I don't disagree with Norm Geras - nurture cannot be the whole story for some human beings being evil. I still think it's important to find out what the triggers are that encourage some people to give full rein to their evil impulses. The Stanley Milgram experiments, where his students were encouraged to give increasingly intense electric shocks to unseen victims, are well known. I was very struck a few years ago by a summary I read of research that had been done into how ordinary Greek men were turned into military police torturers under the Regime of the Colonels. The researcher Mika Haritos Fatouros also wrote this article about his findings, from which I have taken the following extracts:
"Sensitivity to torture was blunted in several steps. First, the men had
to endure it themselves, as if torture were a normal act. The beatings
and other torments inflicted on them continued and became worse. Next,
the servicemen chosen for the Persecution Section, the unit that
tortured political prisoners, were brought into contact with the
prisoners by carrying food to their cells. The new men watched veteran
soldiers torture prisoners, while they stood guard. Occasionally, the
veterans would order them to give the prisoners "some blows.'
At the next step, the men were required to participate in group
beatings. Later, they were told to use a variety of torture methods on
the prisoners. The final step, the appointment to prison warder or
chief torturer, was announced suddenly by the commander-in-chief,
leaving the men no time to reflect on their new duties."
I'm pretty sure that in the original summary I read there was also a reference to taking the trainee torturers away from their families, so they could not refer back to them when troubled by what they were asked to do.
I am sometimes asked in my training seminars whether Japanese people are somehow inherently cruel or weird, based on the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers in WWII. My answer is that all it proves, much as the Germans and the Holocaust, is that human beings are all (maybe there are some exceptions) capable of horrible cruelty, given certain circumstances. The circumstances might include being exposed to warped values or a lack of positive values in one's formative years (see Saddam Hussein's early years), or being excluded from an in-group in some way in later childhood or young adulthood, which is then often followed by being wooed into another, deviant, group. This does not excuse giving into cruel impulses. There are plenty of people in the latter category who have come through
such experiences to be shining examples of good citizenship or success
in their chosen careers. We would all (nearly all) want to believe we would be the brave person who would refuse to join in what we believed to be wrong. We would be in the Resistance.
A lot of these posts are my attempts to see what practical measures could be taken to minimise the manifestation of the evil sides to human nature, particularly in situations where 'plural identities' are at stake.
