Document Text Content
Explaining our taste for excessive harm
Marc D. Hauser
Viking/Penguin
For Jacques and Bert Hauser,
my parents,
my friends,
and my reminder
that life should be
lived to its fullest
Hauser Evilicious. Front matter 2
Pleasure is the greatest incentive to evil.
⎯⎯ Plato
To witness suffering does one good, to inflict it even more so.
⎯⎯ Friedrich Nietzsche
Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.
⎯⎯ William Golding
Hauser Evilicious. Front matter 3
Dear reader,
Having lived in Uganda and spoken with people who escaped from the savagery of the brutal
dictators Milton Obote and Idi Amin, having heard stories of my father’s childhood as a Jew running
through Nazi occupied France, and reading past and present-day accounts of genocide, I am familiar with
the horrors of evil. I have also been a student of human nature, trained as a scientist. These experiences
have propelled me to study the causes of evil, attempt to make some progress in explaining it to myself,
and hopefully to you. There is a great urgency to understanding this problem. None of us can afford to
passively watch millions of individuals lose their homes, children, and lives as a result of malice. Sloth is
a sin, especially when we live in a world where cultures of evil can so easily erupt.
I am also familiar with and deeply moved by human kindness, our capacity to reach out and help
strangers. When my father was in a boarding school in the south of France, hiding from the Nazis, a little
girl approached him and asked if he was Jewish. My father, conditioned by his parents to deny his
background, said no. The girl, sensing doubt, said “Well, if you are Jewish, you should know that the
director of the school is handing Jewish children over to the Nazis.” My father promptly called his parents
who picked him up, moved him to another village and school, and survived to tell the story. This little girl
expressed one of our species’ signature capacities: the ability to show compassion for another person,
even if their beliefs and desires are different.
In preparation for writing this book, I read transcripts and descriptions of thousands of horrific
events, listened to personal stories of survivors from financial ruin and war, worked with abused children
who were crucified by unfit parents, and watched both fictional films and documentaries that portrayed
psychopaths, dictators of totalitarian regimes, and their hapless victims. As one often does in these
circumstances, I developed a tougher skin over time. But I have never lost track of the human travesties
that result from evil. As my father’s story suggests, I have also not lost sight of the fact that we are a
species that has done great good, and will continue to do so in the future. Nonetheless, to provide a sound
and satisfying explanation of evil we must avoid falling into more romantic interpretations of the human
condition. Our best protection is science. This is the position I will defend.
The topic of evil is massive. This is, however, a short book, written without exhaustive
references, in-depth descriptions of our atrocities, and comprehensive engagement with the many theories
on offer to explain evil. What I offer is my own explanation of evil, of how it evolved, how it develops
within individuals, and how it affects the lives of millions of innocent victims. It is a minimalist
explanation of evil that is anchored in the sciences. I believe, as do many scientists, that deep
understanding of exceptionally complicated phenomena requires staking out a piece of theoretical real
estate with only a few properties, putting to the side many interesting, but potentially distracting details.
This book extracts the core of evil, the part that generates all the variation that our history has catalogued,
and that our future holds.
Sincerely,
Hauser Evilicious. Front matter 4
Acknowledgements
I wrote this book while my cat, Humphrey Bogart, sat on my desk, staring at the computer monitor.
Though he purred a lot, and was good value when I needed a break, he didn’t provide a single insight.
Nor did our other pets: a dog, rabbit, and two other cats. For insights, critical comments on my writing,
comfort, and endless love and inspiration, there is only one mammal, deliciously wonderful, and without
an evil bone in her body ⎯⎯ my wife, Lilan.
Marc Aidinoff … a Harvard undergraduate who joined me early on in this journey, digging up
references, collecting data, arguing interpretations, sharing my enthusiasm, while offering his own.
Kim Beeman and Fritz Tsao … my two oldest and closest friends. They have some of the richest
minds around. Their knowledge of film, literature and the arts is unsurpassed. Their capacity to bring
these riches to the sciences is a gift.
Noam Chomsky… for inspiration, fearless attacks on power mongering, and friendship.
Errol Morris… for heated discussion, camaraderie, and insights into evil through his
cinematographic lens and critical mind.
Many colleagues, students, and friends provided invaluable feedback on various parts of the
book, or its entirety: Kim Beeman, Kent Berridge, George Cadwalader, Donal Cahill, Noam Chomsky,
Jim Churchill, Randy Cohen, Daniel Dennett, Jonathan Figdor, Nick Haslam, Omar Sultan Haque, Lilan
Hauser, Bryce Huebner, Ann Jon, Gordon Kraft-Todd, Errol Morris, Philip Pettit, Steven Pinker, Lisa
Pytka, Richard Sosis, Fritz Tsao, Jack Van Honk, and Richard Wrangham.
My agent, John Brockman…not only a great agent but a wonderful human being who supported
me during challenging times.
My editors at Viking/Penguin, Wendy Wolff and Kevin Doughten. Tough when needed.
Supportive when needed. A unique blend. The book is all the better for it.
Hauser Evilicious. Front matter 5
Table of Contents
Prologue. Evilution
Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets
Chapter 2. Runaway desire
Chapter 3. Ravages of denial
Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting
Epilogue. Evilightenment
Hauser Evilicious. Front matter 6
Prologue:
Evilution
“There is no such thing as eradicating evil [because] the deepest essence of
human nature consists of instinctual impulses which are of an elementary
nature… and which aim at the satisfaction of certain primal needs.”
-- Sigmund Freud
I was drowning. This was not the first time. It was also not because I was a poor swimmer. I was 14
years old. A boy named Lionel James, who was the same age but twice my size, was shoving my head
under water, roaring with laughter as I struggled to gasp some air.
I usually managed to avoid Lionel in the pool, but sometimes he got the best of me while I was
playing with friends. Lionel wasn’t the only one who bullied me in junior high school. He was part of an
evil three pack, including Ronnie Paxton and Chris Joffe, each much larger and stronger than I. Almost
daily they locked me inside of the school’s lockers, bruised my arms by giving me knuckle-punches, and
gave me purple-nurples by twisting my nipples. This was no fun for me. For James, Paxton, and Joffe it
was delicious enjoyment. Sometimes, while I was locked in my locker, my math teacher would let me
out and then ask “Why do you get yourself into these situations?” Though I had great respect for my
teacher’s math abilities, and actually had a crush on her, she was socially daft. Did she think I asked to be
packaged up in the locker by my tormenters? It was sheer humiliation.
One day my mother noticed the bruises. Horrified, she asked what happened. I reluctantly told her
the story. She said we were going to talk with the principal. I told her I would prefer water drip torture.
She understood and we never went to see the principal.
The person who rescued me from my misery was my father, a man who had lived through the war
as a child, running from village to village to escape the Nazis, and in so doing, confronted thuggish farm
boys whose weight far exceeded their IQ. My father, upon hearing that I didn’t want to go to school
anymore, offered a compromise: he would pick me up for lunch every day if I kept going to classes. I
agreed, relishing the idea of escaping the lunch-time scene at school where James, Paxton and Joffe
pummeled me at will without getting caught.
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 7
A month passed. I felt better. My father told me that it was time to go back to lunch at school, but
with a plan, one centered around the notion of respect. The only way to command it from my tormenters
was to fight back. “But Dad,” I said, “if I hit them, they will crush me.” “They might,” he said, “but you
will have gained some respect, and they may turn their attention to someone else.” It seemed like a
remarkably stupid idea. But my father lived through a war and fought his way to respect among the thugs
in every village school. I decided to give it a go.
I went back to school. Soon thereafter, I found myself standing behind Paxton who displayed
biceps bigger than my head. I figured I had only one shot. I tapped him on the shoulder and swung as
hard as I could, hitting him square in the chest. What aim. What perfection. What wasted energy. With no
more than a flinch, Paxton looked down at me, fury in his face, and grunted “What’s up with you?” With
tears running and lips trembling, I sputtered “I can’t take it anymore. You, Joffe, and James are constantly
hitting me and locking me in the lockers. I can’t take it!” And then, as if his entire brain had been rewired,
serotonin surging to provide self-control, dopamine flowing to shift his sense of reward, the hulk spoke:
“Really? Okay, we’ll stop.” And just like that, Paxton, Joffe and James stopped. No more locker games,
no more bruises. They even saw me as a useful resource, someone who could help them pass some of
their exams. From victim to victory.
I was fortunate. Many are not. Thousands of children throughout the world are persecuted in a
similar way but never fight back or if they do, are crushed for trying. Some are pushed so hard that they
commit suicide, tragedies that increasingly make headline news reports.
The fact that bullies often torment their victims for personal gain, cause great harm, and often
enjoy the experience ⎯⎯ as did Lionel James ⎯⎯ fits well with a common view of evil. On this view, we
think of someone as evil if they inflict harm on innocent others, knowing that they are violating moral or
legal norms, and relishing the abuse delivered. But what of bullies who, due to immaturity or brain
deficits, simply don’t understand the scope of moral boundaries? What if they impose great harm on their
victims, but don’t enjoy the experience? What if the victims are not entirely innocent, such as those who
double-time as bullies?
We can debate questions like these on philosophical grounds, attempting to refine what, precisely,
counts as an act of evildoing as opposed to some mere moral wrong, like breaking a promise or having an
affair while married. Many have. I don’t believe, however, that this is how we will achieve our deepest
understanding. Instead, I turn to the sciences of human nature, focusing on cases where people directly or
indirectly cause excessive harm to innocent others as the essence of evil. To explain this form of evil, we
must dissect the underlying psychology, the brain circuits that generate this psychology, the genes that
build brains, and the evolutionary history that has sculpted the genetic ensemble that makes us
distinctively human. This is the approach I pursue. If I’m right about this approach, not only will we gain
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 8
a deeper understanding of how and why our species has engaged in evildoing, but we will learn about our
own individual vulnerability to follow suit. This prologue provides a sampling of the central ideas minus
the rich evidence and explanations that follow in the four core chapters of this book.
A brief history of malice
Homo sapiens, the knowing and wise animal, has logged an uncontested record of atrocities,
despite moral norms prohibiting such actions: no other species has abducted innocent children into rogue
armies and then killed those who refused to kill, tossed infants into the air as targets for shooting practice,
gang raped women to force them to carry the enemy’s fetus to term while destroying the souls of their
powerless husbands, and mutilated and burned men to death because more humane forms of killing were
less effective and enjoyable. These are horrific acts. They abound globally and across the ages. Many
scholars have judged them as evil.
Despite the pervasiveness of these atrocities, evil is commonly perceived as a defect, an
unfortunate malignancy that has engulfed and metastasized within our species’ essential goodness. Evil is
also denied, relegated to mythology, the delusional imagination of a few madmen, the propaganda of
imperialist nations, or the result of a rare mutation. Perhaps because of these impressions, we have an
obsessive fascination with evil, evidenced by our fertile capacity to create and then consume films about
genocide, cunning rapists, master criminals, corporate raiders, psychopaths and serial killers. We are of
two minds, wanting to hide from the atrocities of evil while feeding our insatiable appetite for more.
To understand evil is neither to justify nor excuse it, reflexively converting inhumane acts into
mere accidents of our biology or the unfortunate consequences of bad environments. To understand evil is
to open a door into its essence, to clarify its causes. In some cases, understanding may force us to
exonerate the perpetrators, recognizing that they harbored significant brain damage and as a result, lacked
self-control or awareness of others’ pain. In other cases, understanding will reveal that they knowingly
caused harm to innocent others, relishing the devastation left behind. 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.
To understand evil requires facing our species’ sustained record of atrocities, laying out a variety
of cases for inspection. Former Reverend Lawrence Murphy was responsible for over two hundred
instances of sexual abuse, luring innocent deaf children in with a saintly smile. Charles Manson, the
illegitimate son of a sixteen year old woman and the self-proclaimed father of dozens of runaway women,
was responsible for the brutal death of five people by means of 114 knife jabs, while also prostituting his
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 9
lovers, beating his wife, selling drugs, and stealing cars. Former Chairman of the NASDAQ stock
exchange, Bernard Madoff, was responsible for initiating a Ponzi scheme involving money laundering,
perjury, and mail fraud that caused thousands of people to suffer financial ruin. Jane Toppan, born
Honora Kelley, was an American nurse who was responsible for killing over 30 patients by drug
overdose, stating in her testimony that she experienced a sexual thrill when she held dying patients, and
that her goal in life was to kill more innocent people than anyone else in history. Former military
specialist Charles Granger was responsible for forcing nudity and sex among the Iraqi prisoners of Abu
Ghraib, putting individuals on dog leashes, depriving them of their senses with head bags, and piling
naked bodies into photographed still lifes, orchestrations that led to the ultimate humiliation and
dehumanization of these prisoners.
Depending upon how we think about the problem of evil, we might consider the individuals noted
above as minor evildoers or not evil at all because the harms were rather insignificant, because their goal
wasn’t to directly harm anyone and then enjoy the trail of damage, or because they lacked the mental
capacity to assume responsibility for the atrocities committed. These individuals pale in comparison with
the most unambiguously radical evildoers of the 20-21 st century ⎯⎯ the dictators Idi Amin, Francisco
Franco, Adolf Hitler, Kim Jong-il, Slobodan Milosevic, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, Charles Taylor, and Mao
Zedong. These men were responsible for the brutal deaths of approximately 80 million people combined.
Most were mentally healthy, at least in terms of clinical diagnoses. Many relished their atrocities. All
devised over-the-top means of ending lives. Whether by enticing or coercing their followers to torture,
gang rape, and butcher human flesh, they went beyond what was necessary to get rid of unwanted others.
These are excessive harms, carried out with excessive techniques. In this book, I will not only explore
these extreme cases, but more mundane ones as well. Each case helps shape our understanding of what
propells some individuals to cause harm on small or large scales, while others avoid it entirely, despite
temptations to the contrary.
Why and How?
To explain the landscape of human atrocities, from Reverend Lawrence Murphy to Mao Zedong, we need
an account of why we evolved this capacity and how it works. I will explain both of these problems using
the theories and evidence of science.
Why? Evil evolved as an incidental consequence of our unique form of intelligence. All animals
show highly specialized abilities to solve problems linked to survival. Honey bees perform dances to tell
others about the precise location of nutritious pollen, providing an information highway that lowers the
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 10
costs of individual foraging challenges. Meerkats teach their young how to hunt dangerous but energyrich
scorpion prey, providing an education that bypasses the risks of trial and error learning. Humans
unconsciously wrinkle their noses and pull back their lips into an expression of disgust that communicates
information about disease-ridden and toxic substances, thereby lowering the costs of sickness to others
who might be exposed. Each of these specializations involve exquisitely designed neural circuits and
sensory machinery. Each specialization is used for one and only one problem ⎯⎯ except in humans.
Animal thoughts and emotions are like monogamous relationships, myopically and faithfully focused on a
single problem for life. Human thoughts and emotions are like promiscuous relationships, broad-minded
and liberated, free to couple as new problems surface.
Unlike any other animal, the thoughts and emotions we use to solve problems in one domain can
readily be combined and recombined with thoughts and emotions from other domains. This is powerful,
providing great flexibility in addressing novel problems, some of which we create for ourselves. Disgust
provides an example. Disgust originally evolved as an adaptive response to detecting substances that are
toxic to our health, especially substances that are outside of the body but should be inside: feces, urine,
blood, and vomit. Within the circulation of a promiscuous brain, however, disgust journeys to distant
problems, including the moral attitude of vegetarians toward meat eaters, our revulsion toward incest, and
abhorrence of gratuitous torture. This journey involves the same brain mechanism that serves original
disgust, together with new connections that give voice to our moral sense. Promiscuity enables creativity.
What the sciences reveal is that the capacity for promiscuous thinking was realized by
evolutionary changes in the number of newly wired up brain areas. By increasing these connections, it
was possible, for the first time, to step outside the more narrow and specialized functions of each
particular brain area to solve a broader range of problems. Though we don’t know precisely when these
changes occurred, we know they occurred after our split from the other great apes ⎯⎯ the orangutans,
gorillas, bonobos and chimpanzees. We know this from looking at both the brains of these species, as
well as the ways in which they use tools, communicate, cooperate, and attack each other. Not only are
there fewer connections between different regions of the brain, but their thinking in various domains is
highly monogamous, faithfully dedicated to specific adaptive problems.
Empowered by our new, massively connected and promiscuous brain, we alone migrated into and
inhabited virtually every known environment on earth and some beyond, inventing abstract mathematical
concepts, conceiving grammatically structured languages, and creating glorious civilizations rich in
rituals, laws, and beliefs in the supernatural. Our promiscuous brain also provided us with the engine for
evil, but only as an incidental consequence of other adaptive capacities, including those that evolved to
harm others for the purpose of surviving and reproducing.
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 11
All social animals fight to gain resources, using highly ritualized behaviors to assess their
opponents and minimize the personal costs of injury. Changes in hormone levels and brain activity
motivate and reward the winners, and minimize the costs to the losers. In a small corner of the landscape
of aggressive fighting styles are an elite group of killers, animals that go beyond harming their opponents
to obliterating them: ants, wolves, lions, and chimpanzees. When these species attack to kill, they
typically target adult members of neighboring groups, using collaborative alliances to take out lone or
otherwise vulnerable victims. The rarity and limited scope of this form of lethal aggression is indicative
of monogamous thinking, and tells us something important about the economics ⎯⎯ especially the costs
and potential rewards of eliminating the enemy, as opposed to merely injuring them. Killing another adult
is costly because it involves intense, prolonged combat with another individual who is fighting back. The
risks of significant personal injury are therefore high, even if the potential benefit is death to an opponent.
As the British anthropologist Richard Wrangham has suggested, animals can surmount these costs by
attacking and killing only when there is a significant imbalance of power. This imbalance minimizes the
costs to the killers and maximizes the odds of a successful kill. Still, the rarity of killing reinforces an
uncontested conclusion among biologists: all animals would rather fight and injure their opponents than
fight and obliterate them, assuming that obliteration is costly to the attacker. In some cases, we are just
like these other animals ⎯⎯ killophobic.
Historical records, vividly summarized by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman in his book On
Killing, reveal that in some situations, soldiers avoid killing the enemy even though they could have. For
example, despite the fact that Civil War regiments had the potential to kill 500-1000 individuals per
minute, the actual rate was only 1-2 per minute. This suggests that under some conditions, killing another
when you can see the whites of their eyes is hard. But as the history of genocides reveal, we have
evolved ways to bypass this limitation, making us killophilic in a variety of situations. Our brain’s unique
capacity for denial is one of the liberating factors.
By recruiting denial into our psychology’s artillery, we invented new ways of perceiving the
enemy or creating one, distorting reality in the service of feeding a desire for personal gain. Denial, like
so many aspects of our psychology, generates beneficial and toxic consequences. Self-deceiving
ourselves into believing that we are better than we are is a positive illusion that often has beneficial
consequences for our mental and physical health, and for our capacity to win in competition. Denying
others their moral worth by reclassifying them as threats to our survival or as non-human objects is toxic
thinking. When we deny others their moral worth, the thought of killing them is no longer aversive or
inappropriate. If we end someone’s life in defense of our own, we are following our evolved capacity for
survival. When we destroy a parasite, we are also protecting our self-interests to survive. And when we
destroy an inanimate object or lock it away, there is no emotional baggage because we have bypassed the
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 12
connection to individual rights; we have cut out morality as the governor. This suite of transformations,
enabled by our promiscuous brain, allowed us to occupy a unique position within the animal kingdom as
large scale killers.
Chimpanzees only kill adults when there are many attackers against one victim, with the vast
majority of kills focused on individuals outside of their own group; most kills within the group are aimed
at infants, where the costs to the attacker are low. Though humans also kill members of enemy groups
when there are many against one ⎯⎯ a pattern that is common among hunter-gatherers and other smallscale
societies ⎯⎯ we depart from this narrow pattern in terms of numbers and the array of potential
victims. When humans kill, we go at it with many against many, one against one, and even one against
many, including as victims both those outside of our group and those within, young and old, same and
opposite sex, and mating partner and competitor.
Add the chimpanzee’s adaptive capacity for coalitionary killing to the promiscuous capacity of
the human brain, and we arrive at a uniquely aggressive species, one capable of inflicting great harm on
others in any context. Though the modern invention of scud missiles and stealth bombers undoubtedly
enriched our capacity to kill on a large scale by putting distance between killers and victims, these
weapons of mass destruction were not necessary. Today, we need only travel back a few years to 1994 to
witness the machete genocides of Rwanda, a painful memory of our capacity to wipe out close to a
million people in 100 days with hand to hand combat. This is excessive harm, enabled by our ability to
use denial to minimize the perceived costs of killing another person and to motivate the anticipated
benefits. Denial turns down the heat of killing another and turns us into callous predators.
Evolutionary changes in the connections to the brain’s reward system provided a second, costoffsetting
step, allowing us to move into novel arenas for harming others. When an animal wins a fight,
the reward circuitry engages, providing a physiological pat on the back and encouragement for the next
round. This same circuitry even engages in anticipation of a battle or when watching winners. The
reward system is important as it motivates competitive action in situations that are costly. There is one
situation, however, where the reward system is remarkably quiet, at least in all social animals except our
own: detecting and punishing those who attempt to cheat and free-ride on others’ good will.
Punishment carries clear costs, either paid up front in terms of resources expended on physically
or psychologically attacking another, or paid at the end if the victim fights back or retaliates. These costs
can be offset if punishers and their group benefit by removing cheaters or teaching them a lesson. Among
animals, punishment is infrequently seen in vertebrates, especially our closest relatives the nonhuman
primates. When it is seen, the most common context is competition, not cooperation. Like lethal killing,
then, punishment in animals tends to be restricted to a narrow context. Like lethal killing, punishment in
animals is psychologically monogamous.
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 13
Punishment in humans is emblematically promiscuous. We castigate others whenever they
violate a social norm, in both competitive and cooperative situations, targeting kin and non-kin.
Punishment is doled out by the individual directly harmed and also by third party onlookers. We use both
physical and non-physical means to discipline cheaters, including ostracism. Punishment’s landscape is
vast.
The idea I develop here, building on the work of scholars in economics, psychology, and
anthropology, is that our species alone circumvented the costs of punishment as an incidental
consequence of promiscuity, including an intimate coupling between the systems of aggression and
reward. As several brain imaging studies reveal, when we either anticipate or actually punish another, or
even witness punishment as a mere bystander, our reward circuitry delivers a honey hit. Delivering just
deserts, or watching them delivered, is like eating dessert. We absorb the costs of punishment by feeling
good about ratting out the scourges, banishing them from society, and sometimes from life itself.
Ironically, as the economist Samuel Bowles has suggested based on mathematical models and a synthesis
of the historical record, punishment can strengthen solidarity and cooperation within the group, while
simultaneously enhancing antagonism and prejudice toward those outside the inner sanctum. Ironically,
the psychology that benefited cooperation among like-minded others may also have functioned to destroy
those who have different beliefs and values.
The emergence of promiscuous punishment was a momentous event in human history, a
celebration of exquisite brain evolution and adaptive design. But this achievement carried a hidden cost, a
debt that we continue to pay: A mind capable of feeling good about punishing in the name of virtue is a
mind capable of doing bad to feel good. It is a mind that finds real or simulated violence entertaining and
seeks ways to satisfy this interest. It is a mind that enjoys watching others suffer while singing O
Schadenfreude. It is a mind that is capable of feeling good about killing others who are perceived as
parasitic on society. It is a mind that can override the anticipated costs of killing by fueling a taste for
killing.
Desire, denial, aggression and reward are each associated with specific psychological processes,
distinct evolutionary histories, and specific adaptive problems. When processed by a promiscuous brain,
these systems connect in ways that are both beneficial to human welfare and deeply deleterious.
How? Evil occurs when individuals and societies allow desire for personal gain to combine with
the denial of others’ moral worth to justify the use of excessive harms. Everyone has desires, resources
they want and experiences they seek. Our desires motivate us into action, often to fulfill personal needs or
to help others. We all desire good health, fulfilling relationships, and knowledge to explain the world.
Some also desire great wealth and power, each culture weighing in on its signature vision of what counts:
money, land, livestock, wives, and subordinates. The desire system motivates action in the service of
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 14
rewarding experiences. Some actions have benign or even beneficial consequences for the welfare of
others, while others have malignant and costly consequences.
Exquisite studies pioneered by the American cognitive neuroscientist Kent Berridge have
uncovered the core elements of pleasure, including distinctive systems of wanting, liking and learning.
We, and hundreds of other species, often want things we like, and like things we want. This is, obviously,
an adaptive coupling. Thanks to experiments at the level of genes, neurons, and behavior, we can tease
apart these three systems. Thanks to naturally occurring situations, we can watch these systems come
unglued over the course of addictions, leading to the paradoxical and maladaptive situation of wanting
more and more, but liking the experience less and less. Addictions, as archetypal examples of excess,
provide a model for thinking about evil and its trademark signature of excessive harm.
The paradoxical decoupling between wanting and liking is seen most clearly in studies of obesity
in rats and humans, where individuals develop skyrocketing desires for food, but fail to experience
comparable pleasure from eating. By definition, those who become obese are prone to eat in excess. One
reason they do is because eating, or even seeing images of food, no longer delivers the same honey hit to
the brain as in their pre-obesity days. The reward system turns off when we turn to excess. This is
adaptive because nothing in excess is good. But because the wanting system runs independently, the
adaptive response by the liking system has the unfortunate consequence of making us want more even
though we enjoy it less. The proposal I develop in this book is that the same process is involved in evil,
especially its expression of excessive harm. It is a process that is aided by denial.
Everyone engages in denial, negating certain aspects of reality in order to manage painful
experiences or put forward a more powerful image. But like desire, denial has both beneficial and costly
consequences for self and others. When we listen to the news and hear of human rights violations across
the globe, we often hide our heads in the sand, plug our ears, and carry on with our lives as if all is okay
on planet Earth. When doctors have to engage in slicing into human flesh to perform surgery, they turn
off their compassion for humanity, treating the body as a mechanical device, at least until the surgery is
over, and the patient awakes, speaks and smiles. When we confront a challenging opponent in an athletic
competition or military confrontation, we often pump ourselves up, tricking our psychology into believing
that we are better than we are. Denial turns down the heat of emotion, allowing a cooler approach to
decision making and action. But doctors in denial concerning the moral worth of others can be convinced
to carry out heinous operations for the “good” of science or the purity of their group, and military leaders
in denial of an opponent’s strength can lead their soldiers to annihilation. Individuals in denial can reject
different aspects of reality in the service of reward, whether it is personal gain, avoiding pain, or enabling
the infliction of pain on others.
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 15
In a competitive world with limited resources, our desire system never rests. This is a good thing
as it motivates us to take care of our self-interests and strive for bigger and better. But a desire system
that never sleeps is a system that is motivated to accrue ever larger coffers or power. To satisfy this
inflationary need is often not possible without harming others, either directly or indirectly. To offset the
costs of harming another, desire recruits denial. This is a recipe for evil and the creation of excessive
harms. It is a recipe that takes two, often benign and highly adaptive ingredients that are essential for
motivating action and promoting survival, and combines them into an explosive outcome. Seen in this
way, our capacity for evil is as great as our capacity for love and compassion. Evil is part of human
nature, a capacity that can’t be denied. What I will show is both how this capacity works, and how some
of us, due to biological inheritance and environmental influence, are more likely to end up as evildoers.
Historical material on the lives of Franz Stangl and Adolf Eichmann, leaders in the Nazi
annihilation of Jews, illustrates how desire and denial combine within individual minds to create
excessive harms. Although this is a historical example, focused on the lives of only two men, stories like
theirs have been recounted hundreds of times, all over the globe and across time. This pattern points to
common mechanisms, identified in detail by the sciences of human nature.
Stangl was a politically motivated man with a burning desire to climb to the top of the Nazi
hierarchy. A clear path opened when he was appointed commander of the Polish prison Treblinka.
Unbeknownst to Stangl, Treblinka was one of the Nazi’s concentration death camps. To fulfill his desire
for power therefore required harming thousands of others, or more accurately, commanding Nazi soldiers
to harm others on his behalf. But since Stangl had no burning desire to harm the Jews, he dehumanized
them, transforming living, breathing, feeling, and thinking people into lifeless “cargo” ⎯⎯ his own
expression. Stangl was dry-eyed as officers under his command killed close to one million Jews, one
third of them children. The reward? Power and status within the Nazi hierarchy. The death of innocent
Jews was a foreseen consequence of Stangl’s desire for power, not his direct goal.
Eichmann, Lieutenant Colonel in the Nazi regime, was considered one of the central architects of
the Final Solution, the master plan for the extermination of Jews. Eichmann denied Jews their humanity
by championing the pamphlets and posters that portrayed them as vermin and parasites. This
dehumanizing transformation empowered Eichmann’s belief that cleansing was the only solution to
German integrity and power. Eichmann’s reward? Elimination of the Jews. Unlike Stangl, killing Jews
was rewarding. As the historian Yaacov Lozowick stated “Eichmann and his ilk did not come to murder
Jews by accident or in a fit of absent-mindedness, nor by blindly obeying orders or by being small cogs in
a big machine. They worked hard, thought hard, took the lead over many years. They were the alpinists of
evil.”
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 16
Stangl and Eichmann: two different routes into evil. Both possible and both equally lethal to
humanity.
This is a lean explanation of why evil evolved and how it develops within individuals and
societies. It is an explanation that strips evil down to its root causes, focusing on the core psychological
ingredients that enable us to violate moral norms and cause excessive harms to innocent others.
A difficult journey
This book takes you on a journey into evil. It is a story about our evolutionary past, our present state of
affairs, and the prospects for our future. It is as much a story about you and me, as it is about all of our
ancestors and future children. It is a story about the nature of moral decay and the prospects of moral
growth. It is story about society’s capacity to engineer great harm, and about our own individual
responsibility to avoid joining in.
Explaining how our genes create brains that create a psychology of desire and denial that leads to
excessive harms provides a satisfying explanation for the landscape of evil. It explains all varieties of evil
by showing how particular genetic combinations can create moral monsters and how particular
environmental conditions can convert good citizens into uncaring killers and extortionists. This
explanation will not allow us to banish evil from the world. Rather, it will enable us to understand why
some individuals acquire an addiction to feeling good by making others feel bad, and why others cause
unimaginable harm to innocent victims while flying the flag of virtue. This, in turn, will help us gain
greater awareness of our own vulnerabilities by monitoring the power of attraction between desire and
denial.
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 17
Endnotes: Prologue. Evilution
Recommended books:
There are numerous books about evil, most written by philosophers, theologians, historians, political
scientists, and legal scholars. The following recommendations are for books about evil written by
scientists. They are terrific, I have learned a great deal from them, and some of their ideas powerfully
enrich the pages between these covers.
Baumeister, R. F. (1999). Evil. Inside human violence and cruelty. New York, W.H. Freeman.
Baron-Cohen, S. (2011). The Science of Evil. New York, Basic Books.
Oakley, B. (2007). Mean Genes. New York, Prometheus Books.
Staub, E. (2010). Overcoming Evil. New York, Oxford University Press.
Stone, M. H. (2009). The Anatomy of Evil. New York, Prometheus Books.
Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect. New York, Random House.
Notes:
• For a philosophical account of the nature of goodness that treats evil as a deviation from our species’
repertoire, see Philippa Foot Natural Goodness (2001, Oxford, Clarendon Press).
• For an explicit, philosophical argument for the connection between pleasure and evil, see Colin
McGinn‘s Ethics, Evil and Fiction (1997, Oxford, Oxford University Press). For a comprehensive
discussion of evil by a philosopher, including important critiques of the existing literature, see John
Kekes’ The Roots of Evil (2007, Ithaca, Cornell University Press)
• On killing throughout history: Wrangham, R.W. & Glowacki, L. (in press). Intergroup aggression in
chimpanzees and war in nomadic hunter-gatherers: evaluating the chimpanzee model. Human Nature;
Bowles, S. (2009). Did warfare among ancestral hunter-gatherers affect the evolution of human social
behaviors? Science, 324, 1293-1298; Choi, J.-K., & Bowles, S. (2007). The coevolution of parochial
altruism and war. Science, 318, 636-640; Grossman, D. (1995). On killing: the psychological costs of
learning to kill in war and society. New York, NY: Little, Brown.
• For a summary of research on desire, especially the elements of wanting, liking and learning, see
Berridge, K.C. (2009). Wanting and Liking: Observations from the Neuroscience and Psychology
Laboratory. Inquiry, 52(4), 378-398; Kringelbach, M.L., & Berridge, K.C. (2009). Towards a functional
neuroanatomy of pleasure and happiness. Trends Cognitive Science 13(1), 479-487.
• The most serious treatment of Stangl can be found in the penetrating interview by Gitta Sereny (1974,
Into that Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder. London: Random House). There have been
different treatments of Adolf Eichmann, most famously by Hannah Arendt in her Eichmann in Jerusalem:
A report on the banality of evil. (1963, New York, Viking Press). Arendt’s perspective on Eichmann as
an ordinary gentleman who simply followed orders has been seriously challenged, suggesting that he was
anything but a banal evildoer; the quote by Holocaust scholar Yaacov Lozowick is one illustration of the
more generally accepted view that Eichmann was a radical evildoer with heinous intentions to
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 18
exterminate the Jews. He may have lived a calm and peaceful existence outside of his day job at Nazi
headquarters, but this was no ordinary citizen.
Quotes:
• Quote by Lozowick on Eichmann and banality of evil: Lozowick, Y. (2002) Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The
Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil. New York, Continuum Press, p. 279.
Hauser Prologue. Evilution 19
Chapter 1:
Nature’s secrets
Nature hides her secrets because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.
— Albert Einstein
In Charles Darwin’s day, biologists unearthed the mysteries of evolution by means of observation,
sometimes accompanied by a simple experiment. This was largely a process of documenting the patterns
of variation and uniformity that nature left behind. Only breeders were directly involved in manipulating
these patterns, using artificial selection to alter the size, shape, coloration, and lifespan of plants and
animals.
The Darwins of today continue this tradition, but with new tools, informed by understanding of
the genetic code and aided by technical developments in engineering, physics, chemistry, and computer
science. These tools allow for deeper penetration into the sources of change, and the causes of
evolutionary similarities and differences. They also enable biologists to change the course of evolution
and the patterns of development by turning genes off or turning novel ones on, and even creating
synthetic organisms in test tubes ⎯⎯ a wonderful playground for understanding both questions of origin,
change, and extinction.