What Makes a Person Evil?

by M Scott Peck

Opinion Editors Note: M Scott Peck (1936-2005) was a psychiatrist who had a very big following as an author, particularly for his book The Road Less Travelled. (1978).

In 1998  he wrote The People of the Lie: the Hope for Healing Human Evil. It contains several chapters about the My Lai massacre in which US soldiers in Vietnam killed civilians. Nowadays we have much cause to wonder about evil, having learned that many citizens in our midst live in a way that is divergent from society’s stated values.

I post here for consideration by Gumshoers an excerpt from Peck’s work.

The People of the Lie

In the spring of 1972 I was chairman of a committee of three psychiatrists appointed by the Army Surgeon General, at the request of the Chief of Staff of the Army, to make recommendations for research that might shed light on the psychological causes of MyLai, so as to help prevent such atrocities in the future. …

Preface to group evil

Triggers are pulled by individuals. Orders are given and executed by individuals. In the last analysis, every single human act is ultimately the result of an individual choice. No one of the individuals who participated in the atrocities at MyLai or in their cover-up is blameless. Even the helicopter pilot—the only one brave enough and good enough to attempt to stop the massacre—can be blamed for not reporting what he saw beyond the first echelon of authority over him.

…For many years it has seemed to me that human groups tend to behave in much the same ways as human individuals—except at a level that is more primitive and immature than one might expect. Why this is so—why the behavior of groups is strikingly immature—why they are, from a psychological standpoint, less than the sum of their parts—is a question beyond my capacity to answer. …

Specialization is one of the greatest advantages of groups. There are ways groups can function with far greater efficiency than individuals. Because its employees are specialized into executives and designers and tool- and die-makers and assembly-line workers (who are in turn specialized), General Motors can produce an enormous number of cars. Our extraordinarily high standard of living is entirely based on the specialization of our society.

The fact that I have the knowledge and the time to write this book is a direct result of the fact that I am a specialist within our community, utterly dependent on farmers, mechanics, publishers, and booksellers for my welfare. I can hardly consider specialization in itself evil.

On the other hand, I am thoroughly convinced that much of the evil of our times is related to specialization and that we desperately need to develop an attitude of suspicious caution toward it. I think we need to treat specialization with the same degree of distrust and safeguards that we bring to nuclear reactors.

Specialization contributes to the immaturity of groups and their potential for evil through several different mechanisms. For the moment I will restrict myself to the consideration of only one such mechanism: the fragmentation of conscience. If at the time of MyLai, wandering through the halls of the Pentagon, I stopped to talk with the men responsible for directing the manufacture of napalm and its transportation to Vietnam in the form of bombs, and if I questioned these men about the morality of the war and hence the morality of what they were engaged in, this is the kind of reply I invariably received:

“Oh, we appreciate your concerns, yes, we do, but I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong people. We’re not the department you want. This is the ordnance branch. We just supply the weapons—we don’t determine how and where they’re used.    [Etc]

Whenever the roles of individuals within a group become specialized, it becomes both possible and easy for the individual to pass the moral buck to some other part of the group. In this way, not only does the individual forsake his conscience but the conscience of the group as a whole can become so fragmented and diluted as to be nonexistent.

…. The plain fact of the matter is that any group will remain inevitably potentially conscienceless and evil until such time as each and every individual holds himself or herself directly responsible for the behavior of the whole group—the organism—of which he or she is a part. We have not yet begun to arrive at that point.

How is it that so many individuals could have participated in such a monstrous evil without any of them being so conscience-stricken as to be compelled to confess?

The cover-up was a gigantic group lie. Lying is simultaneously one of the symptoms and one of the causes of evil, one of the blossoms and one of the roots. It is why this book is entitled People of the Lie. Until now we have been considering individual people of the lie.

Now we will also be considering a whole people. Certainly, by virtue of their extraordinarily common—that is, communal—participation in the cover-up, the men of Task Force Barker were a “people of the lie.” By the time we are finished we may even conclude that the American people, at least during those war years, were also a people of the lie.

As with any lie, the primary motive of the cover-up was fear. The individuals who had committed the crimes—who had pulled the triggers or given the orders—obviously had reason to fear reporting what they had done. Court-martial awaited them. But what of the much larger number who only witnessed the atrocities yet also said nothing of that “something rather dark and bloody”? (a quote from the Ridenhour letter) What did they have to fear?

Anyone who thinks for a while about the nature of group pressure will realize that for a member of Task Force Barker to report the crime outside of that group would require great courage. Whoever did so would be labeled a “squealer” or “stool pigeon.” There is no more dreadful label that can be applied to a person than that. Stool pigeons often get murdered. At the very least they are ostracized.

To the ordinary American civilian, ostracism may not seem such a horrible fate. “So, if you get kicked out of one group, you can just join another,” may be the reaction. But remember that a member of the military is not free to just join another group. He can’t leave the military at all until his enlistment is up. …deliberately to intensify the power of group pressure within its ranks.

From the standpoint of group dynamics and from military group dynamics in particular, it is not bizarre that the members of Task Force Barker failed to report the group’s crimes. Nor is it surprising that the man who finally did report the crimes was neither a member of the Task Force group nor even a member of the military at the time he did the reporting.

Yet I suspect there is another extremely significant reason that the crimes of MyLai went unreported for so long. Not having spoken with the individuals involved, I offer it purely as conjecture. But I did speak with many, many soldiers who were in Vietnam during those years, and I am deeply familiar with the attitudes prevailing in the military at that time. My profound suspicion, therefore, is that to a considerable extent the members of Task Force Barker did not confess their crimes simply because they were not aware that they had committed them. They knew, of course, what they had done, but whether they appreciated the meaning and nature of what they had done is another matter entirely.

I suspect that many of them did not even consider what they had done a crime. They did not confess because they did not realize they had anything to confess. Some undoubtedly hid their guilt. But others, I suspect, had no guilt to hide.

How can this be? How can a sane man commit murder and not know he has murdered? How is it that a person who is not basically evil may participate in monstrous evil without the awareness of what he has done? It is this question that will serve as a focal point for the discussion that follows on the relationship between individual and group evil.

In attempting to answer this question, I will proceed in the consideration of evil up the ladder from the level of the individual to the level of the small group (Task Force Barker) to the levels of ever larger groups

Up the ladder of collective responsibility

The individual under stress

When I was sixteen I had all four wisdom teeth removed during my spring vacation. For the next five days not only did my jaw hurt but it was ·swollen shut….. I had become utterly self-centered. I was whiny and irritable with others. I expected them to be in constant attendance upon me. When some little thing did not go exactly the way I wanted it precisely when I wanted it, tears came to my eyes and my displeasure was mighty.

What I am describing is a natural tendency of the human organism to regress in response to chronic stress.

The life of a soldier in a combat zone is one of chronic stress. Although the Army did as much as possible to minimize the stress on its troops they were at the other end of the world from their homes. The food was poor, the insects thick, the heat enervating, the sleeping quarters uncomfortable. Then there was the danger, usually not as severe as in other wars, yet probably even more stressful in Vietnam because it was so unpredictable.

Besides regression, there is another mechanism whereby human beings respond to stress. It is a mechanism of defense. Robert Jay Lifton, who studied the survivors of Hiroshima and other disasters, has called it “psychic numbing.”

In a situation in which our emotional feelings are overwhelmingly painful or unpleasant, we have the capacity to anesthetize ourselves. It is a simple sort of thing. The sight of a single bloody, mangled body horrifies us. But if we see such bodies all around us every day, the horrible becomes normal and we lose our sense of horror. We simply tune it out.

If because we live in the midst of garbage our sensitivity to ugliness becomes diminished, it is likely that we will become litterers and garbage-strewers ourselves. Insensitive to our own suffering, we tend to become insensitive to the suffering of others.

Treated with indignity, we lose not only the sense of our own dignity but also the sense of the dignity of others. When it no longer bothers us to see mangled bodies, it will no longer bother us to mangle them ourselves.

I think we can assume, therefore, that after a month in the field with Task Force Barker—a month of poor food, of poor sleep, of seeing comrades killed or maimed—the average soldier was more psychologically immature, primitive, and brutish than he might otherwise have been in a time and place of less stress.

I have spoken of the relationship between narcissism and evil, and I have said that narcissism is a condition out of which human beings normally mature.

We may think of evil, then, as a kind of immaturity. Immature humans are more prone to evil than mature ones. We are impressed not only by the innocence but also by the cruelty of children. An adult who delights in picking the wings off flies is correctly deemed sadistic and suspected to be evil. A child of four who does this may be admonished but is considered merely curious; the same action from a child of twelve is cause for worry.

We asked how it happened that a group of fifty or five hundred individuals—of whom only a very small minority could be expected to be evil—could have committed such a monstrous evil as MyLai. …

Having considered the relationship between evil and stress, it is appropriate to comment on the relationship between goodness and stress. He who behaves nobly in easy times—a fair-weather friend, so to speak—may not be so noble when the chips are down.

Stress is the test for goodness. The truly good are they who in time of stress do not desert their integrity, their maturity, their sensitivity. Nobility might be defined as the capacity not to regress in response to degradation, not to become blunted in the face of pain, to tolerate the agonizing and remain intact. As I have said elsewhere, “one measure—and perhaps the best measure—of a person’s greatness is the capacity for suffering.”

–end of excerpt

Note: Peck did not stop here.  The book goes on to say much more about the causes of the American civilians’ acceptance of the My Lai massacre.