(Kāpēc cilvēki turpina nīcināt viens otru?!)
Deviņdesmitie
Tas
sākās, pirms Augstākā Padomē vēl tikai sprieda par sertifikātiem un
privatizācijas likumdošanu…
Latvenergo
trīs miljoni kā simbols valsts nozagšanas tehnoloģijai.
https://ltv.lsm.lv/lv/raksts/05.10.2016-devindesmitie.id81336/
https://ltv.lsm.lv/lv/raksts/21.09.2016-devindesmitie-privatizacija.id80382/
https://ltv.lsm.lv/lv/raksts/14.09.2016-devindesmitie.-saulvezu-spiets.id79896/
https://ltv.lsm.lv/lv/raksts/07.09.2016-devindesmitie.-medijs-ka-bizness.id79444/
https://ltv.lsm.lv/lv/raksts/20.04.2016-devindesmitie-pilsoni-nepilsoni.id70378/
https://www.rbc.ru/politics/16/04/2019/5cb0bb979a794780a4592d0c
THE GOODNESS PARADOX. THE STRANGE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VIRTUE AND VIOLENCE IN HUMAN EVOLUTION
by Richard Wrangham
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40063330-the-goodness-paradox
«The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence»
by Philip Dwyer , Mark Micale
https://www.amazon.com/Darker-Angels-Our-Nature-Refuting/dp/1350140597
Why
some people are cruel to others
Inflicting harm or pain on
someone incapable of doing the same to you might seem intolerably cruel, but it
happens more than you might think.
Why are some
humans cruel to people who don’t pose a threat to them – sometimes even their
own children? Where does this behaviour come from and what purpose does it
serve? – Ruth, 45,
London.
Humans are the glory and the
scum of the universe, concluded the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, in
1658. Little has changed. We love and we loathe. We help and we harm. We reach
out a hand and we stick in the knife.
We understand if someone
lashes out in retaliation or self-defence. But when someone harms the harmless,
we ask: “How could you?”
Humans typically do things
to get pleasure or avoid pain. For most of us, hurting others causes us to feel
their pain. And we don’t like this feeling. This suggests two reasons people
may harm the harmless – either they don’t feel the others’
pain or they enjoy feeling the others’ pain.
Another reason people harm
the harmless is because they nonetheless see a threat. Someone who doesn’t
imperil your body or wallet can still threaten your social status. This helps
explain otherwise puzzling actions, such as when people harm others who help
them financially.
Liberal societies assume
causing others to suffer means we
have harmed them. Yet some philosophers reject
this idea. In the 21st Century, can we still conceive of being cruel to
be kind?
Sadists and psychopaths
Someone who gets pleasure
from hurting or humiliating others is a sadist. Sadists feel
other people’s pain more than is normal. And they
enjoy it. At least, they do until it is over, when they may feel bad.
The popular imagination
associates sadism with torturers and murderers. Yet there is also the less
extreme, but more widespread, phenomenon of everyday sadism.
Everyday sadists get
pleasure from hurting others or watching their suffering. They are likely to enjoy
gory films, find fights exciting and torture interesting. They are rare, but
not rare enough. Around 6%
of undergraduate students admit getting pleasure from hurting
others.
The everyday sadist may be
an internet troll or
a school
bully. In online role-playing games, they are likely to be the “griefer” who
spoils the game for others. Everyday sadists are drawn to violent computer games.
And the more they play, the more sadistic they
become.
Unlike sadists, psychopaths
don’t harm the harmless simply because they get pleasure from it (though they may).
Psychopaths want things. If harming others helps them get what they want, so be
it.
You might also
like:
- Why happy music makes you do bad things
- The surprising downside of empathy
- Can you ever change a psychopath’s mind?
They can act this way
because they are less likely to feel pity or remorse or fear.
They can also work
out what others are feeling but not get infected by such feelings
themselves.
This is a seriously
dangerous set of skills. Over millennia, humanity has domesticated
itself. This has made it difficult for many of us to harm others. Many
who harm, torture or kill will be haunted by
the experience. Yet psychopathy is a powerful predictor of
someone inflicting unprovoked violence.
We need to know if we
encounter a psychopath. We can make a good guess from simply looking at someone’s face or briefly
interacting with them. Unfortunately, psychopaths know we know this.
They fight back by working
hard on their clothing and grooming to try and make a good first
impression.
As innovations
shape our societies, prosocial psychopaths can change the world for all of us
Thankfully, most
people have no
psychopathic traits. Only 0.5% of people could
be deemed psychopaths. Yet around 8% of male and 2%
of female prisoners are psychopaths.
But not all psychopaths are
dangerous. Anti-social psychopaths may seek thrills from drugs or dangerous
activities. Prosocial
psychopaths, on the other hand, seek their thrills in the fearless
pursuit of novel ideas. As innovations shape
our societies, prosocial psychopaths can change the world for all of
us. Yet this still can be for both good and for ill.
Where do these traits come from?
No one really knows why some
people are sadistic. Some speculate that sadism is an adaptation that helped us slaughter animals
when hunting. Others propose it
helped people to gain power.
Italian philosopher and
diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli once
suggested that “the times, not men, create disorder”. Consistent
with this, neuroscience suggests sadism could be a survival tactic triggered by
times becoming tough. When certain foods become scarce, our levels of the
neurotransmitter, serotonin, fall.
This fall makes us more
willing to harm others because harming becomes more
pleasurable.
Psychopathy may
also be an adaptation. Some studies have linked higher levels of
psychopathy to greater
fertility. Yet others have found the opposite.
The reason for this may be that psychopaths have a reproductive advantage
specifically in harsh
environments.
Indeed, psychopathy can
thrive in unstable, competitive worlds. Psychopaths’ abilities make them master
manipulators. Their impulsivity and lack of fear help them take risks and grab
short-term gains. In the film Wall Street, the psychopathic Gordon Gekko
makes millions. Yet although psychopathy may be an advantage in the corporate world, it
only offers men a slim
leadership edge.
Psychopathy’s link to
creativity may also explain its survival. The mathematician Eric
Weinstein argues, more generally, that disagreeable
people drive innovation. Yet, if your environment supports creative
thinking, disagreeableness
is less strongly linked to creativity. The nice can be novel.
Sadism and psychopathy are
associated with other traits, such as narcissism and Machiavellianism.
Such traits, taken together, are called the “dark factor of
personality” or D-factor for short.
Research shows
that if someone breaks a social norm, our brains treat their faces as less
human
There is a moderate to large
hereditary component to these traits. So some people may just be
born this way. Alternatively, high D-factor parents could pass these
traits onto their children by behaving abusively towards them.
Similarly, seeing
others behave in high D-factor ways may teach us to act this way.
We all have a role to play in reducing cruelty.
Fear and dehumanisation
Sadism involves enjoying
another person’s humiliation and hurt. Yet it is often said
that dehumanising
people is what allows us to be cruel. Potential victims are
labelled as dogs, lice or cockroaches, allegedly making it easier for others to
hurt them.
There is something to this.
Research shows that if someone breaks a social norm, our brains treat their faces as less human.
This makes it easier for
us to punish people who violate norms of behaviour.
It is a sweet sentiment to
think that if we see someone as human then we won’t hurt them. It is also a
dangerous delusion. The psychologist Paul Bloom argues our worst cruelties may
rest on not dehumanising
people. People may hurt others precisely because they
recognise them as human beings who don’t want to suffer pain,
humiliation or degradation.
For example, the Nazi Party
dehumanised Jewish people by calling them vermin and lice.
Yet the Nazis also humiliated, tortured and murdered Jews precisely
because they
saw them as humans who would be degraded and suffer from such
treatment.
Do-gooder derogation
Sometimes people will even
harm the helpful. Imagine you are playing an economic game in
which you and other players have the chance to invest in a group fund. The more
money is paid into it, the more it pays out. And the fund will pay out money to
all players, whether they have invested or not.
At the end of the game, you
can pay to punish other players for how much they chose to invest. To do so,
you give up some of your earnings and money is taken away from the player of
your choice. In short, you can be spiteful.
Some players chose to punish
others who invested little or nothing in the group fund. Yet some will pay to
punish players who
invested more in the group fund than they did.
Such acts seem to make no sense. Generous players give you a greater
pay-out – why would you dissuade them?
One study found
that allowing people to express a dislike of vegetarians led them to become
less supportive of eating meat
This phenomenon is called
“do-gooder derogation”. It can be found around the world. In hunter-gatherer
societies, successful hunters are criticised for catching a
big animal even though their catch means everyone gets more meat.
Hillary Clinton may
have suffered do-gooder derogation as a result of her rights-based
2016 US Presidential Election campaign.
Do-gooder derogation exists because of our
counter-dominant tendencies. A less generous player in the economic
game above may feel that a more generous player will be seen by others as a
preferable collaborator. The more generous person is threatening to
become dominant. As the French writer Voltaire put it, the best is the enemy of
the good.
Yet there is a hidden upside
of do-gooder derogation. Once we have pulled down the do-gooder, we are more open to their message.
One study found that allowing people to express a dislike of vegetarians led
them to become less
supportive of eating meat. Shooting, crucifying or failing to elect the
messenger may encourage their message to be accepted.
Cruel to be kind
In the film Whiplash, a
music teacher uses cruelty to encourage greatness in one of his
students. We may recoil at such tactics. Yet the German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche thought we had become too
averse to such cruelty.
For Nietzsche, cruelty
allowed a teacher to burn a critique into another, for the other person’s own
good. People could also be cruel to themselves to help become the person they
wanted to be. Nietzsche felt suffering cruelty could help develop courage,
endurance and creativity. Should we be more willing to make both others and
ourselves suffer to develop virtue?
Arguably not. We now know
the potentially appalling long-term effects of suffering cruelty from others,
including damage to both physical and mental health.
The benefits
of being compassionate towards oneself, rather than treating oneself
cruelly, are also increasingly recognised.
And the idea that we must suffer
to grow is questionable. Positive life events, such as falling in love, having
children and achieving cherished goals can lead to growth.
Teaching through cruelty
invites abuses of power and selfish sadism. It isn’t the only way – Buddhism,
for example, offers an alternative: wrathful
compassion. Here, we act from love to confront others to protect them
from their greed, hatred and fear. Life can be cruel, truth can be cruel, but
we can choose not to be.
* Simon
McCarthy-Jones is an associate professor in clinical psychology and
neuropsychology at Trinity College Dublin.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201016-why-some-people-are-cruel-to-others
The Fear Factor: How One
Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between
How the brains of psychopaths and heroes show that humans are wired to be good
At fourteen, Amber could boast of killing her guinea pig, threatening to burn
down her home, and seducing men in exchange for gifts. She used the tools she
had available to get what she wanted, like all children. But unlike other
children, she didn't care about the damage she inflicted. A few miles away,
Lenny Skutnik cared so much about others that he jumped into an ice-cold river
to save a drowning woman. What is responsible for the extremes of generosity
and cruelty humans are capable of? By putting psychopathic children and extreme
altruists in an fMRI, acclaimed psychologist Abigail Marsh found that the
answer lies in how our brain responds to others' fear. While the brain's
amygdala makes most of us hardwired for good, its variations can explain heroic
and psychopathic behavior.
A path-breaking read, The Fear Factor is essential for anyone
seeking to understand the heights and depths of human nature.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35142874
The Laws of Human Nature :
by
Robert Greene
The Biology of Kindness
Six Daily Choices for Health, Well-Being, and Longevity
By Immaculata
De Vivo and Daniel
Lumera
How kindness—and other prosocial behaviors toward others—can help us
live longer and healthier lives.
The
science is in: being good is actually good for you. In this bracingly original
book, The Biology of Kindness—the first in a trilogy on the topic
of daily wellness—the science of mindfulness and the findings of biology come
together to show how kindness and optimism improve overall well-being in
profound, organic, and demonstrable ways. Daniel Lumera, an expert in
meditation and mindfulness, and Immaculata De Vivo, a preeminent researcher in
molecular epidemiology, outline a revolutionary approach to health, longevity,
and quality of life—and explain the scientific evidence that supports their
work.
Identifying
five fundamental values—kindness, optimism, forgiveness, gratitude, and
happiness—and describing six essential strategies for cultivating these
values—relationships, nutrition, physical activity, meditation, music, and
connection with nature—De Vivo and Lumera chart a practical course for pursuing
a long, healthy, and happy life. Along the way they provide the scientific data
that reveal the impact such behavior has on biology, particularly on telomeres,
the parts of DNA that serve as biomarkers of aging. While DNA is mostly
immutable, telomeres are influenced by our choices, and The Biology of
Kindness offers incontrovertible evidence that what is commonly
ascribed to “spiritual” well-being has a clear and direct impact on physical
health, helping to buffer premature aging and decrease the incidence of chronic
disease.
At
a time when life seems to be ruled by a desire to get “everything and
immediately,” Lumera observes, there is a compelling case to be made for the
discipline of devotion, dedication, and passion—for the good of the body as
well as the soul.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547659/the-biology-of-kindness/
Nav komentāru:
Ierakstīt komentāru