The Brains That Pull the Triggers

Gretty M. Mirdal, Alain Berthoz, Itzhak Fried

Description

History shows us the same grim phenomenon over and over: under extreme circumstances, apparently ordinary citizens turn into merciless torturers and systematic executioners of defenseless victims. War crimes and genocides may be orchestrated by dictators and terrorist leaders,but they are carried out by individuals who otherwise show empathy, sound moral judgment, and aversion to violence. How does this happen? Is the pull of a murderous regime strong enough to make harmless men become amoral monsters, or is there some underlying psychological or physiological trait that predisposes certain people toward this transition? Can the pathological switch between sensitive human and desensitized killer be isolated, redicted, and prevented? Can it be overridden by compassion and altruism? Is violent aggression addictive? What implications does this have for the way we try and punish perpetrators of such crimes? These are among the questions taken up in a series of conferences on mass violence held from 2015 to 2017 at the Paris Institute of Advanced Studies. In this volume, neuroscientists, sociologists, historians, and legal scholars share research and insights on the roots of radicalization, in-group loyalty, how we learn to follow rules, and many other themes. The result is a troubling but distinctly illuminating glimpse of human nature, and a model of how interdisciplinary dialogue can shed light into its darkest corners. With contributions from Xabier Agirre Aranburu; Scott Atran; Alain Berthoz and Bérangère Thirioux; Thomas Boraud; Michel Botbol; Emile Bruneau;Christopher R. Browning; David Cohen and Nicolas Campelo;Jean-Paul Costa; Susan T. Fiske; Itzhak Fried; Julie Grèzes and Jorge L. Armony; Patrick Haggard; Etienne Koechlin; Heather D. Lucas, Daniel Sanchez, Jessica D. Creery, Xiaoqing Hu, and Ken A. Paller; Gretty M. Mirdal;Mathias Pessiglione; Richard Rechtman; Trevor W. Robbins; Edmund T. Rolls; Françoise Sironi; James K. Stewart; and Jean-Pol Tassin. 

Sujets

• Science
• Neuroscience
• Sciences et techniques
• Life Sciences

Informations

• Publié par: Odile Jacob
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9782738153876
• Langue: English

Extrait

The present English-language edition is published by Editions Odile Jacob.
© Odile Jacob, September 2020.
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INTRODUCTION
Syndrome E: Cognitive Fracture in Our Midst
I TZHAK F RIED *1

The kill switch: ordinary individuals become mass murderers
The images are stark and horrific, yet repetitive and similar: Armenia, 1915; Poland, 1942; Cambodia, 1970; Rwanda, 1994; Srebrenica, 1995; Syria, 2014. The victims and perpetrators change, but the scenario remains the same: trenches full of dead human bodies, and above them men with rifles and machine guns, fingers that pull triggers.
The transformation of groups of previously nonviolent individuals into repetitive killers of defenseless members of society has been a recurring phenomenon throughout history. Some of its notable manifestations are the killing of Armenians by Turks in 1915–16, of European Jews during World War II, of Cambodians during the Pol Pot regime in the 1970s, the ethnic killings in Rwanda in the 1990s, and the mass atrocities performed in the former Yugoslavia. Technological and cultural progress have not eliminated these tragic events but enabled new and varied presentations, such as the brutal massacres performed by ISIS or the public acts of violence performed by contemporary terrorist groups. Civil strife, extreme social conditions, and ethnic, ideological, or religious conflicts have often played a role in these events, much as poverty and lack of hygiene lead to outbreaks of infectious disease. Yet these outbreaks would not have happened without a distinct transformation in the behavior of individuals. This apparent transition of large numbers of seemingly normal, “ordinary” individuals into perpetrators of extreme atrocities is one of the most striking variants of human behavior, and often appears incomprehensible to victims and bystanders—and, in retrospect, even to the perpetrators themselves and society in general. Yet the uniformity and repeating nature of this transformation suggests a common underlying mechanism deserving of scientific inquiry. Labeling the perpetrators of such atrocities bad or mad does little to advance understanding of the social and psychological basis for such a striking change in human behavior. Behind the sociology and psychology as modes of comprehension lies the landscape of neuroscience, a discipline of knowledge that has recently expanded to encompass the ambitious goal of understanding the biological basis of the human mind, both in isolation and in society.
From a purely biological view, individual behavior is an outcome of an individual brain, and collective behavior of individuals is a product of a society of brains. The final common pathway in the transformation of ordinary people into mass murderers is the finger that pulls the trigger, repeatedly. The finger is guided by the individual brain, which is a member of a society of brains. We must, then, look at the brains that pull the triggers.
In 1997 I proposed that this transformation in human behavior—from ordinary peaceful individuals to mass murderers—is characterized by a set of “signs and symptoms” suggesting a common syndrome, Syndrome E. 1 The purpose of such a designation was not to medicalize this form of human behavior, but to provide a framework for future discussion and multidisciplinary discourse, and for potential insights that might lead to early detection and prevention. The medical approach to a disorder affecting human biology and behavior is first to conduct serial observations. Persistent observations usually result in identification of symptoms and signs of the disorder, its penetration within the population, and risk factors that increase individual vulnerability to acquiring it. What follows is a process of building a pathophysiological model of the disease that can become helpful in promoting further scientific inquiry, leading eventually to potential treatments and ultimately to prevention.
The common symptoms and signs suggesting a syndrome were proposed on the basis of meticulous observations performed on perpetrators throughout the twentieth century. Of particular note were the observations described by Christopher Browning in his seminal book Ordinary Men . 2 These observations were based on interviewing five hundred members of mobile killing units who executed over forty thousand Russian Jews—men, women, and children—over a period of a few months. Browning found that these were no Nazi fanatics, but ordinary middle-aged German civilians who over a very short period of time became desensitized to the extent that, despite being given the choice to avoid participating, they became avid, eager killers, obsessively pursuing their victims and sparing none. The same pattern was seen again fifty-two years later in Rwanda, where over a few months in 1994 eight hundred thousand Tutsi were slaughtered by neighboring Hutus, tens of thousands of ordinary men with no previous history of violence. 3 Furthermore, as pointed out by Jean Hatzfeld in his book on the Rwandan massacres: “No examples have surfaced of someone arrested simply for refusing to kill.” 4 The central question put forward by Browning is this: “Why did most men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 become killers while only a minority of perhaps 10%—and certainly no more than 20%—did not?” 2

Symptoms and signs
The key symptoms and signs of Syndrome E are:
1.  Repetitive acts of violence. Individuals engage in repetitive stereotypic acts of extreme violence characterized by compulsion to spare none of the victims.
2.  Obsessive ideation. Individuals are obsessed with a set of beliefs, often directed against a minority group. During the Holocaust that ideology was virulent anti-Semitism; 5 in Cambodia it was Pol Pot’s utopia, the ideal society, where the peasant was the unit of production; in Rwanda it was Hutu power over the Tutsi “cockroaches”; for ISIS it is a virulent view of Sharia wherein all Kurds, Christians, and other “nonbelievers” are heretics who must be killed.
3.  Rapid desensitization to violence. Within a short period of time most individuals habituate to acts of killings. A Hutu farmer, who used to hire help to do the killing of cattle in his stead because it revulsed him, now killed multiple Tutsis over several days. 4
4.  Perseveration. Behavior perseverates in the face of changing circumstances. The death marches of Jews near the very end of World War II continued even when it was clear that the war was lost. Hungry Hutus fleeing to Congo were still hunting for Tutsis in ruined houses, determined to spare none.
5.  Diminished affective reactivity. Acts of violence are not perpetrated in a frenzy, in the heat of emotions, but with flat affect. In the words of a Hutu perpetrator describing the moment his machete hit the neck of a victim: “It came to me naturally without thinking. . . he fell without shouting. . . I felt nothing, just let him lie.” 4
6.  Hyperarousal ( Rausch ). A sense of elation with the number and totality of destruction. This sense can be seen in Himmler’s infamous speech to SS personnel in Posen: “Most of you know what it means when a hundred corpses are lying side by side, when five hundred lie there or a thousand. . . Having borne that and. . . having remained decent. . . This is the most glorious page in our history.” This sense of escalating Rausch is also expressed by one of Hatzfeld’s Hutu interviewees: “The more we killed, the more greediness urged us on.” 4
7.  Intact intellectual abilities . These include language, memory, and problem-solving skills: individuals appear intellectually sound, able to plan ahead and solve problems.
8.  Compartmentalization. Individuals conduct activities of seemingly conflicting cognitive states. They may lead normal family lives while engaging in the killing of families. In love letters to their wives at home, SS soldiers boasted of killing women and children.
9.  Group contagion. The group environment is necessary for maintenance and propagation of the syndrome. Responses of individuals serve as stimuli for other members. However, the rapid development of social media has alarmingly enabled the formation of large virtual groups and viral propagation of virulent messages. Large groups of strangers can now come together in circumstances where remote intimacy is created and normal existence ceases. The use of social media by ISIS was a significant factor in its rise. Beliefs associated with violence and heightened will to act spread virally through social networks. From April 2014 to May 2015 ISIS sources disseminated 250 pieces of original media including text, photos, audio, and videos. 6

Risk factors
It appears that most of the perpetrators observed in accounts such as Browning’s or Hatzfeld’s were men twenty to fifty years old. However, experience with deradicalization of European youth joining the Islamic State shows risk present for females as well as adolescents (see Cohen’s and Campelo’s chapter in Part III). Risk factors can be classified as individual or environmental, where individual risk factors may involve psychological factors and their microenvironment of family and close friends. In most large-scale outbreaks of Syndrome E, risk factors in the macroenvironment are the overwhelming factor.
There have been attempts to further characterize personality traits that might make an individual more likely to exhibit Syndrome E. These include the authoritarian