On monsters....

[conuly]

It's time for this rant again.

I keep hearing that Hitler was a monster. No, don't do anything to attempt to understand what went on in the Holocaust, Hitler was simply a monster.

As nice, pat answers go, it's pretty good - bad things happen because of monsters. As explanations go... not so much. Yup, millions of people died because one person was a monster. No reason, he just was. It happens, let's move on.

Huh?

As I see it, there are two problems with this argument. By calling him a monster, we've effectively removed him from humanity (we couldn't be like that, we couldn't harm people like that, we're not monsters) and absolved him, to an extent, of his crimes (oh, he was a monster. Yes, it was evil, but he was a monster. What could be done?). He's not a person who was responsible for monstrous things, he's just not human at all.

But that can't be true. If we are to accept the proposition that Hitler was simply a monster, we either have to believe that he was born evil, at which point we're treading very close to our own bits of racism (Hitler was born evil, some people can be born evil, maybe that can be predicted, maybe certain groups are more prone to being evil....) or else we're saying that there was some point at which we can clearly say "Hitler isn't a person anymore, he's just a monster". Like, what? One day he was a good guy, bit of a crap artist, and the next he wakes up and says "Just for fun, I'm going to start killing people, see how many I can get away with!"? I don't think so.

The man was a person, just like the rest of us, though we would like to distance ourselves from that. He made choices every day which led him, in the end, to be responsible for atrocities.

And there's the other thing. So we say "Hitler was a monster". Okay. Well, what about all the other high-ranking Nazis? They were monsters too, right? And what about the people who actually got their hands dirty doing the work? They were monsters - how could they not be? And now that we've said that, what about those responsible for other genocides, the ones that happen with depressing regularity in this world of ours?

How many monsters can humanity have?

We can keep by this arbitrary standard - those who do a certain amount of harm are monsters, perhaps? - but that doesn't do anything to actually stop the harm. Why do atrocities happen? "Well, some people are monsters. Hitler was a monster, and so are the people responsible for Darfur, and...."

No.

The nice, pat answer isn't the good answer. It's the answer that absolves us (and to an extent, the guilty) for any responsibility in these crimes. The Holocaust - couldn't be stopped, Hitler was a monster. Yeah - a monster who got 10% of the German population to listen to him, and others to follow along. I don't buy that answer. I can't - maybe if we'd paid more attention to the conditions in Germany at the time, maybe if we paid more attention in the rest of the world now, maybe we could stop breeding these "monsters", stop these problems before they start.

But you can't do that if you attribute problems to the fact that some people (who are nothing like you or yours could ever be, which, given the sheer amount of genocide I know about, I *highly* doubt) are inexplicably monsters.

I don't know the conditions that would lead people to participate in genocide. I don't know the conditions that would even lead people to participate in other forms of bigotry. I don't know how to stop this. I *do* know that stopping it means understanding it - and understanding it means standing up and saying "Look, genocide? Monstrous, but it's still the act of human beings. Any act of bigotry you can imagine, big or small? It's all the work of humans." It means coming to the situation with the attitude that the people involved are, in fact, people - their motivations can be understood, they can stop harming others, they can change.

You can't change monsters, can't stop monsters. But you can change humans. Not sure how, yet - give me some time - but you can change the prejudices of ordinary humans *before* they reach the point where they're harming others.

Comments

[darkpoole.livejournal.com]

Genocide really isn't all that difficult. First, you dehumanize the victims. Humans do that in war all the time; you aren't fighting other humans, you're fighting them. The other. Fill in the racial or ethnic epithet of your choice. Pure bigotry. This goes beyond the "kill or be killed" mentality that makes soldiers pull triggers on the battlefield (for both sides, that's defense of yourself and your comrades first, promotion of your side's objective second). This is what leads to atrocities like massive rape and infanticide by conquerors; show your contempt for the entire race/nation/culture by raping all all of "their" women. This helps justify torture and mass imprisonment.

Add some ideological gloss to the dehumanization, some "ends justify the means" crap about building a better future (for your side, anyway), and getting "them" out of the way is an unfortunate necessity, but hey -- can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? And it's not like killing "them" is actually murder or anything, because "they" are just a bunch of evil filthy fill-in-the-dehumanizing-epithet-here.

As you noted, it doesn't take everyone. Get ten percent of the people to buy in to your world view, make sure that you have all the guns (that's a broad metaphor), then get most of the rest of the population to look the other way for reasons of fear or selfishness or simple unwillingess to acknowledge the evil.

I would never participate in something like this. But I'm not a hero; if I knew it was happening, but I also knew the guys doing this had guns and the power and willingess to kill me if I spoke up, I'd probably keep quiet. Sure, I'd hide people in my attic or basement if the opportunity arose, but otherwise I'd keep my head down and wait for people braver than myself to make it go away.

As for bigotry? Tribalism. I think it's wired into a lot of people. You define yourself as part of a group, then define others as being outsiders. Your group is the best, of course.

Also, the world can be a confusing place, and imagining that you can lump a bunch of people into one category based on some short label is a way of trying to force some sense onto all of it. Think of how much easier it is to be able to know all you need to know about someone based on a single known or imagined characteristic, instead of having to go through the trouble of figuring out each person as an individual.

Bigotry is also a useful form of scapegoating. If you have problems in your life, or your community or your nation, you don't need to take any responsibility for them if the problems are caused by "them." What a wonderful thing to know ... all of your problems would be solved and the world would be a utopia if only "they" weren't around. So much more comfortable than acknowledging there is something wrong with yourself, and then fixing it. Just blame "them." A simple explanation for all that's wrong with the world, and a simple solution -- which under the wrong circumstances, can lead to genocide.

That's my four bits, anyway.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

You're making perfect sense. Also, once you start thinking of Hitler, and Stalin, and maybe even Saddam Hussein as monsters, you ignore any possibility that you could ever be like them. You remember the ruckus from back when Sen. Durbin of Illinois spoke up about Guantanamo (http://billmon.org/archives/001911.html)?

[conuly]

It's interesting you mention dehumanizing because, of course, that's exactly what has been done to Hitler, though with a different goal, I think.

THEY aren't like us, and WE aren't like him. Which does help to explain why Godwin's law happens....

[conuly]

Exactly.

And if you ignore the fact that you could be like them, how can you prevent that from happening in yourself?

[packbat.livejournal.com]

There's no way. That's part of the reason why I find our current U.S. executive office so scary. I think they're refusing to see the similarities between some of the actions they take and those taken by these others.

Which is, of course, why they made Durbin take back what he said.

[polydad.livejournal.com]

Makes perfect sense to me; we just need to take it farther. Premise: There are no monstrous *people*, only monstrous *actions.* We become monsters when we *act* like monsters. And we're afraid of this because there's a bit of monster in all of us.

When we try to discuss Hitler, Bush, and Hussein, we run into problems because large parts of our culture are still mired in the concept of retributive justice, which doesn't work. Inflicting as much suffering on Bush as he has caused to others is simply impossible; we'd have to torture him to death every week, then revivify him every Monday and start over again, for longer than he could possibly live. And even if we did so, it wouldn't lessen the suffering of any of the people he had killed, maimed or tortured, so doing so is completely pointless.

How do we, the good people, deal with other people who have allowed themselves to become monstrous? Good question; I'll work on it and get back to you.

best,

Joel

[raleighj.livejournal.com]

It's the answer that absolves us (and to an extent, the guilty) for any responsibility in these crimes...maybe if we'd paid more attention to the conditions in Germany at the time, maybe if we paid more attention in the rest of the world now, maybe we could stop breeding these "monsters", stop these problems before they start.

It's reminding me of Brothers Karamazov, actually -- my friend and I were puzzling the other day over what on earth Father Zosima meant by "every man must realize he is responsible for the sins of the world." (or something like that...can't find the exact quote).

The Hitler thing gets to me, too, from time to time -- I often just want to say, "Dammit -- he was a human being, with the same limitations and finiteness and biases we're all prone to -- and there but for the grace of God (or better social conditioning or whatever) are YOU."

(Though the conservative in me goes "eek! danger!" at the "you can change humans" part. To some degree, certainly...but new us/them categorizations (and rationalizations of harm) seem to always spring up in the place of old ones, and I don't see much of a way past them. ::sigh:: And the Christian in me says, "we're all broken icons, and there's fault running through the very heart of creation that won't be fixed till the eschaton").

[conuly]

You're right. I think that dividing the world into us/them is an integral part of being a (mostly) social species.

However, I also think that we can divide the world up more or less fuzzily, and with more or less negative reactions - dividing the world doesn't have to always end in genocide.

[leora.livejournal.com]

The above makes many good points. I'd also like to point out, many people do this. But ask someone within the field of psychology why the Holocaust happened, and you generally won't hear, "Hitler was a monster". You'll hear about Milgram's experiments that show thatr most people will kill someone if the person telling them to has sufficient authority and tells them it's in a good cause and that they (the person doing it) is not responsible but they (the experimenter) takes full responsibility for the consequences. Also the dehumanization, but that was covered well above. Milgram varied many factors, and dehumanization, such as putting the victim in a different room out of sight, makes it much easier to torture/kill them.

You'll also hear about Asch's (or is it Asche? it's been a while) experiments showing how difficult it is for someone to speak up with a dissenting view when there is a perceived unanimous opinion.

You might hear about Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, showing how people are highly prone to adopting the roles that they are given.

And yes, you might hear about psychopaths. A small percentage of the population actually is kind of monstrous. They have no concern for anyone's opinions but themselves, and the ones that get noticed are the ones who become serial killers. They are generally arrogant and viscious and actively different from all other humans, as best as is known. They actually could be described as monsters, and they are not like the average person. They will do things that most people will not. However, there is no evidence that I'm aware of that Hitler was a psychopath. And there is a lot of reason to believe that most of the people involved in the Holocaust were not psychopaths. They were acting the way most people will in teh circumstances they were put in. And that is what makes the Holocaust (or other genocides I know less about) so incredibly scary. Because they are people acting the way people are prone to act.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'd like to make some distinctions I feel I didn't put in there. The higher-ups who organized things were people... but they weren't under massive pressures to act in evil ways, and I feel justified in juding them for it. But it's the common people that make the situation so disgusting and horrifying. The masses of ordinairy people in Poland who cheered on the trains of people to be exterminated who knew that they were trainloads of people heading to torture and extermination.

And it's the latter people who acted the way most people will act under similar pressures. It's a scary part of humanity, but studying it helps us learn how to control evironments to make it happen less. And no, not everyone will act this way. We even know some of the factors that will cause people to not act that way. But whenever people are acting in a way that 50% or more people will in the same situation, I do not feel you can call the people monsters. You have to look at it as a societal/environmental problem. And, as you say, watch for such factors so we can try to change the situations precisely because it is so easy for people to get to a point where they are torturing and killing other people.

[darkpoole.livejournal.com]

Genocide really isn't all that difficult. First, you dehumanize the victims. Humans do that in war all the time; you aren't fighting other humans, you're fighting them. The other. Fill in the racial or ethnic epithet of your choice. Pure bigotry. This goes beyond the "kill or be killed" mentality that makes soldiers pull triggers on the battlefield (for both sides, that's defense of yourself and your comrades first, promotion of your side's objective second). This is what leads to atrocities like massive rape and infanticide by conquerors; show your contempt for the entire race/nation/culture by raping all all of "their" women. This helps justify torture and mass imprisonment.

Add some ideological gloss to the dehumanization, some "ends justify the means" crap about building a better future (for your side, anyway), and getting "them" out of the way is an unfortunate necessity, but hey -- can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? And it's not like killing "them" is actually murder or anything, because "they" are just a bunch of evil filthy fill-in-the-dehumanizing-epithet-here.

As you noted, it doesn't take everyone. Get ten percent of the people to buy in to your world view, make sure that you have all the guns (that's a broad metaphor), then get most of the rest of the population to look the other way for reasons of fear or selfishness or simple unwillingess to acknowledge the evil.

I would never participate in something like this. But I'm not a hero; if I knew it was happening, but I also knew the guys doing this had guns and the power and willingess to kill me if I spoke up, I'd probably keep quiet. Sure, I'd hide people in my attic or basement if the opportunity arose, but otherwise I'd keep my head down and wait for people braver than myself to make it go away.

As for bigotry? Tribalism. I think it's wired into a lot of people. You define yourself as part of a group, then define others as being outsiders. Your group is the best, of course.

Also, the world can be a confusing place, and imagining that you can lump a bunch of people into one category based on some short label is a way of trying to force some sense onto all of it. Think of how much easier it is to be able to know all you need to know about someone based on a single known or imagined characteristic, instead of having to go through the trouble of figuring out each person as an individual.

Bigotry is also a useful form of scapegoating. If you have problems in your life, or your community or your nation, you don't need to take any responsibility for them if the problems are caused by "them." What a wonderful thing to know ... all of your problems would be solved and the world would be a utopia if only "they" weren't around. So much more comfortable than acknowledging there is something wrong with yourself, and then fixing it. Just blame "them." A simple explanation for all that's wrong with the world, and a simple solution -- which under the wrong circumstances, can lead to genocide.

That's my four bits, anyway.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

You're making perfect sense. Also, once you start thinking of Hitler, and Stalin, and maybe even Saddam Hussein as monsters, you ignore any possibility that you could ever be like them. You remember the ruckus from back when Sen. Durbin of Illinois spoke up about Guantanamo (http://billmon.org/archives/001911.html)?

[conuly]

It's interesting you mention dehumanizing because, of course, that's exactly what has been done to Hitler, though with a different goal, I think.

THEY aren't like us, and WE aren't like him. Which does help to explain why Godwin's law happens....

[conuly]

Exactly.

And if you ignore the fact that you could be like them, how can you prevent that from happening in yourself?

[packbat.livejournal.com]

There's no way. That's part of the reason why I find our current U.S. executive office so scary. I think they're refusing to see the similarities between some of the actions they take and those taken by these others.

Which is, of course, why they made Durbin take back what he said.

[polydad.livejournal.com]

Makes perfect sense to me; we just need to take it farther. Premise: There are no monstrous *people*, only monstrous *actions.* We become monsters when we *act* like monsters. And we're afraid of this because there's a bit of monster in all of us.

When we try to discuss Hitler, Bush, and Hussein, we run into problems because large parts of our culture are still mired in the concept of retributive justice, which doesn't work. Inflicting as much suffering on Bush as he has caused to others is simply impossible; we'd have to torture him to death every week, then revivify him every Monday and start over again, for longer than he could possibly live. And even if we did so, it wouldn't lessen the suffering of any of the people he had killed, maimed or tortured, so doing so is completely pointless.

How do we, the good people, deal with other people who have allowed themselves to become monstrous? Good question; I'll work on it and get back to you.

best,

Joel

[raleighj.livejournal.com]

It's the answer that absolves us (and to an extent, the guilty) for any responsibility in these crimes...maybe if we'd paid more attention to the conditions in Germany at the time, maybe if we paid more attention in the rest of the world now, maybe we could stop breeding these "monsters", stop these problems before they start.

It's reminding me of Brothers Karamazov, actually -- my friend and I were puzzling the other day over what on earth Father Zosima meant by "every man must realize he is responsible for the sins of the world." (or something like that...can't find the exact quote).

The Hitler thing gets to me, too, from time to time -- I often just want to say, "Dammit -- he was a human being, with the same limitations and finiteness and biases we're all prone to -- and there but for the grace of God (or better social conditioning or whatever) are YOU."

(Though the conservative in me goes "eek! danger!" at the "you can change humans" part. To some degree, certainly...but new us/them categorizations (and rationalizations of harm) seem to always spring up in the place of old ones, and I don't see much of a way past them. ::sigh:: And the Christian in me says, "we're all broken icons, and there's fault running through the very heart of creation that won't be fixed till the eschaton").

[conuly]

You're right. I think that dividing the world into us/them is an integral part of being a (mostly) social species.

However, I also think that we can divide the world up more or less fuzzily, and with more or less negative reactions - dividing the world doesn't have to always end in genocide.

[leora.livejournal.com]

The above makes many good points. I'd also like to point out, many people do this. But ask someone within the field of psychology why the Holocaust happened, and you generally won't hear, "Hitler was a monster". You'll hear about Milgram's experiments that show thatr most people will kill someone if the person telling them to has sufficient authority and tells them it's in a good cause and that they (the person doing it) is not responsible but they (the experimenter) takes full responsibility for the consequences. Also the dehumanization, but that was covered well above. Milgram varied many factors, and dehumanization, such as putting the victim in a different room out of sight, makes it much easier to torture/kill them.

You'll also hear about Asch's (or is it Asche? it's been a while) experiments showing how difficult it is for someone to speak up with a dissenting view when there is a perceived unanimous opinion.

You might hear about Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, showing how people are highly prone to adopting the roles that they are given.

And yes, you might hear about psychopaths. A small percentage of the population actually is kind of monstrous. They have no concern for anyone's opinions but themselves, and the ones that get noticed are the ones who become serial killers. They are generally arrogant and viscious and actively different from all other humans, as best as is known. They actually could be described as monsters, and they are not like the average person. They will do things that most people will not. However, there is no evidence that I'm aware of that Hitler was a psychopath. And there is a lot of reason to believe that most of the people involved in the Holocaust were not psychopaths. They were acting the way most people will in teh circumstances they were put in. And that is what makes the Holocaust (or other genocides I know less about) so incredibly scary. Because they are people acting the way people are prone to act.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'd like to make some distinctions I feel I didn't put in there. The higher-ups who organized things were people... but they weren't under massive pressures to act in evil ways, and I feel justified in juding them for it. But it's the common people that make the situation so disgusting and horrifying. The masses of ordinairy people in Poland who cheered on the trains of people to be exterminated who knew that they were trainloads of people heading to torture and extermination.

And it's the latter people who acted the way most people will act under similar pressures. It's a scary part of humanity, but studying it helps us learn how to control evironments to make it happen less. And no, not everyone will act this way. We even know some of the factors that will cause people to not act that way. But whenever people are acting in a way that 50% or more people will in the same situation, I do not feel you can call the people monsters. You have to look at it as a societal/environmental problem. And, as you say, watch for such factors so we can try to change the situations precisely because it is so easy for people to get to a point where they are torturing and killing other people.