The Anatomy of Evil - Softcover

Michael H. Stone, MD

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1633883353 ISBN 13: 9781633883352

Publisher: Prometheus, 2017

Synopsis

FROM NARCISSISM TO AGGRESSION, AN ORIGINAL LOOK AT THE PERSONALITY TRAITS AND BEHAVIORS THAT CONSTITUTE EVILIn this groundbreaking book, renowned psychiatrist Michael H. Stone explores the concept and reality of evil from a new perspective. In an in-depth discussion of the personality traits and behaviors that constitute evil across a wide spectrum, Dr. Stone takes a clarifying scientific approach to a topic that for centuries has been inadequately explained by religious doctrines. Stone has created a 22-level hierarchy of evil behavior, which loosely reflects the structure of Dante's Inferno. Basing his analysis on the detailed biographies of more than 600 violent criminals, hetraces two salient personality traits that run the gamut from those who commit crimes of passion to perpetrators of sadistic torture and murder. One trait is narcissism, as exhibited in people who are so self-centered that they have little or no ability to care about their victims. The other is aggression, the use of power over another person to inflict humiliation, suffering, and death.What do psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience tell us about the minds of those whose actions could be described as evil? And what will that mean for the rest of us? Stone discusses how an increased understanding of the causes of evil will affect the justice system. He predicts a day when certain persons can safely be declared salvageable and restored to society and when early signs of violence in children may be corrected before potentially dangerous patterns become entrenched.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael H. Stone, MD is professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is the author of ten books, most recently Personality Disorders: Treatable and Untreatable, and over two hundred professional articles and book chapters. From 2006 to 2008, he was the host of Discovery Channel's series Most Evil and has been featured in the New York Times, Psychology Today, the Christian Science Monitor, CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, the New York Post, the London Times, the BBC, and Newsday, among many other media outlets.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

From the Epilogue

The framework for the Anatomy of Evil was a scale I had created called the “Gradations of Evil.” Divided into twenty-two compartments, the scale began with Category 1—set aside for situations that were not evil at all. This represented acts of justified homicide or killing in self-defense, and established a dividing line between “evil” and “not evil.” Category 2 was for crimes of passion, as when a spouse is caught in flagrante delicto with a stranger—and one or the other is killed by the discovering spouse. Because I defined evil the way the word is used in everyday language—namely, as an emotion-word we invoke when confronted with a crime that is startling and horrifying—even a crime of passion may evoke this response. Here is an example of a Category 2 crime: when Clara Harris drove to the hotel where her husband had been spending the night with his mistress—and then ran him over with her car as he left the hotel. This was a “least evil” crime. At the far end of the scale, Category 22, I placed men (and the occasional woman) who subjected their victims to extreme torture or disfigurement before finally murdering them. Most of the persons occupying the latter categories—roughly from 10 through 22—showed strong psychopathic personality traits: they were for the most part callous, exploitative predators devoid of remorse for what they did to their victims. I also emphasized that the concept of evil is peculiar to the human species, given our big brains, and our awareness of death, we are able to kill others of our own species, with malice aforethought, and resulting from motives of Pride, Anger, Envy, Lust, or Greed—five of Saint Gregory’s Seven Deadly Sins. (I can’t get myself worked up much over Sloth and Gluttony.) We are very different from one of the other social species, namely, the lion. The mother lion chases after gazelles to put food on the table, so to say, for the family. The daddy lion establishes his “territory” and restricts his aggression to actions designed to ward off intruders that invade his turf. How different are these acts from our own? But lions do not kill for sport or out of animosity or prejudice or hatred. Perhaps some of the higher apes—chimpanzees, for example—have a capacity for (human-like) trickery to gain advantage over rivals. Whether they know in some fashion that they will one day die—and that they can hasten the death of a rival—remains unclear.

What I did not emphasize in The Anatomy of Evil was the historical—or, in contemporary times, the chronological—aspects of evil. I also restricted my examples (with a few exceptions) to evil in peacetime. Evil has always been with us, both among individuals in peacetime and among warring enemies and other manifestations of group conflict. And evil will always be with us. As regards war and group conflict, I am not referring to “fair fights” between opponents who kill one another in hopes of persevering, but who avoid committing atrocities—as in the 1415 battle between the English and the French at Agincourt. I am referring to the innumerable campaigns of genocide and torture committed by the likes of the Roman emperor Caligula; by Pope Innocent III in his crusade against the Albigensians in the early thirteenth century; and by Tomás de Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition. Other examples include the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the Huguenots in Catholic France; the persecution of the Spaniards by Napoleon’s troops in 1809; the 1915 Turkish genocide of the Armenians; the Nazi atrocities of the 1940s; and Pol Pot’s genocide against his fellow Cambodians in the 1970s. And then there was Brazil’s torture and persecution of suspected “leftists” in the 1970s, the tortures and genocidal acts against the Bosnians by the Serbs under Slobodan Milošević in the 1990s, and now the acts of the Islamic jihadists in our day (of which, more below). This list just scratches the surface. The full story of evil in wartime would require a second book—and a very thick one at that.

What has made our species special is, of course, our ingenuity. We learned to control fire, and—much later—to control ice. When the mother lion fells a gazelle or an antelope, she cannot cook it to make the meat more digestible; she cannot put the remains in the fridge for next Thursday. She and her family must have their dinner then and there. We are able to use fire for cooking, and for innumerable other good things—but also for evil. Examples of the latter are legion, but we can mention just a few: when in France King Philip IV was in debt, he called the Knights Templar “heretics” and took their money. He arrested their leader, Jacques de Molay, on Friday, October 13, 1307 (the true origin of our phobia about “Friday the 13th”), and had him burned at the stake five months later. A century later, the nineteen-year-old heroine Jeanne d’Arc, who led the French to victory over the English—was burned at the stake in 1431. In our time: the pogrom in 1941 when, during the Nazi regime, 340 Jews were locked in a barn in the Polish town of Jedwabne and burned to death; the immolation of the Czech people in the town of Lidice as punishment for their killing the Nazi SS general Reinhard Heydrich in 1942; and the crematoria of Auschwitz. In June 2016, another evil use of fire occurred, namely, the burning of nineteen Yazidi women who had been locked in iron cages in Mosul, Iraq, by their Islamic State (ISIS) captors.

It is hard to think of any product of human ingenuity that cannot be used for evil purposes, as well as for good. We use fire for smelting ore to extract metal with which to make, among other things, knives—to cut our meat or to behead our opponents. We use rope to tie packages, or to hang our enemies. Trains, cars, and planes—they speed our travel but can be put to evil purposes as well. Trains took victims to concentration camps; cars are used to run people over (as when Tomohiro Katoh ran his car into a crowd, killing ten, or when on Bastille Day in 2016 Tunisian jihadist Lahaouiej-Bouhlel drove his truck into a crowd of celebrants in the French city of Nice, killing eighty-nine people); planes were used by the German Luftwaffe in April 1936 as they practiced the efficacy of bombs (for future use in their eventual Blitzkrieg in Europe) by obliterating the Basque town of Guernica—the atrocity later immortalized by Picasso in his masterpiece by the same name. We have created medicines through plant extracts and our own chemical genius that render surgery painless—using ether and cocaine and opiates. We have learned to kill rats and other pests with arsenic and cyanide and a host of other agents—all also poisons, used in innumerable murders. A particularly chilling example comes from my hometown of Syracuse, New York, in which James Cahill III, the feckless (and jobless) husband of Jill, struck her on the head with a baseball bat in the spring of 1998 during an argument prompted by her plan to divorce him and marry another man. He intended to kill her, but she survived and was making a gradual recovery in a hospital. Several months later he sneaked into the hospital, dressed as a female janitor—wearing a wig, and carrying a mop—entered her room, and poisoned her to death with cyanide that he had obtained under false pretenses as though for use in a photo lab. Furthermore, several murders of spouses have been committed by doctors and other hospital personnel, using the curare-like agent succinylcholine, which is used in surgical procedures. The most notorious case occurred in 1965, when thirty-two-year-old Dr. Carl Coppolino murdered his wife, thirty-two-year-old Dr. Carmela Musetto, so he could be free to marry his lover.

Another example of the evil aspect of something otherwise good concerns radioactivity. Now that we live in the atomic age, for example, much of our power is generated by nuclear fuels, which are good for mankind because they are more environment-friendly than burning coal. As always, there is an evil downside. In the early years of this century, for example, Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer in the Russian Federal Security Service and the KGB, had some unflattering things to say about how Vladimir Putin came to power. On the first of November 2006, as Litvinenko was lunching on sushi at a restaurant in London’s Piccadilly Circus, another Russian agent poisoned him with polonium-210. Polonium-210 is a highly radioactive metal that does have some “good” properties (as a heat source for thermoelectric generators), but it also has a potentially evil property (as a poison with no possible antidote). Litvinenko died three weeks later.

The preceding remarks will, I hope, convince the reader that events of the sort that elicit in us the reaction, “That is evil!” stretch back to antiquity and continue not only to the present day but also beyond, as an unwelcome but ineradicable element in the tangled skein of human interaction. À propos antiquity, I could have begun with persons or groups well before Emperor Caligula from scarcely two millennia ago. It’s just that Caligula is one of the few evil men in antiquity about whose repugnant (and evil) acts of sadism we have ample written records. A confounding factor is the tendency for persons of the “older generation” to suppose that the younger generation is somehow less worthy and more apt to indulge in reprehensible actions. There is a long history here. The fourth-century ascetic preacher St. John Chrysostom (349–407), whose name means “golden-tongued,” believed that the adolescent boys of his day, wearing their hair so long and living (as he saw it) frivolous lives, were of a generation worse than his own. Yet here we are, sixteen centuries later, still inventing wonderful, life-enhancing things, still—for the most part—leading commendable lives. In trying to assess whether or not life is getting worse, I recently prepared two PowerPoint presentations. One focused on “Evil in the Good Old Days”; the other I called “The New Evil.” Both dealt with evil in peacetime, as it would have been absurd to dwell on evil during wartime. I can think of no century in human history as horrific and atrocity-ridden as the twentieth century. Besides the genocidal outbreaks alluded to above, there were the persecutions of the leftists in Argentina under Juan Perón; in Chile under Augusto Pinochet; and in Colombia during La Violencia in the 1950s. There was the massacre of Ibos in southern Nigeria in the 1960s and the genocidal mass killing of Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda in the 1990s. There was the starvation of the Ukrainians under Stalin (and, later, the Gulags in Siberia) and the massacres in China’s “Great Leap Forward” under Mao Zedong in the late 1950s.

The human suffering, the dreadfulness of the atrocities, and in many instances, their pornographic quality of the sadism and torture make it impossible—unseemly, even—to assign gradations to the level of awfulness. But there is something special about the Japanese invasion of Nanking during the Sino-Japanese wars of 1937–1945—so thoroughly and disturbingly documented by Iris Chang in her 1997 book The Rape of Nanking. Earlier I mentioned the good versus the evil use of metal knives. Shortly after the invasion of Nanking, in 1937, the Japanese soldiers instituted a beheading contest with swords. Which soldier could behead the most Chinese townspeople in a ten-minute period? The goal was to reach one hundred. The winner: a soldier named Mukai (106 victims), who bettered his rival, Noda (only 105). Their accomplishments were cheered, alongside their photos, in the Japanese newspapers. As for the suffering and indignities of the thousands of women, young and old, who were raped and tortured by the Japanese soldiers, those who have the stamina to read Iris Chang’s book can learn the details. Mercifully, Chang’s book contains only a few photographs of the atrocities. Also published in 1997, the book by the same name, The Rape of Nanking, by Shi Young and James Yin contains much greater photographic documentation—but also a commentary on the “killing as entertainment” by the Japanese soldiers, with their Bushido mentality. As the authors put it: “One way in which the Japanese fascists overshadowed their German counterparts in massacre was the abnormal enjoyment they derived from the killing. ... Many Japanese soldiers carried heads severed from refugee victims on the ends of their rifles and strolled down the streets, exhibiting their achievement with great joy.” Compounding the evil of Nanking is the refusal of the Japanese to acknowledge, let alone express remorse, for what happened there—with the exception of Emperor Hirohito’s youngest brother, Prince Mikasa. In an interview with the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, the prince, an outspoken pacifist—who died in 2016 at age one hundred, gave details of the atrocities against the Chinese and openly condemned the actions of the Japanese soldiers. Copies of his statements were later quashed and destroyed by the military authorities—except for one copy discovered by a Kobe University professor. The behavior of the Japanese stands in marked contrast to that of the Germans, who in the post-Nazi era have written a whole library of books offering full accounts of, and expressing deep regret for, what their countrymen did during the Holocaust. We still await expressions of acknowledgment and regret from the Turkish government for the genocide of Armenians, a third of whose population were killed by shootings, burnings, and death marches a hundred and two years ago (and thirty years before Hitler employed the same techniques).

About this edition

• Publisher: Prometheus
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1633883353
• ISBN 13: 9781633883352
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496