The Political Psychology of Evil

C. Fred AlfordProfessor of GovernmentUniversity of Maryland

Fifty-eight subjects were interviewed about their concepts of evil. They include students,retirees, white collar workers, and 18 prison inmates. Many defined evil not as a moralcategory but as an experience of impending doom. This definition reflects and affects howmany subjects experience evil as an ethical problem, leading them to “privatize”evil—experiencing it in terms of their own terror. Many have considerable difficultyconnecting this experience with issues of morality and goodness. An education about evilmust respectfully confront this private dimension. The same conclusion applies to how westudy evil on a larger scale, such as the Holocaust. This is revealed by subjects’ responses,some quite troubling, to questions about the Nazis.

KEY WORDS: evil; Holocaust; prison inmates; ethics; morality

I

There is not a lot of research on the political psychology of evil. Or perhapsthere is, it is just not called that. Ervin Staub’sThe Roots of Evil: The Origins ofGenocide and Other Group Violenceis a well-known and highly regarded excep-tion to this generalization. For Staub (1989, p. 25), evil is not just a generic termfor very bad. It is strictly defined. “The essence of evil is the destruction of humanbeings,” under which he includes psychological as well as physical obliteration.

Most, however, do not write about evil explicitly, even if that is what theymean, at least by Staub’s definition. But who could argue that works like RaulHilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews(1985) or Zygmunt Bauman’sModernity and the Holocaust(1989), are not about evil? But what is evil? Not alldestruction of human beings is evil. There are just wars, and justifiable homicides.The term “evil” carries with it connotations that are not exhausted by terms like“bad,” “aggressive,” “destructive,” and so forth. One anthropologist (Southwold,1986, p. 131) argues that if we can substitute “bad” or “immoral” for the term evil

Political Psychology, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1997

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0162-895X © 1997 International Society of Political PsychologyPublished by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.

without loss of meaning, then the term has lost its resonance. Evil is a special qualityof badness.

What exactly is this quality? Hannah Arendt (1965) struggles with thisquestion inEichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.So doesRobert Jay Lifton (1986, p. 5), who opens hisNazi Doctorswith a quote from asurvivor about the doctors: “It isdemonicthat they were notdemonic.”Severalyears ago I (1990) wrote “The Organization of Evil,” arguing that the compliancetheory is inadequate. Whatever evil is, it is notjust going along with malevolentauthority. It is identifying with malevolent authority, finding pleasure and satisfac-tion in joining with its destructiveness.

Is this what evil men want? Is this what evil is? These are, of course, twodifferent questions, one empirical, one conceptual, to be studied by two entirelydifferent methods, even if it is not entirely clear how to study the empiricaldimension. Ask people? Perform more experiments like those of Milgram (1974)and Zimbardo (Haney, Banks & Zimbardo, 1973)? If, that is, a Human SubjectsCommittee could be found somewhere that would allow it! In any case, the secondquestion should be easy enough. Just agree upon a definition.

Definitions are rules for language use, are they not? Let us agree and get onwith it. Nothing important hangs from the definition of evil, does it? Socialscientists are all good nominalists these days; the belief that a definition could orshould capture the essence of something was gone long before Wittgenstein got hishands on that philosophical conceit.

Or perhaps it is not so simple. Perhaps these two questions (What do evil menwant? What is evil?) are related. Not identical, but related, so that we learnsomething important about the reality of human evil by studying how people use,and abuse, the term. Peter Winch (1958) would go further, using Wittgenstein toargue that explaining human action is explaining the meaning of the concepts actorsuse to explain their actions. Because human action is meaningful, not merely themovement of bodies, we explain action by understanding how actors use terms todescribe their actions. We have understood all we can about an action when weknow all that an “ideal native informant,” fully conversant with the concepts of hisculture, could tell us about it. For example, to understand a banking transaction, itis necessary and sufficient to understand the concepts involved, such as bank,money, exchange, teller.

Winch goes too far. If he were correct, unconscious forces, as well as long-termhistorical forces (indeed, any forces) of which the participants are unaware, couldnot count as explanations. Nevertheless, Winch makes an important point. Howpeople understand a concept is not incidental to their actions’ falling under thisconcept, but constitutive of it. This is particularly important when social scientistsuse definitions that diverge from popular concepts, or when popular concepts havedepths of meaning of which neither the holder nor the social scientist is aware. Atissue is not unconscious meanings, but semiconscious ones, connotations fallingoutside the penumbra of everyday use, but by no means inaccessible to reflection.

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It is this reflection that was encouraged in my interviews with a variety of subjectson how they understand the concept of evil.

As an academic, I understood evil as a moral and philosophical problem. Werethe men who made the Holocaust evil, or do we better understand them as human,all too human—obedient to a fault? Does Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banalityof evil make sense, or is it an oxymoron? Is radical evil best seen in terms of Kant’sconcerns about self-serving morality, or in terms of the enormity of the deed? Theseare issues an academic might expect informants to be wrestling with—not in theseterms, but in popular and recognizable variants.

But what an academic might expect is not what informants said. They talkedabout concepts of evil more private and personal than I had ever imagined, morewidely shared too. It is this oxymoron we must come to terms with if we are tounderstand the paradigm of evil that will be called “pre-categorical.” For someinformants, pre-categorical evil simply swamped all I had defined as evil. “What’sHitler got to do with evil?” “Murder’s bad, so is war, but it’s not really evil, is it?”More than a few said things like this.

For most, however, pre-categorical evil was a separate dimension of evil, notincompatible with moral evil, but belonging to a separate reality. This dimensionwas apparent from the second interview, when Patricia D. defined evil as the feelingshe was losing herself, her separate identity, to her boyfriend. “What’sthat got todo with evil?” you might ask. When we figure that out, we shall understand muchabout evil.

Throughout the interviews I listened for metaphors, images of evil, and themost common was the most mundane. A dozen informants defined evil in terms ofthe experience of going down into the basement as a kid, the feeling that somethingdark and dangerous was about. The approach fostered this private and inward focus,aimed as it was at elucidating informants’ feelings and beliefs. In effect, thequestion was not “Tell me about what is evil in the world” (though this encom-passed the first and third questions), but “Tell me how you understand the conceptof evil in light of your experiences.” Nevertheless, this inward focus was sooverwhelming it is hard to believe it was an artifact of the approach. Certainly Iobserved it on the internet bulletin board on “Evil,” where the questions werepre-tested.

Spury F., the oldest informant, liberated Dachau as a young PFC. He remem-bers corpses laid out as far as he could see, but his leading example of evil isdrowning some kittens as a child. Our task is to understand what it is about theconcept of evil that produces such private and personal responses. The key problemwith evil is how to connect this private and inward experience with the shared moralworld, so as to respect both the integrity of private experience and the reality ofshared moral experience.

The Political Psychology of Evil 3

II

Fifty-eight men and women were interviewed. Twenty men and 20 womenwere among those who responded to advertisements placed in the campus news-paper andRetirement World News.Aged 18 to 80, their demographic characteristicsare summarized in the appendix. In addition, I have been meeting weekly with agroup of inmates at a maximum security prison to discuss “Concepts of Evil.” Wehave been meeting for six months; the research is ongoing.

All inmates are doing serious time; several are serving life sentences. Theprison program is aimed at inmates who need and can benefit from a program of“psychological remediation.” This means, in effect, that, while troubled, they arenot psychopathic. Many have killed a relative or loved one: a mother, father,brother, wife, child, or girlfriend. One beat a policeman severely; another torturedand raped his teacher; still another raped a relative. Two committed nonviolentoffenses against property. Most are filled with remorse. Many joined the group tocome to terms with their own sense of being evil. Inmates’ perspectives on evil are,in general, more rigidly held than those of other informants, but the content is notvery different. This is, it should be noted, nothing to be encouraged about.

III

A number of informants spoke of absolutely terrifying dreams that seemed notlike dreams at all, but real experiences, dreamlike states in which they would bedestroyed if they did not awaken. The dream itself is not important; important ishow it affects the dreamer’s concept of evil, which it does.

Alexa K., about 50, talked about a dream she had 20 years ago. Recentlyseparated from her husband, she dreamt of a malevolent figure who would paralyzeand destroy her if she did not awaken. Who was he, I asked? “You know who Imean,” she answered in a husky voice. “The opposite one, the opposite of God.”At the last minute Alexa woke up and has been on her guard ever since.

Sally L. is about 25 years younger than Alexa. She too talked about a terrifyingdream.

“Three times I dreamed it. A powerful force attacked me, like a demon. Itgrabbed me around the neck, making weird mechanical sounds deep in its throat.Slowly it turned toward me, until I could see its face. It was the grim reaper, witha skull for a face. I knew I would die. And the pain. I was in bed, but it was nodream. I know it was no dream. It was like a headache, only my pain was outsidemy head, throbbing.”

It sounds terrible, but why call it evil?“I thought you understood . . . It was, you know, weird, like the pain was

outside of me trying to get in.”

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Many talked about similar dreams. All were certain their dreams had to do withevil, and none could explain the connection. No questions were asked about dreams.In every case the informant originated the topic.

For Kara T. the dream had to do with a neighbor to whom she is attracted. Hecomes to her, holds her in his arms, and suddenly begins to paw her, all the whilemaking strange, inarticulate noises from somewhere deep in his throat. He hasturned into a monster, Satan, with claws for hands. She dreamed the same dreamevery week for a month.

Understanding an informant’s inner world so as to better understand his useof the term “evil” is not about causal knowledge, what causes what. Comingbetween sleep and wakefulness, sleep paralysis (said to affect 4% of the population)often results in terrifying dreams that have the quality of reality and a contentfrequently related to paralysis, such as being overcome by an alien force. Severalinformants reported being sexually molested as children, but the memories weredistinct, not dreamlike (Siegel, 1992; Masson, 1984).

Causal explanations like these, even if true (and how could one know in anyparticular case?), would miss the point. Understanding how people employ theconcept of evil means taking informants’ experiences seriously wherever they comefrom. Experiences influence how we use concepts, and it is the connection betweenexperience and concept that counts. Where the experience “really” comes from, ifit could be known, is not important from this perspective.

Not all precategorical experiences concerned dreams. Most concerned experi-ences that seemed more real than reality. They were not always bad. Mary H.,almost 60, talks like a whimsical teenager. A few years ago she visited the zoo, andwhile looking at the monkeys, she twisted her neck sharply and felt a shock go toher brain. In the moment in which she lost consciousness she had a beatific vision.

“It was like a bowl of cottage cheese bathed in a golden light. Everything inthe world was there, everything. . . . Each curd was good or evil, but they were allmixed up so you couldn’t separate them. And the whole, even though there wasevil in it, was good. It was good. Ever since then I’ve been more relaxed. I knowthat no matter how much evil it contains, the universe is good.”

Andrew lost his wife a few years ago. Now he drives an hour to attend anotherchurch because he cannot enter the sanctuary where her memorial service was held.“It’s like part of her is still there, I really can’t explain it.” This in response to aquestion about how his religion helps him understand evil.

A down-to-earth man not given to flights of fancy, Andrew speaks about livingin London during the blitz. It was not the exploding bombs that got to him but thesilence of the buzz bombs (V-1 rockets) when they ran out of fuel. “You knew theywere going to fall, but for a moment it was just silence. Nothing. It wasstrange, beautiful. Then you heard the explosion.” This in response to aquestion about having experienced evil. He could not explain the connec-tion, but he could make it.

The Political Psychology of Evil 5

Why call these experiences precategorical? Because they are prior not just tomorality, but to the distinctions that make morality possible, including such basicdistinctions as self and other. Expressed in images and words, the experiences arenevertheless preverbal. The precategorical is the realm of mimesis, a world ofmirrors, in which the outer world is experienced as deep inside, the inner world asthough it were part of the external. Like Sally’s throbbing pain, located somewherebetween the surface of her body and infinity, the skin a semipermeable membrane.

Henry A. grew up in one of the world’s trouble spots. One day he went to themarket. Just as he was to go inside there was a tremendous explosion, and he wasthrown to the ground by the blast from a homemade bomb. Still dazed, he got up,brushed himself off, and went inside, where he saw a dozen wounded people,several dead or dying. “It could have been me. If I’d finished brushing my teethone minute earlier, it would have been me.” One of the merchants was washingaway the blood from around his stall, and when Henry looked down he foundhimself standing in a river of diluted blood flowing over his shoes. In the river hecould see the image of his face—only, for a second, the image did not look like animage: it looked like it really was his disembodied face, covered in blood.

In the precategorical experience of evil, the intensity of the experience dis-solves normal distinctions between subject and object, inner and outer, so that fora moment it looked to Henry like he had been killed or wounded, that he had beeninside, not outside. The experience is not simply that evil is bad and should becontained. Rather, what is uncontained is itself experienced as evilbecauseit isuncontained, overwhelming, beyond limits. Not every uncontained experience isevil, of course, only those in which the experience seems boundless, likely tooverwhelm the self in a tidal wave of emotion. Evil is that which threatens toobliterate the self, overcoming its boundaries. This is what the informants weresaying.

D.W. Winnicott refers to the transitional object, such as the baby’s blanket,which does more than represent the security of mother. It is mother, and at the sametime it is not. It is both, all at once, and only a fool would try to say it isreally oneor the other. The whole point of the transitional object is that we suspend the lawsof noncontradiction for a moment, letting something be A and not-A at the sametime. Precategorical experience has the quality of a transitional object. It is atransitional realm, self and non-self at the same time. Potential space, Winnicott(1971, pp. 95–103) calls it, the fount of all creativity, where we play with evil.

Though I have drawn upon a psychoanalytic concept to explain it (Ogden’spsychoanalytic account of the autistic-contiguous position [1989, pp. 47–82] is alsoapposite), precategorical experience is fundamentally a phenomenological concept:that is, one concerned with our primordial experience of the world, how we mustexperience it if we are to account for lacuna in more developmentally elaboratedexperiences. In this sense it is akin to what Edmund Husserl (1973), founder ofphenomenology, calls “prepredicative experience,” experience on which all else ispredicated (Schutz, 1973, v.1, pp. 79–82).

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If precategorical experience makes no firm distinction between subject andobject, then what of categorical experience? Ponder Immanuel Kant’s founding actof morality, the categorical imperative: “Act as if the maxim of your action wereto become through your will a universal law of nature.” You might want to lie inorder to get someone to loan you money. But what if your maxim “lying is the bestpolicy” became a universal law and everyone did it? The world would become helland you would be its first citizen. Though Kant denied its identity with the goldenrule, the idea is similar. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Consider what is involved in the categorical imperative. You must knowyourself as separate from other people, with your own interests and projects. If youdo not, there can be no conflict between your interests and theirs, all would havethe same desires, not merely for the same thing, but literally the same desires. Whileseparate and distinct from others, the holder of the categorical imperative must careabout others, not just about their behavior but about their inner worlds, so that youcan imagine them being like you but not you. They too feel pain and joy at manyof the same things you do, but not exactly the same things, and not exactly the samepain and joy either. The other is separate, different, yet similar, so that you areobligated to treat him with as much respect as you treat yourself.

The academic might argue that Kant’s categorical imperative is not properlycontrasted with the phenomenon of precategorical thought. By “categorical” Kantmeans universally binding upon all; its opposite is not precategorical, but hypo-thetical, provisional. Kant is a moral philosopher, concerned not with the originsof experience, but how we must live if we are to regard ourselves as ethical beings.In a word, the objection is that I am contrasting apples and oranges, even if one iscalled “pre-apples.”

Seen from the perspective of the history of ideas, such an objection is correct, orat least relevant. My argument is not, however, a play on the terms precategorical andcategorical. The argument is operational: what psychological operations, or distinc-tions,mustonebeable tomake inorder toactmorally?Theanswer isall thedistinctionsthat are assumed as given and obvious in Kant’s categorical imperative. Precategoricalthought is properly contrasted with Kant’s categorical imperative if we recognize thatthecategorical imperativemakesmanyassumptionsaboutpsychologicaldevelopment,assumptions not operative under precategorical thought. Morality depends upon beingable to make basic distinctions between self and other, distinctions so obvious they areoftenassumedtobegiven,available toall. In fact, theyaremade.Avoidingevil dependsupon how they are made.

Sometimes the opposite is argued—that morality depends upon the ability toidentify with another so completely that the boundaries between self and world aresuspended, as in precategorical thought. But identification is not a good basis formorality, because it as readily supports the opposite conclusion. Susan Smith, whodrowned her children, said she was really trying to kill herself, theNew York Timesreported. If we save others to save ourselves, then we may kill them to kill ourselvesand torture them because we are tortured.

The Political Psychology of Evil 7

“I just had to let someone know how bad I felt,” said one inmate who murderedtwice. In one way or another, half a dozen inmates said the same thing, murderbecoming a type of perverse communication, or rather a perverse trading of places(“Now it was his turn to feel dead”), as though psychic state and external realitywere one. Morality respects boundaries, finding a place for the other outside theboundaries that define me, but inside the boundaries that define the human worldwe both share. This realization is what the categorical imperative is about, even ifwe do not agree that it is the best formulation of this insight.

The mere existence of pre-categorical thought is not striking: All art dependson it. What is striking is how the dread carried in precategorical thought may isolateit in the mind so that it becomes impervious to categorical reflection—that is,morality. Creating a two-way traffic flow between dread and morality may lessenevil, but only if we can find the symbols to embody our dread. In the absence ofsymbolization, evil gets lodged in the body, acted out rather than expressed in moreabstract, less destructive forms.

“Evil is a feeling of doom, the feeling we get when we depart from God’s law”is how Mr. Caine put it, capturing the psychologic perfectly backwards, “perfectly”because this is just how the mind works, confusing the experience of doom withevil. Actually evil is the defense against doom, as though by inflicting doom onothers, we could rid ourselves of evil, as though doom were a concrete thing thatcould be moved from place to place, preferably with a gun.

Most noninmate informants had strong precategorical experiences of evil, inwhich normal distinctions between self and world, inner and outer, part and whole,were suspended. Far fewer inmates did. Many could hardly understand the experi-ence. “That’s just insane!” said Ms. Ball when she heard the story of Henry, whosaw his face covered with blood. Few noninmate informants were so quick todismiss the experience. The difference points the way to understanding evil.

The inmates live in a highly controlled world, traveling between prisonbuildings by tunnels. Even the outdoor recreation area feels like a tunnel, sur-rounded by prison buildings. On the floor in the tunnels is a line down the center,like a highway. During busy periods inmates must walk to the right, and keep theirhands to themselves. Bars divide the long tunnels into corridors. In such a controlledworld, one might expect the inmates to dream of freedom. Perhaps they do, but theydo not talk about it. They talk about controlling their dreams, the only informantswho did.

Evidently the practice is widespread, inmates working hard in the minutes (orhours?) before sleep trying to structure their dreams, so they dream about what theywill. If this does not work, as it frequently does not, they interpret their dreams asthough they could control them in retrospect. Mr. Deacon kept dreaming he wasbeing chased over a cliff by a faceless man. “I know now that it was me,” he said.“I just couldn’t face myself.” His interpretation is not necessarily wrong, butconsider his need for control, containing and restraining the precategorical imagi-nation even in sleep, even in retrospect, via interpretation. The prison restrains

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inmates’ bodies, so they might become authoritarians over their own minds. Or soit sometimes seems.

Not every inmate is so controlled. For months after his partner in the drug tradewas murdered, Mr. Beaty saw his ghost in the basement of the townhouse they hadshared, the basement where they stored their drugs. Sometimes the ghost seemedto speak to Mr. Beaty, telling him to find another line of work. “Prison saved me.Without it I’d be dead by now. Maybe Joe [the ghost] turned me in.” There is moremoral promise (as yet unrealized) in Mr. Beaty’s dream experience than a hundredhomilies to virtue, or a dozen moral imperatives.

IV

Was Adolf Eichmann evil? He didn’t kill anyone, but he orchestrated themurder of millions. Doesn’t that make him evil? Most said no. The truth ofinformants’ assumptions is not at issue, though it is interesting to consider why somany not only assume Eichmann would be killed if he failed to obey, but talk as ifthis assumption were written into the question. (Hannah Arendt [1965, p. 91] statesthat “in the Nuremberg documents not a single case could be traced in which anS.S. member had suffered the death penalty because of a refusal to take part in anexecution.”)

While the proportion of inmates and free informants who held Eichmann to bewithout evil was roughly equal (almost two-thirds), their reasoning was different,at least on the surface. It is a difference that is key to understanding evil. Every freeinformant who found Eichmann not evil used the “just a cog in the war machine”argument: he didn’t have any choice, he was just doing his job, if he didn’t do itsomeone else would have, and he would have gotten himself killed for no reasonat all.

Not a single inmate used this argument. Instead, inmates see the world inHobbesian terms, a perpetual war of all against all in which there are no innocents,only victims and executioners. “It’s total war, man, and in total war there’s nobystanders. Everyone is a soldier.”

Even babies?“Yeah, they just don’t know it yet.”“All’s fair in love and war,” said another inmate, Mr. Leotine. In prison for

murdering his parents, he might as well have said “love is war, war is war,everything is war, so anything is fair all the time.”

Just as the reality of the ghetto mirrors in exaggerated form the reality ofmiddle-class life (threatened families, teenagers raised by peer groups and massmedia, the cultivation of violence and toughness as the currency of every relation-ship), so the reality of prison reflects the values of the free world. The prisonerswho can make no distinction between the mass murder of innocent civilians andthe clash of armies, dividing the entire world into victims and executioners, are

The Political Psychology of Evil 9

expressing in slightly exaggerated (and not always exaggerated) form a worldviewcommon among a majority of informants.

Connect the “only a cog in the war machine” argument with the assumptionof almost every free informant who did not find Eichmann evil, that he did whathe did because he would be killed if he didn’t. Is this not really a bureaucratizedand rationalized version of the war of all against all? This is still total war, kill orbe killed, only now the chaos is contained within the bureaucracy. It has order,structure, and in that sense is not the chaotic war of all against all of which Hobbeswrites. Instead, it is the war of some against others. If the some don’t carry out theirorders, they will be killed and replaced by others who will. This war is still the warof all against all, only now it’s serial.

Prisoners are like the neurotics that Freud writes of: people like everyone else,but more so. They are closer to their dread: it is less contained, less well-managed.This makes some dangerous, more in need of prison walls. It does not make themand their reasoning fundamentally different. On the contrary, they know somethingabout the horror of victimization, the sense of living in a world in which one iseither victim or executioner, which free informants feel but can’t know, or rather,cannot know in such bitter and unmediated form. (Every statement here comparinginmates and free informants should be read with an implicit “on average.”)

The “Iron Cage”

If the war of all against all and cog-in-the-machine arguments are trulycontinuous, one would expect to find informants having difficulty finding a wayout: a third path between that of victim and executioner, domination and submis-sion, evil-doer and victim of evil. One would expect that informants wouldexperience this world as having no outside, no exit. Many do, with consequencesfor how they view evil. This critique of modern society has been made many times.The analysis of Herbert Marcuse (1964) and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theoryfinds this totalizing tendency not just in totalitarian regimes, but liberal democraticones. It is not, however, a critique limited to the left. Its original and most famousproponent is Max Weber, who wrote of the modern world as an “iron cage” of icypolar darkness and night, every aspect of life the subject of administration(Mitzman, 1984).

For prisoners the iron cage is no metaphor, though it is striking how many feelthat they are more free in prison than without. “In the world I had two choices: killmy husband or die a little more every day.”

Why didn’t you just walk out?“I’ve thought about that everyday I’ve been here. I don’t know. I know that I

was in a worse prison than now. At least here I can think, I can choose my values.”For free informants the iron cage is more metaphorical, more multidimen-

sional too, but no less real, the world providing few choices between doing evil

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and suffering it. Grace E. turned down a commission in the Air Force to be a fighterpilot because she knew she could not drop bombs on people. Now she is in anaerospace engineering program, learning how to design better bombs. “I hate it, butwhere do I draw the line? How do I draw it? Where does the responsibility stop?How far do I have to go to get away from evil?” She thinks Eichmann was evilbecause he knew the Nazi reality.

Mary H., believer in the creamy All, had a job several decades ago updatingmaps of Cambodia. Later she discovered these maps were used to guide theinvading forces under Nixon. “None of us considered what these maps might beused for, we never thought about it. We were kids, you know.”

Was it evil?She pauses. “No, it’s not evil if you don’t know, or if you don’t think about

it.” She doesn’t believe Eichmann was evil. “He didn’t know, did he? Not really.Who could?”

Terry P. sat in the hall reading her Bible before her interview. Her lesson wasthe 52nd Psalm. It is about not lying. She thinks Eichmann was evil. “We all havea choice, including the choice to die for what we believe.” But she is bothered bythe question, obsessing over it, stating several times “There but for the grace ofGod go I.”

She was not identifying with his victims. She was identifying with Eichmann.She hopes, but is far from certain, that she would have the wit and courage to refuse,because she knows what it is like to be morally lost, adrift. She had been therebefore converting to Christianity several years ago.

Andrew S. fought in Europe during World War Two. “I was the youngestsecond lieutenant in the army, just like Bush in the Navy.” He is certain thatEichmann was not guilty. “He was just a cog in the war machine, just like the restof us.” The German officer who shot Jews was guilty, but Andrew quickly changesthe question around. “Now if they’d been partisans, blowing up the railroad orsomething, then he would have been within his rights.”

The key point but a subtle one is that all but Andrew identify with Eichmannnot the victims. Five Jewish informants, all under the age of 35, identify withEichmann. Identification does not mean they think he is not evil, though three donot and one is not sure. It means that Eichmann’s victims and their suffering do notenter the picture, except as abstractions. They see the issue strictly from Eichmann’sviewpoint, from his eyes. “You grow up in Nazi Germany, you hear all this stufffor years, you come to believe it. It all depends on how you were raised. Peoplewill believe anything if you brainwash them long enough.”

One might argue that the question is posed from Eichmann’s perspective, soof course informants identify with him. But the question is simply whether theEichmann-type individual (who does not necessarily hate Jews, knows about the“Final Solution,” and above all likes to carry out his assigned duties) is evil. It isthe informants’ choice to see the situation from his eyes, a choice so simple andnatural it took me awhile to see how strange it really was.

The Political Psychology of Evil 11

The dictionary meaning of evil is “excess,” “beyond the norm,” from theGermanuebel,“over” or “beyond.” Evil is the destruction of order, chaos, andconfusion, the second most common definition among informants. In such adisordered world power is the only currency. Victimhood can have no meaningwhen there is no one to witness, remember, or understand.

Theorists of the Holocaust such as Bauman and Arendt fail to appreciate theintrusion of doom and dread, what has been called precategorical evil, into moder-nity. They fail to understand, in other words, how scared people really are. Theexperience of precategorical dread is above all an experience of powerlessnessbefore terror. “I couldn’t move, it was like this tremendous weight.” “I wasparalyzed with terror, helpless.” “It was there, right over my shoulder, but I couldn’tturn around and look at it. My heart was frozen.” Here is the language of precate-gorical dread, a language in which power is the only antonym to paralysis.

Many identify with Eichmann not because they want to, but because identify-ing with the meaningless deaths of his victims is too terrible to contemplate. Notall the time but when push comes to shove, we live in a world of executioners and“dead meat,” as one puts it. Except for Andrew, who identifies with a regime thatonce, at least, combined power with righteousness, even if this did not always keepit, or him, from doing evil.

The bars of the iron cage are composed of power and victimhood, the percep-tion that these are the only choices. The cage is made more confining still by thefailure of cultural memory, which makes of meaningful victimhood an oxymoron.How can being a victim—living and dying for a belief or value rather thanpower—be meaningful in a world in which being a victim is tantamount to havingnever existed?

The problem, of course, is not the failure of memory per se. It is the failure ofthe culture to preserve those categories of experience that make victimhoodmeaningful so that the meaning might be available to make the memory meaningful.Rachel B. remembers back to grade school, when her teacher had the class drawfamily trees. She couldn’t. All her relatives had been killed in the Holocaust. Herfamily did not talk about them, so it was as if they had never existed.

What evil have you done?“Once I wished my baby sister had never been born.” For Rachel that was the

consummate evil, not just to harm another, not just to kill him, but to make it as ifanother had never existed. Primo Levi said he would take his life when it no longerserved to remind people of the Holocaust, when people no longer wished toremember. Robbed forever of the joy of living, his life had meaning only as witness,and only as long as others were willing to be witnessed to.

The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, whose intellectual founders wereMax Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Marcuse, understood that power cannotovercome dread. They also understood the persistence of the illusion that it can.They called this illusion the dialectic of Enlightenment, referring to how progressin Enlightenment culminates in the resurrection of myth. Capable of transforming

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the external world, reason is in the end powerless before the dread that motivatesthis transformation: dread of limits, of mortality, of meaninglessness, of vulner-ability and loss.

Adorno, lead author ofThe Authoritarian Personality,which seemed toexplain the Holocaust in terms of the prevalence of authoritarian types in the Naziregime, held a position that was vastly more complex than this. InDialectic ofEnlightenment,written with Horkheimer (1972) and published in 1947, Adornoargued that man turned his reason to the domination of nature because of the terrorsunconquered nature held for him. Not just science but philosophy expressed thisethic of domination. Reason as rage at a world too sparse to be dominated, asAdorno put it elsewhere. Marginal groups such as Jews, Blacks, and prison inmatesare identified with unconquered nature, in the vain hope that with their containmentor destruction the terror of nature itself can be overcome. More recently, MichelFoucault (1979, 1990) has made a similar argument about how the irrationalstealthily intrudes upon the rational, leading to the deployment of rational methodsand argument in the service of delusion.

If you go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., you may find that itis not the photographs, or even the piles of shoes and hair, that overcome you. Forbetter or worse, many seem to have become immune to the pathos of such images.Overwhelming is the perverse rationality of it all, the elaborate categories of beingsto be destroyed, the Institutes for Racial Hygiene, the Offices of Purification of theReich, the Departments of Special Procedures. The Holocaust was science, indus-try, and bureaucracy driven by images of doom, impurity, and dread, the stuff ofprecategorical evil. The Holocaust was the intrusion of precategorical dread intomodernity, where it is not supposed to be, and which has no categories for it, justprimitive superstition, which makes modernity all the more vulnerable (Glass,forthcoming).

Though Andrew is not walled off to his own precategorical experiences, suchas the awesome silence of the buzz bombs over London, he steadfastly refuses tolet them influence his moral judgment. He defines evil as the irresponsible lack ofself-restraint, a refusal to face life’s seriousness. He ran a department store in a poorsection of the city, and in so defining evil, he and I both know he is talking byimplication about blacks.

Andrew guides his life by his father’s motto, “the fittin’ thing to do,” whichmeans fitting in with the values and needs of one’s group, no matter what, and notbecause these values are objectively right in every case. Andrew is surprisinglyrelativistic about the German and Japanese aggressors, recognizing that from theirperspective they may have been acting morally. This, though, does not confuse him,it only reaffirms his belief that loyalty and morality are one, about commitment toone’s group no matter what. Nor does his relativism assuage his fury at the“historical revisionists” who want to paint the atomic bombing of Japan as wrong.

The Political Psychology of Evil 13

“You want to know what’s evil, that’s evil. Historical revisionism is evil. Thebomb saved my keester. I’d already been wounded in Europe. I’d have been a deadman if they sent me to Japan.”

The utter conventionality of Andrew’s morality means there was nothing hewould not do for his group: nothing right, nothing wrong, nothing. Andrew is intouch with precategorical experience, though it would be more accurate to say thatprecategorical is in touch with him, such as feeling his late wife’s presence in thechurch so strongly he cannot return there. But it does not translate into reflec-tiveness about anything, including morality. He is surprisingly relativistic, butin ways that only enhance his loyalty to the one thing he can believe in, “thefittin’ thing to do.”

Andrew is the dialectic of Enlightenment living out its final days in RetirementWorld, images of precategorical doom, like the silent buzz bombs, defended againstby perfect loyalty, and rage at the “historical revisionists” who would wish his deathon the beaches of Japan. Or so it seems to him. “Final days” because in a postmodernworld, myth no longer masquerades as reason. For better and worse, it is all fiction.

By and large younger informants are more cynical. Less vulnerable to the evilsthat stem from unreflective, conventional attachment to one’s group, they are morevulnerable to the belief that morality is not about what you do in this iron cage ofa world, but who you are. For all his faults, Andrew believes that individuals canact together in the world to overcome aggressors like Hitler. For many youngerinformants, real freedom is what takes place deep inside. Inmates share this belief;they just have better reasons for it.

Among those who let Eichmann off the hook, Tom A. was speaking for amajority when he said, “You’d really have to know what he was thinking, wouldn’tyou? I mean down deep. And how could you, how could anyone? So you just can’tjudge, I mean people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” In Tom’s world thereis no place to hide, except perhaps deep down inside, where all that is important injudging good and evil resides. The outside, “it’s just what I do, not who I am.”

Tom’s is not a great morality. There is an objective quality to evil that itignores, abandoning the world to the powerful and the damned. But this moralityis real, and must be dealt with. It is interesting to learn about how people understandevil, for it is interesting to learn about the world. It is, however, more thaninteresting. It is morally important, so that we might have a dialog about evil, adialectic that connects surface belief with core experiences, precategorical doomwith categorical morality. In the end this is the only dialectic that counts.

V

Inmates and free citizens think about evil in roughly the same ways. Amonginmates, however, there is greater variation, more extremes. “Thinking evil is the

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same as doing it,” is a common view among inmates, less common among otherinformants. Life is a war in which there are only victims and executioners is acommon view among informants. But it is held in a harsher, more literal sense bymany inmates.

Such extremes are the mark of borderline thinking. Few psychoanalysts wouldbe so naive, or boring, as to say that the goal is integration. Rather, it is to increasethe traffic between the extremes, so that they might communicate with each other,know the other, even if they do not become best friends, indistinguishable compan-ions. I have made much the same argument about evil, an argument that appliesequally to inmates and free citizens.

Education about evil, an education that helps people become aware that somechoices are evil, is not about moral inculcation. Nor is it about “values clarifica-tion,” whatever that means exactly. It is about the explication of doom, so that itdoes not corrupt categorical morality, reducing morality to a question of power, thepower to avoid victimization. This requires playing with evil, exploring one’ssadistic and destructive inclinations in thought and talk, not deed, lest the deedbecome a substitute for self-knowledge. Evil is, or can be, fun; if it were not, peoplewould not do it. It is a simple but powerful point that most informants get, and manyscholars do not (Alford, 1990).

The leading definition of evil among all informants is evil as pleasure inhurting. The psychoanalyst Erna Furman (1993, p. 263) calls it “hurting fun” whenshe talks with her young patients, and she is just right. Adults should not beencouraged to play with evil for fun’s sake, but to create new traffic patterns, so tospeak, new connections between their fears, desires, and morality. Far more thanwe are aware, morality, including the morality of sociological relativism, is toooften about power. Morality = power is an equation as central to the modern worldas Foucault’s knowledge/power. Unlike Foucault (1990), I argue that if we explorethe roots of the moral equation in doom, we may have a chance to refigure it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the inmates and staff of the Patuxent Institution for their helpand encouragement at every stage in this project. Director Joseph Henneberry, Dr.Henry Richards, and Ms. Deborah Kafami saw immediately why it might be usefulto study concepts of evil among prisoners. Dr. Kevin McCamant is my associatein the prison portion of the research; Mr. Wayne Beckles has been most helpful.The eighteen inmates have shared their lives.

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APPENDIX

Among Free World informants, 20 men and 20 women were interviewed.Age Distribution:18-25: 24; 25-50: 10; 51-80: 6Ethnicity:10 Oriental, 1 Indian (Eastern), 2 black, 27 white.Religion: 11 Catholic (or raised Catholic), 3 Lutheran, 10 other Protestant

denominations, 1 Jehovah’s Witness, 1 Hindu, 2 Buddhist, 3 Evangelical Christian,5 Jewish, 3 atheist/agnostic, 1 “pagan”

The 18 inmates range in age from 19 to 48; 5 are women. The prison refers toinmates as Mr. or Ms. It is how I came to know them, so it is my practice here.Other informants are referred to by first name and last initial. All are pseudonyms.

My work with inmates was in a group, the average size a dozen inmates. As amember of the A.K. Rice Institute (the American branch of the Tavistock Schoolin London), I am schooled in group process. Though I pay attention to process inorder to decipher the complexity of the group experience, my conclusions are nothypotheses about process, but about what inmates actually say.

Age Distribution:18-25: 5; 26-35: 7; 36-48: 6Ethnicity:10 black, 8 whiteReligion: The varieties of religious experience among inmates defy my at-

tempts at categorization. Most were raised in nominally Protestant homes. Severalare from Catholic backgrounds, two are Jewish. The Nation of Islam is active inprison, and many have been influenced by its teachings, including white inmates.

The questionnaire has about 50 items. The question about Nazis reads asfollows:

12. Consider two examples. A good German during World War II works hardat his desk, helping to keep the trains running on time, making sure there are alwaysenough boxcars available to transport Jews to the concentration camps. The officerknows what happens at the camps. He doesn’t like to think about it though. He justlikes to do his job well.

—Another German officer leads a platoon that rounds up Jews and shoots themin the neck. He has shot his share of Jews, mostly to set a good example to his men.Is either of these men evil? Is one more evil than another?

—What about a third officer, drafted into this murderous platoon. He usesevery excuse he can to avoid the shooting, hates it, makes him sick to his stomach,gives him ulcers, and nightmares. But when his commander says shoot, or you goto the Russian front, he shoots. Is he evil? As evil?

16 Alford

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