The Worst Type of Violence

A morbid thought occurred to me today: every act of cruelty we read about has at some point happened to someone.

There have existed humans capable of doing things to other people that we can't even imagine.

This isn't going to be a macabre expose on the nature of human cruelty, so stick with me.

You and I, the average person in the respect we're discussing, are not psychologically capable of most forms of violence towards another person. At the very least we would not be capable of being methodical about it.

So where does that leave the people that are? So often we simply designate people capable of horrific or intricate violence against another human being as a monster, someone we are incapable of understanding.

I'm not talking about the kind of person like Stalin or Mao or Hitler who orders mass genocide. It's chilling how easy it is to distance yourself from people to the point that mass murder can become easy. People like them aren't dealing with other people, they're dealing with numbers. I'm talking about the executioners.

Saying that such people are monsters is letting ourselves off the hook. Put one way, if we see a person who is good at something, like running, we let ourselves off easy if we just claim that that person is superhuman. Going the opposite direction, we let ourselves off easy if we simply call the executioner subhuman; we deny that we could ever become capable of what they do.

I know I started out saying that you and I are incapable of most forms of violence, and we are, right now. But we have to acknowledge the possibility that given terrible circumstances, we could degenerate into people we would barely recognize. Failure to do so leaves us unprepared in case disaster strikes.

The two following examples illustrate the point. The Stanford prison experiment took a group of college students, and using nothing more than a stimulated prison environment, they turned a group of boys into "wardens" who inflicted a tangible amount of psychological violence on the "inmates." I'm not going into details here but the premise still holds: it doesn't take much pressure to turn us into the people we fear.

The second example is another controlled experiment. In it a subject was introduced to a "participant" who was actually an actor, and told that the actor was going to answer questions. Wrong answers would be punished by a shock that went from harmless to fatal. Nearly every participant "killed" the actor with limited resistance to verbal coercion.

There are countless of more extreme examples from this century alone: the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, the list doesn't end. If people capable of brutality inflicted on other humans in these conflicts were rare, violence would not happen on the scale it does. Every one of us risks being beaten into a weapon simply because we exist; we may rightly believe that we are at no risk of being tested in an extreme way, but if everyone did their best to understand their own limits as human beings, the world would be a much safer place.