Gyroscopic Investing

doodle wrote: My perspective is that if you murder and rape you are the perfect example of a person with a mental illness. A mentally healthy individual in my opinion does not engage in such behavior. Whether they should be expunged or not is another topic I guess...I'm generally opposed to it for many of the reasons MT cited, but I don't have exceptionally strong feelings on the matter. I'm more concerned with where this behavior comes from and why it emerges in some individuals than with the question of what to do once it does. I find the act of judging someone as "evil" a highly unscientific stance to take in the 21st century. There must be a causative reason for these behaviors...

RuralEngineer wrote:

doodle wrote: My perspective is that if you murder and rape you are the perfect example of a person with a mental illness. A mentally healthy individual in my opinion does not engage in such behavior. Whether they should be expunged or not is another topic I guess...I'm generally opposed to it for many of the reasons MT cited, but I don't have exceptionally strong feelings on the matter. I'm more concerned with where this behavior comes from and why it emerges in some individuals than with the question of what to do once it does. I find the act of judging someone as "evil" a highly unscientific stance to take in the 21st century. There must be a causative reason for these behaviors...

So you ascribe all harmful behavior to mental illness?  My, there's a lot of mentally ill people in the world then.  There's a difference between deviant behavior and mental illness.

For example, no one can argue that the Nazi's who ran the death camps in WWII weren't murderers.  They were exterminating people who did them no harm based purely on ethnic, religious, or other criteria such as disabilities.  However, I've never heard anyone argue that every SS officer involved in the extermination of the millions of Jews, Roma, disabled, and other individuals was mentally ill.

Modern science and psychologists seem to be able to tell the difference between someone who is committing murders because there's a wretched person, scum, not fit to live (in my opinion), and someone who is actually mentally ill. 

The idea that all violent crimes are only committed by mentally ill people sounds more like a fantasy born from the refusal to accept that a human could choose to do such horrible things than anything based in reality.  Do you have any evidence or research to back up such a claim?  If only mentally ill people commit murders and rapes, what about all the other crimes?  What about child molestation?  What about in cultures where it's not considered to be a crime?  Are they only mentally ill in certain parts of the world or certain cultures?  Maybe it's the drinking water.

One of my biggest pet peeves about many story villains is that they walk around twisting the ends of their mustaches and declaring that they are the bad guys. In reality, most people involved in evil behavior don’t see that behavior as evil. 

In a conflict, each side sees itself as good and justified and the enemy as evil. In fact, you can argue that the only real thing that differentiates a protagonist from an antagonist is that the author is taking the protagonist’s side and showing his or her justifications rather than the justifications of the antagonist.

In a conflict, the enemy is painted to seem horrible. WWII propaganda fascinates me because each side is vilifying the other. American propaganda shows a swastika-bearing boot crushing a church, or a swastika-bearing arm stabbing a dagger through the Bible. Meanwhile, the Nazis were painting Hitler as a Christ-like figure wearing a cross and bearing a sword to vanquish the evil dragons representing Germany’s enemies. 

“The face of evil is no one’s face,”? writes Roy Baumeister in his book Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. “It is always a false image that is imposed or projected on the opponent.”? And philosopher Hannah Arendt said, “The most horrifying things about the Nazis was not that they were so deviant but that they were terrifyingly normal.”?

Pure evil, argues Baumeister, is just a myth.

Psychologist Albert Bandura would probably agree. He theorized that people who do evil have justified the morality of their actions to themselves in some way. By convincing themselves their behavior is moral, these people can separate and disengage themselves from immoral behavior and its consequences.

 Bandura said that there were four different approaches to “disengaging internal control.”?

1. Redefine the behavior

 Redefining the behavior is a manner of changing perspective so one’s behavior seems less reprehensible than heroic. Many hate groups use this approach; so did a great deal of WWII propaganda.  For example, while most people believe that hatred and killing are generally wrong, hating and destroying something you have defined as evil is a whole different ball game. (Bandura called this “moral justification.”?) This calls to mind that old ethical dilemma—if you could travel back in time and kill Hitler as a baby (and theoretically save millions of lives in the process), would you do it?

I Googled around to see what people online have said about it, and the majority seem to be for killing baby Hitler. What’s interesting about the dilemma that a lot of people don’t point out is that Hitler was not the only person responsible for WWII, the Holocaust, and related atrocities. It also assumes that Hitler was evil incarnate from the cradle, and that environment had little or no influence on what he became. But then, it’s much easier to redefine your behavior as moral and good when things are black and white.

2. Disregard or distort the consequences of behavior

Minimizing, distorting, or disregarding the pain one’s actions create for others certainly reduces feelings of guilt for harming others. When I was collecting propaganda to talk about stereotyping, prejudice, and hatred for my classes, I discovered Ferris State University’s Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia (the goal of which is to teach tolerance). I was astonished by the number of images of slaves looking—or even saying—they were happy to be in the positions they were in.

3. Dehumanize or blame the victims

In many cases, the propaganda identifies the happy-looking slaves mentioned with the n word. Epithets like this are used to dehumanize people who are being mistreated. As Roy Fox writes in his article Salespeak (printed in the book Common Culture: Reading and Writing about American Popular Culture, 5th ed), “Names [are] sacred: they communicate the essence of our identity, not just to others but to ourselves as well. To rob someone of her name was to appropriate her identity, to deny her existence.”?

4. Displace or diffuse responsibility

Rather than taking personal blame for evil, many people blame a larger group or organization. Over and over in history, people who have committed atrocities blame the orders they were given, and because they believe that following orders was the greater good, they feel little or no guilt for their actions.

 During the Nuremburg trials, for example, individuals who personally ushered Jewish people into gas chambers and killed them passed off personal responsibility by arguing that they had not done evil … they had simply been following orders. William Calley, who was convicted for his role in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, stated during his testimony that “I carried out the orders that I was given, and I do not feel wrong in doing so.”? In a talk I saw Philip Zimbardo do on his book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, he said that the soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture  were also following orders. “The only thing they were not told to do,”? he said, “was take pictures.”?

All of this is to say that reprehensible acts are often disguised by intentions people have convinced themselves are good. So when you create your story villains, don't show your villain twisting his mustache ... show him arguing that his evil behavior was all for the good. He might well be wrong, but he will certainly be acting like a real villain.

Ad Orientem wrote:

doodle wrote:

Not all murderers and rapists have mental illness.  Sometimes bad people are just animals that need to be expunged from society.

My perspective is that if you murder and rape you are the perfect example of a person with a mental illness. A mentally healthy individual in my opinion does not engage in such behavior. Whether they should be expunged or not is another topic I guess...I'm generally opposed to it for many of the reasons MT cited, but I don't have exceptionally strong feelings on the matter. I'm more concerned with where this behavior comes from and why it emerges in some individuals than with the question of what to do once it does. I find the act of judging someone as "evil" a highly unscientific stance to take in the 21st century. There must be a causative reason for these behaviors...

For someone who has hinted at a lack of religious belief you have an almost Calvinist approach to this subject. The only real difference being that you are replacing Calvin's divine predestination with his elect and damned, with a modern psychological construct. Either way though you end up repudiating free will.

Science as I understand it however has not embraced this point of view. Some people really are evil by choice.

RuralEngineer wrote: The fact that the Nazi's didn't recognize that rounding people up based on ethnicity or religion and then gassing them was wrong further reinforces my point that such individuals are animals, not humans.  Whether the murderers and child molesters we have locked up at this moment have rationalized their behavior to themselves is irrelevant.  What matters is that their victims are still dead, raped, or molested.  Human beings don't have to rationalize away such behavior because they understand that it's wrong to molest a child and it's wrong to go around murdering innocent people. 

As for evil being in the eye of the beholder, that's true.  And if we were talking about adultery, underage drinking, or some other crime we might have a meaningful discussion.  But this is about capital crimes.  Murder.  It's universally condemned.  Except for a few nuts in the Middle East and some modern Nazi's scattered about, everyone who knows about the Holocaust condemns what the Nazi's did as evil.  As the perpetrators, their opinion doesn't really matter and that's why we the masterminds we were able to catch.

doodle wrote: Humans are animals though. There is a fossil record to prove that. Homo sapiens is just one particular species that evolved from apes....there have been many others, homo erectus, Neanderthals etc.

RE, why in this thread are you so morally outraged about how universally wrong it is for the nazis to gas civilians, but in the case of Syria so unwilling to do anything to stop the behavior that you so vehemently condemn? If something is so wrong that it transcends cultures, then it shouldn't matter if the person being gassed or murdered is your next door neighbor or on the other side of the world, no?