You\u2019re a participant in an experiment: you are in a room, there\u2019s a list of correct answers in front of you; in the next room there is someone else, another participant who must solve some memory tests correctly. Whenever the person answers incorrectly, you will have to press a button on a device and give them an electric shock. The intensity of the electric shock will increase with each wrong answer. What do you think, could you do this? What about your colleague from the office?<\/p>\n
How about if you were to take part in another experiment and were told that you were supposed to be a guard in a fake prison (and the other guards and inmates were ordinary people, participants in the study and playing a role, just like you), what kind of guardian would you be? What kind of punishments would you apply for insubordination?<\/p>\n
People are fundamentally good. Humans are inherently evil.<\/p>\n
It is an age-old debate and religion, philosophy, literature, anthropology, biology, and psychology have tried to find arguments in favor of one position or the other. The debate continues. What\u2019s certain is that we are fascinated by the problem of evil, we passionately binge documentaries and true-crime movies, we sympathize with real or fictional negative heroes.<\/p>\n
We cannot fully understand what it means to be human unless we reflect on the nature of evil; we can’t claim to know ourselves and be okay with ourselves if we don’t also examine the dark corners of our minds. We don’t even need to think about extreme gestures, such as terrorist acts, crimes, etc. It’s much simpler: dark thoughts that make us feel ashamed, hidden desires, barely formulated in the conscious mind, violent impulses that seem to come from somewhere else, not from ourselves, secret, unconfessed gestures, aggressive behaviors that we try to justify, but which leave us devastated. They are all part of us. But how?<\/p>\n
I have summarized below some of the explanations offered by various branches of psychology:<\/p>\n
Jungian\/ analytical psychotherapy<\/em><\/strong>: Carl Jung, psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychotherapy says that we all have a part of our personality that we reject and repress because we don’t like it or we find it morally unacceptable. Jung calls the unaccepted and pushed back to the unconscious traits “shadow”. If we ignore the demons within, the shadow archetype becomes even more powerful and controls us. What we have to do, says Jung, is to integrate this shadow into our personality, that is, to become aware of our less desirable parts and work with them. Only then can we be whole and happy.<\/p>\n Clinical psychology<\/em><\/strong>. Since the 2000s, clinicians have begun to talk about the “dark triad”\u2014a trio of negative, overlapping personality traits: narcissism (excessive self-centeredness, sense of entitlement), Machiavellian attitudes (manipulative, vengeful), and psychopathy (cruelty, insensitivity to the feelings of others, lack of remorse). Individuals who fall into the dark triad personality type are prone to violence and criminal activities.<\/p>\n Evolutionary Psychology<\/em><\/strong>. There is talk of a “selfish gene” that would make acts of aggression, rape and murder appear to be rational acts, in the sense that they would prove beneficial to the survival of the species. It is possible that those Paleolithic ancestors who were willing to participate in acts of violence might have been the beneficiaries of more resources, thus increasing their chances of having offspring.<\/p>\n Social psychology<\/em><\/strong>. Hannah Arendt, witnessing the trial of Eichmann (the architect of the “final solution” that led to the extermination of more than 6 million Jews between 1940-1945), speaks of the “banality of evil”: the monsters who committed war crimes are ordinary people, and criminal acts are not fundamentally done by bad people, but by people who blindly obey authority. Seemingly confirming Arendt’s theory, the experiments of Milgram, Ash, and Zimbardo dramatically emphasize how conformity, obedience to authority, and social pressure lead people to commit extremely bad acts (eg, severely electrocuting others, deprive them of food or treat them brutally – see my questions from the beginning of this article).<\/p>\n Neurosciences<\/em><\/strong>. The idea that people have a kind of innate moral compass, even for the first months of life, is starting to take shape more and more clearly. Scientists have observed how babies up to one year old, after watching a skit with puppets, tend to choose the puppet that showed altruism and kindness. It appears that we are conditioned by a complex neural and chemical network to be inclined toward empathy and connection with others.<\/p>\n As I was saying, the debate continues. What we each have to do is look in the mirror at our less pleasant parts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You\u2019re a participant in an experiment: you are in a room, there\u2019s a list of correct answers in front of you; in the next room there is someone else, another […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7971,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsletter-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n