REFLECTIONS ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EVIL:
THE HOLOCAUST
DR. PETER DAN
Is evil a legitimate subject of study for
psychology?
• Moral dilemma: does trying to explain and understand the Holocaust implicitly reduce its horror? Does demythifying evil carry risks?
• Scientific inquiry requires impartiality – and, in this context, the mere pretense of it is a moral monstrosity
• George Steiner: “There is no human form of language adequate to the conceptualization and understanding of Auschwitz”
• Elie Wiesel: We may lack the adequate words to discuss the Holocaust
• Psychology can integrate a moral and a scientific standpoint,
allowing understanding without forgiveness
• Examples of evil abound throughout History. The Holocaust is the
most representative example of evil.
• The participation of the “common man ”stands at the core of any
attempt at an explanation.
• What is sought, is a commonality – a specific configuration of factors
that permit the emergence of evil.
• The cooperation of the common man made possible and gave the true
dimension to the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the various
Gulags, the killing fields, ethnic cleansing, Rwanda, Darfur.
Hypothesis
• Participation in Evil is made possible by the
interaction of several unrelated interpersonal,
intrapersonal, and social phenomena, whose
adaptive function is to foster socialization, avoid
anxiety and pain, and insure an optimal
processing of information.
Adaptive mechanisms involved in the emergence of evil
• The acceptance of symbolic reality
• Death denial and the quest for
symbolic immortality
• The universality of stereotyping
and obedience to authority
• Psychological mechanisms for
stress reduction
• Self Deception
• Facilitate socialization
• cope with awareness of own
mortality
• Facilitate the anticipation of others’
reactions. Increase group
cohesiveness
• Help cope with extreme situations
• Help cope with guilt and internal
consistency
Symbolic reality
• Origins: deception, need for explanations
• Widespread acceptance across cultures:Plato
• Symbolic Universes (Berger & Luckman)• gives meaning to the entire human experience, which is conceived as
taking place within it.”
• is sustained by universe maintenance mechanisms, which ensure their internal consistency and continuity, and act as a safeguard against dissonance. Mythology, theology, philosophy, culture and science are all universe maintenance mechanisms.
• Deviants – those whose beliefs threaten the symbolic universe – are either included, by making them fit (i.e. conversion, forced or not) or by “nihilation”: using the maintenance mechanisms to “liquidate conceptually everything outside the universe” (i.e. heresies, excommunication)
• When “nihilation” is used against individuals or group, they are seen as inferior and not belonging to society. In the Nazi symbolic universe, the Jews were seen as deviants and a threat
• “Liquidating physically what one has liquidated conceptually is a practical question of policy.”
Death denial and symbolic immortality• Becker (1976): culture has evolved from humankind’s attempts to master the
awareness of its own mortality and. The main function of culture is death denial
• Bronowski (1974) the identification of the individual with symbols of his culture helps
establish “a sense of permanence characteristically human, that life forms a continuity
which transcends and flows through the individual”
• Lifton (1983) the culture fosters a sense of “oneness” and continuity, creating a
context in which one can “both die and continue”.
• Becker: culture offers symbolic immortality, obtained by the accumulation of
“immortality symbols” which promise “symbolic immortality”
• Mankind readily dies to obtain “symbolic immortality”
• Power, wealth , prestige, notoriety, works of art, scientific discoveries are all
“immortality symbols”
• Those who cannot obtain them follow those who do or their causes, such as “1000
Years Reich”
• The Jews are seen as possessing symbolic immortality, and having obtained it at the
expense of the “host nation”
The evolution of antisemitism: Religious antisemitism
• Rooted in a fundamental ambivalence
• Christianity: Jews are the Chosen People but also Christ killers:
Matthew 27:25: “His blood be on us and our children” Paul, 1
Thessalonians 2:14-16 directly accuses the Jews of having killed
Jesus
• Islam: The Jews are a People of the Book, but also Jews the enemies
of Muhammad,
• Qur’an: The Jews are “cursed by Allah" (4:46), are liars (2:78) distort
the word of Allah (2:75) they are the servant of the Devil(4:60) they will
be turned into apes and swine (2:65, 7:166; 5:60), and will burn in the
fires of hell. They are the worst of created beings.” (98:6, also 4:55,
5:29 and 58:14-19).
• Both based on the notion of collective guilt: John Chrisostom “Sicut
Iudeis”, Hadith: Mohammed poisoned by Jews (Vol.3, bk.47, no.786)
Allah cursed the Jews and the Christians (Vol.2,bk 23, no 414)
• At a personal level, antisemitism is a normative structure: alleviates
cognitive dissonance and guilt and facilitates aggression
• Outcomes: pogroms, forced expulsions, forced conversions,
ghettization, blood libel, dhimmi status, jizya
The evolution of antisemitism: Racial antisemitism
• Purity of Blood laws:
• Netanyahu: 633, 4th Toledan Council:prohibits the granting of public
office “ to Jews or those who are of the Jews”
• The“Fuero Juzgo”, codex of Spanish law, prohibits “Jews, whether
baptized or unbaptized to testify against Christians” (1241)
• Roth: 1449,Toledo “Sentencia Estatuto”, prohibits the Jews and
their descendants, convert or not, from holding any public office
“as this causes harm to “old Christians of pure lineage ( a los
Christianos viejos lindos)”
• Roth:Jewish identity and issues framed in racial terms, positing
“(two) inseparable relationships (one) between racial and moral
qualities of man and another that imputed to Jews as a race a
predisposition to evil”
• Outcomes: The negative characteristics attributed to the Jews are
seen as a biological fact; the concept of “The Jewish Problem”
The evolution of antisemitism: ideological antisemitism
• Originated in Germany and France, pseudoscientific frame work
provided by comparative linguistics, Social Darwinism and ethnology:
competition between Semitic and Aryan Civilizations.
• von Hellwald: “… the Jew is the cancer slowly eating into the flesh of
the other nations. Exploitation of the people is his only aim.
Selfishness and lack of personal courage are his chief characteristics”
(1872)
• Drumont:”The Semitic race can be recognized almost exclusively by
negative characteristics. It lacks a mythology, an epic, science,
philosophy…the Jew will never be the equal of a man of Christian race
(sic). He creeps at your knees or crushes you under his heel, he is
beneath or above, never by your side.”(1886)
• Core antisemitic beliefs: Bering (1992) ““Jews are not only partially
but totally bad by nature… their bad traits are incorrigible.” They
remain “essentially alien” to their host societies and “bring disaster
(on them) or on the whole world” Because their bad nature is a
generalized trait, Jews must be seen not as individuals but as a group.
The evolution of antisemitism: ideological antisemitism
• racial antisemitism incorporates the religious antisemitism, and ideological antisemitism incorporates racial antisemitism
• The Jews are a triple threat:
• a threat to the symbolic immortality and the symbolic universe
• a threat to the existence of the nation as a biological entity
• a threat to the existence of society and culture.
• Paranoid projection: casting the Jew as aggressor:
• Hitler:” Today…it is the inexorable Jew who struggles for domination over the nations. No nation can remove this hand from its throat except by the sword”
• Himmler: “we had a moral right vis-a-vis our people to annihilate this people which wanted to annihilate us.”
• Outcomes: eliminationist mindset (Goldhagen), complicity of
population, Final Solution
Modern Islamic antisemitism: the convergence between fascism and
Islam
• Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Quassam encouraged the use of violence against Jews and founded “The Black Hand” secret society whose goal was to target Jews for terror and murder.
• Sheikh Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem urged the killing of all Jews, not only Zionists
• Al-Husseini, March 1 1944 , ”Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion
• Al- Husseini got the support of Himmler and Eichmann urging the governments of Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania to cancel exit visas granted to Jews, resulting in the revocation of 80.000 visas by Romania and 400.000 visas by Hungary
• Hitler assured Al-Husseini that Germany’s uncompromising war against the Jews included active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine and that the objective was the destruction of the Jews residing in the Arab countries.
• Karl Jung:” We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on his way; he is like Muhammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic. They are all drunk with (their) wild god. That can be the historic future”
• Speer: Hitler talked wistfully about the more vigorous Islam which he considered more suitable for the Germans than the “flabby and meek” Christianity
Corresponding reactions at different levels of universe maintenance
mechanisms:
• mythology: worldwide Jewish conspiracy
• art: antisemitic art, representations of the Jew as demonic or monstrous
• theology: the Jew as Christ killer
• philosophy and science: attacks on the theory of relativity as “Jewish physics”
• biology: theories of racial superiority
• legislative: the elimination of Jews from civil society
• Nuremberg laws: The systematic exclusion of Jews from society:
• prohibition of intermarriage and non conjugal sex with Jews (Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor 9-15-1935),
• barring Jews from holding public office (11-11-1938)
• destruction of synagogues (11-11-1938),
• dissolving all Jewish businesses ( 11-23-1938)
• cutting Jewish homes’ heat and electricity (2-2-1938),
• forbidding Jewish children to attend German schools ( 11-13-1938)
• forbidding Jews to own radios (9-29-1939)
• forbidding Jews to own telephones (7-20-1940),
• forbidding Jews to own bicycles (5-15-1941),
• forbidding Jews from using public transportation (9-18-1941)
• forbidding Jews from using public phones (12-26-1941)
• mandatory wearing of the yellow star (9-1-1941)
• prohibition of friendly relations with Jews (11-24-1941).
The Final Solution
• Goebbels: “In the case of the Jews there are
not merely a few criminals, but all Jews rose
from criminal roots, and in their very nature
are criminal. The Jews are no people like
other people but a pseudo-people welded
together by hereditary criminality…The
annihilation of Jews is no loss to humanity
but just as useful as capital punishment or
protective custody against other criminals.”
Roots: Turn of the century French and German antisemitic
cartoons
Antisemitic art and cartoons: Nazi Germany
Stereotyping• Ubiquitous
• Favor attribution bias
• Stem from the need to predict the behavior of others
• Self fulfilling prophecy
• Distort the incoming information, maximizing the differences
between groups and minimizing the differences within group
• Impervious to cognitive dissonance
• Negative stereotypes are “sanctions for evil” : they dehumanize
potential victims, weakening the moral restraints against
violence.
• Dehumanization of both victim and victimizer leads to
disinhibition of aggression (Bandura, Zimbardo, Milgram,
Lifton)
Conformity and obedience to authority
• Ash: Individuals tend to conform through deception and self
deception in the 60% to 75% range
• Milgram: in order to conform and obey authority, a significant
number of “normal” people are ready to hurt their peers
• Agentic state, the opposite of autonomy: “a self regulating
entity is internally modified so as to allow its functioning within
a system of hierarchical control. From a subjective standpoint,
a person is in a state of agency when he defines himself in a
social situation in a manner that renders him open to regulation
by a person of higher status. In this condition the individual no
longer views himself as responsible for his actions, but defines
himself as an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others”
• Free will is maintained, moral responsibility is not avoided
Psychological mechanisms for coping with extreme
situations
• Lifton:
• Psychic numbing: observed both in victims and victimizers.
• A decrease in emotional reactivity due to the inability to process
symbolically what is taking place. “Death in Life”
• Slovic: exposure to mass atrocities leads to “a collapse of
compassion”: the number of lives at risk and the value of a life worth
saving are inversely correlated; the higher the number at risk, the
lower the value of life(2007)
• Himmler:“Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses lie there,
or when 500 corpses lie there, or when 1000 corpses lie there. To have
gone through this and – apart from a few exceptions caused by human
weakness – to have remained decent, that has made us great. That is a
page of glory in our history which has never been written…”
Psychological mechanisms for coping with extreme
situations
• Lifton: Doubling
• ”the division of the self in two functioning wholes so that a part self
acts as an entire self”
• Allows guilt free functioning
• Prior Self and Auschwitz self : ”. “There is dialectic between the two
selves in terms of autonomy and connection. The individual Nazi
doctor needed his Auschwitz self to function psychologically in an
environment so antithetical to his previous ethical standards. At the
same time, he needed his prior self in order to continue to see himself
as humane physician, husband, father. The Auschwitz self had to be
both autonomous and connected to the prior self that gave rise to it.”
• This is not dissociation, there is full continuity of awareness, just the
acceptance of different norms. Free will is maintained
Psychological mechanisms for coping with extreme
situations
• Lifton :controlling image
• Highly symbolic, emotionally loaded metaphors that distill the
essence of a culture and help to both motivate and rationalize
behavior
• “Killing in the name of healing” :equates the very existence of the
Jews with the symptom of a disease that threatens the well being of
the national organism.
• Facilitates the emergence of an eliminationist mindset
• Facilitates transfering the requirements of conscience to the
“Auschwitz self”
• For example, Auschwitz prisoners who worked could be expected to
survive approximately 12 weeks, and those who had survived for more
than the expected period of time were executed, because it meant that
either they avoided work or stole food. Within the Auschwitz self this
action could be rationalized as an issue of fairness loyalty, discipline
and getting rid of parasites.
Self deception
• In order to have become a co-participant in the Holocaust one had
to make conscious decisions; – no one became “unconsciously” a
member of the SS.
• The “choice for evil” was achieved by self deception: one has only
to feel convinced that there is “no choice” and the moral dilemma
disappears.
• Paul Ricoeur: “intimate core of personality”: there are successive
layers of truth, half truth and falsehoods, but at the level of the
intimate core self deception is impossible. not a moral arbiter, but
an incorruptible witness.
• The multiple layers of truth and lies permit the forging of coherent
versions of reality and of the past and of life stories consistent
with them, with different levels of self deception corresponding to
different levels of justification.
• Orwell: doublethink – a vast system of mental cheating that
flourishes in totalitarian society.
Self deception
• Arendt: self deception was “almost a moral prerequisite for survival” providing an effective – and culturally shared – shielding from reality: “Eichmann needed only to recall the past in order to feel assured that he was not lying and he was not deceiving himself for he and the world he lived in had once been in harmony and that a society of 80 million people has shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self deception”
Participation in evil
• All humans groups belong to a symbolic universe
• Belonging to a culture provides death denial
• In order to share symbolic immortality, humans
accept others’ definition of reality
• By implication, they tend to become subservient to
authority
• They accept and share the stereotypes that facilitate
the use of violence
• Psychic numbing and doubling insulate them
against the consequences
• By using self-deception, they can create consistent
life stories that free them of guilt
• Free choice is present at every step and individual
responsibility is never eschewed.
Initial Conclusion
• The awareness of the potentiality of the Holocaust
must become part of our symbolic universe and the
moral repugnance of genocide must become a
universe maintenance mechanism
• That is why is important to understand what
happened and never forget
• Failing to do so opens the possibility of it occurring
again
• George Steiner: there were “wolves in the streets of
cities in the center of Europe at the close of the
Thirty Year’s war. If man is a rabid creature, he is
also a tenacious one. There are living Jews, and
Hiroshima is a booming city”.
20+ Years Later: Resurgence and acceptance
of antisemitism
• “If we searched the entire world for a person
more cowardly, despicable and week in
psyche, we would not find anyone like the
Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.If they
(the Jews) all gather in Israel it will save us
the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
Hassan Nasrallah , secretary general of the
Hezbollah, 2006
20+ Years Later: Resurgence and acceptance of
antisemitism
• The Jews are the accursed people, who incurred the wrath of Allah. They are the offspring of snakes and vipers, the slayers of our Prophet Muhammad, whose death was a consequence of his being poisoned by a Jewish woman... We should know that the Jews are the slayers of the prophets…the Jews are behind all the ruin and destruction in the world…The Jews were behind World War I and World War II. When the American commander said that Japan had agreed to the terms of surrender, Rothschild the American – or rather, Roosevelt the American –was told by the Jewish loan sharks to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Jews were behind the English Revolution. The Jews were behind the French Revolution. The Jews were behind the U.S. Civil War in 1869-1866 [sic]. The Jews were behind the French coup of 1815. The Jews were behind the war between France and Prussia. The Jews were behind the rise of Communism. Karl Marx was a Jew. The Jews instigated war by means of sex. The Jewish Mathilde inspired Johnson to carry out the 1967 war.” Egyptian cleric Sheik Said Al-'Afani , Al Rahma TV, January 17, 2009,
20+ Years Later: Resurgence and acceptance of
antisemitism
• "We must believe that our fighting with the Jews is
eternal, and it will not end until the final battle...You
must believe that we will fight, defeat, and annihilate
them, until not a single Jew remains on the face of
the Earth.” Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein
Yacoub, Al-Rahma TV on January 17, 2009
ANTISEMITIC CARTOONS IN NAZI AND
CONTEMPORARY ARABIC PRESS
Cartoons in the Arabic press equating Israelis with Nazis
Cartoons in the Western press with antisemitic themes
• Italy: Caption: They don’t want to kill me again
Spain. Caption: No problem. At least Hitler taught me how to
invade a country and kill everything living thing
Greece.Caption: Holocaust II
China and Brazil
Russia
Norway: Comparing Olmert to Aron Goeth
USA:Oliphant, New York Times
Belgium, Moslem publication
Conclusion 2009
- The anti-Jewish prejudice demonstrated by these quotes has
precisely the hallucinatory, delusional quality Goldhagen
identified in the antisemitism of Nazi Germany
- The Pew Global Attitudes Project Report from September 2008,
indicates that the “unfavorable view of Jews is increasing in
Europe
- Western reaction to acts of religious intransigence is
conciliatory and muted
- Violence against the Jews is constantly downplayed or
excused.
- At the same time “The systematic building up of a false picture
of Israel as aggressor, and deliberate killer of babies and
children, is helping to slowly chip away at Israel’s legitimacy”
Gross, 2001
Conclusion 2009The Pew Global Attitudes Project Report:
Percentage of population holding an unfavorable opinion of the Jews:
Country
• Spain
• Poland
• Russia
• Germany
• France
• Britain
• US
2004 2008
21% 46%
27% 36%
25% 34%
20% 25%
11% 20%
9% 9%
8% 7%
Conclusion 2009
• Nathan Sharansky: “Israel has become the world’s Jew.”
• Genocidal mentality is present in certain Islamic nations today.
• It is accompanied by a widespread tolerance of antisemitism and a de-legitimizing of Israel.
• The image of the Jew as the focus of evil in the world is gaining acceptance
• The idea that an “Israeli Problem” exists that requires a “Solution” is making headway
• This dynamic is eerily reminiscent of the one that existed in Nazi Germany. The structure that permitted the emergence of evil at a national scale is reproduced at a global scale.
Conclusion 2009
We ignore these
warning signs at our
own risk !
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