Primo Levi And Breaking Down The Innate Human Act of Being Malicious
In 1945, Primo Levi arrived in Auschwitz, and he was thirsty. That's something prison camp movies seem to leave out. Hunger is the focus of Schindler's List, showing starving men and women - Jews and threadbare uniforms that look like pajamas starving to the bone. Primo Levi, the award-winning chemist who wrote the periodic table of elements, he remembered being thirsty the most. He was dehydrated and exposed to the cold almost constantly. His book, by the way, The Periodic Table of Elements, is considered the best science book ever written by The Royal Institution.
When Primo remembers Auschwitz, he talks about the cold and being thirsty a lot. And most famously, he talked about the unnecessary cruelty of the camp guards. When the men arrived, many of them knew they were going to die. Primo wrote in his book, The Truce, that when they walked in, he asked another prisoner if they will they give them something to drink. The answer, of course, was no. He was told that they would line up, be lead us to a huge square, and the only way out was through the chimney. The cruelty of allowing the inmates to see the chimneys and gas rooms when they first arrived was planned. The
horrors of Auschwitz and the cruelty/terror were applied by the SS officers. It was all meticulously planned. In another one of Primo’s books, he recalls a time when he was deliriously thirsty and cold to the bone. He noticed an icicle hanging from the gutters outside his cell window, and he reached for it so we could hold it in his cold fist and lick the ice to quench his thirst. As he stretched out to grab it, a passing Nazi guard knocked it out of his hand, shattering the icicle.
Primo, ask one question: “Why?” The guard answered in German, “Hier gibt es kein warum.” This translates to, “Here, there is no why.” That simple answer by a mindless guard to a young, starving scientist has become the symbol for the Holocaust itself. In fact, the answer might hold a seat of truth for mindless cruelty going back to the beginnings of man. Why would anyone torture another person if it's not for land or power? Why burn down a building? Why throw a brick through a window? Why commit murder if it's not for passion or property? Here, there is no why.
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There might not be a ‘why’ exactly. The nature of mindless cruelty is that it is mindless. But in today's episode, we want to explore why we have malice in us. What makes some of us want to knock the ice from Primo’s hand? Maybe we would never do anything cruel to another living creature. But most of us would admit to enjoying violent video games, maybe being fascinating by watching a car wreck, seeing someone face-plant during a TikTok video, or perhaps smashing a window or TV when you were younger. We don't have to be camp guards, but on some level and at some point in our lives, we all felt the instinct for wanton malice. Where does instinct come from, and why does it feel so good to indulge in malicious acts even if we can't stomach the thought of hurting someone? We're going to unravel the inner springs of malice and do that by starting with three myths.
Myth 1: It's in our DNA as humans to conquer. So, maybe the fun we have destroying something is just leftover ink stings to conquer kind of just leaking out.
Joe: Before we get too far, I want to talk about our opening narrative. That is an extremely famous quote – there is no why here. And we just want to state from the start that this will not be an Auschwitz episode. Many podcasts cover that era of history, and many podcasts cover what the camps were like. We are taking more of a holistic, overall look at malice as a human condition. This also came from a weird side conversation that led to something much deeper and much more interesting. So, I want to give a shout-out to Dr. Jude Roberts, who recommended a philosophy book called Malice by Francois Flahalt. So, do we all have these malicious instincts? If we're all willing to curb stomp people while playing Grand Theft Auto, does that make us monsters? To get us started, Todd, have you ever heard of Vlad the Impaler?
Todd: No, I have not.
Joe: Okay, so he's the guy who Dracula was loosely based on - the parts of owning a castle, Impaling people, torture, etc. He was known for doing extremely cruel things. He was called the Impaler because at one of his events, an Army was marching on his castle to wreck up his day. Vlad the Impaler took his peasants and impaled his own people outside his castle. He did it in such a way to where they were still living/moving when the enemy Army showed up. This lured them away. This is not a Vlad the Impaler episode, but there is sort of an argument to be had there. What's the difference between meanness and maliciousness? Because Vlad did some insanely violent and cruel things, but one could make the argument that he had a kingdom to rule. He could have just been doing these seemingly insane vicious acts because he was trying to hold and keep power. So, when you think of meanness, what would you consider mean?
Todd: The big one that always pops out to me is being a stepparent or being a parent in general. Sometimes you must be tough so the kids won't walk all over you. However, sometimes you push too far and you can become mean. In business, you can have a very structured boss who can get results because it sets good boundaries. But when the boss becomes unfair or being a bully, it turns to meanness/maliciousness.
Joe: Right. Well today, we're going to try to get away from examples of people who are being mean for a purpose because we strictly want to talk can about malice, which is punishing somebody because it's fun to punish them.
The first argument we have to bust is if we're doing something malicious, are we doing it to bolster social standing? Is your social status attracted to risky behavior? A little bit of element of this is establishing a pecking order. It's also demonstrating that you're willing to engage in risky behavior. I guess this is sort of a big preamble to say we sure as heck find a lot of ways to justify malicious behavior, whether that is through establishing pecking order, conquering, getting sexual rights, getting land, etc. However, we're moving past that because there are moments in human existence where you're not shooting a Roman Candle at somebody to establish order to establish social order. You are doing it for fun.
There's a great Louis CK interview where he talked to a late-night interviewer about
his kids will call each other names or be cruel verbally just to see a reaction. With that being said, let’s get into the theories as to why this happens.
So, science kind of sides with it's our need to dominate. The hyper-aggressive gamer theory is what we will call it. It's in our DNA to be aggressive, and when we play a game, we're being rewarded for conquering. We get a prize in video games, and that reward shoots off dopamine. It's dopamine in tiny increments and that's what a kill in any game gives us. Now, that's not the same as our guard knocking an icicle out of Primo's hand. I'm guessing Primo did not make a sound aside from abject depression having that happen. Another theory that I like a lot is that being cruel to somebody else is an expression of our own mortality. If you have a health scare, maybe you'll be more careful. Maybe you'll reorganize your priorities. If you're younger and aggressive, you might take out that mortality on somebody else instead of doing that. Say you are a tribal man and you have just gone to meet another tribe. Then you've clubbed somebody to death for no reason other than just taking it out on their tribe. The idea is that you would do that as a recognition of your own mortality. When you see something else wink out of existence, it gives you a sense of control. So, the theory goes if you feel vulnerable, you take that vulnerability out on somebody else or something else.
Another theory that came out of malice was that self-hatred might motivate us to separate ourselves from others - to the point of not even seeing other people as people. The Nazis referred to the Jews as rats, capitalist pigs, dogs. They basically conditioned themselves to believe that it was not people in the camps but rather animals. I really went with that theory for a very long time. In fact, if you had asked me two weeks ago why people are capable of doing malicious things, that would be primarily it. Mixing philosophy and science, this kind of explains a couple of things: Gamers blowing up buildings and kids reckon TVs can just be empowerment. They don't feel like they're killing real people. Certainly, some Nazi guards had this attitude, too and it is even happening right now with the rise of genocides.
Myth 2: Okay, if cruelty and malice do not come from our instinct to conquer, then maybe the Nazi guards are cruel because they were ordered to be cruel. Weren't there many experiments like that where it was proved people would do awful things if driven by authority?
The next part we will get to is why malicious acts might be done out of moral righteousness. Turning to the Milgram experiment here, people tend to do things if authority instructed them to, even maliciously. They would never do it until they're sitting there with their finger on the button. And that is quite literally how the Milgram experiment was designed. Somebody would do it even to the point where the other person passed out. The problem is that it was hardly ever repeatable for a very long time. But it boils down to how humans tend to listen to authority.
In this experiment, they thought it was morally justifiable because it was in the name of science. If the authority tells you that you will not be punished for doing something, it changes things. I think if somebody told me it was for a good purpose, I would probably hit the button. But then again, emotionally, I don't know how that would work out. Malice would be somebody who hits that button for fun; Milgram does not have to come over the microphone and say, please continue. They just do it anyway.
Myth 3: What about blame? Maybe we're secretly cruel for fun because we need someone else to blame for all of life's problems.
So, if we are not malicious for land or order, for pecking order, it could simply be that we are doing it because an authority tells us. However, it's hard to repeat, and a lot of people won't just straight up refuse an authority if they say do this cruel thing. Here's this one weird trick to get people to act maliciously, and I got this from a really fantastic article by Paul Bloom which appeared in Vox. It’s all about human-on-human cruelty and why we are able to be malicious.
So first, I'm going to play a little bit of a game. What is a hardship that you have suffered in the last 10 to 15 years? Whatever it is, you probably have a sour taste towards someone or something, making it easy for us to have malicious intent. It could make it easier to shock someone or knock an icicle out of somebody's hand if you put the face of someone who hurt you on someone else. So, if your divorce lawyer screwed you over, and I put them behind a wall with electrodes attached to them, I would more likely shock them for fun rather than in the name of science. We would feel better because we are getting even or trying to prove that we are not moral.
Something that they talk about in this Vox article was mass killings or even slavery. He says that you basically start with a dehumanizing ideology and then put up a system that promotes the dehumanization. If Paul Bloom told me that he had everybody who ever done crooked medical billing in a pen and then he told me these people don't deserve water, I could easily be convinced to agree with him. If you started showing me evidence and if you took me aside showed me their personal file, it would be harder for me to help them out or release them.
Bloom puts it that people do this because they don't believe they're killing people. The dehumanizing allows you to be violent without guilt. These don't explain the genocides that are currently going on though. If you merely thought of people as animals, you wouldn't get pleasure from these things because you can't humiliate an animal. Paul says there's this myth that people who do evil are psychopaths or monsters. The truth is more complicated. We talked about the myth of dehumanization. If only we could sit down and say, hey guys, the Jews, the blacks, and the gays are people just like you, we think evil would disappear.
If you watch movies about confronting racism or any kind of ism or hate, they make it seem like if you had dinner with these people, you would change your mind. Paul Bloom says that's not the case.
He says, consider the rhetoric of white supremacy. White supremacists know about the humanity of Jews and black people and whoever else they're discriminated against, and it terrifies them. One of their slogans is, you will not replace us. So, if you think about what that means, that's not a chant they would use if they thought that roaches were replacing them. That's a chant at people. It is segregating a group of people, saying here are the wrongs these people did, and they are a threat, and suddenly we have an urge to be malicious to them. And again, I'll simply state what Paul said at the beginning of this; you have to start a genocide with dehumanizing ideology.
Final Thoughts
We all have malice in us, and we let it out in little rebellious spurts throughout our lives. We trip a classmate for no reason. We smashed windows as a teen, played violent video games, and dominated in micro tyrannies. But when we find ourselves being threatened, such as threatened by crushing debt by a worldwide pandemic or by just not having enough while being surrounded by people who speak another language, we start dreaming up ways to push back. We start looking for people who took away all our opportunities – opportunities that previous generations enjoyed. Many radicalized organizations want to point at a group of folks and tell you they did it. They took away your health coverage. They put you in debt. They sucked up all the resources. Vote for me, and we can make them all go away.
Want to know what made Nazis do what they did? Want to feel what the guard felt what he knocked the icicle out of Primo’s hand? If you're an American and you have debt or health problems, the answer is simple. Just imagine we've rounded up all the shady student loan companies. We've rounded up the opioid executives who sold drugs to 1 million overdose victims. Imagine we imprisoned all the bankers who caused the 2009 recession and all the big Pharma CEOs who have charged too much for HIV drugs. Imagine we have them all in a big wire pain right in the middle of Washington DC, and we've conveniently forgotten to give them water.
If one of them is reaching for an icicle, would you knock it out of their hands? Because what we did here this little mental exercise; that's exactly how malice works. Take a mob of people, assign them morally outrageous crimes, and let desperate people who have been hurt, be their jailers. What do you think would happen? There is no ‘why’ here.