The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.
—MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
At the root of all forms of violence there is a lack of altruism and a devaluing of the other. Not granting enough value to the other’s fate, we knowingly harm him, physically or morally.
By “violence” we mean here the ensemble of actions and hostile, aggressive attitudes between individuals, including use of constraint and force in order to obtain something against the other’s will, or in order to harm his physical or mental integrity. Violence is often used by humans and animals to obtain food, reproduce, defend themselves, conquer or protect a territory, or assert one’s authority or hierarchical rank. One can also considerably harm another by torturing him mentally and making his life unbearable, without resorting to physical violence.
Why violence? The attitudes that incite us to harm others are linked in part to our dispositions and our character traits, but they are also strongly influenced by our transient emotions and by situations in which we find ourselves. Violent behavior can arise in the heat of the moment or be premeditated.
When we enter into affective resonance with someone else, if he is suffering, we feel uneasy, while if we do not feel empathy, this suffering doesn’t move us. The extreme case is that of psychopaths. When a psychopath who was in prison for rape and kidnapping was questioned, he replied, “Do I feel bad if I have hurt someone? Yeah, sometimes. But mostly it is like… uh… [laughing]… how did you feel the last time you squashed a bug?”1
A breeder who was concerned exclusively with the swiftness, effectiveness, and profitability of his stable and who castrated his horses by crushing their testicles between two bricks, replied when asked if it was very painful, “No, if you watch out for your thumbs.”2
Hatred makes us see the other in an entirely unfavorable light. It leads us to amplify his defects and ignore his qualities. These cognitive distortions result in a deformed perception of reality. The psychologist Aaron Beck said that when one is under the influence of violent anger, something like three-quarters of our perceptions of the other are mental fabrications.3 The aggression that comes from hatred thus involves a rigid categorization that makes us see the opponent as being basically evil, and oneself as being right and good.4 The mind shuts itself up in illusion and convinces one that the source of dissatisfaction lies entirely outside oneself. Actually, even if the resentment was set off by an external object, the resentment itself is nowhere else but in our own mind.
The harmful effects of animosity are obvious. The Dalai Lama describes it thus:
By giving in to animosity, we do not always harm others, but we unfailingly harm ourselves. We lose our inner peace, we no longer do anything right, we have poor digestion, we can’t sleep, we make people who come to see us run away, we glare furiously at anyone who dares to stand in our path. We make life impossible for those who live with us and we even distance ourselves from our closest friends. And since those who want to share our company become rarer and rarer, we become more and more alone.… So long as we harbor within us this inner enemy that is anger or hatred, even if we destroy our external enemies today, others will appear tomorrow.5
“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” The desire for revenge is a major cause of violence. Blood vengeance is approved in many cultures. Wherever there are tribal wars, revenge constitutes one of the main motives.6 An inhabitant of New Guinea describes his feelings when he learns that the person who had killed his uncle was paralyzed by a poisoned arrow: “I feel as if I am developing wings, I feel as if I am about to fly off, and I am very happy.”7
The feeling of revenge is closely linked to egocentrism, notably when one has not just been wronged, but also humiliated, especially in public. Wounded pride is willing to make great sacrifices to avenge itself. This is the case for individuals, but also for nations that enter into war to avenge attacks on their national pride. When someone violently avenges himself for some criticism that attacked his image, the act of punishing this affront does not, however, prove the criticism was unjustified. Hitting someone who has called you a liar does not prove you told the truth.8
The existence of “honor codes” considerably increases the risks of violent confrontations. One study showed that young men who attach great importance to such codes, and who are always ready to avenge an insult, are the most likely to commit a violent act in the following year.9
Goodwill, forgiveness, and an effort to understand the aggressor’s motives are often regarded as generous but optional choices. It is hard to bear in mind that the desire for revenge stems essentially from an emotion similar to the one that led the aggressor to do harm in the first place. It is even rarer for victims to be capable of regarding a criminal as being himself a victim of his own hatred. However, so long as hatred of one person engenders that of the other, the cycle of resentment and reprisals is endless. History is full of examples of hatred between families, clans, tribes, ethnic groups, and nations, which have been perpetuated from generation to generation. What’s more, revenge is usually disproportionate to the gravity of the wrong it means to avenge. There are many examples of excessive reprisals for minor attacks on someone’s honor. A cowboy’s gravestone in Colorado reads, “He Called Big Smith a Liar.”10
In some cultures and religions, revenge is not only tolerated but exalted in the founding texts. Although the New Testament urges forgiveness—“Forgive us our sins; as we also forgive every one that is indebted to us”—the Old Testament puts these words in God’s mouth:
I will render vengeance to mine enemies, and will reward them that hate me. I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh; and that with the blood of the slain and of the captives, from the beginning of revenges upon the enemy. Rejoice, O ye nations, with his people: for he will avenge the blood of his servants, and will render vengeance to his adversaries, and will be merciful unto his land, and to his people.11
It is important to stress that one can feel profound aversion to injustice, cruelty, oppression, fanaticism, and harmful actions, and do everything one can to thwart them, without succumbing to hatred. When one looks at an individual prey to hatred, one should regard him more as a sick person to be cured than as an enemy to subdue. It is important not to confuse the sick person with his illness, or a feeling of repulsion for an abominable action with definitive condemnation of a person. Even the most cruel torturer was not born cruel, and who can assert he will not change? If people either undergo a genuine transformation or become harmless because of old age or any other reason, there is no justification to continue punishing them, by keeping them in jail, for instance. As the Dalai Lama says, “It might be necessary to neutralize a vicious dog that bites everyone around it, but what’s the point of chaining it up or shooting it in the head when it’s just an old, toothless mutt that can barely stand on its legs?”12
As Gandhi says, “If we practice an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the whole world will be blind and toothless.” Rather than follow the law of an eye for an eye, isn’t it preferable to rid one’s mind of the resentment that’s eating away at it and, if one has the strength, to wish that the murderer change radically, renounce harm, and make reparation for the harm he has committed as much as he can? In 1998, in South Africa, an American teenager was raped and killed in the street by five young men. During the trial, the victim’s parents, both lawyers, said to the principal attackers: “We do not want to do to you what you did to our daughter.”
A few months before she died in Auschwitz, Etty Hillesum wrote:
I can see no way around it. Each of us must look inside himself and excise and destroy everything he finds there which he believes should be excised and destroyed in others. We may be quite certain that the least iota of hatred that we bring into the world will make it even more inhospitable to us than it already is.13
That is particularly true for the death penalty, which is still practiced in many countries, although the number of executions continues to decrease over the years. In the eighteenth century, in England, a seventeen-year-old girl was hanged for having stolen a petticoat. In China, not so long ago, one could be condemned to death for having stolen a bicycle. China remains by far the country where most executions are performed. Amnesty International gave up establishing a precise number of executions because of the opacity of the Chinese judicial system, but believes there are several thousand a year. According to the estimations of the Dui Hua Foundation, about 5,000 people were executed in 2009.14, 15 In Saudi Arabia, innocent people are regularly condemned to death following accusations of witchcraft made by their neighbors.
We know, however, that the death penalty does not have any preventative value. Its suppression throughout the European Union did not give rise to an increase of criminality, and its reestablishment in certain states in North America, where it had been temporarily suppressed, did not diminish the crimes committed. Since life in prison is enough to prevent a murderer from committing a second offense, the death penalty amounts to legalized revenge. “If crime is a transgression of the law, revenge is what hides behind the law to commit a crime,” writes the essayist Bertrand Vergely.16 Thus, the death penalty is nothing but the law of an eye for an eye disguised in a judge’s gown. As Arianna Ballotta, president of the Italian Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, notes, “As a society, we cannot kill in order to show that killing is evil.”
According to a long-standing opinion among psychologists, people who have a poor opinion of themselves are inclined to resort to violence in order to compensate for their feeling of inferiority, and to show others what they are capable of. If this theory were true, in order for these individuals to renounce violence, it would be enough to provide them with other means of constructing a better image of themselves. However, as the psychologist Roy Baumeister at the University of Florida has shown, all serious studies have concluded that this theory is false. On the contrary, it turns out that most violent people have a high opinion of themselves. Rarely humble or self-effacing, most of them are arrogant and vain.17 All the people who came in contact with the dictators of the twentieth century—Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Hitler, Idi Amin, or Saddam Hussein—confirm that they were definitely suffering from a superiority complex, not an inferiority complex. Many psychopathic criminals and convicted rapists think of themselves as exceptional beings, endowed with manifold talents.18
A person who is endowed with real humility is scarcely concerned with his own image. A person who possesses undeniable qualities and justified self-confidence will have few opportunities to be damaged by criticism. On the other hand, a person who considerably overestimates his qualities sees his ego constantly threatened by the opinion of others, and is quick to react with anger and indignation.19 The psychologist Michael Kernis and his collaborators have shown that the most reactive and most hostile individuals are those who have a high but unstable opinion of themselves.20 So it is those equipped with an oversized ego and who feel vulnerable who are the most dangerous. Any interlocutor who doesn’t show them enough respect or offends them, even superficially, is sure to receive immediately a hostile response.21 A series of interviews conducted by the psychologist Leonard Berkowitz with English criminals imprisoned for violent acts also confirmed that these delinquents had an abnormally enlarged but fragile ego, causing them to react to the slightest provocation.22
The same is true for dictators and totalitarian regimes. Despite appearances, they are aware of the illegitimacy of the oppression they exercise over their own people or over others, and are particularly intolerant and prompt to crush any dissidence. The political historian Franklin Ford notes that “ancient history—and later history as well—suggests that official terror is usually the mark of a regime that may appear brutally self-confident but is in fact insecure.”23
When one is confronted with criticism, one can react in two ways. Either one thinks the criticism is justified and one thus revises the opinion one has of oneself, or else one does not value the criticism at all and rejects it—one thinks the other is ill-intentioned, stupid, or somehow prejudiced. The most usual reaction then is anger.
Positive illusions about oneself usually lead to overestimation of one’s ability to conquer an opponent; this can sometimes end up causing confrontations with catastrophic outcomes. The most serious mistakes of nations waging war come from gross overestimation of their forces. On certain occasions, an intimidating maneuver stemming from pure boastfulness can trick the opponent, but most often it ends in crushing defeat.
The political scientist Dominic Johnson studied this phenomenon in the field of video games, and showed that the more certain a player was of himself, the more often he lost. In a game where the participants assume the role of state leaders who enter into conflict, the players who were overconfident launched rash attacks and set off a cascade of reprisals devastating for both camps. Since women are less prone to this failing, the worst possible combination was a woman that opposed two men suffering from excessive self-confidence.24
In certain cases, a firm attitude can be an effective signal that one is not about to let oneself be manipulated, and to dissuade potential attackers. This explains in part the bragging matches and intimidating behavior that the males of both the human and animal species indulge in. These ritualized behaviors can substitute for violent confrontations.
Regardless of whether or not the protagonists are right or wrong, if we want to remedy violence, we must understand what is going on in people’s heads. To do this, it is indispensable to listen not only to the victim’s testimony, but also to the aggressor’s. In most cases, those who have made use of violence do not regard themselves as guilty; they present themselves as victims, asserting that they have been treated unfairly and should be shown tolerance. In Prisoners of Hate, Aaron Beck explains that aggressors are firmly entrenched behind the belief that their cause is just and that their rights have been violated. The object of their anger (who, to the eyes of neutral observers, seems to be the victim) is perceived by them as the offender.25 Bosnian Serbs, for example—perpetrators of merciless ethnic cleansing—regarded themselves as one of the most wronged peoples in the world. Even when these assertions grossly misrepresent reality, it is important to analyze the motives of aggressors if we want to prevent new eruptions of violence.
Studies show that perpetrators of violence present the facts in such a way as to minimize their fault, while victims almost always exaggerate the harm they have undergone.26 Victims and perpetrators of violent acts tend to experience them in different chronological contexts. For example, an abused woman will describe the years of abuse she underwent, while the violent man who has just committed abuse will try to explain his despicable action by invoking the immediate events that set it off.
Based on study of domestic violence in North America, the sociologist Murray Straus has shown that mutual hostility is the norm rather than the exception. Even when a single spouse is violent, he will assert he was reacting to an injustice committed by the other.27 This of course refers to mild domestic violence, not to cases of rape, and not to the chronic abuse and domestic violence suffered by women, and often children, in many countries and cultures throughout the world.
Many crimes are committed “in the name of justice”: reprisals inspired by jealousy or a feeling of betrayal, crimes of honor, settling of accounts, reactions to insults, family conflicts that fester, and actions of self-defense. According to the lawyer and sociologist Donald Black, only 10% of homicides have a “pragmatic” aim (murder of a police officer during an arrest, of a homeowner during a break-in that goes bad, or of a rape victim so that she won’t talk). In the majority of cases, criminals claim the “morality” of their actions.28
Several criminologists29 have shown that murder is usually the outcome of a series of quarrels and violent acts between family members, neighbors, or acquaintances; one person insults another, who returns the insult instead of trying to put a stop to the conflict, and things go from bad to worse.30
An overview of a number of published studies led Roy Baumeister to note that the majority of murders occur in two types of situations. In the first case, two people who know each other argue, the conflict escalates, and insults and threats are exchanged, until one of the protagonists takes out a knife or a gun and kills the other. Most people regret these murders committed in the heat of the moment. In the second case, murder results from an armed holdup during which the criminals encounter unexpected resistance and resort to violence in order to reach their goal, eliminate witnesses, or escape.31
These studies instruct us about what occurs in most documented murders, but they do not include the less frequent existence of premeditated murders and frightening killings like those that occurred in the past few years in the United States at Columbine and, more recently, at Sandy Hook in Connecticut, which are made possible by the open access to powerful, deadly weapons.
Even those who have committed the worst atrocities—including the bloodiest dictators—claim they acted to defend themselves against the forces of evil, and they are often actually convinced of this. Their interpretation of reality, as aberrant and repugnant as it may be, still leads to the observation that none of them seemed to be moved initially by the sole desire to do evil for evil’s sake.32
Media and works of fiction like to evoke evil in its pure state. They portray monsters, fundamentally evil mutants who wish to harm for harm’s sake and rejoice in doing so. Most horror films open with happy scenes that are soon turned upside down by the intrusion of evil—a gratuitous evil, or an evil motivated solely by the sadistic pleasure of making people suffer.33 Evil comes from the “other,” the stranger, the person who is not one of us. These are not kind people who have temporarily gone bad: the evil person has always been evil, and will always be so; he is implacable, profoundly selfish, sure of himself, and subject to uncontrollable fits of rage. He is the enemy of peace and stability.
What Baumeister denounces as a myth is the idea that certain people can be evil by nature and have no other aim than doing harm. If the crimes that appear as the manifestation of absolute, gratuitous evil are widely diffused in the media, it is precisely because they are rare and aberrant.34
Some serial killers have acknowledged that they took pleasure in killing.35 The murderer Arthur Shawcross spoke of his time serving in Vietnam as one of the best times in his life. He had free rein to kill men, women, and children. He not only killed, but also tortured and mutilated his victims.36 Back in the United States, he committed fourteen murders before he was arrested. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge would torture their victims before killing them. This is true in most wars.
Sometimes gang members sadistically torture their victims before killing them. But the American sociologist Martin Sanchez Jankowski, who lived for ten years among California gangs, reports that, even among these criminals, they represent only a tiny minority.37 Unfortunately, for that minority, this pleasure quickly becomes an addiction.38 The social psychologist Hans Toch estimates that about 6% of men inclined to violence become chronically violent and take pleasure in it.39 There again, we see that we are not far from the percentage of the 3% of psychopaths present in every population.
How can we understand people taking pleasure in making others suffer? Roy Baumeister has suggested that the pleasure linked to sadism does not come from the act itself, but from the moment that follows it. He compares it to the pleasure procured by extreme sports. In the case of bungee jumping, for example, one jumps into the void from a bridge or the top of a cliff, attached by a harness to an elastic cord that makes you rebound just before you hit the ground. According to Baumeister, when, after this terrifying experience, one comes back to normal, this return is accompanied by a euphoric sensation. After a certain number of times, the terrifying aspect of the act diminishes, while the pleasure it arouses remains just as strong, which creates a phenomenon of dependence. Baumeister thinks the same is true for sadistic violence. By inflicting violence on others—a behavior that begins by being unpleasant, shocking and revolting, but to which one becomes accustomed—the moment that follows the violent act is experienced as euphoric relief. Later, disgust for the violence itself gradually diminishes, and the person kills without the slightest hesitation.40
People who repeatedly enact violence tend to become desensitized to the suffering of others, whether it’s in war, during genocide, or, to a lesser degree, by playing violent video games. With time, they feel less and less restraint about committing their crimes and become capable of ever-increasing violence. Murder can then become an occupation like any other. Nathan McCall, a black American journalist for the Washington Post who grew up in a gang in Portsmouth, explained that the first time he took part in a gang rape, he felt horrible, distressed: he felt pity for the victim and disgust for his actions. But afterwards, gang rape became routine. McCall ended up in prison, where he educated himself and began a new life, that of a writer devoting his efforts to the improvement of interracial relations in the United States.
According to the criminologists Gottfredson and Hirschi, one of the reasons why people sometimes resort to using violence to reach their goals stems from the fact that most crimes require little or no skill, patience, work, or effort. Shoplifting in supermarkets, robbing a shop, or grabbing a handbag from an old lady in the street is easier than earning one’s living by learning a profession and acquiring skills that involve years of training. A pistol is enough to rob the cash register in a store; you don’t even have to be a good shot, since taking out the weapon and threatening the cashier is usually enough.41 Terrorists are also convinced that violence is the best and simplest of methods to impose their will, since they think they don’t have much chance to succeed by legal methods.42 Similarly, criminals settle conflicts between themselves with violence: two drug dealers can’t resort to the court or the police to settle their differences. So they create a parallel, expeditious justice.
The force of example is also a factor in major violence. We know that children who have long seen their parents arguing and physically attacking each other are more likely to practice domestic violence when they in turn live as part of a married couple.43 They are used to thinking that violence is an acceptable way to resolve a conflict or impose one’s will. Many (but not all) battered children become abusive parents in turn.
Yet, sociological studies have shown that in the long run, for the great majority of criminals, crime does not pay: 80% of bank robbers get arrested, and those who practice organized crime have a much shorter life expectancy than the rest of the population.44
When one submits to an authority, it is that authority that decides what is good and what is bad. If an officer orders a soldier to execute war prisoners, he knows that violates international conventions, but the soldier is not in the position to question the orders of a superior. And he says to himself that the prisoners might have killed some of his comrades.
Many studies, including one by the American psychologist Stanley Milgram,45 revealed how much we are willing to bend to the orders of an individual in a position of authority, even if it’s in contradiction to our own system of values. In a series of experiments that have since become famous, carried out between 1960 and 1963, Milgram made volunteers (600 subjects recruited by ads) believe they were taking part in an experiment on memory, and that scientists wanted to evaluate the effects of punishment on the training process. He asked the participants to teach various word combinations to a student (actually an accomplice of the experimenter). If the student gave a wrong reply, the participant was supposed to administer an electric shock whose intensity increased by 15 volts with each mistake made. The participant had a range of buttons indicating the voltages, from 15 to 450 volts, and accompanied by indications that went from “Slight Shock” to “Very Strong Shock,” culminating, at 450 volts, with the warning, “Danger, Severe Shock.” Actually, the actor student received no shock at all, but simulated pain with shouts whose intensity was proportional to the power of the shocks inflicted.
The scientist in charge of the experiment wore a white smock and looked like a respectable authority. He only gave a few instructions, using a firm, terse tone and saying things like “The experiment requires you to continue.”
Before undertaking this experiment at Yale, Milgram had done a survey among his psychiatrist and sociologist colleagues and among graduates, asking them to predict the outcome of the tests. They unanimously answered that the vast majority of the subjects would refuse to administer the shocks as soon as they became painful. Only a few psychopathic cases, 2% or 3% of the subjects, would normally remain indifferent to the suffering they were inflicting.
The reality was quite otherwise. Kept on the “straight path” by the injunctions of the experimenter, 65% of the participants ended up administering the maximum dose, which they knew could potentially be deadly. The average of the strongest shock administered was 360 volts! This experiment has been reproduced many times in other laboratories and has led every time to the same results.
According to Milgram and those who analyzed these experiments, the individual who takes part in a system of authority no longer regards himself as an actor responsible for unmoral actions, but rather as an agent executing the will of another person. He shifts his responsibility onto the possessor of authority. Only a handful of participants rebelled, and when the experimenter said to one of them, “You don’t have a choice,” he crossed his arms over his chest and replied defiantly, “Yes, I have many choices, and the one I’m making is to stop.” The participants in this experiment were neither sadistic nor indifferent. As they administered the shocks in increasing intensity, their hands and voices trembled, and sweat pearled on their foreheads. Raised like many others in respect for the authority of their parents and educators, they were obviously disturbed by a moral conflict. When one is thus divided between one’s personal ethics and the moral obligation to conform to authority, and when one doesn’t have much opportunity to take a step back to assess the situation, most of the time one follows orders. These days, nonconformism and rebellion against any hindrance to individual liberties are much more widespread, but the fact remains that in 2010, a repetition of Milgram’s experiment as a TV show gave identical results.46
In 1971, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo imagined an unusual experiment to evaluate the influence of circumstances and situations on human behavior, malevolent behavior in particular. He had a replica of an actual prison built in the basement of Stanford University, with some cells and quarters for guards. Then he recruited volunteers willing to become either prisoners or guards. In the beginning, none of the students had a natural affinity with either of these groups. Yet within the space of a week, they would undergo a radical transformation.
The setting was extremely realistic, since actual policemen, who had agreed to take part in the experiment, came to arrest the volunteers chosen by lot to become prisoners. The prisoners were transferred, blindfolded, to the “prison” at the university and duly imprisoned. At first, the prisoners, dressed as inmates with a number on their chest, joked around and had trouble taking the situation seriously.
The leader of the volunteer guards read out loud the prison rules, as the scientists filmed most of the events with a hidden camera. In a few days, the situation degraded considerably. The guards tolerated neither dissension nor any breaking of the rules, and imagined all sorts of humiliating punishments for the prisoners. They made them do many push-ups, swore at them, and called them only by their number. Soon, some prisoners adopted a submissive, resigned attitude, while others showed a rebellious inclination. The guards increased pressure and began to wake up the prisoners several times a night. “Get up, you bums!” they shouted to the sound of shrill whistles. Bullying, some of which became obscene, occurred more frequently; violent actions were committed; some prisoners began cracking under pressure, and one of them started a hunger strike. The situation degenerated so far that the scientists were forced to abort the experiment prematurely after six days, instead of the fifteen days initially planned.
One of the guards later testified: “I had to intentionally shut off all feelings I had toward any of the prisoners, to lose sympathy and any respect for them. I began to treat them as coldly and harshly as possible verbally. I would not let show any feelings they might like to see, like anger or despair.” Little by little, his feeling of belonging to the group became stronger. “I saw the guards as a group of pleasant guys charged with the necessity of maintaining order among a group of persons unworthy of trust or sympathy—the prisoners.”
For Philip Zimbardo, “Evil consists in intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy innocent others—or using one’s authority and systemic power to encourage or permit others to do so on your behalf.”47 In light of this research, he came to realize that almost all of us tend to overestimate the importance of character traits linked to our habitual tendencies and, on the other hand, to underestimate the influence that situations can exercise over our behavior.48
The Stanford experiment is rich with teachings; it shows us how individuals who in principle are kind can be led to make others suffer entirely gratuitously, to the detriment of the moral values they themselves possess. This reversal occurs under the insidious pressure formed by a given framework whose logic is implied to all, to the point of substituting its norms for each person’s individual values.49
This experiment lets us better understand the case of Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison where American guards, both men and women, obscenely humiliated their prisoners. On the video images that were released, we see a woman in uniform leading one of the prisoners by a leash, naked and on all fours, as if he were a dog. President Bush asserted it was just a case of a few “bad apples” in an otherwise healthy army. But Zimbardo argued that this wasn’t a case of a few bad apples, but rather of a rotten barrel, and that the army and its system as a whole was to blame.
Appropriating others’ property and overcoming and despoiling one’s rivals have always been major sources of violence, as much for individuals as for nations. It is a utilitarian, predatory, calculating, and generally merciless violence. A criminal who was asked why he robbed from banks replied coldly, “Because that’s where the money is.”50 It’s also usually for practical reasons—from fear of being denounced or because a holdup goes wrong—that criminals kill the witnesses of their crime, without any premeditation.
This pragmatic violence is illustrated on an entirely different scale by the conquests of Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century. It was mainly his desire to seize the wealth of the conquered peoples and increase his power that pushed this Mongolian conqueror to become most likely the worst murderer in history. His invasions caused about 40 million deaths. On the scale of today’s world population, that would be the equivalent of 700 million individuals.51 His troops massacred 1.3 million inhabitants of the city of Merv and the 800,000 inhabitants of Baghdad, where his armies laid waste for days, leaving no survivors.52
It was not a genocide. Genghis Khan wanted two things: to impose his power and to appropriate the wealth of other peoples. He had established a very simple rule: either the cities agreed to open their gates to him and acknowledge his sovereignty, and he spared them; or they resisted, and he destroyed them and massacred their population.
On the individual level, the desire to establish one’s domination over others is also a powerful motive for violent behavior. According to the philosopher Frantz Fanon, those who practiced torture confess that even if they didn’t manage to make the most resistant speak, the simple fact of making them scream in pain was already a victory.53 Similarly, according to Baumeister, men who engage in domestic abuse generally do so in order to establish their power as the head of the family.54
When a religious or political ideology declares it is acceptable to kill in the name of a superior cause, those who have adopted it set aside their scruples and kill for that “good cause” anyone who doesn’t conform to the views promulgated by the dominant group. Political purges violently suppress the slightest dissension and designate the scapegoats held responsible for problems that the leaders were unable to solve. This was the case for the Khmer Rouge, which never admitted a single “mistake” and savagely eliminated anyone they regarded as responsible for the failures of their political ideology, torturing and executing over a million innocent people.
This violence committed by a political regime finds its religious counterpart in the example of the Crusades. In Antioch, crusaders decapitated their enemies and threw their heads with catapults over the walls of the besieged city. In Jerusalem, they massacred Muslims, even those who didn’t actively resist them. They gathered together a community of Jews, locked them up in a synagogue, and set fire to it. Convinced of working in the service of their God, crusaders performed evil in the name of good.55 Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the Crusades caused more than a million deaths. If this number is compared to the world population at the time (about 400 million), that is the equivalent of 6 million dead in the twentieth century, which numerically equals the Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust.56
Some of the most influential thinkers and researchers in the twentieth century, notably Sigmund Freud and Konrad Lorenz, have asserted that humans and animals possess an innate instinct for violence which they have trouble repressing. According to Freud, the biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill” is the very proof that “we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.”57 According to Freud and Lorenz, appeasing this aggressive instinct, just as one satisfies sexual impulses and the desire for food, is supposed to procure a certain satisfaction. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud writes, “I take the view that the tendency to aggression is an original, autonomous disposition in man.”58 Aggression was thought to build up in humans like pressure in a pressure cooker, and needed to be vented and released from time to time.
But neither physiologists nor psychologists have been able to demonstrate the existence of such a spontaneous impulse for hostility. Aggression does not manifest as a natural motivation comparable to that of hunger, thirst, or the need for activity and social contact.59 The need for social contact is a tendency that regularly arouses specific behavior in everyone, even in the absence of stimulation from the external environment. According to the psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer, “Aggressivity is not a kind of substance produced by the organism, which the individual must externalize under penalty of destroying himself. To understand defense and attack behaviors, it is infinitely more useful to wonder about the relations of the subject with others, and with himself, than to invoke the action of a mysterious death impulse.… This Freudian theory is nothing but a myth.”60
The hypothesis of an omnipresent aggressiveness in the animal kingdom as a fundamental part of its nature was also popularized by Konrad Lorenz, one of the founders of modern ethology, in his book for the layman, On Aggression,61 in which the author sets out to demonstrate the basically violent nature of the animal kingdom. He states that aggression is an “indispensable way to attain man’s highest goals.”62 According to him, the misfortune of humans stems from the fact that they are “without those safety mechanisms that prevent carnivorous animals and predators from killing members of their own species.”63 When two wolves fight for domination of the pack, if one of them decides to give up the fight, it lies on its back, thus presenting its carotid to its opponent, an extremely dangerous situation, but one that causes its opponent’s aggressivity to vanish instantly. According to Lorenz, because we descend from vegetarian ancestors and not from predators, “during human prehistory, there was no selective pressure likely to produce a mechanism that would inhibit murdering one’s fellows.” For Lorenz, when man began making weapons, there were no safety mechanisms in place: “We tremble at the idea of a creature as irascible as all the pre-human primates are, now brandishing a very sharp hand-axe.” In short, humans supposedly suffer from a “harmful dose of aggression whose unhealthy heredity still penetrates mankind to the marrow,”64 and makes humans born killers. Actually, as we will see in a later chapter, the large majority of humans feel profound repugnance about killing other human beings.
Early on in his career, the primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal was concerned with the emphasis placed up to that point in time on violent behavior, especially by Lorenz. He set out to study the behavior of the long-tailed macaque, a species that was reputedly particularly aggressive. But after long periods of observation, he noted that in the end these monkeys rarely fought each other.65 After several decades devoted to the study of primates, de Waal concluded that aggression depended essentially on external conditions and on the style of relations established between individuals, and not on a universal instinct for violence that was shared by all beings, as Lorenz argued.
Several other ethologists have also contradicted Lorenz’s theories, including Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, who66 offers numerous arguments refuting these theories, and argues that “man’s aggressive impulses are counterbalanced by his equally deep-rooted social tendencies. It is not only conditioning that programs us to be good—we are good by inclination.” The psychologist Alfie Kohn reached a similar observation: “Freud and Lorenz notwithstanding, there is absolutely no evidence from animal behavior or human psychology to suggest that individuals of any species fight because of spontaneous internal stimulation.”67
What’s more, psychologists regard chronic and impulsive violence as pathological, and acknowledge that anger and aggressivity are harmful to the health.68 In a study carried out by Williams and Barefoot, 255 medical students passed a personality test measuring their degree of aggressiveness. Twenty-five years later, it turned out that the most aggressive ones had five times more heart attacks than those who were less hostile.69
Here, as in the case of the wicked-world syndrome we discussed earlier, it seems that the fascination the spectacle of violence exercises over us makes us forget that it does not constitute the norm in animal behavior. It is indeed more exciting to show wild animals hunting than sleeping most of the day, but it’s comparable to showing only images of a man spending his leisure time hunting deer, and not showing those of the family man, farmer, or doctor that he also is. The sad reality of hunting for pleasure is undeniable, but it alone does not define the man.
The idea that murderers are completely incapable of controlling their violent impulses has also been dismissed by specialists, except with regards to a few pathological cases. According to the FBI expert John Douglas, who studied the cases of hundreds of murderers, it is impossible to believe that these criminals temporarily lost total control of their actions. He notes, for example, that none of these murderers committed a murder in the presence of a uniformed policeman. If their killer’s rage had truly been uncontrollable, such a factor should not have prevented them from killing.70
This also applies to collective violence. In January 1993, according to the historian Gérard Prunier, an international human rights commission arrived in Rwanda before the genocide had reached its extreme, but at a time when members of the Hutu community had begun killing many Tutsis and burning their houses. When this commission arrived, though, the crimes instantly stopped, and as soon as it left, the murders resumed.71 So humans are generally capable of checking their desire to harm when they know it’s not the time to give it free rein.
A study revealed that when certain regions of a rat’s or cat’s brain are activated, these animals immediately enter into an uncontrollable rage, and furiously attack anyone in reach.72 The same study showed that stimulation of other regions of the brain activates the cat’s hunting behavior, causing the cat to chase a phantom prey in a crazed way. However, with the hunting behavior stimulated, the cat did not violently or indiscriminately attack anyone who appeared that did not resemble prey. So hunting and violence are two distinct behaviors, and the neural networks of violent aggression and predation are also different. Moreover, the areas of the brain linked to aggression are organized in a structured way. When a certain number of these areas are activated, the cat hisses and arches his back, but the experimenter can still touch him. When certain additional areas are activated, the cat becomes enraged and lunges at the experimenter’s face.73 The amygdala especially is one of the brain areas closely implicated in the impulsive behaviors of fear and aggression in superior animals and humans. It is activated notably when danger is perceived, which induces a reaction of fight or flight.
Charles Whitman killed several people from the top of a tower on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, before shooting himself in the head. He left a note saying he felt incapable of resisting the rage that was overwhelming him, and asked that his brain be examined after his death. The autopsy revealed that a tumor was compressing his amygdala.74 It is clear that our emotional world can be considerably disturbed by such brain pathologies.
Other studies in the neurosciences shed light on the differences between the various types of violence. Adrian Raine, at the University of Pennsylvania, compared the brains of murderers who acted impulsively with those of murderers who premeditated their crimes. Only the former showed a dysfunction in a section of the brain (the orbital cortex), which plays an essential role in regulating emotions and controlling violence.
Almost 3,500 scientific studies and the overviews published in the last decade have shown that the spectacle of violence acts as an incitement to further violence. For the American Academy of Pediatrics, the evidence is clear and convincing: “Significant exposure to media violence increases the risk of aggressive behavior in certain children and adolescents, desensitizes them to violence, and makes them believe that the world is a ‘meaner and scarier’ place than it is.”75 These effects are measurable and lasting. Children are particularly vulnerable, but we are all affected.76
These studies have also made it possible to refute the hypothesis (inspired in part by Freudian theories) by which the spectacle of violence allows the individual to purge himself of the aggressive impulses he is supposed to have. It has now been established that on the contrary, this spectacle aggravates violent attitudes and behaviors.77 Yet despite these scientific observations, the idea of a liberating catharsis continues to be regularly invoked.
According to Michel Desmurget, research director at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) at the Center for Cognitive Neurosciences in Lyon, violent images operate according to three principal mechanisms. First, they increase the propensity to act with violence or aggression, acting as the priming mechanism. Second, they raise our threshold of tolerance for violence—the habituation mechanism. Third, they exasperate our feelings of fear and insecurity—the wicked-world syndrome. It is the convergence of these influences that, in the end, explains the impact of audiovisual violence.78 It has also been established that violent images reduce emotional reactivity to violence, lower one’s propensity to come to the aid of an unknown victim of aggression, and weaken the capacity for empathy.
After two decades of studies on the influence of television, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated that TV viewers who constantly watch negative actions show an increased tendency to act in the same way, and that the more one watches television, the more inclined one is to think that people are selfish and would deceive us at the first opportunity.79 Long before the audiovisual age, Cicero observed:
If we are forced, at every hour, to watch or listen to horrible events, this constant stream of ghastly impressions will deprive even the most delicate among us of all respect for humanity.80
On the other hand, when the media take the trouble to highlight the generous aspects of human nature, spectators easily enter into resonance with this positive outlook. The recent series entitled CNN Heroes met with great success in the United States. This show broadcasts portraits and testimonials about individuals, often quite humble and unknown, who undertook innovative, beneficial social projects, or who have become wholeheartedly involved in defending just causes.
The most revealing studies are those that have measured increase of violence following the introduction of television in regions where it hadn’t existed previously. One of these studies, carried out in isolated rural communities in Canada, showed that two years after the arrival of television, verbal violence (insults and threats) observed in elementary schools had doubled, and physical violence had tripled. Another study revealed a spectacular increase of violence in children after the introduction of English-language television shows (which contained a high proportion of violent images) in South Africa. Keeping in mind the magnitude of the effects observed, Brandon Centerwall, at the University of Washington in Seattle, estimated that there would be, in the United States alone, 10,000 fewer homicides, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer physical, injury-producing attacks each year if television did not exist.
In France, according to the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (Higher Audiovisual Council), a TV viewer watches television an average of three hours and thirty minutes per day, which exposes him, more or less, to two murders and a dozen violent actions every hour, or almost 2,600 murders and 13,000 violent acts each year. In the United States, a twelve-year-old has already seen some 12,000 murders on television. Research analyzing 10,000 hours of programs selected at random showed that 60% of American shows contain violent actions, at a rate of six scenes per hour. The most frightening thing is that in programs meant for young people, this percentage reaches 70%, with fourteen violent scenes every hour. We can see the benefits a reduction in the number of violent images could lead to. In fact, one study has revealed that, among nine-year-old children, this reduction had the direct consequence of a diminution of the level of violence at school. What’s more, as the psychologists Mares and Woodard have shown,81 TV programs with prosocial tendencies lead to an increase of corresponding behavior, diminish aggressiveness, and encourage viewers to be more tolerant.
The most worrisome aspect of the harmful effects of audiovisual violence is its lasting impact. Dimitri Christakis and Frederick Zimmerman, at the University of Washington in Seattle, have studied almost 200 boys aged two to five for five years. These psychologists discovered that one hour of violent programs a day quadrupled the probability of behavioral disorders in the following five years.82
The same effects have been observed in adults: subjects who watched television for between one and three hours per day when they were twenty-two manifested, at the age of thirty, one and a half times more risk of attacking a third party physically or verbally, and two and a half times more risk of being involved in a fight than individuals who had watched less than one hour.83
The psychologist Bruce Bartholow, at the University of Missouri, has shown that the brains of people exposed regularly to violent images become almost insensitive to these images when they are projected in front of them. These individuals are shown to be more aggressive than others during a test measuring their aggressiveness after projection of the images.84
According to Michel Desmurget,
scientific data show today, without the slightest doubt, that by lessening our exposure to violent material, we can contribute to creating a less violent world. Of course, that does not mean that television is responsible for all the evils of our society. Nor does it mean that all viewers will become dangerous murderers if they watch too many violent films on television. It simply means that the television screen represents a notable vector of fear, anxiety, aggressiveness, and violence. It would be wrong not to act on this causal lever mechanism, so much more amenable to change than other social determinants, such as poverty, education, abuse in early childhood, etc. Instead of criticizing (and even reviling) the scientific community when it denounces the effects of this televisual violence, it would no doubt be legitimate to demand an accounting from the audiovisual companies that make such great use of it.85
The desire of television networks to increase their audience by constantly diffusing violent images is not only regrettable, considering their effects on society, but also stems from a misguided assumption about their viewers. This foregrounding of violence is supposed to answer the public’s taste, but research does not confirm this opinion. The psychologists Ed Diener and Darlene DeFour showed fifty students a detective film that depicted frequent scenes of violence; fifty other students were shown the same film in which these scenes had been cut, while the plotline was preserved. It turned out that the students who saw the nonviolent version enjoyed the film just as much as the others. The researchers concluded that the fact of considerably reducing the frequency of violent scenes in television programs and in films would not lead to any loss of viewers.86 This point of view is also confirmed by the popularity of films that present human nature in a positive light, like The Tiger and the Snow, Groundhog Day, Amélie, Forrest Gump, and so on, far from the usual cynical view of existence.
Video games have become one of the favorite pastimes of children and teenagers all over the modern world. In the United States, 99% of boys and 94% of girls have played video games, and the time they devote to them is constantly increasing.87
An overview carried out by Craig Anderson and his colleagues dealing with 136 research studies measuring the effects produced on 130,000 people by playing violent video games established that these games unquestionably furthered the development of aggressive thoughts and behavior, and lessened prosocial behavior. These effects are important and have been observed in both children and adults, in boys and in girls.88 Douglas Gentile and his colleagues at the University of Iowa, for example, established that the more teenagers are exposed to violence in video games, the more hostile they are to others, the more they argue with their teachers and are involved in fights, and the less they succeed at school.89 The degree of hostility and densensitivization of subjects who played violent games is clearly higher than that of those who played games neutral from the point of view of violence—a motorcycle racing game, for instance.
To measure the long-term effects of video games, Douglas Gentile and his colleagues questioned twice (a year apart) over 400 children aged nine to eleven along with their peers and teachers. It turned out that those who played more violent video games during the first test attributed more hostile intentions to people they met, were more verbally and physically violent, and were less inclined to altruism when questioned again a year later.90
Analyses of video games show that 89% contain violence, and 50% contain acts of extreme violence toward the characters in the game.91 The more realistic the game is and the more blood one sees flowing, the more its effect on the viewer’s aggressiveness is accentuated.92 As Laurent Bègue, professor of social psychology at the University of Grenoble, reports,93 the video game that sold the most in the whole world in 2008, Grand Theft Auto IV, is incredibly violent. The player can, for example, drive on the sidewalks and crush pedestrians, whose blood stains the bumpers and windshields of the SUV the player has just hijacked. Since actions in video games are controlled by the player himself, his identification with the character who performs the violence is potentially stronger than when passively watching violent images on a TV or film screen. To that is added the repetitive aspect, which can make the player addicted. For we know that, in any learning activity, changes at the level of the brain and temperament are more marked when one practices an activity regularly.
The psychologists L. Kutner and C. Olson have distinguished four aspects of virtual games that are especially sought out by children: excitement and pleasure (they play to win, to reach a certain score, or to meet the challenge posed); socialization (they like playing with friends); the effect on their emotions (they play to calm their anger, forget their problems, feel less alone); and dispelling boredom (they play to kill time).94
From the point of view of the American military authority and instructor Dave Grossman, the conditioning effected by violent video games in which enemies appear suddenly and frequently, and must immediately be pulverized in a bloody and realistic manner, is a way to become desensitized to the act of killing, the effectiveness of which has been proven in the armed forces. But there is a crucial difference: children and other video game adepts are not subject to any authority that defines the rules and limits their actions. Soldiers are at least subject to the orders of their superiors and are supposed to shoot only when they have been ordered to do so.95
What’s more, children associate violent games not with heartrending tragedies, but with amusement and fun, their favorite beverage or food, and the friends they play with. Thus, a whole section of the population is ready to accept as models brutal superheroes endowed with supernatural powers who have no mission other than killing, for no reason, the largest possible number of people.96 “Not to speak,” writes the psychologist Laurent Bègue, “of the hypocrisy of the gaming industry that, with profits that are far from virtual (70 billion euros in 2011), continues to stigmatize parents (who are supposed to do a better job of controlling which games their offspring have access to) and lead us to believe that if there is a problem, it stems not from their software, but from people who have psychiatric problems, who spoil the atmosphere at the shooting gallery!”97
It is undeniable that video games can also be used for educative purposes, provided they are conceived with that purpose in mind. Otherwise, it has been established that their use harms performance at school.98 It has been observed that playing video games can increase visual alertness.99 But one can imagine other ways to increase attention than by killing people all the time. So we can neither simply say that video games are bad nor that they’re not as harmful as most scientists claim. Everything depends on their content, and it is precisely that content that produces beneficial or harmful effects. John Wright, eminent observer of media influence, liked to say: “The medium is not the message. It’s the message itself that’s the message.”
“I like video games,” said American comedian Demetri Martin, “but they’re really violent. I’d like to play a video game where you help the people who were shot in all the other games. It’d be called Really Busy Hospital.” Until recently, little attention was paid to the creation of prosocial, nonviolent video games in which the characters cooperate and help each other, instead of kill each other. Things are about to change.
For two years, under the inspiration of the science adviser to President Obama, a group of researchers including psychologists, educators, and neuroscientists have gathered several times in Washington to consider the best way to use the keen interest of youth in video games for constructive goals.
Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratories for Affective Neuroscience and Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin, has now teamed with Kurt Squire, associate professor at the UW–Madison School of Education and director of the Games Learning Society Initiative. Their project was awarded a 1.4-million-dollar grant by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with a mission of inventing and rigorously testing two educational games meant to help high school students cultivate their social and emotional skills.100
The first game will help cultivate attention and calm the mind. According to Davidson, “If you can learn to focus your attention more skillfully and concentrate, that will have ripple effects on all kinds of learning.” The second will stress empathy, altruism, compassion, and prosocial cooperation. “Empathy,” said Davidson, “is actually a better predictor of life success than cognitive intelligence.”
There are good reasons to think that if these games are presented in an attractive way to young people who enjoy video games, they will have positive effects on the players. Saleem, Anderson and Gentile carried out the first study, which clearly showed that prosocial video games101 reduce the general level of hostility and malevolent feelings in players, while simultaneously increasing positive emotions, compared to violent or simply neutral games, and this is true in the long term.102 When they checked the players’ motivation, they noted that the lessening of aggression and the increase of positive emotions were especially marked in those who showed altruistic motivation. On the other hand, among players who stated they had taken part in prosocial games mostly for selfish reasons, to diminish their empathic distress, the level of hostility increased as they played.103
It has been shown that by their presence alone, weapons set off psychological processes that activate aggression. The American social psychologist Leonard Berkowitz gave volunteers the opportunity to avenge themselves for insults made by someone (an accomplice of the experimenter) by administering electric shocks to him (actually nonexistent). In half the cases, the experimenter also placed a revolver on the table (with the explanation that it was for another study). The subjects placed in the presence of this weapon administered, as revenge, more electric shocks than the others. More recently, a study by Christopher Barlett, at the University of Iowa, showed that people playing a violent video game with a joystick in the form of a pistol were more aggressive after the experiment than those who had played the same game with a classic joystick.104
A report by Amnesty International, entitled “Broken bodies, shattered minds: Torture and ill-treatment of women,” indicates that one woman out of five in the world is a victim of serious abuse on a daily basis, and that “torture of women is rooted in a global culture which denies women equal rights with men, and which legitimizes the violent appropriation of women’s bodies for individual gratification or political ends.”105 In India, the proportion of women suffering from domestic abuse rises to 40%, and in Egypt, to 35%. The organization, which cites numerous testimonials by women and girls who have been beaten and raped, adds that “without exception, women’s greatest risk of violence comes not from ‘stranger danger’ but from the men they know, often male family members or husbands.… What is striking is how similar the problem is around the world.”106
The existence of “crimes of honor,” which can go as far as homicide, has been observed in several countries, including Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Turkey. The mere presentiment that a woman may have damaged the family honor can lead to torture and murder. In November 2012, Pakistani parents killed their fifteen-year-old daughter, Anusha, by spraying her with acid simply because she had looked at a boy who had stopped in front of their house on a moped, when they had forbidden her to look at boys (she was supposed to lower her eyes); they then let her suffer on the ground for hours because “that was her fate” (said her mother) after such a dishonor.107
Women who have been bought and sold for forced labor, sexual exploitation, or forced marriage are also exposed to torture. After drugs and weapons, the slave trade in human beings represents the third highest source of profit for international organized crime. Women who are victims of it are vulnerable to physical violence, especially rape, illicit imprisonment, confiscation of their identity papers, and slavery.
In armed conflicts, women are often torture victims because of their role as educators, and as symbols for their community. Thus, during the genocide carried out in Rwanda in 1994 and the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia, Tutsi, Muslim, Serbian, Croatian, and Kosovar women were tortured simply because they belonged to a particular ethnic, national or religious group.
Women who have been torture victims can encounter numerous obstacles when they try to obtain reparation, especially the indifference or mockery of the police, the absence of appropriate provisions in criminal law, sexist prejudice in the judicial system, and criminal procedures that violate the fairness of legal process.
In some countries, women are not allowed to appear in court: it is the men of their family who are supposed to represent their interests. The police regularly abstain from investigating cases of violence alleged by women and often leave them to their sorry fate instead of registering their complaints. In Pakistan, women who are rape victims can themselves be accused of zina (fornication), a crime punishable by death by stoning or public flagellation. As the Amnesty International report stresses:
In the past, violence against women in the home was viewed as a private matter, not an issue of civil and political rights. Today, the international community has explicitly recognized violence against women as a human rights issue involving state responsibility.… States have a duty to ensure that no one is subjected to torture or ill-treatment, whether inflicted by agents of the state or by private individuals. Yet far from protecting women, states all around the world have allowed beatings, rape, and other acts of torture to continue unchecked. When a state fails to take effective measures to protect women from torture, it shares responsibility for the suffering these women endure.
In some cases, the mental suffering inflicted by others is harsher and more difficult to endure than physical violence. The sufferings are set off by a multiplicity of causes over which we sometimes have no control, but in the end, it is our mind that translates into happiness or misery the external circumstances with which we are confronted. Consequently, any kind of violence that destroys our inner peace seriously affects our perception of the world and of others. Some forms of violence, including rape and other forms of sexual abuse, combine physical violence with devastating effects on mental integrity. Other attitudes, like scorn, indifference, wounding words or attitudes, and malevolence in general, can destroy our inner well-being.
Harassment is one of the most common forms of mental cruelty, different facets of which the Swedish psychologist Heinz Leymann has catalogued. It can consist of refusing someone any possibility of expressing themselves; constantly interrupting them; insulting them; criticizing their work and private life; ridiculing them; making fun of their physical aspect; mimicking their gestures; attacking their personal, political, or religious convictions; and even threatening them. It can also consist of ignoring someone’s presence; avoiding any eye contact with them; not talking to them and thereby giving them the impression that they are being rejected; giving them a task that isolates them from their colleagues; forbidding colleagues to speak to them; forcing them to do tasks that are either below or above their abilities; assigning them useless or absurd tasks; or else making them perform humiliating jobs or jobs that are harmful to their health. Harassment can culminate in physical aggression, especially that of a sexual nature.108
In schools, bullying incidents are forms of harassment that are sometimes cruel and that can have long-term effects on those who are its victims. One way of remedying this is to establish a mentoring system in which students tutor younger peers. This way of making older children responsible not only benefits progress at school—for both the elder and the younger student—but also helps to diminish bullying.
Three main factors counteract the desire to harm others: altruism, or kindness, which will cause us to be sincerely concerned with the fate of others; control of our emotions, which allows us not to give in to sudden impulses; and moral scruples, which make us hesitate at the idea of harming others, or regret having harmed them. We discussed the characteristics of kindness and consideration of others at length in earlier parts of this book.
As for control of emotions, it turns out that a number of criminals share the characteristic of being very impulsive and suffering from a lack of emotional control. They are more vulnerable than average individuals to various addictions and very quickly squander the spoils of their criminal activities. Several studies have proven that being easy prey to intense, fleeting emotions, and not taking a step back to assess the situation, favors giving in to violent behavior. In general, any emotional tension that escapes our control leads us to make irrational, instinctive choices that seem the easiest solution to, or way out of, an emotionally charged situation.109
Experience shows that appropriate training and sustained attention allow us to identify and manage emotions and mental events as they occur. This training also includes the development of healthy emotions like empathy, altruistic love and compassion.
The first stage of this training consists of identifying how emotions arise. This step requires one to cultivate a vigilant attention to the unfolding of mental activities, accompanied by an awareness that allows us to distinguish afflictive emotions from emotions that contribute to our well-being.
Experience also shows that like an untreated infection, afflictive emotions gain power when given free rein. Failing to control them, one forms habits to which one will again be prey as soon as one’s emotional charge reaches a critical threshold. What’s more, this threshold will get lower and lower, and one will grow more and more excitable.
Conclusions of psychological studies contradict the general belief that by letting anger explode one temporarily lowers the accumulated pressure.110 Actually, it’s quite the opposite that occurs. If one avoids letting anger openly manifest itself, blood pressure diminishes (and it diminishes even more if one adopts a friendly attitude), whereas it increases if one lets anger burst out.111
In addition, it serves no purpose to merely suppress the emotions. That would come down to preventing them from expressing themselves while still leaving them intact, which amounts to nothing but a temporary, unhealthy solution. Psychologists assert that a suppressed emotion can provoke serious mental and physical disorders, and that we must at all costs avoid turning our emotions against ourselves. Still, uncontrolled expression of emotions can also have disastrous consequences. One can die of a stroke in a fit of rage or be consumed by obsessive desire. What matters above all is to know how to establish an intelligent dialogue with one’s emotions.
To do this, one of the methods used most often consists of neutralizing disturbing emotions with the help of specific antidotes. In fact, two diametrically opposed mental processes cannot occur simultaneously. One can alternate quickly between love and hate, but one can cannot feel at the same instant of consciousness the desire to harm someone and that of doing him good. As the philosopher Alain remarked, “One movement excludes another; if you hold out your hand in a friendly way, no fist punches are possible.”112 Similarly, by training one’s mind in altruistic love, one eliminates animosity little by little, since these two states of mind are mutually exclusive. These antidotes are to the psyche what antibodies are to the organism.
Since altruistic love acts like a direct antidote to hatred, the more one develops it, the more the desire to harm will dwindle and finally disappear. So it is not a question of suppressing our hatred, but of turning the mind to something entirely contrary to it: love and compassion. Little by little, altruism will end up impregnating our mind more and more, until it becomes second nature.
A second way of confronting disturbing emotions consists of mentally dissociating ourselves from the emotion afflicting us. Usually, we completely identify with our emotions. When we are caught in a fit of anger, it is omnipresent in our mind and leaves little room for other mental states such as patience or taking anything into consideration that could calm our discontent. But even at that moment, the mind remains capable of examining what is going on inside it. To do this, all it has to do is observe its emotions, the way we would observe an external event taking place in front of our eyes. The part of our mind that is aware of anger is simply aware: it is not angry. In other words, mindfulness is not affected by the emotion it observes, in the same way that a ray of light may shine on a face disfigured by hatred or on a smiling face, without the light itself becoming mean or kind. Understanding that allows us to keep our distance and to give anger enough space for it to dissolve on its own.
By doing this, we avoid two equally detrimental extremes: suppressing emotion, which will remain somewhere in a dark corner of our consciousness, like a delayed-action bomb, or letting emotion explode, to the detriment of those around us and our own inner peace.
Societies that try to promote a high opinion of the individual, as well as narcissism, deem the feeling of shame unhealthy and undesirable.113 However, feelings of unease and regret experienced when one recognizes having committed an action that goes against moral values stems from a lucid discernment and constitutes a driving force for transformation: by acknowledging our mistakes, we intend not to repeat them and, whenever possible, to repair the wrong done. Regret differs from feeling guilt; instead of concentrating on a particular action, guilt overflows into the whole being, making us think “I’m a horrible person,” and may translate into a devaluing of self and into doubts about our ability to transform.
Psychological studies show that the fact of experiencing a feeling of shame while thinking about the sufferings one has inflicted on others or while contemplating the possibility of harming them, associated with an empathic awareness of these sufferings, serves as an antidote to violence. These scruples lead the individual to see reason—and also annihilate the sensation of pleasure that some criminals associate with their harmful actions.114
It is relatively easy to shoot at a crowd. It certainly requires more courage to confront, with bare feet and without any weapons, armed troops, as Burmese monks did during the 2008 insurrection to show their disapproval of the dictatorial regime that was still in power. Nonviolence is not a sign of weakness, but of courage and determination. It does not consist of letting oneself be oppressed, but of acting in a just way, without being blinded by hatred or a desire for revenge that clouds over all faculty of judgment. As the Dalai Lama often says, nonviolence and tolerance do not come down to saying “Go on, hurt me!” They are neither submission nor giving up; they are accompanied by strength of mind and an intelligence that spare us from useless mental sufferings and prevent us from falling into malevolence. We know that violence usually leads to a chain reaction that is disastrous for everyone. So we must avoid it by all means possible and resolve conflicts through negotiation and dialogue.
When we are the victims of an abuse or an injustice, it is legitimate to use the appropriate means and the necessary vigor to remedy it, but never with hatred and always with the hope of reaching a more just, constructive situation. This is what Gandhi did in India, during the nonviolent movement of Satyagraha (“the power of truth”), and what Martin Luther King Jr. did in all his actions, based on these words:
Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.115