How Your Ego Leads to Evil: Three Lessons from “Ordinary Men”
I have a daily ritual of reading a passage from Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” in the morning as a reminder to focus on some bigtruths before the distractions of the day take over.
One paragraph always takes me be surprise in how it suddenly zooms out from the very personal sense of self, anxiety and over-thinking, to the nadir of all humanity. He says:
How is it possible that humans killed in excess of 100 million fellow humans in he twentieth century alone? …
Do they act this way because they are in touch with their natural state, the joy of life within? Only people who are in a deeply negative state, who feel very bad indeed, would create such a reality as a reflection of how they feel.
Tolle talks about a kind of collective sickness which causes people to inflict more daily and banal injuries upon each other (“hurt people hurt people”), and that “the collective egoic mind is the most dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit the planet”.
We see this now in the context of climate change and our wilful lack of progress in bringing about the substantive meaningful change to avert further damage to the planet. But also in the political sphere, where nihilism, populism, and tribalism serve the collective ego at expense of our longer term interests.
Ordinary People
In his book, based on participant testimony, Browning documents how a group of older, working and middle-class men, with little devotion to anti-semitism or the ideology of Nazism, took part in face-to-face mass executions of defenseless men, women, and children in Poland during the Second World War. Rather than being crazed killers or emotionless automatons, most of the men were sickened by what they were doing, but went ahead and did it anyway. Why?
The reasons were many, and also varied among the men, yet a few key themes emerged.
1. Peer pressure
“I must answer that no one wants to be thought a coward”
After they had received their orders on their first day of killing:
The act of stepping out that morning meant leaving one’s comrades and admitting that one was “too weak” or “cowardly”. Who would have dared, one policeman declared emphatically, to “lose face” before the assembled troops?
Here is our instinct towards loyalty, community and friendship, turned against ourselves, and towards another group. So that in ‘helping’ our tribe we engage in a collective debasement because no one dares to question the overall act. It is the ultimate Ego-saving act, not wanting to feel the shame or embarrassment of losing status in the eyes of the group.
2. Obedience to Authority
..the exception is the rare individual who has the capacity to resist authority and assert moral autonomy, but who is seldom aware of his hidden strength until put to the test.
The most common defense of the perpetrators after the war was that they were soldiers carrying out orders, as they were obliged to do. It wasn’t until 1949 that the Geneva Convention was ratified (in response to what happened during the War), which compelled soldiers to disobey any illegal order. Browning suggests that many of the Policemen found some solace (or ego preservation) from the idea that they had no choice. This is despite the fact that often were given either an explicit or implicit choice by some commanders. Some soldiers took the initiative to hide themselves or make up some other task when it came time to perform the killing, but the majority did not.
The most tragic part of all for the perpetrators perhaps, is that they could have gotten away with refusing to comply:
In the past forty-five years no defense attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of postwar trail as has been able to document a single case where refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly dire punishment. The punishment that occasionally did result from such disobedience was never commensurate with the gravity of the crimes the men had been asked to commit.
3. Dehumanization of the Other
An interesting facet of the book is how Browning reveals that strong antisemitism did not play a massive role in the mass killing carried out by the men of the book. Many had friends or colleagues who were Jewish, and appeared to have little sympathy or interest in the antisemitic propaganda promulgated by the hardcore party ideologists (the Nazi party never won much more than a third of the vote in free elections). However, they shared a common disdain for anyone who they considered as ‘the enemy’. Indeed, in statistical analysis as well as well as first-hand accounts, Russian PoWs, Polish partisan, and civilian Jews were all treated with same systematic cruelty by the soldiers. It was however, the official policy which singled out the innocent Jewish population for systematic destruction, rather than the inherent racism of the men. As the war went on, the harrowing experiences of the war meant that the foul treatment of anyone deemed as enemy became easier for the troops to carry out.
The point here is that what happened to the Jewish civilians is not a once in a lifetime aberration which can never be repeated again. Indeed there is eerie similarity between the mass executions carried out by the Battalion examined in ‘’Ordinary Men”, and those carried out by the Serbian army against Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995 — in my own lifetime — and we see elements of it today in Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine.
It can happen again
In the 2001 Afterword to the book, Browning ends with this rather chilling summation:
It would be very comforting if …. very few societies have the long-term, cultural-cognitive prerequisites to commit genocide, and that regimes can only do so when the population is overwhelmingly of one mind about its priority, justice, and necessity. We would live in a safer world .. but I am not so optimistic.
I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners”.
But Tolle offers us a first step towards helping ourselves out, at least at an individual level. To be one of the men who stepped away when given the choice, and perhaps to help avoid these conditions in the first place.
Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species. That’s not a judgement. It’s a fact. It is also a fact that the sanity is there underneath the madness. Healing and redemption are available right now.
It happens every day in our life choices and decisions, in how we choose to think and interact with each other, and what we give our attention to. When we unconsciousnessly go along, do anything to avoid hurting the ego or experience shame (shame from the other, rather than our own internal values), discomfort or embarrassment, that is when bad things happen. We can each do our bit to avoid the conditions to become ’’willing executioners” in a literal sense, or in the more mundane everyday harms that we inflict on each other.
