Evil, the subconscious and awareness
„The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely“
C. G. Jung
Our brain basically implements two systems [1]: an intelligent agent and a reward system. The reward system has been shaped by evolution over large timescales and tells us which goals we should try to achieve. It implements a strategy which is supposed to achieve short term and long term goals (sometimes over a timescale of many thousand generations). A simple example of a reward related to a short time goal would be the thirst we experience, if we drink no water for a longer time. This negative reward for not drinking makes sure we survive the next few days. An example of rewards related to long term goals are our sexual desires (with the orgasm as the strongest positive reward we can experience). They work on a timescale of many human generations.
The intelligent agent on the other hand simply tries to optimize the reward (i.e. maximize pleasure and minimize pain produced by the reward system) by acting smart. It implements tactics (over a timescale of hours, days or a single life). Or in other words: the conscious part of our brain is just trying to act in a way which makes us feel as good as possible.
This separation into two systems allows us to achieve long term goals while still being able to adapt to the varying conditions on a short timescale.
The reward system in our brain does give us positive reward (good feelings, pleasure or even lust) when acting evil in certain situations, otherwise being cruel would be impossible for humans. To be evil is (or was), if we like it or not, sometimes a successful strategy to survive or reproduce. The problem now is that we cannot change the wiring of our reward system. Evolution has come to an end now, there is almost no natural selection happening anymore (and if it was there, it would not make things better). We are what we are now, we have to find a good way to live with it. Therefore we cannot get rid of the evil in us. No matter how hard we try to fight it, in certain situations humans do hurt other humans.
Humans are highly social creatures. But there are always situations where it is more effective not to behave cooperatively. The characteristics of such situations are also stored in our reward system. Once we are in such a situation, we are given the signal that we will get a reward for doing a certain evil. This does not happen before. The reason is that it is safer not to become aware of this evil behavior: other humans might sense it in us and stop to trust us. We might even reveal it by talking. Therefore most of the evil in our reward system is carefully hidden from us (i.e. the conscious part of our mind, i.e. the intelligent agent) until the moment we „need“ it.
In the Vietnam war, young, well educated and churchgoing men started to commit the most horrible crimes after spending some time in the war zone. Nobody thought this could be possible, until some journalist brought pictures of the crimes back to the U.S.. The young men also did not know before that they had the potential in themselves to commit such crimes.
First it is important to realize that becoming fully aware of the reward system (which is very difficult to achieve) would not change our behavior. Even when fully aware of everything in it, the rewards, and therefore the way the intelligent agent behaves to optimize the rewards, do not change. Therefore awareness alone does not increase or decrease evil behavior.
This is important to understand. It means that becoming aware of the evil in us does not make us act evil (or good). Contrary to popular belief, we don’t fall into the abyss when looking too long into it. Learning about ourselves is safe! This is good news. But this is true only if we know that it is totally normal to find such evils (see also the earlier chapter „How our hypocrisy makes people act evil“).
Acting evil normally comes with negative rewards (i.e. bad feelings), such as compassion for the victim/opponent and fear from punishment from other people (including revenge from the victim). There is normally a balance of a strong negative reward from compassion and fear with the comparatively smaller positive reward of doing evil which makes sure we don’t actually act evil. Normally the net balance is therefore pushing us towards doing good and not evil. The biological purpose of this is to avoid dangerous conflicts with other humans. In general we prefer to be good because it is safer. Only when the negative reward gets suppressed for some reason (e.g. we feel no compassion because we don’t identify with the other or we even hate) we are able to actually do evil.
Now we can understand why it is very important that we become aware of the evil in us:
- Not being aware of your inner evil gives us the wrong certainty that we are incapable of doing evil. This makes us potentially dangerous.
- We can learn like this that we are in no way morally superior to anybody else, not even to the worst criminal or the most difficult „asshole“. Then we cannot point with our fingers on other „evil“ people anymore. We cannot identify enemies anymore. Evil is as much lurking in ourselves than it is in others. This insight will conquer hate and will make it easier for us to identify with others (i.e. to be compassionate).
- It makes you realize how important compassion is! It is, apart from the fear of punishment and retaliation, the only thing preventing us from doing evil. The more you know about the evil in yourself the more you will want to keep it at bay by strengthening compassion in you (and this is not possible without some efforts).
There is another nice side effect of this insights: fortunately, if we only play evil, we can often get the positive reward alone without the negative reward from compassion and fear resulting in a great net pleasure for us. Until now, because we are scared to reveal our true nature to others, we deny ourselves in most cases to play with evil when in fact we could have great fun with it, without harming anybody. We could even give others great pleasure by playing with evil (but not by actually acting evil). We will explore forms of ‚playing evil‘ (like war themed computer games, watching cruel movies, shooting guns, boxing, wrestling, BDSM etc.) as examples. Cruel movies and brutal computer games are in fact the only exceptions where most of us allow ourselves to play with and enjoy substantial evil. But we still always need the good hero to win such that we don’t have to identify with the evil guys in the end. This is a big hypocrisy, because in fact we identify during most of the movie with both good and evil with equal intensity.
Let's look, as an example, at the following dialogue from „Alien“:
Ash: You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
Lambert: You admire it.
Ash: I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.
It's a robot speaking the first sentence. But we identify with him. We also identify with the Alien, we admire it. This becomes clear in the final scene where Ellen Ripley undresses to get ready for the hybernation pod. The erotic touch in this scene should show us that we too would like to inseminate beautiful Ellen (or, in the case of women specators: see her getting inseminated), exactly like the Alien which is present in the same room.
Note that playing with evil will also not make us more evil. Playing has no influence on the reward system. Millions of people all over the world play cruel computer games and only an extremely small fraction of them commits crimes. But it will also not make us better people (this again would require a modification of the reward system).
But playing with evil does have an advantage: it makes us aware of the evil in us. Which is, as we have seen, a good thing.
Please note that people are different. My evils are different from yours. Also different cultures have different evils. While in one country they suppress women, they store the money of dictators in others (like in my country). But in a competitive system there is no alternative to nooncooperative (i.e. evil) behavior. Within most countries there is a large amount of unfair rules and behaviors which are accepted or tolerated by most people. We got so used to them that we don't perceive them as evil anymore. But people from other countries easily identify these behaviors as what they are.
[1]: This simple model of the brain comes rather from machine learning than from neuroscience, but I believe it is helpful for the discussions in this chapter.