. We convince ourselves that we are morally in the right
and that extermination or manipulation are our only options. We convince ourselves that the other is an
object or animal, emotionally inert or unrecognizable. We shrink our moral circle, creating a culture of
indifference. We convince ourselves through self-deception that the other is a threat. When we feel
threatened, we raise our hackles in self-defense. When self-defense steps forward it recruits violence,
justified by the belief that fighting back is not only right, but obligatory. Once violence starts, supported
by a moral imperative, uncontrollable escalation follows, leaving a trail of dead bodies, raped women, and
abducted children. Desire couples with denial. Once this liaisons forms, it evolves, grows and feeds on
itself. We have arrived at excessive harms. We have arrived at evil.
What can we do? How can we harness our understanding of evil to predict when it might occur
again? Can we reduce future danger?
Future dangerousness
Why do we allow 16 year olds to drive in many parts of the United States, but prevent them from drinking
alcohol until 21 and from renting a car until 25? Why must the President of the United States be at least
35 years old, but members of the House of Representatives can enter at 25? If 16 is the magic number for
driving, why isn't it also the magic number for drinking, voting, becoming president, marrying without
parental consent, joining the military, and being executed for a felony murder? Or why not make 21 the
magic age for all age-restricted behaviors and positions? This would make sense in terms of our biology:
it is precisely around the age of 21 that our frontal lobes have matured more completely, thereby
providing us with a more functional engine for self-control. Or, why not question why we have a legal age
at all? Why not have a brain scan for frontal lobe maturation along with a test for self-control that would
allow some pre-16 year olds to drive, but might prevent some post-21 year olds from drinking? And if
you are in favor of the death penalty ⎯⎯ I'm not ⎯⎯ than why not detach it from age altogether and look at
the individual's moral competence and capacity for self-control?
These are hard questions. How we answer them will have resounding implications for law and
society. When a legal system decides that someone can drive, drink, vote, kill, run for president, marry,
and die as a penalty for crime, it has constrained human behavior based on a statistical evaluation of
psychological capacity. In each case, our assignment of age-appropriateness indicates that we believe the
person is responsible for his or her actions and thus, his or her future actions. It also indicates that those
under age are not responsible for their actions. We grant permission to drive at 16 years of age because
we believe that most 16 years olds are capable of driving responsibly, now and in the future. We believe
that a person who committed a heinous crime at the age of 18 is responsible for harming others and is
likely to do so in the future. He or she is thus eligible for the death penalty, at least in some states within
the United States. In contrast, we believe that someone at the age of 17 is still developing and has the
potential to change. In this sense, we hold them less responsible for their actions.
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 147
Looking out at the tapestry of age-limited situations reveals a rather eclectic pastiche. In many of
these cases, the cut-off age seems both arbitrary and inappropriate given the statistics. Consider the legal
driving age. Is it the case that 16 year olds are responsible drivers? 16 years olds have higher crash rates
than any other age group in the United States, are more likely to die in a car crash than the average of all
other age groups, and car crashes are the leading cause of death among 16 year olds. North Dakotans
believe that 14 year olds can drive a car. They may have fewer drivers on the road, but that doesn’t mean
that a 14 year old won’t hit them or drive off the road after irresponsibly drinking. Why not keep all
youths off the road until 21 when the statistics on fatal car crashes drop? Or why not follow the lead of
car rental agencies and wait for the 25 th birthday?
There are at least two common answers to the driving age problem, both utilitarian: in farming
communities, and other environments where children work with their parents, it is essential to have
children driving as soon as possible; and throughout the country, many parents look forward to the day
when their children can drive, thereby alleviating the need for their private chauffeur service. There is no
question that these are benefits. But if the cost is death to the child and others, the economics just don’t
work out. One option would be to lower the legal driving age for those communities or situations in
which parents demonstrate the significance of young children driving for their financial security and well
being. Those without this justification must wait until they are 21, frontal lobes matured and the novelty
of intoxication lowered.
The most interesting and relevant age-related issue is when someone is treated as an adult as
opposed to a juvenile criminal. Within the United States, most states set the bar at 18 years, but some as
young as 16. Where a state sets its bar determines whether or not the individual is eligible for the death
penalty or a life sentence, as well as a host of social services. Many states with the bar currently set
below 18, including my own state of Massachusetts, are presently debating whether the age limit should
be raised. For some, the issue is simply one of parity: this is not an issue where states should differ, and
thus everyone should be with the majority at 18 years. Others add to this discussion by arguing that it
should be 18 because of brain maturation. Although it is absolutely the case that a more mature brain
brings with it better self-control and less sensation-seeking or risk-taking, there is no evidence of a
reliable difference between 16, 17 and 18 year olds. Some 16 year olds are remarkably patient and riskaverse
whereas some 18 years olds are remarkably impulsive and risk-prone. If this is to be a meaningful
discussion about future risks, plasticity, and the opportunity for rehabilitation, it will have to grapple with
the scientific evidence that is presently on offer.
When we use age to distinguish between legally permissible and forbidden actions, we have
acknowledged that our biology and upbringing represent mitigating factors. We believe that juvenile
crimes are forgivable and their actions correctable. In fact, their crimes are forgivable because their
actions are correctable. Once we admit nature and nurture into the legal calculus concerning our youths,
we must also allow such factors to guide our decisions about adults with developmental disorders, brain
damage, and different genetic make-up. Yet, the law seems to have a double standard: youths lack free
will, whereas adults have it, even if it is somewhat diminished. But if we believe that juveniles lack a
sufficiently mature capacity for self-control, planning and thinking about alternative options, then we
must recognize that fully mature adults can lose these capacities as they naturally age, and can lose them
at any age if they suffer from brain damage. We must also wrestle with the fact that some people are born
with a genetic constitution that makes them more vulnerable to addictions, sensation-seeking, violence,
and a lack of compassion. Perhaps they too should be banned from driving, voting, drinking, marrying
and military combat. When do we look at the excessive harms caused by individuals or groups and hold
them responsible? When do we punish them to pay for their crimes and fend off future atrocities?
The law often invokes the notion of future dangerousness as a means of evaluating risk. So too
does the public and media. The general presumption is that for certain kinds of offences, there is a
predictably high level of recidivism, of doing the same thing over and over again. But the implication of
this judgment is that those who are deemed guilty are, in some way, not responsible for their future. Their
future is determined for them. In fact, it is so determined that the law is willing to make a confident
wager and send these criminals to prison or to their death. On this view, someone who has already
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 148
repeated a crime is more likely to repeat than someone who has only committed a crime once. On this
view, those who engage in certain kinds of crimes, such as child molesters and rapists, are more likely to
repeat because it is “in” their system. Unfortunately, both folk perception and legal analysis of future
dangerousness are based on weak evidence, unfounded assumptions, or both.
Consider sexual offenders. Their crime is intentional, frequently repeated, and aimed at innocent
victims. Given that many sexual offenders repeat their offenses, it has the appearance of inevitability, of
a process that is highly determined. Because many sexual offenders were abused as children, some
experts conclude that we should blame their parents. Other experts believe that particular situations either
promote or support sexual offenders, including the church and medical exam rooms. And yet other
experts, including the psychiatrist Boris Schiffer, reveal brain differences among pedophiles, including
especially the areas involved in reward and self-control. Together, these observations suggest that the
combination of a deviant nature and toxic nurture have led to a more deterministic universe. In this
universe, sexual offenses are inevitable or so highly probable that we should lock up offenders and post
their crimes in every county’s registry, and if possible, as replacements for flamingo lawn art.
If this assessment of sexual offenders is right, how should we think about responsibility, blame,
and punishment. If sexual offenders can’t help themselves, how should we assign blame? How should we
assign an appropriate level and form of punishment, if punishment is even appropriate? Studies of
recidivism among sexual offenders generate rates as low as 15% and as high as 80%. These studies also
reveal that recidivism rates differ for incest perpetrators, rapists, and child molesters. These numbers tell
us that even child molesters don’t always repeat their crimes. They also tell us that sexual offences should
not be lumped, but split apart into their underlying causes and triggers. Like the high odds favoring a
horse with a distinguished lineage and top rated jockey, there are high odds favoring repeated sexual
molestation in an individual who was sexually abused as a child and enters the clergy. Does this mean
that we should all bet on this one horse or forget the race altogether? Does this mean that we should lock
up the priest before he has an opportunity to enter his parish? No and No. Neither horse racing nor sexual
molestation are that easily determined. Future success and future dangerousness are probabilistic. They
represent our best guesses. When the law determines that someone is at high risk of committing a future
offense, it doesn’t really care whether the individual is perfectly healthy or brain damaged. It cares about
risk. In terms of blame and punishment, however, the law cares about the perpetrator’s brain. The law
cares about a person’s capacity to act rationally and independently. It is this capacity that allows us to
assign responsibility. It is this capacity that drives many theories of blame and punishment, including the
Australian legal scholar Michael Moore’s massive treatise Placing Blame. These are reasons why
scientific understanding of future dangerousness is important for law and society.
Armed with these ideas about future dangerousness, we can return to the list of potential evildoers
that I mentioned in the prologue. This list included individuals who caused relatively minor harms such as
Reverend Lawrence Murphy and Charles Manson, as well as those who committed much more major
harms such as Idi Amin and Mao Zedong. Whether we consider these individuals and their acts as evil is
orthogonal to the fact that each one posed a great risk to society. Each of these individuals would have
been judged as high risk for causing future danger. Only some of these individuals should have been
punished if punishment is guided by our understanding of responsibility and blame. Only those
individuals who can take responsibility for their actions and change should be punished. On this view, all
of the dictators were rightly blamed and punished. And so too were Jane Toppan, Bernard Madoff, and
Charles Granger. In contrast, although Lawrence Murphy should have been locked up as opposed to
exiled to a cottage, both Murphy and Charles Manson are more difficult to assess in terms of
responsibility, and thus, the appropriateness of punishment. No one would want them walking the streets
today, free to rape innocent children or create a cult of murderers. But for the law to evolve, we need
better tools to evaluate the biological underpinnings of diminished capacity. These measures, still in the
early stages of development, will help refine our understanding of risk, guide our clinical interventions,
and contribute to the construction of a safer society.
As we move forward, we must also recognize the rapidly changing landscape, and the future
dangerousness of globalization, especially its capacity to breed evildoers. Like authority, conformity,
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 149
dehumanization, and self-deception which each have both beneficial and toxic personalities, so too does
globalization. Globalization has integrated developing countries into the global economy and allowed
them to profit from new resources and advances. But globalization has also fragmented these countries
by giving them access to resources that corrupt, such as arms for guerrilla leaders and rogue armies. What
has changed in the twenty-first century, perhaps as early as the 1990s, is a new form of war, one that is
tied to the signature of evil and its expression as excessive harm. No longer are wars confined to state
borders, restricted to states and their legitimized militaries, financed by governments and tax revenues,
and focused on combatants. Instead, the new wars of the twenty-first century have entirely porous
boundaries, are funded by private organizations, run by grass-root groups, and motivated by the use of
horrific means to achieve equally horrific ends, including torture, rape, mutilation, and the use and abuse
of civilians, women, children and men alike. As a result, international law is effectively, ineffective.
Those running these new wars are outside of international law.
The consequence of the new wars extends beyond the travesties experienced by those living in
these hot spots to the humanitarian aid workers and journalists who attempt to help the victims.
Humanitarian aid is often pirated by rogue militias, and journalists are frequently killed or badly injured.
We must therefore face the sad reality that as we ended the twentieth-century and initiated the twentyfirst,
casualties to non-combatant civilians shifted from few to many. We must face the reality that
combating evil will require new laws and new protections for those who risk their lives to aid victims and
give voice to their often silent suffering.
Evil ever after?
We won't eradicate evil. Why? Because the capacity for evil is rooted in human nature, born of a
promiscuous mind that enables ideas and feelings to flip between beneficial and toxic. Though we
institute programs and practices that promote the beneficial, living within every human mind is a toxic
neighbor, waiting to move in. Adhering to authorities is beneficial in that great leaders are energizing,
empowering, creative, and a source of guidance into a brighter future. But even great leaders can turn
toxic, imposing corrosive ideologies and eliminating basic human rights. Conformity is beneficial in that
we want to live in a society where norms are followed, providing stability and cooperation. But
conformity is toxic when it leads to blind faith and uncritical thinking. Dehumanization is beneficial in
allowing us to carry out medical procedures and live with certain kinds of human suffering. But
dehumanization is toxic when it facilitates ethnic cleansing by shrinking the moral circle, turning
atrocities into virtuous offerings. Tolerance and pluralism are beneficial in that they lead to respect and
concern for others’ attitudes and desires. But tolerance and pluralism are toxic when they breed apathy
and a willingness to stand by as passive bystanders.
My diagnosis of evil is not meant to be defeatist, but realist. It is only through an
acknowledgment of our biology and the environments it has created ⎯⎯ and can create ⎯⎯ that we can look
for solutions to ameliorate the human condition. We are all vulnerable to walking on the wrong side. We
are fallible. We are also enormously creative, capable of great change. Like no other species, we
relentlessly seek novelty. No one wants to be like his or her predecessor. Whether it is a new culinary
tradition, extreme sport, technological innovation, musical genre, or weapon of destruction, our search for
novelty is an indestructible component of human nature.
Our journey into the nature of evil has come to an end. Bombarded by the sheer magnitude of
lives lost or damaged beyond repair, it is natural to deaden our senses and choke our feelings in the hope
of finding solitude and peace. As painful as a re-awakening is, we must remember the individuals that
make up these massive atrocities. Reflecting upon the loss of his son who was murdered by the Lord's
Resistance Army, an 80 year old Ugandan chief summed it up ⎯⎯ "We have been forgotten. It’s as if we
don’t exist."
We must never forget. We must never deny our potential to cause horrific pain and suffering
while finding ways to forgive and express deep compassion. We must never give up on humanity.
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 150
Endnotes: Epilogue
Recommended Books:
Glover, J. (2000). Humanity. Yale University Press.
Grossman, D. (1996). On Killing. New York: Back Bay Books.
Moore, M.S. (2010). Placing Blame. Oxford University Press.
Quotes:
• Human Rights Watch Report, 2010, “The Trail of Death”
Hauser Epilogue. Evilightenment 151