EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (12 page)

Each case above tells the story of a person who acted as if the world was one way even though it wasn’t. The Holocaust and its trail of atrocities were real, confirmed by thousands of scarred survivors and the relatives who have heard their accounts — this includes my father. Judge Couwenberg was never in Vietnam, never earned a Purple Heart, and never had a connection with the CIA. There are no pet poodle impostors. Our brains don’t soften, though they do deteriorate with age. When dashboard indicators suggest engine trouble, better to be safe than sorry when you are responsible for the lives of many people. Hilary Clinton landed in the exceptionally
safe
airport of Tuzla where she was
warmly
greeted by US and Bosnian officials. I am no McEnroe.

In each of these cases, there was a mismatch with reality. The person either harbored a false belief, but believed it was true, or was outright lying. In some cases, the mismatch was due to psychosis, some kind of delusion or malfunctioning of the brain. These people didn’t know that their beliefs were false. In other cases, the mismatch resulted from an intentional lie or distortion, a process that is adaptive, designed to promote self-confidence and manipulate others. When I conjured up images of McEnroe, I momentarily deceived myself. I believed it helped my game. I never thought I was McEnroe. When Hilary Clinton misreported her trip to Bosnia, perhaps she misremembered or perhaps she distorted her memory to convince voters that she had what was necessary to run the country — toughness and international experience.

Some cases of self-deception are harmless and even beneficial, as in my illusion of tennis grandeur. Others are only mildly harmful, as in Clinton’s distortion of her political experiences. And yet others are deeply harmful, as when leaders such as Ahmadinejad deny the suffering of millions. Self-deception thus traffics between two poles, from harmless to harmful.

Why does our mind play tricks on us, allowing us to believe things that are false? Why didn’t we evolve a reality checking device that is vigilant 24/7? The answer here parallels the refrain carried throughout this book: like dehumanization, self-deception is Janus-faced, showing both an adaptive and maladaptive side. Self-deception allows us to protect ourselves from the reality of a current predicament or loss. Self-deception allows us to brand ourselves in a more powerful way, providing a competitive edge in attracting mates and garnering other resources. As Mark Twain presciently noted, “When a person cannot deceive himself, the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.”

The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers was the first to identify the adaptive significance of self-deception and its connection to deception. As argued in his book
The Folly of Fools,
what appears completely irrational about self-deception evolved as a consequence of selection to deceive competitors. The most effective self-deceiver acts on auto-pilot, without any sense of his true motives. Here, I further discuss these ideas, focusing especially on how deception works to satisfy our desires in the face of moral opposition
³⁹
. As with the dangers of dehumanization and its role in denying reality, so too is self-deception a dangerous state of mind, allowing individuals to inflict great harm on innocent others while feeling aligned with the angels. This process begins with two rather benign states of mind — our developing sense of self and our capacity to create positive illusions.

It is not until the age of about 18-24 months that we acquire the ability to recognize ourselves in a mirror. It is not until a couple of years later that we have an explicit understanding that our own beliefs can sometimes differ from others that we interact with. It is not until this time that we develop the capacity to actively deceive, along with a powerful suite of social emotions that enable us to feel embarrassed, envious, and remorseful. These feelings link up our sense of self with our sense of others. These are comparative feelings and beliefs, and they feed back to who we are, either building up our self-confidence or crushing it. When my youngest daughter Sofia was ten years old, she announced that she will one day go to Brown University, earn a lot of money, have five children, obtain a veterinarian degree, open a restaurant, and win Olympic gold in gymnastics or soccer. Sofia was not delusional, but brimming with uncalibrated confidence. Her confidence was uncalibrated in part because this is who she is, and in part because she had no sense of what it takes to get into Brown, become rich, take care of five kids, obtain a vet degree, open a restaurant, and win gold. My wife and I would have been horrid parents if we had popped her bubble. We would have been irresponsible parents if we didn’t, over time, describe the challenges associated with each of these desirable goals and help her move toward them.

Developing a sense of self depends on at least two capacities: looking inwards at what we know and are capable of doing, and looking outwards at what others know and are capable of doing. When we look inwards, if we honestly open our eyes to the richness of our autobiography, we will recognize cases where we have succeeded and those in which we have failed. This history reveals our knowledge and ignorance, our strengths and weaknesses, and our capacity to exert control or meld to external forces. When we look outwards, again with an honest, panoramic perspective, we learn about those who know more or less than we do, about those we can outcompete and those we lose to in defeat, and about situations that undermine our capacity for self-control. Distortion enters these personal narratives when we either lack information or filter it in some way, consciously or unconsciously, often for personal benefit.

Positive illusions are biases that distort our sense of confidence, control, and invincibility. Positive illusions differ from delusions in that they are less fixed, and more amenable to change. Delusions are highly maladaptive, a signature of brain dysfunction and the source of great personal suffering. Positive illusions, in contrast, are often highly adaptive, generating the confidence necessary to take on great challenges and challengers, convincing an audience or a group of opponents that we are stronger, smarter, and sexier. Positive illusions are a form of self-deception with considerable evolutionary benefits, as well as toxic consequences.

The criminology scholar Mandeep Dhami examined positive illusions in criminals incarcerated in prisons within the United States and the United Kingdom. Because recidivism levels are high among convicted criminals, with 40-60% of offenders re-convicted after 1-3 years from release, it is important to understand risk factors. Some criminals may believe that their prior offense was just a one-off event or bad luck, and that they will never engage in crime again. They have learned their lesson and feel confident in their capacity to lead a crime-free life. In their own eyes, they are low risk. Based on a sample of over 500 prisoners from medium security prisons, only 30% felt that they would commit another crime, and most felt that they were much less likely to commit another crime than other prisoners. Thus, whether prisoners were evaluating their own chances of success or their success relative to others, they were living with a distorted narrative, confident that they wouldn’t commit another crime.

Certain experiences can also enhance positive illusions by giving individuals an unrealistic sense of self-control, along with a distorted expectation that future outcomes are highly deterministic. For example, people who are wealthy, highly educated, part of a dominant group, or citizens within a society that value independence, are more likely to believe that they have control over the future and are more likely to express optimism and high self-esteem. These attitudes often lead to a boosted sense of control and an illusory sense of control over future outcomes. The psychologist Nathanael Fast ran a series of experiments to further explore the relationship between power and illusory control, specifically asking whether subjects endowed with power expect control over outcomes that are strictly due to chance or that are unrelated to the domain of power. Across each study, whether subjects recalled a personal situation where they were in power or had to imagine being in power, they were more likely than those in a subordinate position to express confidence about the outcome of rolling a six-sided die, predicting the future of a company, and influencing the results of a national election. Power distorts our sense of personal control.

That power and winning distort is a tale that has been told and retold countless times in the annals of industry and warfare. As Francesca Gino and Gary Pisano note, the business world is bloated with cases where leaders and leading companies crash because they fail to examine the causes of success. They assume, for example, that their success is entirely due to their brilliance, control over the market, and the weakness of the competition, as opposed to a shot of good luck. So too goes the story of unexamined war victories, as supremely confident generals discount relevant information about their opponents, leading battalions on a death march — a conclusion supported by the in-depth analyses of Johnson, Trivers and Wrangham.

Our willingness to accept victories without question stands in direct contrast with our motivation to scrutinize failures, drilling down for explanations or causes. When we lose or fail in some way, the negative emotions accompanying this experience focus our attention on working out an explanation. When we win, we bask in the glory, often blind to the underlying causes. Winning leads to confidence of winning again, accompanied by surges in the hormone testosterone. Sometimes, confidence turns to overconfidence, a positive illusion that can have disastrous consequences.

Dominic Johnson explored the link between overconfidence and testosterone in the context of a simulated war game. Each subject played the role of a leader in a country at war with another over diamond resources. The goal of the game was to accrue the highest level of resources or defeat the neighboring country. Though war games on a computer can not capture the full reality of war, the fact is that military specialists throughout the world use simulations to prepare combatants for some of the strategic and emotional problems they will confront.

Most subjects judged that they would outcompete their opponents, had the desire to do so, with men more competitive than women. Those who believed that they would whip their opponents actually had the worst records, suggesting that they were not only uncalibrated but that their distortion of reality led to costly outcomes. Those with the highest expectation of victory had the highest testosterone levels and were most likely to launch unprovoked attacks on their opponents. Given these outcomes, and the use of such games by the military, perhaps they should be used as a screening device, selecting only those who pass the reality check.

Whether in real life or in the simulated world of computer games, brimming overconfidence can lead to a distorted sense of risk and the odds of victory in war — or any competitive arena. Though this is a costly strategy, there are clear evolutionary benefits under conditions explained by Trivers and Johnson. Self-deception is favored when opponents have imperfect information about their strengths and weaknesses, and where the payoffs are high relative to the costs. Self-deception leads individuals to go for it, convincing themselves and others that the risks are low, the gains are great, and the standard social norms are no longer applicable. This is a dangerous form of denial, a process of moral disengagement that enables us to satisfy our desires by justifying horrific means and ends. Sadly, this process has left one of its most toxic stains on our most innocent victims — children — under the flag of moral virtue.

During the tenures of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, some 4,000 priests sexually abused some 10,000 innocent children. This is unquestionably an underestimate. This is excessive harm. The priests who carried out these horrific acts didn’t intend to harm their innocent victims. They acted to fulfill a desire, while denying in important ways that they would hurt the children. They were morally disengaged, despite the constant reminders that they were men of the church. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, together with their cardinals and bishops, were well aware of these rampant cases of child rape. They could have acted, but didn’t. They could have reported the priests to the police for a criminal act, or minimally, could have defrocked them. Instead, they either let them keep their posts or moved them to another clergy. They convinced themselves through the magic of positive illusions that they could handle the matter internally and that all would be well again. Their omissions are archetypal examples of the sin of sloth. By omission, they are responsible for excessive harm and should be held legally accountable. This process has only just begun as evidenced by the decision in October of 2011 to indict Bishop Robert Finn for failing to report a priest who took pornographic photographs of young girls. Though Finn was only charged with a misdemeanor, this case opened a legal floodgate, followed in June of 2012 with the indictment of Monsignor William Lynn, a former cardinal’s aide. Lynn knew about charges of pedophilia against 35 priests, and sent this information to Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, the senior member of the Philadelphia Archdiocese. These priests were never removed from their clergies, despite repeated complaints. Cardinal Bevilacqua died before the trial ended, but Lynn was sentenced to 3-6 years in prison. As Judge Sarmina noted, her punitive decision was based on the Monsignor’s concealment of “monsters in clerical garb who molested children.” She then followed up, looking right into his eyes, and said “You knew full well what was right, Monsignor Lynn, but you chose wrong.”
⁴⁰

Sentencing these clergy members for omissions is only the start. It is a legal decision that should empower the parents and children who have suffered to rise up and demand justice for allowing excessive harm to occur. It is a decision that should spread all the way up the hierarchy to Pope Benedict, as he too was aware of all the problems and yet did nothing to stop it. He could have morally engaged, rising above his self-interest in protecting the church. His decision to say nothing at all should cause everyone to express outrage over the fact that allowing priests to rape innocent children perpetuates a cycle of pedophiles as those who have been abused are likely to abuse others. The leaders of the church have not only committed a crime of omission, but have helped perpetuate a culture of harm. Popes John Paul and Benedict are evil omitters, allowing excessive harm to the most innocent of victims — our children.