The Collisions of Good and Evil in Human Minds

                                                                         Veritas odium parit

 

                                                  

              

The Collisions of Good and Evil in Human Minds

(Why do people keep destroying each other ?!)

There is both good and evil living in each of us. There is a light and a dark side of personality. It is the realities of the surrounding life, external conditions, daily routine and culture that enhance morality or undermine it, determining the predominance of some or other personality traits.

          To begin with, it is essential to realise the need for evaluating oneself in order to understand one’s true nature. In order to find the motivation to dismiss the illusions about one’s perfection, consciousness of a know-it-all and rightness of one’s conduct stemming from self-indulgence. In order to comprehend the narrow-mindedness of self-righteousness and the groundlessness of arrogance. The illusory nature of imaginary superiority, creating a fictitious right to regulate fellow citizens, to impose one’s own visions on them and to assume the functions of an indisputable judge, blaming others, but not seeing and not noticing one’s own imperfections, not wanting to critically evaluate the results and consequences of one’s actions.

           Disdain for fellow citizens, their depreciation and humiliation because of their beliefs, faith, race, nationality or social status, and aggressive behaviour always cause a negative backlash, even if it remains in a latent form and is not shown openly. Such manifestations in a socially fragmented, hierarchical society often become an example (not) to be followed.... Read more: https://www.amazon.com/HOW-GET-RID-SHACKLES-TOTALITARIANISM-ebook/dp/B0C9543B4L/ref=sr_1_1?crid=19WW1TG75ZU79&keywords=HOW+TO+GET+RID+OF+THE+SHACKLES+OF+TOTALITARIANISM&qid=1687700500&s=books&sprefix=how+to+get+rid+of+the+shackles+of+totalitarianism%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C181&sr=1-1

          

How evil happens

Why some people choose to do evil remains a puzzle, but are we starting to understand how this behaviour is triggered?

Noga Arikha

is a historian of ideas, particularly interested in the relation between mind and body, and in tracing the genealogy of the concepts that pertain to it. She has taught at Bard College, was on the advisory board for Prospect Magazine, and was chair of liberal studies at the Paris College of Art. Her essays have been published in Lapham's Quarterly and Architectural Digest, and she is the author of Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours(2007).

In 1941, en route from a ghetto to a concentration camp in Ukraine, a Nazi soldier beat my grandfather to death. My father witnessed this murder. His is just one of millions of similar stories, of course, and I grew up aware of how death hovered on the other side of life, and brutality on the underside of humanity. The ‘sapiens’ in Homo sapiens does not fully describe our species: we are as violent as we are smart. This might be why we are the only Homogenus left over in the first place, and why we have been so destructively successful at dominating our planet. But still the question nags away: how are ordinary people capable of such obscene acts of violence? 

This duality is also a puzzle to ourselves, at the heart of cosmologies, theologies and tragedies, the motor of moral codes and the tension at the heart of socio-political systems. We know light and we know dark. We are capable of doing terrible things, but also of asking ourselves contemplatively and creatively how that is. The self-consciousness that characterises the human mind is nowhere more baffling than in this problem of evil, which philosophers have been discussing since Plato. An obvious place to look for explanations of evil is in the patterns of behaviour that those who commit atrocities display.

This is what the neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried at the University of California, Los Angeles did with his article ‘Syndrome E’ (1997) in The Lancet. A syndrome is a group of biological symptoms that together constitute a clinical picture. And E stands for evil. With Syndrome E, Fried identified a cluster of 10 neuropsychological symptoms that are often present when evil acts are committed – when, as he puts it, ‘groups of previously nonviolent individuals’ turn ‘into repetitive killers of defenceless members of society’. The 10 neuropsychological symptoms are:

1. Repetition: the aggression is repeated compulsively.
2. Obsessive ideation: the perpetrators are obsessed with ideas that justify their aggression and underlie missions of ethnic cleansing, for instance that all Westerners, or all Muslims, or all Jews, or all Tutsis are evil.
3. Perseveration: circumstances have no impact on the perpetrator’s behaviour, who perseveres even if the action is self-destructive.
4. Diminished affective reactivity: the perpetrator has no emotional affect.
5. Hyperarousal: the elation experienced by the perpetrator is a high induced by repetition, and a function of the number of victims.
6. Intact language, memory and problem-solving skills: the syndrome has no impact on higher cognitive abilities.
7. Rapid habituation: the perpetrator becomes desensitised to the violence.
8. Compartmentalisation: the violence can take place in parallel to an ordinary, affectionate family life.
9. Environmental dependency: the context, especially identification with a group and obedience to an authority, determines what actions are possible.
10. Group contagion: belonging to the group enables the action, each member mapping his behaviour on the other. Fried’s assumption was that all these ways of behaving had underlying neurophysiological causes that were worth investigating.

Note that the syndrome applies to those previously normal individuals who become able to kill. It excludes the wartime, sanctioned killing by and of military recruits that leads many soldiers to return home (if they ever do) with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); recognised psychopathologies such as sociopathic personality disorder that can lead someone to shoot schoolchildren; and crimes of passion or the sadistic pleasure in inflicting pain. When Hannah Arendt coined her expression ‘the banality of evil’ in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), she meant that the people responsible for actions that led to mass murder can be ordinary, obeying orders for banal reasons, such as not losing their jobs. The very notion of ordinariness was tested by social psychologists. In 1971, the prison experiment by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University played with this notion that ‘ordinary students’ could turn into abusive mock ‘prison guards’ – though it was largely unfounded, given evidence of flaws in the never-replicated experiment. Still, those afflicted with Syndrome E are indeed ordinary insofar as that they are not affected by any evident psychopathology. The historian Christopher Browning wrote of equally ‘ordinary men’ in the 1992 book of that name (referenced by Fried) who became Nazi soldiers. The soldier who killed my grandfather was very probably an ordinary man too.

Today, biology is a powerful explanatory force for much human behaviour, though it alone cannot account for horror. Much as the neurosciences are an exciting new tool for human self-understanding, they will not explain away our brutishness. Causal accounts of the destruction that humans inflict on each other are best provided by political history – not science, nor metaphysics. The past century alone is heavy with atrocities of unfathomable scale, albeit fathomable political genesis. But it was the advent of ISIS and the surge in youthful, enthusiastic recruits to it that gave Fried’s hypothesis a new urgency, and prompted him to organise, with the neurophysiologist Alain Berthoz at the Collège de France in Paris, three conferences around Syndrome E that between 2015 and 2017 gathered cognitive neuroscientists, social psychologists, neurophysiologists, psychiatrists, terrorism specialists and jurists, some of whose theories and insights I share here. Syndrome E is a useful provocation to an innovative, interdisciplinary discussion of this old problem – and a powerful example of how to frame neuroscientific output in human terms. Already this approach is giving rise to interesting hypotheses and explanations.

Bottom of Form

As the brain’s functional anatomy reveals itself in increasingly precise ways, neuroscience is growing in its ability to address the complexities underlying our behaviour, violence included. But since we are evolved animals, to investigate the biological bases for behaviour is to look both at the embodied results of evolutionary time and at historical time – at how the evolved circuits of the brain are recruited by cultures, as well as producing cultures. Given that we evolved as inherently social, interactive creatures, neuroscience requires dialogue with other disciplines – the brain has not evolved in isolation, and action always takes place at a moment in time in a particular place with particular meaning. The psychological and cultural environment is central in determining whether and how given biological processes will play out. The traits enumerated by Fried thus encompass a combination of neurological and environmental conditions.

Central to Syndrome E is the symptom of ‘diminished affect’. Most people – except, precisely, psychopaths – shy away from or are extremely reluctant to inflict pain, let alone kill. As the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has shown, it takes brainwashing and coercion to dull our emotional response and to overcome our reticence to cross the line beyond which ‘habituation’ sets in – the Syndrome E symptom whereby the repetition of the act makes it easier to perform. Perpetrators of mass murder and torturers can also love and want the best for their children, while feeling nothing for their victims – an instance of the ‘compartmentalisation’ symptom of Syndrome E. This was probably the case for the anonymous Nazi soldier who killed my grandfather. Family belonging and social belonging are separate. When they meet, as happened in Bosnia and Rwanda when families turned on each other, the group identity prevails. Empathy is rarely universal.

The social neuroscientist Tania Singer at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig in Germany defines empathy as the ability to ‘resonate’ with the feelings of the other. It develops from babyhood on – as imitation at first, then joint attention – into the ability to adopt the point of view of another, along with a shift in spatial perception from self to other, as if one were literally stepping into another’s shoes. This requires an ability to distinguish between self and other in the first place, an aspect of the so-called ‘theory of mind’ that one acquires over the first five years of life. The developmental psychologist Philippe Rochat at Emory University in Atlanta has shown how children develop an ethical stance by that time as well, and become aware of how their actions can be perceived by others.

But while empathy ensures the cohesion of a group or a society, it is also biased and parochial. Revenge thrives on it. The social psychologist Emile Bruneau at the University of Pennsylvania has demonstrated how it is easily directed at an ‘in-group’ at the expense of an ‘out-group’ that can then be targeted as an enemy, and dehumanised. Its selectivity also explains how we can walk by a homeless person without feeling the need to offer help, or rejoice in nasty gossip about a disliked absentee. Inevitably, we all practise selective empathy, its absence manifest in everyday, non-lethal instances of violence that occur in social and family life, in business and politics. What the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge calls ‘empathy erosion’ in The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty(2011) is therefore not a sufficient ingredient in the outbreak of extreme violence. But it is a necessary one, opening the way to discrimination and ultimately genocide. As the social neuroscientist Jean Decety at the University of Chicago put it, ‘our hypersociality has a dark side’.

This developmental account can dispel, in part, the mystery of our two faces – of our ability at once to help each other and to kill each other, or to argue ourselves into ‘just wars’. In common with other hominins such as chimpanzees, we have evolved the capacity to cement relationships, communicate and cooperate with those in our immediate environment – and also to attack outsiders and members of other tribes. But our evolved self-consciousness is what defines our humanity even apart from other hominins. What remains puzzling is our continued ability to destroy even as we are able to understand ourselves and to create sophisticated scientific models of our own minds.

Under given circumstances, 70 per cent of a population can take part in crimes as part of a group

Neuroscience gives an interesting physiological model of the emotion of empathy as a complex, dynamic process that unites executive, premotor and sensorimotor functions. It recruits, in particular, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the orbitofrontal context (OFC), with which the vmPFC overlaps in part, and which is crucial for the processing of emotions generated in the amygdala – an evolutionary ancient structure within the limbic system. Lesion to the OFC impairs emotional feeling – and with it, decision-making. With his ‘somatic marker hypothesis’, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles has shown how bodily feelings that participate in signalling emotions, processed in the OFC and vmPFC, enable appropriate, socially situated decision-making, thereby informing our evaluations of the world, including our moral sense.

In the phenomenon of diminished affect, hyperactivity in these same areas of the frontal lobe inhibits activation of the amygdala. Studies have shown dysfunctional activity of the OFC in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. It thus might also be involved in the obsessive nature of ideas about one group that justify murderous intent against its members. And the sense of elated hyperarousal – such as that induced by cocaine – that entrains action upon these ideas involves processing in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). In short, in cases of Syndrome E emotional pathways in the brain no longer regulate judgment and action. A breakdown occurs in the feedback between the amygdala and higher, cognitive cortical structures. The acting self splits away from the feeling self, a phenomenon that Fried calls ‘cognitive fracture’. He believes that, under given circumstances, about 70 per cent of the population can be subject to it and be able to take part in crimes as part of a group – as might have happened in the Stanford prison experiment, despite caveats regarding its results.

The acting self of the individual with cognitive fracture feels no empathy. But empathy is not always a reliable guide to appropriate behaviour – we don’t feel empathy for the insects dying because of climate change, for instance, but we can decide rationally to act against the disaster. It can even lead to bad decisions with regard to those at whom it is directed – a surgeon who feels empathy for the patient under drapes should really not operate. There is such a thing as a surfeit of feeling. The psychologist Paul Bloom at Yale University has argued ‘against empathy’, in a 2016 book of that title and elsewhere, suggesting that ‘rational compassion’ is a better barometer with which to evaluate our environment and how we should act upon it. That is to say, members of a group whose mission is to kill its perceived enemies might have the ability for emotional empathy for their group, and no rational compassion for their perceived enemy.

An account of the inability to feel any emotion for such perceived enemies can take us closer to understanding what it is like to have crossed the line beyond which one can maim and kill in cold blood. Observers at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague note frequently the absence of remorse displayed by perpetrators. The clinical psychologist Françoise Sironi, who assesses perpetrators for the ICC and treats them and their victims, has directly seen what Lifton called the ‘murder of the self’ at work – notably with Kang Kek Iew, the man known as ‘Duch’, who proudly created and directed the Khmer Rouge S-21 centre for torture and extermination in Cambodia. Duch was one of those who felt absolutely no remorse. His sole identity was his role, dutifully kept up for fear of losing himself and falling into impotence. He did not comprehend what Sironi meant when she asked him: ‘What happened to your conscience?’ The very question was gibberish to him.

Along with what Fried calls this ‘catastrophic’ desensitisation to emotional cues, cognitive functions remain intact – another Syndrome E symptom. A torturer knows exactly how to hurt, in full recognition of the victim’s pain. He – usually he – has the cognitive capacity, necessary but not sufficient for empathy, to understand the victim’s experience. He just does not care about the other’s pain except instrumentally. Further, he does not care that he does not care. Finally, he does not care that caring does, in fact, matter. The emotionally inflected judgment that underlies the moral sense is gone.

Such a state involves the fusion of identity with a larger system within which occurs the splitting of the feeling self and the cognitive self, and the concomitant replacement of individual moral values with that system’s norms and rules. Chemistry is operative throughout, as it is in all cerebral and somatic functions – and tweakable by pharmaceuticals. The neuroscientist Trevor Robbins at the University of Cambridge has studied ‘pharmacoterrorism’, and how, for instance, the amphetamine Captagon – used, inter alia, by ISIS members – affects dopamine function, depletes serotonin in the OFC, and leads to rigid, psychopathic-like behaviour, increasing aggression and leading to the perseverance that Fried lists among the Syndrome E symptoms. It shuts off social attachment, and disables all emotional feeling (empathy included), a condition called alexithymia.

This is one simplified neurological account of how murderous action becomes possible. The neuroscience of value and action can help to further explain what might be going on. The OFC is exceptionally developed in humans and primates. As Edmund Rolls at the Oxford Centre for Computational Neuroscience has shown, it plays a crucial role in representing reward value in response to a stimulus: we make choices based on the assignation of value – to an object, an idea, an action, a norm, a person. Our emotions are value-rich, and our actions vary and can be updated according to how they are met in the world, in turn motivating us to seek or avoid a stimulus. Our behaviour can continue in the search of an absent reward – this would be one account of compulsive action, a Syndrome E symptom. The neuroscientist Mathias Pessiglione and his team in Paris have also shown a central role for vmPFC in value-attribution to a stimulus or an idea, whereby we choose to undertake an action based on its attractive reward or its aversive outcome. But when this function is overstimulated, new inputs – such as cries for mercy – have no impact on the attribution of value to the idea, for instance that ‘all you people deserve to die’, and action cannot change. It becomes automatic, controllable by an external agent or leader, independently of any sense of value.

Coercion switches off the sense of responsibility – a chilling finding

But these neurological events signify criminal action only under particular environmental circumstances. The psychiatrist David Cohen and his team at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris evaluated teenage candidates for radicalisation. They found that certain socio-psychological conditions in childhood – such as an absent father or an unstable mother, and a history of foster care – affected the development of identity, in some cases eventually leading to the need to subsume it into a wider group with a transcendental message. Again, group trumps family. As the anthropologist Scott Atran has shown, conflicts are often intractable and non-negotiable because they are conducted in the name of absolute, spiritual values – secular or religious – and not for any utilitarian outcome. These values can seem highly attractive – stronger than family ties.

In her novel Home Fire (2017), the British Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie showed how a loving, innocent but maladjusted and lost young man of Pakistani origin could fall prey to an ISIS recruiter’s siren call to rejoin a lost father and find fulfilment and belonging in a community depicted as devoted to a greater good. Our narratives, inner and outer, inform and justify the choices we make, conferring on them a coherence that is reassuring and can seem good and right. Coherence rides on the moral sense and masquerades as it, bringing on a cognitive dissonance ‘between what we think and what we do’, as Zimbardo once put it – between what we convince ourselves was an appropriate action, and our deeply held, prior beliefs. Shamsie’s character soon regrets his choice and tries to get away from a violence he cannot stomach, unable to withstand the cognitive dissonance. Not so Nazi doctors, say, who convinced themselves that they were acting for a greater good – in a perverse twist to the equivalence of morality with a concern for the good of others. Heinrich Himmler’s speech in Poznan in 1943 is a chilling instance of this high-minded justification of criminal behaviour: ‘We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who wanted to kill us.’ Once moral justification is divorced from an emotionally calibrated response to the other, violence can be deployed on rationalised grounds. This has happened time and again throughout history.

But ‘ordinary men’ must cross a line into that zone where the Syndrome E symptoms operate – pushed by circumstance. A noteworthy insight into what happens during the crossing is provided by the neuroscientist Patrick Haggard at University College London. He has shown how powerful is the initial coercion that allows us to step beyond the line. In the wake of the 1961 trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, who invoked the ‘Nuremberg Defence’ that he was ‘just obeying orders’ – so-called because it was first used by the Nazi defendants in the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46 – the psychologist Stanley Milgram at Yale University showed, or rather exaggeratedly claimed, that most people will obey orders from an authority even if the order is to harm another person. Milgram was interested in obedience. Haggard, who has been studying the sense of agency – the sense that we initiate and own our actions, which is central to our lives, and also to legal arguments about criminal accountability – asked instead what it feels like to be coerced and have one’s autonomy removed to some degree. Through an experiment that partly takes its cue from Milgram’s (but addresses some of its ethical and methodological issues) and uses the intentional binding effect, Haggard found that people do feel a notable reduction in their sense of agency when they are coerced into an action. Coercion switches off the sense of responsibility – a chilling finding.

The neurological correlates of what can lead to our worst actions do not indicate a clinical condition. Syndrome E is not a disease, nor quite a disorder eligible for integration into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Problems. If it were officialised as such, it would have intricate juridical ramifications: the use of neurological evidence in court is problematic, as the jurist Jean-Paul Costa, a former president of the European Court of Human Rights, has pointed out, because it requires the expert reading of imprecise and opaque data. It is hard to establish exactly which brain events – including those underlying the sense of agency – could or should constitute legally mitigating factors.

But introducing, as Fried has done, a set of features that characterise our most beastly nature, and kickstarting a wide-ranging discussion across the fields relevant to their study, particularly in the area of neuroscience, can only help to enrich programmes of prevention and remediation at a time when these are sorely needed. The devil might be dead, but evil actions will 

https://aeon.co/essays/is-neuroscience-getting-closer-to-explaining-evil-behaviour

The Light vs. Dark Triad of Personality: Contrasting Two Very Different Profiles of Human Nature:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00467/full?utm_source=S-TWT&utm_medium=SNET&utm_campaign=ECO_FPSYG_XXXXXXXX_auto-dlvrit;

https://scottbarrykaufman.com/lighttriadscale/

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

The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between

Abigail Marsh

 "A riveting ride through your own brain." --Adam Grant

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

 Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History

(Негодяи и ангелы: честный взгляд на добро и зло в христианской истории)

by John Dickson

Is religion a pernicious force in the world? Does it poison everything? Would we be better off without religion in general and Christianity in particular? Many skeptics certainly think so.

John Dickson has spent much of the last ten years reflecting on these difficult questions and on why so many doubters see Christianity as a major cause of harm not blessing. The skeptics, he concludes, are right: even a cursory look at the history of Christians reveals dark things therein--violence, bigotry, genocide, war, inquisition, oppression, imperialism, racism, corruption, greed, power, abuse. For centuries and even today, Christians have been among the worst bullies you could ever imagine.

But these skeptics are only partly right: this is not what Christianity was meant to be. When Christians do evil they are out of tune with the teachings of their Lord. Jesus gave the world a beautiful melody--of love, grace, charity, humility, non-violence, equality, human dignity--to which, tragically, his followers have more often than not been tone-deaf. Denying the evils of church history does not do. John Dickson gives an honest account of the mixed history of Christianity, the evil and the good. He concedes the Christians' complicity for centuries of bullying but also shows the myriad ways the beautiful melody of Christ has enriched our world and the lives of countless individuals. This book asks contemporary skeptics of religion to listen again to the melody of Jesus, despite the discord produced by too many Christians through history and today. It also leads contemporary believers into sober reflection on and repentance for their own participation in the tragic inconsistencies of Christendom and seeks to inspire them to live in tune with Christ.:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55918296-bullies-and-saints

 

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/

Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition 1st Edition

by Patricia Churchland

In her brilliant work Touching a Nerve, Patricia S. Churchland, the distinguished founder of neurophilosophy, drew from scientific research on the brain to understand its philosophical and ethical implications for identity, consciousness, free will, and memory. In Conscience, she explores how moral systems arise from our physical selves in combination with environmental demands.

All social groups have ideals for behavior, even though ethics vary among different cultures and among individuals within each culture. In trying to understand why, Churchland brings together an understanding of the influences of nature and nurture. She looks to evolution to elucidate how, from birth, our brains are configured to form bonds, to cooperate, and to care. She shows how children grow up in society to learn, through repetition and rewards, the norms, values, and behavior that their parents embrace.

Conscience delves into scientific studies, particularly the fascinating work on twins, to deepen our understanding of whether people have a predisposition to embrace specific ethical stands. Research on psychopaths illuminates the knowledge about those who abide by no moral system and the explanations science gives for these disturbing individuals.

Churchland then turns to philosophy—that of Socrates, Aquinas, and contemporary thinkers like Owen Flanagan—to explore why morality is central to all societies, how it is transmitted through the generations, and why different cultures live by different morals. Her unparalleled ability to join ideas rarely put into dialogue brings light to a subject that speaks to the meaning of being human.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41817561-conscience

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 Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

by Philip Zimbardo 

 The Lucifer Effect explains how—and the myriad reasons why—we are all susceptible to the lure of “the dark side.” Drawing on examples from history as well as his own trailblazing research, Zimbardo details how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women. 

Here, for the first time and in detail, Zimbardo tells the full story of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the landmark study in which a group of college-student volunteers was randomly divided into “guards” and “inmates” and then placed in a mock prison environment. Within a week the study was abandoned, as ordinary college students were transformed into either brutal, sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners.
By illuminating the psychological causes behind such disturbing metamorphoses, Zimbardo enables us to better understand a variety of harrowing phenomena, from corporate malfeasance to organized genocide to how once upstanding American soldiers came to abuse and torture Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib. He replaces the long-held notion of the “bad apple” with that of the “bad barrel”—the idea that the social setting and the system contaminate the individual, rather than the other way around.
This is a book that dares to hold a mirror up to mankind, showing us that we might not be who we think we are. While forcing us to reexamine what we are capable of doing when caught up in the crucible of behavioral dynamics, though, Zimbardo also offers hope. We are capable of resisting evil, he argues, and can even teach ourselves to act heroically. Like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, The Lucifer Effect is a shocking, engrossing study that will change the way we view human behavior.

https://www.amazon.com/Lucifer-Effect-Understanding-Good-People/dp/0812974441

 Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice

by Martha C. Nussbaum

 How can we achieve and sustain a decent liberal society, one that aspires to justice and equal opportunity for all and inspires individuals to sacrifice for the common good? In this book, a continuation of her explorations of emotions and the nature of social justice, Martha Nussbaum makes the case for love. Amid the fears, resentments, and competitive concerns that are endemic even to good societies, public emotions rooted in love--in intense attachments to things outside our control--can foster commitment to shared goals and keep at bay the forces of disgust and envy.

Great democratic leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., have understood the importance of cultivating emotions. But people attached to liberalism sometimes assume that a theory of public sentiments would run afoul of commitments to freedom and autonomy. Calling into question this perspective, Nussbaum investigates historical proposals for a public civil religion or religion of humanity by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Rabindranath Tagore. She offers an account of how a decent society can use resources inherent in human psychology, while limiting the damage done by the darker side of our personalities. And finally she explores the cultivation of emotions that support justice in examples drawn from literature, song, political rhetoric, festivals, memorials, and even the design of public parks.
Love is what gives respect for humanity its life, Nussbaum writes, making it more than a shell. Political Emotionsis a challenging and ambitious contribution to political philosophy.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23502943-political-emotions

How to be perfect

A Foolproof Guide to Making The Correct Moral Decision in Every Situation You Ever Encounter Anywhere on Earth, Forever

Michael Schur

 How can we live a more ethical life?

This question has plagued people for thousands of years, but it's never been tougher to answer than it is now, thanks to challenges great and small that flood our day-to-day lives and threaten to overwhelm us with impossible decisions and complicated results with unintended consequences.
Plus, being anything close to an 'ethical person' requires daily thought and introspection and hard work; we have to think about how we can be good not, you know, once a month, but literally all the time.
To make it a little less overwhelming, this fascinating, accessible and funny book by one of our generation's best writers and adept minds in television comedy, Michael Schur, boils down the whole confusing morass with real life dilemmas (from 'should I punch my friend in the face for no reason?' to 'can I still enjoy great art if it was created by terrible people?'), so that we know how to deal with ethical dilemmas. Much as Chidi used humour and philosophy to make Eleanor a less selfish person, Schur takes us on a journey through the 2,500-year discussion of ethics, sketching a roadmap for how we ought to act along the way.
By the time the book is done, we'll know exactly how to act in every conceivable situation, so as to produce a verifiably maximal amount of moral good. We will be perfect, and all our friends will be jealous. OK, not quite. Instead, we'll gain fresh, funny, inspiring wisdom on the toughest issues we face every day
With contributions from Professor Todd May of Clemson University, who served as an advisor on The Good Place, this is a brilliant, clever and hugely entertaining book about one of the most important topics in the world.
'The problem is, if all you care about in the world is the velvet rope, you will always be unhappy, no matter which side you're on.' - Tahani Al-Jamil, The Good Place

https://www.amazon.com/How-Perfect-Correct-Question-creator/dp/1529421322

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

By Pinker Steven

Believe it or not, today we may be living in the most peaceful moment in our species' existence. In his gripping and controversial new work, New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows that despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history. Exploding myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly enlightened world. : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13543093-the-better-angels-of-our-nature

 Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain

by Michael Gazzaniga

The author of Human, Michael S. Gazzaniga has been called the “father of cognitive neuroscience.” In his remarkable book, Who’s in Charge?, he makes a powerful and provocative argument that counters the common wisdom that our lives are wholly determined by physical processes we cannot control. His well-reasoned case against the idea that we live in a “determined” world is fascinating and liberating, solidifying his place among the likes of Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio, V.S. Ramachandran, and other bestselling science authors exploring the mysteries of the human brain:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11976774-who-s-in-charge-free-will-and-the-science-of-the-brain

 SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE. THE NEW SCIENCE OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

By D. Goleman

Author Daniel Goleman explores the manner in which the brain is designed to engage in brain-to-brain “hookups” with others, and how these interactions affect both our social interactions and physical/mental well being. Based upon conceptualizations pioneered by Edward Thorndike, Goleman analyzes a traditional concept of social intelligence for the purpose of developing a revised model that consists of two categories: Social awareness (e.g., assessing the feelings of others) and social facility (e.g., awareness of how people present themselves). Goleman also explores advances in neuroscience that have made it possible for scientists and psychologists to study the ways in which emotions and biology work together. 

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Social-Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence Why It Can Matter More Than IQ

By Daniel Goleman

https://www.academia.edu/37329006/Emotional_Intelligence_Why_it_Can_Matter_More_Than_IQ_ 

 The Laws of Human Nature :

by Robert Greene

https://sites.google.com/a/minahbook.web.app/download-pdf-m28n/-pdf-download-the-laws-of-human-nature---robert-greene

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--and How to Make It Work for You

by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

 In this indispensable guide to navigating the twenty-first century, two visionary thinkers reveal the unexpected ways power is changing--and how "new power" is reshaping politics, business, and life.:

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35484894-new-power  

 Hal Hershfield

  On the relationship between positive and negative affect: Their correlation and their co-occurrence

Meaningful endings and mixed emotions: The double-edged sword of reminiscence on good times