On July 22, 2011, Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 persons, many of them children and youths, in two separate events. Most people’s first reaction would be “How can anybody be so evil? That guy must have been a psychopath”. Acts like these are called “proactive” or “cold” (premeditated) aggression. Contrary to reactive aggression, i.e. “hot” aggression - e.g. when you are threatened, offended, etc. we consider proactive aggression as evil. It is typical for psychopaths, who have no empathy for their victims and have indeed difficulties recognizing their fear.
Why are some people more like angels and others more like demons? Of course, there is good and bad in everyone, but some people are truly altruistic whereas others are truly evil. For people familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality system there is an additional twist to the question: why did Jesus and Hitler share the same personality type?
In the Goodness Paradox evolutionary anthropologist Richard Wrangham explains the range of human behaviour, by our reduced reactive aggressiveness while maintaining the proactive aggressiveness of our ancestors. In a way we are in between your chimp cousins, who go on killing raids among neighbouring populations and bonobos, who are the hippies among our primate relatives, making love instead of war.
chimpanzees | humans | bonobos | |
Proactive aggressive | +++ | +++ | + |
Reactive aggressive | +++ | + | + |
Wrangham argues convincingly that natural selection (or rather self-selection) for reduced reactive aggressiveness can be seen in neotenous traits, like smaller teeth, and reduced sexual dimorphism. In this respect, we are more like bonobos than chimps. He hypothesizes that we have inherited our propensity for proactive aggressiveness from our more chimp-like ancestors all the way through hunter-gatherers and farming societies.
Wrangham thus explains the pessimistic Hobbsian view of humans as naturally violent with an inherited tendency towards proactive aggressiveness, and the contrary Rousseauean view with reduced reactive aggressiveness that occurred in our evolutionary history after the Homo Sapiens - Neanderthal split, sometime around 300k to 60k years ago.
Wrangham notes that there are many scholars who maintain that hunter-gatherers are in general much less war-like than farmers and pastoralists, which he considers a myth more than than the truth. However, he notes:
A standard sample of twelve hunter-gatherer societies found a median death rate of from intergroup conflict of 164 deaths per 1000.000 per year, compared to a median for twenty for small-scale farming societies of 595 deaths per100.000 per year.
This is a more than 3.5-fold increase of proactive aggression with the advent of farming! Wrangham doesn’t comment on this phenomenon, but it should be little surprising to him, as he writes himself that proactive aggression serves territorial species like chimpanzees and wolves for better reproduction. Hunter-gatherers often had the choice to migrate in case of conflicts - and they did so a lot, until they basically inhabited the whole planet. The cases of high proactive hunter-gatherer aggression Wrangham cites are typically in areas where migration is only a limited possibility, like in Tasmania.
If proactive aggression is increased in farmers, it is even more so in pastoralists, who often went on raids among their neighbours. In history, it is mostly pastoralist tribes who wreaked havoc among the local populations: the Yamnaya (Indo-Europeans), the Mongols, the Huns, etc. Even nowadays pastoralist societies are among the most violent peoples, with the Mursi pastoralists of Sudan earning the title of the most dangerous tribe on Earth.
I have argued before that person in modern civilisations have inherited their temperament from ancestors who were adapted to hunting-gathering, farming and herding:
Early farmers evolved higher levels of serotonin, which allowed them to control their impulses, focus on routine work and have even lower levels of reactive aggressiveness. This made it possible that they peacefully went with a lower position in the social hierarchy, something hunter-gatherer people would have never accepted due to their egalitarian nature:
“[…] when the Spanish began their conquest of South America, one of their earliest settlements was at the site of modern Buenos Aires. The settlement was a colonial failure and soon abandoned because the local hunter-gatherers refused to work for the Spanish, even under extreme duress. When the Spanish ventured farther inland and encountered agriculturalists in Paraguay, they easily subjugated the local people by conquering and replacing the aristocracy […]” (from: William von Hippel The Social Leap).
The Spanish found little resistance among the Paraguayan farmers once their leaders were defeated. For them, life didn’t change much as they had been living in a hierarchical society before. For the hunter-gatherers, on the other hand, it would have meant going against their inborn egalitarian instincts.
Many people with high proactive aggressiveness and psychopaths should be found in the pastoralist group, albeit as a minority. Indeed, psychopaths only constitute only about 1% of the population and many of them aren’t even physically aggressive, but become, say, successful CEOs. A table of temperament type and genetically inherited tendency to aggressiveness should look like this.
hunter-gatherers | farmers | pastoralists | |
Proactive aggressive | + | ++ | +++ |
Reactive aggressive | ++ | + | ++ |
A famous example of a hunter-gatherer type is Albert Einstein. He had extremely low proactive aggressiveness, mostly gentle nature and was a pacifist and an outspoken advocate for racial justice. However, he also had a rebellious nature (reactive aggressiveness), best seen in his rebellious childhood and many tantrums. Nor did he conform very much to social standards as an adult.
We should be able to conclude now that Breivik was of the pastoralist temperament. Except Breivik wasn’t - he wasn’t a typical psychopath. He was a sociopath, himself a victim of an abusive mother, who in turn might have experienced adverse life-conditions, judging from her borderline personality disorder. Even though the DSM-5 treats psychopathy and sociopathy as one Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), there are marked differences:
psychopath | sociopath |
genetic predisposition | environmentally influenced |
proactive aggressive | reactive aggressive |
low stress reactivity | high stress reactivity |
socially integrated | socially isolated |
more often extraverted | more often introverted |
low in neuroticism | high in neuroticism |
lack empathy and remorse | feel empathy and remorse |
act in their own interest | usually have a "mission", motivated by ideology |
most frequently pastoralist temperament | most frequently hunter-gatherer temperament |
In a way, therefore, Breivik's aggression was reactive turned into proactive, like revenge on society. In fact, people like Breivik are often lone-wolves, outcasts of society, who are highly dissatisfied with society and usually have a vision or “manifesto” of what it should be like.
Breivik’s personality type in the Myers-Briggs system is INTJ, the most common type among lone-wolf terrorists and school shooters. In the case of school shooters, you will often read descriptions like “quiet, friendly, inconspicuous, bright and hard-working in school” - usually outcasts at school and often with broken homes.
The Evilness-Paradox consists in the fact that the people we consider the most evil actually are of the low proactive-aggressive hunter-gatherer type. What’s more, many of them are of the hunter-gatherer + high serotonin type (high conscientiousness in Big 5, “J” in Myers-Briggs”. This should predict the temperament with the lowest disposition towards reactive and proactive aggressiveness.
hunter-gatherers(N) | Hunter-gatherers (N) + high serotonin (J) | Farmers (SJ) | Pastoralist (SP) | |
Proactive aggressive | + | + | ++ | +++ |
Reactive aggressive | ++ | + | + | ++ |
Indeed, many people of that type are angelic. Jesus (INFJ) was of this type:
³⁸You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." ³⁹But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.
So were many other people we admire for their non-violent stance: Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. Many people with such a personality profile can identify with these role models and are at the same time horrified to learn that Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, Khomeini, Pol Pot, Stalin, Lenin were of the same (NJ) temperament. Hitler’s dream was to become an artist and the rejected artist became an evil dictator. But he always had a shy, insecure personality in private and was very polite and friendly towards the people surrounding him and he became inconsolable when his dog Blondi died. That is certainly not the profile of a psychopath. Friends described young Pol Pot as a gentle and shy French teacher, who would not even have killed a chicken. One with a narcissistic personality disorder, however, that turned him into one of the most evil dictators in history.
The Evilness-Paradox consists in the fact that many of the best angels and worst demons among our fellow humans belong to a small group of personality types (NJ, less than 10%). Many of the “demons” are born good and then go horribly wrong. They begin to suffer from various mental problems, ranging from ASPD to NPD and paranoia and turn evil in the belief they are fulfilling a noble mission.
WoW,this was the case of Light from Death note
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