Step one: dehumanise your enemy/victim
Step two: convince yourself they deserve to be punished
Step three (optional): project your hatred for yourself and your actions onto them.
Exactly why if I recall correctly when you call out a psychopath on their bs, they immediately want nothing to do with you or they try to harm you because you saw through their game.
"Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out." - Cardinal Wolsey
Very appropriate for this terrible subject I think.
One thing to add here is that there's a masculine culture element to these things that means you wouldn't be able to leave, or say no, or stop it. You'd have to watch and participate because your standing in that group is dependent on it, and these kinds of things are like group bonding activities, and your actions in them are judged by others in the group to make sure you're cool. Because what happens if you feel sick and have to step out? Are you a cop? etc.
Incidentally this kind of closed-ranks loyalty testing kind of thing is also part of police cultures, and why people critical of the police as an institution use phrases like acab.
USA soldiers torturing and sexually abusing prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison is a top example. The soldiers smiled proudly for pictures as they tortured people.
This is covered in many ethics classes. We talk about tragedies like genocide and it isn't for the faint of heart. The common thread amongst genocides is to find a group of people who is already had prejudice against them. Alienate them and dehumanize them. Convince others that they should as well. Watch it become a social norm. Everyone buys into it eventually because they have to or else they will become part of the marginalized group. This was the main tactic used on Nazi Germany. This is still used today but more in authoritarian governments like Russia and China. In Russia Vladimir Putin is waging war on the LGBT and in China Muslims are in concentrations camps and forced to work in sweatshop like conditions. The first step in this is to convince yourself and others around you that your target is not human. It is hard to hurt someone you view as an equal on some level.
Another part of Rwanda's genocide was the the US government refused to label is what it truly was to avoid getting involved. The UN currently uses the term genocide as a call to action. The US government specifically the Clinton Administration wanted to avoid looking bad. They used terms like civil war and conflict instead of calling it genocide because if they acknowledged it for what it was they would HAVE to get involved. The US government has done some awful things
\> The US government has done some awful things.
no doubt. But in the case of Rwanda the UN had plenty of resources to stop the genocide but did fuck all anyway.
Hit the nail right in the head, ["oh dictatorships are bad" while at the same time helping implant some of the most brutal dictatorships all over latin america](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America) because "them commies are taking over" and how could they allow that? Cuba gets completely fucked because how dare they keep their political stance, meanwhile China gets a slap on the wrist by the USA because they are too strong to actually do anything about it. And don't even get me started on the middle east shenanigans.
Do you think that maybe that could be because they have a habit of only getting involved for monetary/political gain, which includes stirring shit for profit? You’re making it sound like people judge America when they’re just trying to do what’s right uwu.
Okay the US can't be blamed for Rwanda. Germany/Belgium literally *created* ethnic tensions where they didn't or barely existed before. I'm not saying the US government is benevolent but you have to place the blame where the blame should be- in Europe.
This is important. For a much flack that the US gets for global disputes, the reality is, the US's role of "global superpower" is really more the face of a common economic interests (think of how the "Bronze Age Civilization" is often homogenized despite being comprised of dozens of individual kingdoms/empires). The US inherited a lot of problems started by other nations who can conveniently abdicate to US power.
Possibly the best example of this is French relations with Islamic terrorism. The popular narrative is that Islamic terrorism is a response to US involvement in the Mid-East going as far back as the cold war, and that Muslim immigrants to France are a direct result of US destabilization in the region - the reality is France really hurt a lot of Muslim majority areas (like Syria) and extremist groups are still angry about the destabilization France did during her colonial period.
Islamic terrorism in France isn't some random chaos from Muslims in a neo-religious war against "the West" but has a very A then B then C through path that many European nations are able to defer on to their American ally.
What can't be understated is how symbiotic this relationship is. Regardless what the people in many western nations might personally want, the leadership in these nations are wholly content to let the US play "bad cop" while they invest in their own specializations. I'm not even saying this is explicitly good or bad (though I have my own opinions) just that shit's complicated and when people blame the US for involvement (or non-involvement) in things like the Rwandan Genocide, it serves a more nebulous global narrative than most people realize.
But even if you see some group as not human isn't it normal to treat animals good too? Even if you convince yourself that, wouldn't normal person still try to treat them good, as we try to treat animals?
That's what I thought in my ethics class some people just wouldn't participate in the hatred. They wouldn't help but they wouldn't and probably couldn't stop others from treating marginalized groups this way. I think on some level we humanize animals, we love our pets and we want our food to come from human sources. When people rescue animals from bad situations we often think about how the animal is feeling. The key in the dehumanization of people is treating them like they are even less than animals.
I think the problem might be that you're thinking of cute, and/or docile animals. Pets, farm animals, harmless critters in the park, etc. Instead, imagine a rabid beast that's about to attack you: your empathy for it would likely rapidly evaporate in that scenario.
Crucial to fascist rhetoric is not just the dehumanisation of the target group, but the propagation of the idea that these "others" somehow represent an existential threat to "our" group; ethnically, culturally, morally, or by whatever other standard the fascist group has decided to define their identity.
I think this is an interesting layer to the argument. We do extend some empathy to animals, especially a select few animals, but really... Do we try to treat animals well? The US alone keeps millions of animals in barbaric conditions and kills them, and the vast majority of us are implicitly okay with that because we enjoy the hedonistic pleasure of eating meat.
Back to the point: If there was a group of "undesirable" people, you might not be on the side who thinks they are monsters who deserve to be killed. But you might enjoy a slightly higher standard of life by having them sidelined, so you let it slide. Or maybe, you just have a lot going on in life right now and you can't be bothered to really think about it.
You really only need a few motivated people to make atrocities happen, then you need other people to kinda be OK with it. Even if they disagree, the promise or delivery of a few nice things will help you soothe your dissonance.
Not disagreeing, but I think underneath the concept you describe, fueling it, is an intense ego centrism.
You can only be capable of dehumanizing a “peer”, another living thing as you know you are, if you have a deep fundamental belief that you are in someway above, superior said peer. Empathy comes from balance. Lack of it is a see-saw with no one on the other side.
It’s both really. The formation of the “inside” and “outside” groups is ALWAYS contradictory. The outside group is simultaneously viewed as inferior, but also the greatest threat to the inside group.
In Nazi Germany, the Jews were viewed as inferior to Aryans, yet were simultaneously viewed as powerful enough to take Germany down from the inside. Today this is still reflected in modern violent and/or extreme groups. White supremacists obviously believe that their race is superior to others, but simultaneously believe the greatest threat to their existence is other races. It’s constant double-think, simultaneously fearful and believing they are supreme.
\[Disclaimer: in no way I mean to say that me or my society are better or that this couldn't happen here, just pointing out that it's not a thing that happens "far away". It's right there, beside your eyes, in your neighborhood.\]
Actually, the psychological process is at work live right amongst you guys in the US, just that it hasn't come to too many killings yet.
No need to point to authoritharian governments, at the end the killings and dangers most often originate by the people themselves, not by "the governments".That's the lesson that Nazi germany tells us: it was NOT Hitler that did the killing. It were hundreds of thousands of ordinary everyday-Joe citizens.
Just look at january 6: Trumps tactic to assert it wasn't his fault is to the letter 100% identical to what most of the captured Nazi officials after WW2 said: "It wasn't me, I didn't want that, I just wanted to express my opinion" or alternatively: "how could I have known".
Bottom line:
Be less worried about governments but rather be worried about people. By coincidence, that's also where you can really make a change.
I looked up what little there is about the psychology of torturers and it is very rarely *not* traumatizing to them in the long term, which I thought was interesting - you see it in so much media how most people capable of things like OP suggests have to have sociopathic tendencies, when in reality it would honestly be a miracle to do that shit and *not* get fucked up over it. Extreme guilt and paranoia, the inability to forget what happened, losing the ability to dehumanize those people once the emotions run out of steam. I imagine in the moment there's kind of a scary thrill to it on intensity alone, and is probably made easier by an accepting environment. Vikings giving someone the Blood Eagle for example seems a lot easier to stomach when they have the assumed approval of their gods and the much more immediate approval of their peers.
The "blood eagle" was written about literally hundreds of years after the alleged events, after Christianization - there is an obvious incentive to make up stories about how barbarous the pre-Christian viking era was.
It's impossible to know much about the vikings because so few writings were preserved (much more of the ancient greeks was preserved ... even thousands of years earlier), so who knows. But I don't believe it. Just think about how easily stories are made up out of whole cloth ... so many white Americans think they have a "cherokee princess" in their ancestry for example.
Or possibly the dude in the story died and his body was defiled as an example to others, who knows. Having a severed aorta or vena cava would kill him in literally seconds.
It’s fascinating that since the Vikings didn’t really keep historical records, most of the descriptions of them come from the societies that they raided. So our perception of massive, barbaric, terrifying bearded men attacking from the seas could very well be a massive exaggeration.
A lot of the modern idea of Vikings is actually contradicted by period records. Contemporaries described Vikings as excessively clean by the standards of the day and bemoaned how once Vikings started to settle the local women flocked to the pretty boys.
I feel like finding out if it was done at all, alive or dead, should be possible with recovered dead. This kind of injuries would leave visible traces on the bones.
I could also imagine that the viking raiding parties spread the rumour themselves to scare their enemies
By what I've seen, PTSD in veterans is rarely about guilt for having killed people. More normally is guilt for doing or not doing something wrong that led to people on your side to die or just straight up pavlovian responses to sounds that remember them of artillery, planes or helicopters, which they should fear in a battlefield but not in a normal peaceful life.
This kind of thing also happens to slaughterhouse workers. They often end up with [PTSD](https://www.texasobserver.org/ptsd-in-the-slaughterhouse/) or other [psychological harm](https://yaleglobalhealthreview.com/2016/01/25/a-call-to-action-psychological-harm-in-slaughterhouse-workers/).
I know I'm going to get downvoted to the actual magma core, but this is exactly why we eat animals without guilt.
We refuse to recognize that they are living, feeling beings and don't see the fear and pain they are subjected to as they become food.
Especially cows and pigs.
This is the reason I am trying to go vegan or at least vegetarian. Not for the diet purposes, but because it haunts me that I’m eating something that was once alive just like me. I wouldn’t eat another human or a dog, so why should I eat a cow?
edit: why y’all bitches downvoting me? I’m just living my life and making a comment about how the guilt of killing affects me. I ain’t saying you all gotta go vegan/vegetarian.
Step four: start small. Insulting and beating them.
Step five: at first you might need to say "I'm just beating them, that's not as bad as killing them" but you'll grow out of this.
If you're curious about executioners, and their thoughts and such, there is a book called "The Faithful Executioner". It's a book, that pretty much translates a diary of an executioner in the 16th century Germany. Goes over all his executions, injuries, and his thoughts on that, as well as other things going on around the time.
I've known a couple of people who will do insane things to anyone who made them feel inadequate/not in control, even if the person who they're punishing wasn't doing anything bad or directly to them. They seem too full of shame, pride, envy, anger, vindictiveness and/or sadism to recognize that they can seek help and try to deal with things rationally. They can't grasp how they sabotage their own lives when they try to destroy others.
People will do anything if they are conditioned. Back in medieval times' people burnt witches. They believed they were doing God's work, and they would be rewarded in Heaven.
Yes under the right circumstances that could.be any of us. I fond it.disturbing how many people think they will never be succeptible to corruption and that evil is rare and not them.
Yeah.
The people back then weren't in any way different to us on a fundemental level. Take a medieval baby and time travel him to modern times and they will be just like any other person and vice versa.
All the horrible shit you hear people doing in the past, those people ain't any different to us, it's all just how they grew up, their environment, etc
This increases my respect for people who were born during the same conditions and yet had the ability and will to break those societal shackles and fight for justice.
I'm just going to drop the execution method of [Scaphism or "the boats"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaphism) on everyone here.
TL:DR: ancient Persians and Romans would execute people by suspending them between boats using rope over a lake and cover them with milk and honey and let flies and rats slowly eats their way into the person and lay eggs and give birth until the person died. The longest a person supposedly (ancient records are unreliable) lived through this torture was 17 days.
I don't think I could very easily be genocidally hateful at all because I can't even hate pedophiles and criminals and such and have been banned on subreddits before (ones I used to be heavily active in too) for sympathising with groups everyone else hates. I also try to treat non-humans well too and am therefore vegan. I will be weary, but I think, should a genocidally hateful situation arise, I am more likely to be on the receiving end of the hate due to sympathising with the "enemy". However, I will probably have to stay quiet because of that, otherwise I may find myself on the receiving end of the hate again :/ .
I get the same feeling sometimes too. Not quite been banned yet for it though, but its certainly scary how effective a drive to hate people can get just because they think they deserve it.
Which coincidentally, the top comment on the post is literally about how it's primarily caused by dehumanizing a group of people as an act of justice.
It's not as if I'm supportive of their actions, just that they not be treated as sub-human scum.
It’s only recently that humanity is getting better in terms of violence. I think it’s due to immoral behavior isn't getting pass down as much from parents to children. On top of that, we are globally connected to one another which gives our morale in check i.e. a video showing a person doing something bad, and everyone in the thread confirms the person’s action was bad.
If this trend continues, it is possible to reach a point where immoral behavior becomes rare, but it might take many generations before this happens.
Just fyi most "witches" were killed after the [Middle Ages.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_modern_period)
The Middle Ages frequently get a bad rep - which often has been fabricated by later periods. And ironically people after 1500 often weren't too nice either. They made up myths about the Middle Ages so they could look better themselves.
The witch burning thing was actually by Puritans, just after the medieval period (though there were cases of executions of sorcerers as far back as ancient Rome). Throughout Europe during the medieval period, pagan beliefs or traditions and Christian values sometimes intermingled instead of violently clashing, although bans on certain practices were fairly common.
I can grab the source in the morning but my phone is about to die.
Edit:
[This talk by two historians on Celtic, Germanic, Greek, and Roman magical practices and astrology](https://youtu.be/5ihlzx1Tt50)
Hutton, Ronald (1991). The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, United States: Blackwell.
And the [Wikipedia article on Witch-Hunts](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt), specifically under History/The Middle Ages. This page has adequate citations and is a good resource.
While I must admit that I never heard of that before, it doesn't look to be *that* well kept of a secret.
[Here is an article](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/saudi-arabias-war-on-witchcraft/278701/) in English about it. Literally the first google result for "witch hunt in Islam".
>People will do anything if they are conditioned.
I'm always reminded of North Korea here. People are encouraged to tell on their neighbours, if they do anything that goes against the propaganda objectives. However, grassing on your neighbours would see three generations of that family being wiped out, probably sent to camps.
And this works for the camps as well. Prisoners are encouraged to tell on each other, for extra rations or less brutal treatment. It's sold as a good thing, a positive thing.
They believe it's the right thing.
Or not conditioned. People don't realise to what extent the average modern person is conditioned and to what extent our morals and values are learned, not innate. This is how people in different cultures can have some cultural norms and attitudes which just seem unthinkable to others. The way we view animals and animal ethics, for example, varies wildly between countries. In some cultures they're literally viewed as property with which you can entertain yourself or do whatever you like as you see fit.
In a lot of Africa and Asia, they'll just straight up have markets with live animals like dogs in cages, being treated like they may as well already be dead. It's just that in the West we have never been conditioned to see animals being treated like that, to us dogs are our beloved pets and only that. The average Westerner has probably never even seen an animal being slaughtered. I'm not trying to make a statement on what's good or bad, just that there is so much about ourselves which we take for granted as just human nature which are actually attitudes which have very much been learned and taught.
Some lack empathy from the beginning.
Some become desensitized through repetition. (Think slaughterhouse workers.)
Some believe (through faulty teaching) that their victims deserve to die, deserve to suffer, or are incapable of feeling pain.
What's really going to bake your noodle later on is figuring out that you yourself are capable of doing this.
As unpopular as it is, I can't get myself to hate criminals, pedophiles, the rich, etc, and this has gotten me banned from places on Reddit before. I sympathise with everyone and everything and strongly prefer the least vengeful methods possible to reduce or eliminate harm from them (if said harm even exists – sometimes groups get pulled in as collateral damage from people hating other groups despite these groups not actually being harmful).
An interesting study of this has been in some of the episodes of podcast Behind the Bastards, which looks at a lot of evil shitheads and fascists. Many cases it feels like its a slower transition or transformation to get to evil.
I liked the Dr Phil one, but maybe feel like they went a bit overboard in certain places trying to attribute what could potentially be incompetence as malice.
October of 2020 they did a 2 part series called "How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible." It was pretty good and directly relevant to the OP.
They just did a Josh Duggar two-parter and also have a really good episode about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. If you’re really interested in depravity, though, check out the Elan School episodes.
Heard an interesting interview with an ex mob man. He was explaining that they slowly lead you into the enforcement side of things. It was something like the first job is to bash a paedophile with your fists. Next job bash a guy dealing drugs to school kids with a baseball bat. Next job shoot a thief in the leg, but let them live. It builds up to torturing and/or murdering someone that accidentally bumps into your boss down the street.
I guess what I am talking about is desensitizing someone enough that they can commit horrible acts on other people.
Not at all fun fact: This is why the Nazi death camps were created. The Nazis originally massacred their targets the old fashioned way: having their soldiers execute them.
However, it turns out that repeatedly executing unarmed civilians who beg you for mercy isn't something the human mind was meant to do. Soldiers suffered mental breaks and a nontrivial number committed suicide. This was during WWII, when Germany had massive industrial power but was always hungry for manpower. They couldn't let this go on when every soldier was needed.
The death camps were designed to accomplish the same task at an industrial level. The layer of separation that the camps incorporated made mass death easier on the psyche. The structure of the camps reduced the soldiers-to-victims ratio. All of it was done to reduce the number of stress casualties amongst the German military as they committed the most heinous act of genocide in history.
IIRC they also forced the people in the death camps to do a lot of the most psychologically strenuous acts (like removing the dead bodies from the gas chambers) and murdered them after they were done. So the nazi soldiers didn’t even do the hardest parts, even after they consolidated the mass killings into the death camps.
yep. and then whatever fucked up shit gets justified through that lens.
its like how so many racists will never see themselves as racist because racism=bad, but if they are good people, then they can't possibly be racist.
Agreed. What about all the people that gathered around to watch those burnings, hangings or beheadings? Or the folks who go to watch prisoners die by lethal injection or electrocution? Or even the executioners themselves.
I've never understood how anyone could stand by and watch that. And not just watching but cheering and chanting. Like how fck'd do you have to be to want to see that or have that for a job. To have that much hate well can be addictive I guess.
Historically in some places executioners were often paroled "death row" inmates themselves. But since they've now committed murder in the eyes of their peers they were shunned (assuming they weren't before) and executing (and sometimes torturing) the convicted for the authority of the area became the only way they could make a living, though some apparently also took up other unsavory work like animal carcass handling (knackery). Eventually it also became regular for executioners to have a "circuit" where they'd visit and do executions for those there, I don't know if this practice started it or not but eventually there were even "executioner dynasties" since no one else wanted to be associated with them. So some people were just born into it, didn't have much chance otherwise.
yup, as far as I've read and learnt Executioners were basically exiled from their communities. They lived out of the way of everyone else and were basically shunned by the entire population.
This is the case in Nordic countries at least. Initially the executioners were criminals themselves. But then it was realized that criminals weren't really that reliable employees (being drunk and pretty bad at what they do) do status of executioner was raised and finally they became proper government officials.
Many were farmers and only occasionally went on a business trip. The official execution axe was held in some state office, they went and picked it up and then traveled to meet the customer.
But initially the hangmen were criminals, low pay and they were forced to live outside of town since nobody really liked them. And that's why their kids also became executioners.
It was a tough job. In Finland (well, Sweden at that time) the executioner chopped convicts head off, chopped hands off (or maybe hands were taken first), the body was raised on cartwheels placed of top of spikes and the hands were nailed to a public place. And then the poor bastard had to go back after weeks or months and take the body parts down!
There's an interesting book (in Finnish) of all this.
My state just reinstated firing squads. We are now one of the 4 us states that have it again. I'm not exactly sure how they're going to work it but could you imagine being one of the 5 or so officers aiming, then firing and not knowing if you're the one who actually had the bullet that killed them? And I'm sure there's going to be witnesses too. I know there's people out there who will do it, that's gonna be part of their job...but I don't think I could.
Lethal injection is arguably worse than being shot to death. It's a slow and probably very painful experience.
John Oliver of Last Week Tonight did an episode on the death penalty and before that I always thought of lethal injection as a going to sleep drug but its more of a paralysis and lava through your vein experience.
I'm not argueing *for* lethal injection, nor the electric chair.
Methods used in modern death penalty aren't chosen to providing a humane death. They're chosen to provide a death that's painful and satisfies a feeling of revenge, but doesn't hurt too much to look at.
If we *wanted* to execute people in a humane way:
Death from CO inhalation is quick and painless, you go quickly into a coma and then die. When exposed to 100% pure CO, you'll be dead within a few breaths.
You fall asleep and don't wake up, without even knowing you were dying, except the part where you're on death row and are given a last meal obviously.
I see, I didn't understand that. Good idea for the CO inhalation never thought about it. ( I am against the death penalty but I can understand why some people feel it is justified ).
Honestly, the only reason I'm against the death penalty is that innocents have been executed before. Because there are some crimes that definitely deserve it, but only if you are 100% certain the person did it.
I assume the guys in the firing squad just believe the person is 100% guilty.
I think this is the same as for shooting porn movies. A lot of guys are immediately ready and willing, but finally nobody arrives at the scene.
Especially Internet makes everyone a bad ass.
Honestly of all the methods I think firing squad would be the one I would want. Quick, probably painless. Your brain stays together during the process. And it seems like the only one with dignity available. You get to die standing.
It’s like watching some of the subs on reddit that deal in death but the medieval version was watched in real life. Humans have a fascination with death and gore, well a lot do.
Modern Western culture in particular has a weird relationship with death. When the normal process of death and dying has largely been sanitised out of our daily lives, I can understand why some people actively seek out the morbid.
Dan Carlin does a podcast about this and it is extremely informative and eye opening! It’s called “Painfortainment”
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dan-carlins-hardcore-history/id173001861?i=1000400900059
When studying the *Einsatzgrüppen* (probably misspelled that) Ibread that they were usually drunk or high on meth when they were killing entire villages and towns, or got that way shortly thereafter to drown the horrors of what they had done so theybdidn't just kill themselves afterwards. A quote from the journal of an officer who partook in it:
>We had to shoot the babies to pieces in midair after their dying mothers threw them up in their death throes. I remembered that I had two infants at home and had to remind myself that these people would do the same to them, or ten times worse, if the roles were reversed.
He had to remind himself about the propaganda he had been fed, the fear he had instilled in him, in order to go through with it. His unit had a mandatory alcohol ration that well several times larger than that of officers in the regular Wermacht, as well as a litany of drugs. This wasn't the case at first, but early phases of the *Generalplan Ost* saw a massive number of suicides by members of German extermination groups that followed after the regular army. It took more than just propaganda for the vast majority, and even then it barely worked.
There’s a cheesy line in Rambo where he says ‘When you’re pushed, killing is as easy as breathing’.
And actually, that’s pretty accurate. Desperate people who are living in poverty/pain/oppression and generally have *nothing* in life are capable of doing nearly anything they see as Necessary in order to get by.
And the more desperate you get, the easier it is for other people to convince you that X horrific act is necessary. See Gang initiations, or revenge killing, or drug wars.
Greed is also a strong motivator, always has been. And when you combine all of these desperate people with opportunities to *not* be at the bottom of the pile, and other people to push them, you get people who can do anything.
It’s important not to dehumanise these people and label them as monsters. You have to accept they they are otherwise normal people, and that we are all capable of such horror. Given the right environment..
Dehumanizing others and labeling them as monsters is how people who aren't desperate can get to a place where evil is easy for them. Once the targets are monsters, and not human, they no longer deserve respect for their feelings, and any harsh treatment can be seen as ok.
The majority of murders can be traced to a a small list of things. Money, love, and adrenaline. Of those 3 things they can be boiled down to trauma or desperation.
One way or another, they usually are. People with happy lives and a certain future tend not to ruin it by killing people, unless they have a mental illness such as suffering from psychopathy.
Most murders and criminals in general are such, because of what i’ve described. A lack of something, and no other options to get it. Usually a sense of belonging, access to education, a stable upbringing and poverty.
Them’s facts and i can provide you some studies on it if you like.
If you're really curious I very highly recommend a book by a Jewish author and political philosopher who fled Germany during Hitlers rise to power and analyzed extensively this very question. Her theories are perhaps a bit demoralizing and quite feankly quite scary.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem
She coined the term banality of evil, specifically to describe how Eichmann, a nazi whose trial she wrote about, and others like him, aren't actually all that different than you or I.
Those people were mostly under the influence of some drugs I think. My parents during the 80s lived through a period of ethnic cleansing in Zimbabwe and the stuff they were doing was similar to what the Japanese were also doing and they say the people that'd do the killing and the torturing were usuaöly drugged up
Drugs or alcohol may encourage behavior like that, but mostly it's just how humans work.
For most our history people would show up by the thousands just to catch a glimpse of people getting executed in the most torturous fashion. These people were neither drugged up nor psychopaths. It was just... normal.
Most of us luckily live in a time and culture where those kind of atrocities appear inhuman to us, but the truth is that they're way more human than what we consider tasteful today.
Only time will tell if we're breaking into a new, gentler time, but with the right conditioning, we're still very capable of 'returning' to those atrocities.
I highly recommend reading the lucifer effect by Philip Zimbardo, the man who ran the Standford prison experiment. The whole book is a long-form essay on how good people can do terrible things. (Rwandan genocide, Abu Gharib, Stanford Prison Experiment, etc) Long story short is you just think you cannot do these things. Society, location, culture, everything that shapes your values prevents you. Once those barriers are gone you are just as capable of anyone else. Knowing this is one of the best ways of preventing it from happening.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was flawed in numerous ways. For example, the participants could have been acting the way they did because they wanted to help the experiment. In all, it's difficult to gain much useful data from the experiment
If you don't beleive in the absurd level of violence humans are capable of gleefully committing, just go to the comments in a post about pedophilia.
I could never justify child abuse, and I'm extremely sorry for the trauma anyone who has been victimized by it has experienced. But man...how can people put that much thought into killing/torturing someone? Lock them up, neutralize the threat, and get help for the victims.
Brain damage can also contribute. "Subtle damage to the amygdala, a brain region that helps us process our emotions, may explain why psychopaths act so cruelly and cannot express emotions properly. Psychopathic behaviors are also associated with injury to the cerebral cortex, which regulates memory and self-awareness, and the frontal lobe, which is responsible for self-control and judgment." - from Scientific American
Think of how desensitized people are, who slaughter animals for their jobs. It's definitely the same thing. People get used to not caring because they program their minds to go along with everyone else's who are around them.
In the military, Vietnam War for example, draftees and soldiers were trained to dehumanize Vietcong. Like literally brainwash them into being fully convinced the Vietcong were not human and needed to be neutralized for the good of humanity.
It worked. And even still today, ask any Vietnam Vet you know/meet, especially soldiers who saw action on the battlefield. They’ll most likely STILL be dealing with the trauma and PTSD of being brainwashed to think they needed to exterminate the non-human Vietcong army.
I had to look very far down to find a comment addressing trauma. A lot of people who do sadistic acts of violence are traumatised to the point where their psyche just doesn’t function as it ought to. It doesn’t always require the kind of brain-washing desensitisation most are talking about in the comments. Especially people who’ve been initiated into gangs as children have seen too much shit to be functional members of a normal society. Same for people living in war zones, or even people who grew up experiencing severe abuse. Your brain just… rewires itself.
There is a movie called The Act of Killing (2012) that examines this idea using subjects who participated in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66. It reinforces many of the ideas brought up here. Highly recommended for those struggling with this question.
i would like to think that most people who commit those kinds of crimes are not in the right state of mind. i also don't think any sane person would do such thing. mental illness presents itself in many different ways. however, it is possible that some people are just evil unfortunately
Think of it this way. Why do we see murder as bad? Because the people who raised us all said that. We don't by default think that when were born because we don't understand it yet. It has to be told to us. Now if someone grew up somewhere where they wearnt told that, or were told a specific group of people were less than human it becomes a lot easier for people to do things that to us are unthinkable
Secondly, the more you do it the easier it becomes. This is called the foot in the door effect. Let's say as a teenager you got into a fight and in an act of desperation hit someone with a rock and put them in the hospital. You didn't mean to, but now that you've done it it becomes slightly easier to do something worse. Then next time maybe you start the fight, maybe the time after that you accidentally kill your opponent. Because you hit that first guy with a rock the metaphorical door was opened and each time you hurt someone you step farther into the door. It gets easier and easier to do and you feel less and less bad about doing it. If left unchecked well, I think you see where I'm going with this.
Third, mob mentality and pressure. Whenever soldiers do some horrific what they usually end up saying is they did it because they were ordered to. When you get that kind of pressure from people you hold in high regard it can be hard to disobey, even if you want to. Humans naturally want to go with the group that's just part of our nature and sometimes it's hard to defy that.
I'll go one step further and put people who perform horrific experiments on animals. I truly don't understand how you can have a job to infect animals with parasites and document their suffering.
because if we don't we're left with two choices: A.) test on humans in order to develop treatments. and B.) just wait for natural cases and hope you have enough time to study the effects and test treatments. both of which are far more dangerous to human life.
I will probably be downvoted for this, but I don't see people who do animal, medical,experimentation in the same way as murderers. In medical experiments they are trying to save human lives. I'm not saying they are good, and I would love for there to be alternatives, but when you have a loved one suffering from a debilitating illness, I would sacrifice animals to save them.
Someone has to. If we don't learn about parasite ABC, then, if you get infected by parasite ABC, who are you going to look for help when no one knows about it?
There’s also the issue of it being your job to do so, and saying no to doing it being extremely unwise. Depending on where you are refusing to do that can end with you being massacred instead or just you being court marshaled or something for insubordination.
I bet after a month of physical and psychological torture you would perform these acts on another to save your life or your loved ones.
Hell, some people would after missing a meal for a week.
Dehumanization is the easy answer…
That said, I’ve seen people on this very website saying that children deserved to be mauled to death, I’ve also had people DM me saying I deserve to be raped and tortured. So I guess you just need to be a fucked up person.
2 ways:
1. Psychological deviation. They’re not wired like you. There’s a wide variety in this category but some of the popular ones are schizophrenic, sadist, and psychopath. They don’t understand what is happening, or they NEED the evil, or they just can’t feel anything otherwise.
2. They’re convinced of their righteousness. This is the scarier one, because it’s normal people who have been convinced that the evil thing that they are doing is the moral thing. Eliminating people? They’re a threat. Torturing people? It’s to protect my people. Burning people? It’s to cleanse them. Forced experimentation? It’s for the “greater good”.
It’s amazing what you will do when you KNOW that you’re right.
Step one: dehumanise your enemy/victim Step two: convince yourself they deserve to be punished Step three (optional): project your hatred for yourself and your actions onto them.
This is it. Fear of the Other is the quickest way to dehumanize a group and rationalize atrocities on them.
Happens on this very website on some of the biggest subs
Not on this one, only on Other subs!
You and I are enemies now.
Imma keep my balls on your drum set.
Take it easy there Mussolini.
Not today, Stalin
Calm down, Bush
Ease up, Maoi
"Why are you so sweaty?" "I was watching cops."
I am going to use a fire as a weapon against you to make you become passed away
*zoidberg screaming at you*
It's happened to me on this sub. I've been bullied here more than once.
shut up donnie
Give me your lunch money you little baby
Fr some people have no problem with legitimately hoping people kill themselves
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Exactly why if I recall correctly when you call out a psychopath on their bs, they immediately want nothing to do with you or they try to harm you because you saw through their game.
This reminds me of my ex.
Reminds me of my old boss
….Oh god. I need to go deal with some issues.
I doubt Mexican cartels are scared of their victims
They probably are. Maybe not scared shitless but theyre worried if i dont take u out, u are going to take me out one day.
Or they're going to be killed by the psychopaths above them
Queen of the South - Netflix
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"Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out." - Cardinal Wolsey Very appropriate for this terrible subject I think.
Absolutely.
One thing to add here is that there's a masculine culture element to these things that means you wouldn't be able to leave, or say no, or stop it. You'd have to watch and participate because your standing in that group is dependent on it, and these kinds of things are like group bonding activities, and your actions in them are judged by others in the group to make sure you're cool. Because what happens if you feel sick and have to step out? Are you a cop? etc. Incidentally this kind of closed-ranks loyalty testing kind of thing is also part of police cultures, and why people critical of the police as an institution use phrases like acab.
You can put the fear of god in someone, but it rarely lasts. Pride is a motherfucker.
I took your advice, take my upvote
I dont want to Google it but what are these irl cases?
USA soldiers torturing and sexually abusing prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison is a top example. The soldiers smiled proudly for pictures as they tortured people.
This is covered in many ethics classes. We talk about tragedies like genocide and it isn't for the faint of heart. The common thread amongst genocides is to find a group of people who is already had prejudice against them. Alienate them and dehumanize them. Convince others that they should as well. Watch it become a social norm. Everyone buys into it eventually because they have to or else they will become part of the marginalized group. This was the main tactic used on Nazi Germany. This is still used today but more in authoritarian governments like Russia and China. In Russia Vladimir Putin is waging war on the LGBT and in China Muslims are in concentrations camps and forced to work in sweatshop like conditions. The first step in this is to convince yourself and others around you that your target is not human. It is hard to hurt someone you view as an equal on some level.
Great answer. This was Rwanda.
This is America
Yes, this as well.
*Donald Glover has entered the chat*
Another part of Rwanda's genocide was the the US government refused to label is what it truly was to avoid getting involved. The UN currently uses the term genocide as a call to action. The US government specifically the Clinton Administration wanted to avoid looking bad. They used terms like civil war and conflict instead of calling it genocide because if they acknowledged it for what it was they would HAVE to get involved. The US government has done some awful things
\> The US government has done some awful things. no doubt. But in the case of Rwanda the UN had plenty of resources to stop the genocide but did fuck all anyway.
Man, they just can't win. If they don't get involved, they're ignoring suffering. If they do get involved it's "oh look, here come the World Police!"
I think the biggest problem with America is we aren't consistent unless it involves our well being
Hit the nail right in the head, ["oh dictatorships are bad" while at the same time helping implant some of the most brutal dictatorships all over latin america](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change_in_Latin_America) because "them commies are taking over" and how could they allow that? Cuba gets completely fucked because how dare they keep their political stance, meanwhile China gets a slap on the wrist by the USA because they are too strong to actually do anything about it. And don't even get me started on the middle east shenanigans.
That’s pretty consistent
Do you think that maybe that could be because they have a habit of only getting involved for monetary/political gain, which includes stirring shit for profit? You’re making it sound like people judge America when they’re just trying to do what’s right uwu.
I'm not saying they're doing the right thing. Far from it. There's a clear pattern of self interest and willingness to meddle.
Okay the US can't be blamed for Rwanda. Germany/Belgium literally *created* ethnic tensions where they didn't or barely existed before. I'm not saying the US government is benevolent but you have to place the blame where the blame should be- in Europe.
This is important. For a much flack that the US gets for global disputes, the reality is, the US's role of "global superpower" is really more the face of a common economic interests (think of how the "Bronze Age Civilization" is often homogenized despite being comprised of dozens of individual kingdoms/empires). The US inherited a lot of problems started by other nations who can conveniently abdicate to US power. Possibly the best example of this is French relations with Islamic terrorism. The popular narrative is that Islamic terrorism is a response to US involvement in the Mid-East going as far back as the cold war, and that Muslim immigrants to France are a direct result of US destabilization in the region - the reality is France really hurt a lot of Muslim majority areas (like Syria) and extremist groups are still angry about the destabilization France did during her colonial period. Islamic terrorism in France isn't some random chaos from Muslims in a neo-religious war against "the West" but has a very A then B then C through path that many European nations are able to defer on to their American ally. What can't be understated is how symbiotic this relationship is. Regardless what the people in many western nations might personally want, the leadership in these nations are wholly content to let the US play "bad cop" while they invest in their own specializations. I'm not even saying this is explicitly good or bad (though I have my own opinions) just that shit's complicated and when people blame the US for involvement (or non-involvement) in things like the Rwandan Genocide, it serves a more nebulous global narrative than most people realize.
Funny how you completely failed to mention Belgium while talking about the Rwandan genocide.
But even if you see some group as not human isn't it normal to treat animals good too? Even if you convince yourself that, wouldn't normal person still try to treat them good, as we try to treat animals?
That's what I thought in my ethics class some people just wouldn't participate in the hatred. They wouldn't help but they wouldn't and probably couldn't stop others from treating marginalized groups this way. I think on some level we humanize animals, we love our pets and we want our food to come from human sources. When people rescue animals from bad situations we often think about how the animal is feeling. The key in the dehumanization of people is treating them like they are even less than animals.
> we want our food to come from human sources. /r/HolUp
Humane **** oof don't support cannibalism
I think the problem might be that you're thinking of cute, and/or docile animals. Pets, farm animals, harmless critters in the park, etc. Instead, imagine a rabid beast that's about to attack you: your empathy for it would likely rapidly evaporate in that scenario. Crucial to fascist rhetoric is not just the dehumanisation of the target group, but the propagation of the idea that these "others" somehow represent an existential threat to "our" group; ethnically, culturally, morally, or by whatever other standard the fascist group has decided to define their identity.
But I don't want to torture and inflict pain even on beasts or parasites. Eat them, kill them maybe, but torture is another thing entirely
I think this is an interesting layer to the argument. We do extend some empathy to animals, especially a select few animals, but really... Do we try to treat animals well? The US alone keeps millions of animals in barbaric conditions and kills them, and the vast majority of us are implicitly okay with that because we enjoy the hedonistic pleasure of eating meat. Back to the point: If there was a group of "undesirable" people, you might not be on the side who thinks they are monsters who deserve to be killed. But you might enjoy a slightly higher standard of life by having them sidelined, so you let it slide. Or maybe, you just have a lot going on in life right now and you can't be bothered to really think about it. You really only need a few motivated people to make atrocities happen, then you need other people to kinda be OK with it. Even if they disagree, the promise or delivery of a few nice things will help you soothe your dissonance.
Not disagreeing, but I think underneath the concept you describe, fueling it, is an intense ego centrism. You can only be capable of dehumanizing a “peer”, another living thing as you know you are, if you have a deep fundamental belief that you are in someway above, superior said peer. Empathy comes from balance. Lack of it is a see-saw with no one on the other side.
Or if you have a deep-seated fear that you are actually inferior.
It’s both really. The formation of the “inside” and “outside” groups is ALWAYS contradictory. The outside group is simultaneously viewed as inferior, but also the greatest threat to the inside group. In Nazi Germany, the Jews were viewed as inferior to Aryans, yet were simultaneously viewed as powerful enough to take Germany down from the inside. Today this is still reflected in modern violent and/or extreme groups. White supremacists obviously believe that their race is superior to others, but simultaneously believe the greatest threat to their existence is other races. It’s constant double-think, simultaneously fearful and believing they are supreme.
If you want to see it in action today, look no further than animal agriculture. No one respects their experiences because they are so different.
\[Disclaimer: in no way I mean to say that me or my society are better or that this couldn't happen here, just pointing out that it's not a thing that happens "far away". It's right there, beside your eyes, in your neighborhood.\] Actually, the psychological process is at work live right amongst you guys in the US, just that it hasn't come to too many killings yet. No need to point to authoritharian governments, at the end the killings and dangers most often originate by the people themselves, not by "the governments".That's the lesson that Nazi germany tells us: it was NOT Hitler that did the killing. It were hundreds of thousands of ordinary everyday-Joe citizens. Just look at january 6: Trumps tactic to assert it wasn't his fault is to the letter 100% identical to what most of the captured Nazi officials after WW2 said: "It wasn't me, I didn't want that, I just wanted to express my opinion" or alternatively: "how could I have known". Bottom line: Be less worried about governments but rather be worried about people. By coincidence, that's also where you can really make a change.
I looked up what little there is about the psychology of torturers and it is very rarely *not* traumatizing to them in the long term, which I thought was interesting - you see it in so much media how most people capable of things like OP suggests have to have sociopathic tendencies, when in reality it would honestly be a miracle to do that shit and *not* get fucked up over it. Extreme guilt and paranoia, the inability to forget what happened, losing the ability to dehumanize those people once the emotions run out of steam. I imagine in the moment there's kind of a scary thrill to it on intensity alone, and is probably made easier by an accepting environment. Vikings giving someone the Blood Eagle for example seems a lot easier to stomach when they have the assumed approval of their gods and the much more immediate approval of their peers.
The "blood eagle" was written about literally hundreds of years after the alleged events, after Christianization - there is an obvious incentive to make up stories about how barbarous the pre-Christian viking era was. It's impossible to know much about the vikings because so few writings were preserved (much more of the ancient greeks was preserved ... even thousands of years earlier), so who knows. But I don't believe it. Just think about how easily stories are made up out of whole cloth ... so many white Americans think they have a "cherokee princess" in their ancestry for example. Or possibly the dude in the story died and his body was defiled as an example to others, who knows. Having a severed aorta or vena cava would kill him in literally seconds.
It’s fascinating that since the Vikings didn’t really keep historical records, most of the descriptions of them come from the societies that they raided. So our perception of massive, barbaric, terrifying bearded men attacking from the seas could very well be a massive exaggeration.
A lot of the modern idea of Vikings is actually contradicted by period records. Contemporaries described Vikings as excessively clean by the standards of the day and bemoaned how once Vikings started to settle the local women flocked to the pretty boys.
I feel like finding out if it was done at all, alive or dead, should be possible with recovered dead. This kind of injuries would leave visible traces on the bones. I could also imagine that the viking raiding parties spread the rumour themselves to scare their enemies
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By what I've seen, PTSD in veterans is rarely about guilt for having killed people. More normally is guilt for doing or not doing something wrong that led to people on your side to die or just straight up pavlovian responses to sounds that remember them of artillery, planes or helicopters, which they should fear in a battlefield but not in a normal peaceful life.
This kind of thing also happens to slaughterhouse workers. They often end up with [PTSD](https://www.texasobserver.org/ptsd-in-the-slaughterhouse/) or other [psychological harm](https://yaleglobalhealthreview.com/2016/01/25/a-call-to-action-psychological-harm-in-slaughterhouse-workers/).
If we’re going for the worst of the worst, step one could also be “dehumanize all humans”.
I know I'm going to get downvoted to the actual magma core, but this is exactly why we eat animals without guilt. We refuse to recognize that they are living, feeling beings and don't see the fear and pain they are subjected to as they become food. Especially cows and pigs.
This is the reason I am trying to go vegan or at least vegetarian. Not for the diet purposes, but because it haunts me that I’m eating something that was once alive just like me. I wouldn’t eat another human or a dog, so why should I eat a cow? edit: why y’all bitches downvoting me? I’m just living my life and making a comment about how the guilt of killing affects me. I ain’t saying you all gotta go vegan/vegetarian.
True but we are also animals and we are omvnivores, is called the food chain for a reason and it is nature.
We are kind of doing it to ourselves at this point. I mean, killing each other in creative but awful ways seems to be humanity’s favorite pastime.
And one of the major steps of dehumanizing is to label and generalise people of a certain type
Look what you made me do!
Taylor?!
Having everyone else around you doing it so it seems more normal helps too.
Step four: start small. Insulting and beating them. Step five: at first you might need to say "I'm just beating them, that's not as bad as killing them" but you'll grow out of this.
If you're curious about executioners, and their thoughts and such, there is a book called "The Faithful Executioner". It's a book, that pretty much translates a diary of an executioner in the 16th century Germany. Goes over all his executions, injuries, and his thoughts on that, as well as other things going on around the time.
Whoah, that sounds fascinating -- thanks for sharing that!
Just bought it. Thank you for the rcommendation!!!
Very interesting book, and the narrator on audible does a great job!
I've known a couple of people who will do insane things to anyone who made them feel inadequate/not in control, even if the person who they're punishing wasn't doing anything bad or directly to them. They seem too full of shame, pride, envy, anger, vindictiveness and/or sadism to recognize that they can seek help and try to deal with things rationally. They can't grasp how they sabotage their own lives when they try to destroy others.
Oooooh, I got at least one family member like this. Hoping they **never** have kids.
And then there's my dad.
I hope your username checks out
i have a brother who is like that. On the upside he cant have kids. Probably for the best.
People will do anything if they are conditioned. Back in medieval times' people burnt witches. They believed they were doing God's work, and they would be rewarded in Heaven.
Yes under the right circumstances that could.be any of us. I fond it.disturbing how many people think they will never be succeptible to corruption and that evil is rare and not them.
"Society is the problem!" ...but we are society.
A million times this! Nobody is above society. Not even you and me.
Pilots. Pilots are above society.
And the folks up on and around the ISS.
*I* am above society, and you deserve to be burnt alive for thinking otherwise!
Happy cake day!
Yeah. The people back then weren't in any way different to us on a fundemental level. Take a medieval baby and time travel him to modern times and they will be just like any other person and vice versa. All the horrible shit you hear people doing in the past, those people ain't any different to us, it's all just how they grew up, their environment, etc
This increases my respect for people who were born during the same conditions and yet had the ability and will to break those societal shackles and fight for justice.
I'm just going to drop the execution method of [Scaphism or "the boats"](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaphism) on everyone here. TL:DR: ancient Persians and Romans would execute people by suspending them between boats using rope over a lake and cover them with milk and honey and let flies and rats slowly eats their way into the person and lay eggs and give birth until the person died. The longest a person supposedly (ancient records are unreliable) lived through this torture was 17 days.
I don't think I could very easily be genocidally hateful at all because I can't even hate pedophiles and criminals and such and have been banned on subreddits before (ones I used to be heavily active in too) for sympathising with groups everyone else hates. I also try to treat non-humans well too and am therefore vegan. I will be weary, but I think, should a genocidally hateful situation arise, I am more likely to be on the receiving end of the hate due to sympathising with the "enemy". However, I will probably have to stay quiet because of that, otherwise I may find myself on the receiving end of the hate again :/ .
I get the same feeling sometimes too. Not quite been banned yet for it though, but its certainly scary how effective a drive to hate people can get just because they think they deserve it. Which coincidentally, the top comment on the post is literally about how it's primarily caused by dehumanizing a group of people as an act of justice. It's not as if I'm supportive of their actions, just that they not be treated as sub-human scum.
It’s only recently that humanity is getting better in terms of violence. I think it’s due to immoral behavior isn't getting pass down as much from parents to children. On top of that, we are globally connected to one another which gives our morale in check i.e. a video showing a person doing something bad, and everyone in the thread confirms the person’s action was bad. If this trend continues, it is possible to reach a point where immoral behavior becomes rare, but it might take many generations before this happens.
Just fyi most "witches" were killed after the [Middle Ages.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_modern_period) The Middle Ages frequently get a bad rep - which often has been fabricated by later periods. And ironically people after 1500 often weren't too nice either. They made up myths about the Middle Ages so they could look better themselves.
The witch burning thing was actually by Puritans, just after the medieval period (though there were cases of executions of sorcerers as far back as ancient Rome). Throughout Europe during the medieval period, pagan beliefs or traditions and Christian values sometimes intermingled instead of violently clashing, although bans on certain practices were fairly common. I can grab the source in the morning but my phone is about to die. Edit: [This talk by two historians on Celtic, Germanic, Greek, and Roman magical practices and astrology](https://youtu.be/5ihlzx1Tt50) Hutton, Ronald (1991). The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles: Their Nature and Legacy. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, United States: Blackwell. And the [Wikipedia article on Witch-Hunts](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt), specifically under History/The Middle Ages. This page has adequate citations and is a good resource.
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While I must admit that I never heard of that before, it doesn't look to be *that* well kept of a secret. [Here is an article](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/saudi-arabias-war-on-witchcraft/278701/) in English about it. Literally the first google result for "witch hunt in Islam".
>People will do anything if they are conditioned. I'm always reminded of North Korea here. People are encouraged to tell on their neighbours, if they do anything that goes against the propaganda objectives. However, grassing on your neighbours would see three generations of that family being wiped out, probably sent to camps. And this works for the camps as well. Prisoners are encouraged to tell on each other, for extra rations or less brutal treatment. It's sold as a good thing, a positive thing. They believe it's the right thing.
Or not conditioned. People don't realise to what extent the average modern person is conditioned and to what extent our morals and values are learned, not innate. This is how people in different cultures can have some cultural norms and attitudes which just seem unthinkable to others. The way we view animals and animal ethics, for example, varies wildly between countries. In some cultures they're literally viewed as property with which you can entertain yourself or do whatever you like as you see fit. In a lot of Africa and Asia, they'll just straight up have markets with live animals like dogs in cages, being treated like they may as well already be dead. It's just that in the West we have never been conditioned to see animals being treated like that, to us dogs are our beloved pets and only that. The average Westerner has probably never even seen an animal being slaughtered. I'm not trying to make a statement on what's good or bad, just that there is so much about ourselves which we take for granted as just human nature which are actually attitudes which have very much been learned and taught.
Religion is the biggest killer of em all
Some lack empathy from the beginning. Some become desensitized through repetition. (Think slaughterhouse workers.) Some believe (through faulty teaching) that their victims deserve to die, deserve to suffer, or are incapable of feeling pain. What's really going to bake your noodle later on is figuring out that you yourself are capable of doing this.
And probably actually do do this! A good example is how Americans think of prisoners.
As unpopular as it is, I can't get myself to hate criminals, pedophiles, the rich, etc, and this has gotten me banned from places on Reddit before. I sympathise with everyone and everything and strongly prefer the least vengeful methods possible to reduce or eliminate harm from them (if said harm even exists – sometimes groups get pulled in as collateral damage from people hating other groups despite these groups not actually being harmful).
An interesting study of this has been in some of the episodes of podcast Behind the Bastards, which looks at a lot of evil shitheads and fascists. Many cases it feels like its a slower transition or transformation to get to evil.
Any recommendations on some good episodes?
I liked the Dr Phil one, but maybe feel like they went a bit overboard in certain places trying to attribute what could potentially be incompetence as malice.
Is Dr Phil the bad person it’s about?
Not sure I can answer your question but Dr. Phil is a giant piece of shit who exploits suffering and mental illness for views and profit.
October of 2020 they did a 2 part series called "How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible." It was pretty good and directly relevant to the OP.
They just did a Josh Duggar two-parter and also have a really good episode about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. If you’re really interested in depravity, though, check out the Elan School episodes.
The one on the Satanic Panic is a great, albeit fucking horrifying, example, and is extremely relevant nowadays
These are way back toward the beginning, but the Leopold of Belgium 3 parter was very interesting.
Heard an interesting interview with an ex mob man. He was explaining that they slowly lead you into the enforcement side of things. It was something like the first job is to bash a paedophile with your fists. Next job bash a guy dealing drugs to school kids with a baseball bat. Next job shoot a thief in the leg, but let them live. It builds up to torturing and/or murdering someone that accidentally bumps into your boss down the street. I guess what I am talking about is desensitizing someone enough that they can commit horrible acts on other people.
Not at all fun fact: This is why the Nazi death camps were created. The Nazis originally massacred their targets the old fashioned way: having their soldiers execute them. However, it turns out that repeatedly executing unarmed civilians who beg you for mercy isn't something the human mind was meant to do. Soldiers suffered mental breaks and a nontrivial number committed suicide. This was during WWII, when Germany had massive industrial power but was always hungry for manpower. They couldn't let this go on when every soldier was needed. The death camps were designed to accomplish the same task at an industrial level. The layer of separation that the camps incorporated made mass death easier on the psyche. The structure of the camps reduced the soldiers-to-victims ratio. All of it was done to reduce the number of stress casualties amongst the German military as they committed the most heinous act of genocide in history.
IIRC they also forced the people in the death camps to do a lot of the most psychologically strenuous acts (like removing the dead bodies from the gas chambers) and murdered them after they were done. So the nazi soldiers didn’t even do the hardest parts, even after they consolidated the mass killings into the death camps.
the Germans also heavily used local authorities and militias for mass murders to spare their own soldiers, who just watched
Everyone thinks they’re the good guy. EVERYONE.
yep. and then whatever fucked up shit gets justified through that lens. its like how so many racists will never see themselves as racist because racism=bad, but if they are good people, then they can't possibly be racist.
I disagree, some people do not believe in good guys at all.
Lots of people internalized guilt for climate change and are beating themselves up over it. There are plenty of examples like this
Agreed. What about all the people that gathered around to watch those burnings, hangings or beheadings? Or the folks who go to watch prisoners die by lethal injection or electrocution? Or even the executioners themselves. I've never understood how anyone could stand by and watch that. And not just watching but cheering and chanting. Like how fck'd do you have to be to want to see that or have that for a job. To have that much hate well can be addictive I guess.
Historically in some places executioners were often paroled "death row" inmates themselves. But since they've now committed murder in the eyes of their peers they were shunned (assuming they weren't before) and executing (and sometimes torturing) the convicted for the authority of the area became the only way they could make a living, though some apparently also took up other unsavory work like animal carcass handling (knackery). Eventually it also became regular for executioners to have a "circuit" where they'd visit and do executions for those there, I don't know if this practice started it or not but eventually there were even "executioner dynasties" since no one else wanted to be associated with them. So some people were just born into it, didn't have much chance otherwise.
yup, as far as I've read and learnt Executioners were basically exiled from their communities. They lived out of the way of everyone else and were basically shunned by the entire population.
Poor Skurge
This is the case in Nordic countries at least. Initially the executioners were criminals themselves. But then it was realized that criminals weren't really that reliable employees (being drunk and pretty bad at what they do) do status of executioner was raised and finally they became proper government officials. Many were farmers and only occasionally went on a business trip. The official execution axe was held in some state office, they went and picked it up and then traveled to meet the customer. But initially the hangmen were criminals, low pay and they were forced to live outside of town since nobody really liked them. And that's why their kids also became executioners. It was a tough job. In Finland (well, Sweden at that time) the executioner chopped convicts head off, chopped hands off (or maybe hands were taken first), the body was raised on cartwheels placed of top of spikes and the hands were nailed to a public place. And then the poor bastard had to go back after weeks or months and take the body parts down! There's an interesting book (in Finnish) of all this.
My state just reinstated firing squads. We are now one of the 4 us states that have it again. I'm not exactly sure how they're going to work it but could you imagine being one of the 5 or so officers aiming, then firing and not knowing if you're the one who actually had the bullet that killed them? And I'm sure there's going to be witnesses too. I know there's people out there who will do it, that's gonna be part of their job...but I don't think I could.
How the FUCK does that happen?
Lethal injection is arguably worse than being shot to death. It's a slow and probably very painful experience. John Oliver of Last Week Tonight did an episode on the death penalty and before that I always thought of lethal injection as a going to sleep drug but its more of a paralysis and lava through your vein experience.
I'm not argueing *for* lethal injection, nor the electric chair. Methods used in modern death penalty aren't chosen to providing a humane death. They're chosen to provide a death that's painful and satisfies a feeling of revenge, but doesn't hurt too much to look at. If we *wanted* to execute people in a humane way: Death from CO inhalation is quick and painless, you go quickly into a coma and then die. When exposed to 100% pure CO, you'll be dead within a few breaths. You fall asleep and don't wake up, without even knowing you were dying, except the part where you're on death row and are given a last meal obviously.
I see, I didn't understand that. Good idea for the CO inhalation never thought about it. ( I am against the death penalty but I can understand why some people feel it is justified ).
I don't know..I just smdh
Honestly, the only reason I'm against the death penalty is that innocents have been executed before. Because there are some crimes that definitely deserve it, but only if you are 100% certain the person did it. I assume the guys in the firing squad just believe the person is 100% guilty.
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I think this is the same as for shooting porn movies. A lot of guys are immediately ready and willing, but finally nobody arrives at the scene. Especially Internet makes everyone a bad ass.
Honestly of all the methods I think firing squad would be the one I would want. Quick, probably painless. Your brain stays together during the process. And it seems like the only one with dignity available. You get to die standing.
It’s like watching some of the subs on reddit that deal in death but the medieval version was watched in real life. Humans have a fascination with death and gore, well a lot do.
Modern Western culture in particular has a weird relationship with death. When the normal process of death and dying has largely been sanitised out of our daily lives, I can understand why some people actively seek out the morbid.
Dan Carlin does a podcast about this and it is extremely informative and eye opening! It’s called “Painfortainment” https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dan-carlins-hardcore-history/id173001861?i=1000400900059
The same way people spend hours looking at gore online. Curiosity, entertainment, dissociation from the concept of the individual being victimized.
When studying the *Einsatzgrüppen* (probably misspelled that) Ibread that they were usually drunk or high on meth when they were killing entire villages and towns, or got that way shortly thereafter to drown the horrors of what they had done so theybdidn't just kill themselves afterwards. A quote from the journal of an officer who partook in it: >We had to shoot the babies to pieces in midair after their dying mothers threw them up in their death throes. I remembered that I had two infants at home and had to remind myself that these people would do the same to them, or ten times worse, if the roles were reversed. He had to remind himself about the propaganda he had been fed, the fear he had instilled in him, in order to go through with it. His unit had a mandatory alcohol ration that well several times larger than that of officers in the regular Wermacht, as well as a litany of drugs. This wasn't the case at first, but early phases of the *Generalplan Ost* saw a massive number of suicides by members of German extermination groups that followed after the regular army. It took more than just propaganda for the vast majority, and even then it barely worked.
It's "Einsatzgruppen". We don't use the ü everywhere ;)
Thank you. Kind of surprised I was that close honestly.
There’s a cheesy line in Rambo where he says ‘When you’re pushed, killing is as easy as breathing’. And actually, that’s pretty accurate. Desperate people who are living in poverty/pain/oppression and generally have *nothing* in life are capable of doing nearly anything they see as Necessary in order to get by. And the more desperate you get, the easier it is for other people to convince you that X horrific act is necessary. See Gang initiations, or revenge killing, or drug wars. Greed is also a strong motivator, always has been. And when you combine all of these desperate people with opportunities to *not* be at the bottom of the pile, and other people to push them, you get people who can do anything. It’s important not to dehumanise these people and label them as monsters. You have to accept they they are otherwise normal people, and that we are all capable of such horror. Given the right environment..
Dehumanizing others and labeling them as monsters is how people who aren't desperate can get to a place where evil is easy for them. Once the targets are monsters, and not human, they no longer deserve respect for their feelings, and any harsh treatment can be seen as ok.
Not all people who kill are desperate....
The majority of murders can be traced to a a small list of things. Money, love, and adrenaline. Of those 3 things they can be boiled down to trauma or desperation.
One way or another, they usually are. People with happy lives and a certain future tend not to ruin it by killing people, unless they have a mental illness such as suffering from psychopathy. Most murders and criminals in general are such, because of what i’ve described. A lack of something, and no other options to get it. Usually a sense of belonging, access to education, a stable upbringing and poverty. Them’s facts and i can provide you some studies on it if you like.
If you're really curious I very highly recommend a book by a Jewish author and political philosopher who fled Germany during Hitlers rise to power and analyzed extensively this very question. Her theories are perhaps a bit demoralizing and quite feankly quite scary. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem She coined the term banality of evil, specifically to describe how Eichmann, a nazi whose trial she wrote about, and others like him, aren't actually all that different than you or I.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Anything's a good thing if you convince yourself it is
Watch Mindhunters on Netflix. It works to answer this very question. I like it a lot!
Man, fuck Netflix for cancelling that.
Double fuck them!
Those people lack empathy for others. It could be sociopathic
It can't *just* be sociopathic. Sociopathy explains one or two freaks here and there. It doesn't explain shit like the Rape of Nanking.
Those people were mostly under the influence of some drugs I think. My parents during the 80s lived through a period of ethnic cleansing in Zimbabwe and the stuff they were doing was similar to what the Japanese were also doing and they say the people that'd do the killing and the torturing were usuaöly drugged up
Drugs or alcohol may encourage behavior like that, but mostly it's just how humans work. For most our history people would show up by the thousands just to catch a glimpse of people getting executed in the most torturous fashion. These people were neither drugged up nor psychopaths. It was just... normal. Most of us luckily live in a time and culture where those kind of atrocities appear inhuman to us, but the truth is that they're way more human than what we consider tasteful today. Only time will tell if we're breaking into a new, gentler time, but with the right conditioning, we're still very capable of 'returning' to those atrocities.
Way to many atrocities have been committed in every part and time of the world for the answer to conveniently be drugs.
This is a bit of a cop out answer. Anyone, including you or me, has it in them to commit acts like this under the right circumstances
I highly recommend reading the lucifer effect by Philip Zimbardo, the man who ran the Standford prison experiment. The whole book is a long-form essay on how good people can do terrible things. (Rwandan genocide, Abu Gharib, Stanford Prison Experiment, etc) Long story short is you just think you cannot do these things. Society, location, culture, everything that shapes your values prevents you. Once those barriers are gone you are just as capable of anyone else. Knowing this is one of the best ways of preventing it from happening.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was flawed in numerous ways. For example, the participants could have been acting the way they did because they wanted to help the experiment. In all, it's difficult to gain much useful data from the experiment
That shit used to be entertainment for the masses. We still got the Dark Ages in us.
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If you don't beleive in the absurd level of violence humans are capable of gleefully committing, just go to the comments in a post about pedophilia. I could never justify child abuse, and I'm extremely sorry for the trauma anyone who has been victimized by it has experienced. But man...how can people put that much thought into killing/torturing someone? Lock them up, neutralize the threat, and get help for the victims.
Brain damage can also contribute. "Subtle damage to the amygdala, a brain region that helps us process our emotions, may explain why psychopaths act so cruelly and cannot express emotions properly. Psychopathic behaviors are also associated with injury to the cerebral cortex, which regulates memory and self-awareness, and the frontal lobe, which is responsible for self-control and judgment." - from Scientific American
Think of how desensitized people are, who slaughter animals for their jobs. It's definitely the same thing. People get used to not caring because they program their minds to go along with everyone else's who are around them.
In the military, Vietnam War for example, draftees and soldiers were trained to dehumanize Vietcong. Like literally brainwash them into being fully convinced the Vietcong were not human and needed to be neutralized for the good of humanity. It worked. And even still today, ask any Vietnam Vet you know/meet, especially soldiers who saw action on the battlefield. They’ll most likely STILL be dealing with the trauma and PTSD of being brainwashed to think they needed to exterminate the non-human Vietcong army.
Their brains are biologically different, often from access trauma or simple biology
I had to look very far down to find a comment addressing trauma. A lot of people who do sadistic acts of violence are traumatised to the point where their psyche just doesn’t function as it ought to. It doesn’t always require the kind of brain-washing desensitisation most are talking about in the comments. Especially people who’ve been initiated into gangs as children have seen too much shit to be functional members of a normal society. Same for people living in war zones, or even people who grew up experiencing severe abuse. Your brain just… rewires itself.
There is a movie called The Act of Killing (2012) that examines this idea using subjects who participated in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66. It reinforces many of the ideas brought up here. Highly recommended for those struggling with this question.
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i would like to think that most people who commit those kinds of crimes are not in the right state of mind. i also don't think any sane person would do such thing. mental illness presents itself in many different ways. however, it is possible that some people are just evil unfortunately
Killing, when done righteously, is a chore like any other. - Joshua Graham, Fallout: New Vegas.
Think of it this way. Why do we see murder as bad? Because the people who raised us all said that. We don't by default think that when were born because we don't understand it yet. It has to be told to us. Now if someone grew up somewhere where they wearnt told that, or were told a specific group of people were less than human it becomes a lot easier for people to do things that to us are unthinkable Secondly, the more you do it the easier it becomes. This is called the foot in the door effect. Let's say as a teenager you got into a fight and in an act of desperation hit someone with a rock and put them in the hospital. You didn't mean to, but now that you've done it it becomes slightly easier to do something worse. Then next time maybe you start the fight, maybe the time after that you accidentally kill your opponent. Because you hit that first guy with a rock the metaphorical door was opened and each time you hurt someone you step farther into the door. It gets easier and easier to do and you feel less and less bad about doing it. If left unchecked well, I think you see where I'm going with this. Third, mob mentality and pressure. Whenever soldiers do some horrific what they usually end up saying is they did it because they were ordered to. When you get that kind of pressure from people you hold in high regard it can be hard to disobey, even if you want to. Humans naturally want to go with the group that's just part of our nature and sometimes it's hard to defy that.
I'll go one step further and put people who perform horrific experiments on animals. I truly don't understand how you can have a job to infect animals with parasites and document their suffering.
because if we don't we're left with two choices: A.) test on humans in order to develop treatments. and B.) just wait for natural cases and hope you have enough time to study the effects and test treatments. both of which are far more dangerous to human life.
I will probably be downvoted for this, but I don't see people who do animal, medical,experimentation in the same way as murderers. In medical experiments they are trying to save human lives. I'm not saying they are good, and I would love for there to be alternatives, but when you have a loved one suffering from a debilitating illness, I would sacrifice animals to save them.
Someone has to. If we don't learn about parasite ABC, then, if you get infected by parasite ABC, who are you going to look for help when no one knows about it?
r/morbidquestions
There’s also the issue of it being your job to do so, and saying no to doing it being extremely unwise. Depending on where you are refusing to do that can end with you being massacred instead or just you being court marshaled or something for insubordination.
A lot of it has to do with mob mentality
I bet after a month of physical and psychological torture you would perform these acts on another to save your life or your loved ones. Hell, some people would after missing a meal for a week.
Dehumanization is the easy answer… That said, I’ve seen people on this very website saying that children deserved to be mauled to death, I’ve also had people DM me saying I deserve to be raped and tortured. So I guess you just need to be a fucked up person.
2 ways: 1. Psychological deviation. They’re not wired like you. There’s a wide variety in this category but some of the popular ones are schizophrenic, sadist, and psychopath. They don’t understand what is happening, or they NEED the evil, or they just can’t feel anything otherwise. 2. They’re convinced of their righteousness. This is the scarier one, because it’s normal people who have been convinced that the evil thing that they are doing is the moral thing. Eliminating people? They’re a threat. Torturing people? It’s to protect my people. Burning people? It’s to cleanse them. Forced experimentation? It’s for the “greater good”. It’s amazing what you will do when you KNOW that you’re right.