What makes us good? What makes us evil? We know a lot about one of these two.
So when I ask about why did some people to turn evil? Here’s a shopping list.
There is a research in every one: dehumanization, diffusion of
responsibility, obedience to authority, unjust system, group pressure, power and control,
moral disengagement—my colleague Al Bandura has studied this in great detail—and anonymity.
When we ask the question, why do others become heroic, we don’t have an answer. It could be
compassion, it could be empathy, maybe there’s a hero gene, maybe oxytocin, the work of Paul
Zak at Claremont, I guess at Claremont McKenna, showing that this mother-love chemical in
the brain increases the likelihood you behave empathic or altruistic, but heroism is something
different, as we’ll see.
The interesting thing, what we do know about, is the very same situation that enflames
the hostile imagination in some people making them villains—war corruption, fraud—instills
the heroic imagination in other people to do heroic deeds. So Christians who helped Jews
in the Holocaust were in the same situation as the Nazis and other people other civilians
work to imprison Jews. Few people do evil; fewer people act heroically. Between these
extremes in the bell curve of humanity are the masses, the general population who do nothing,
who do no imagination at all. In thinking about it, I’m going to call these reluctant heroes,
who refuse the call to action, and we know by doing nothing when something is needed, they implicitly
support the perpetrators of evil.
Edmond Burke says, “All that matters for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.”
So on this bell curve of humanity, villains and heroes are the outliers. I’m going to say the
reluctant heroes are the rest. And our job is, how do we give a call to service of
the general
population. How do we make them aware of the evil that exists? How do we make them, at
the same time, how do we prevent people on the evil side, the people who promote these
these evil systems, to keep them from seducing them to their side? When we do, we convert the “me” into
the “we” because the egocentric “me” has to become a sociocentric “we.”
Heroism is about one thing: It’s about a concern for other people in need, a concern
to develop, to defending a moral cause knowing there is a personal cause or risk. That’s the key.
And you do it without expectation of reward. So altruism is heroism light. Compassion is a
virtue that may lead to heroism, but we don’t know. Nobody’s established said link. So we want
new research looking at these links. Uh. Which leader would you follow? It could all depend
on the circumstances. You like to not believe that, but here are these great leaders also with
their masses clearly obeying them. There are many ways for ordinary people to become evil,
to become heroic, I’m sorry.
The equal number, that’s another side, so here’s just a quick run-through. We know
that the Chinese student—the tank man—who stopped this
row of tanks from coming, crushing, killing Chinese students who were simply there saying,
"We want our freedom.” We know in 911 the firefighters from Brooklyn from
Brooklyn Heights Fire Department did extraordinary deeds of heroism. In fact, when I was president of APA,
I gave a presidential citation to Richie Murray on behalf of the other firefighters.
But these are these are men who show extraordinary courage essentially in battle or in disaster.
Abu Ghraib stopped because this guy—the most
ordinary guy in the world, Joe Darby—his buddy showed him this CD. He looked at it,
and he was horrified. He said, we’re supposed to be bringing dignity to these people, we’re
humiliating them. He took that. He’s a private in the army reserve, gave it to his senior investigating officer:
“Sir, you have to investigate this,” and that whistle blowing had great cost to him.
They had to put
him in hiding for 3 years, and his mother, and his wife because not only people in his battalion wanted to kill him,
people in his little hometown in Pennsylvania wanted to kill them because they embarrassed
the military and the Bush administration.
Here's a wonderful kid, a 9-year-old. I call him a dutiful hero. In 2008,
there was a massive earthquake in Schezuan province. The ceiling fell down on a school, killing
almost all the kids. He escaped, and as he was running away, he noticed two kids struggling
to get out.
He ran back and saved them. They said, “Why did you do that?” He said, “I was the hall monitor!
"It was my duty, it was my job to look after my classmates!”
So this is gonna become really important in a minute, when I talk about our new project:
the Heroic Imagination Project. We think that heroism starts with this imagination, with
this focus on the other. What can I do? What is my obligation to society?
Irena Sendler was a Polish hero, a Catholic who documented saved at least 2,500 Jewish
kids who were holed up in the Warsaw Ghetto that the Nazis erected before they brought
people in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. She went in and had to convince Jewish parents
to give her their kids because she’s saying the kids are gonna die. We will, we will,
we will try to
hook them up with you if everybody lives. And she was able to, to smuggle out,
2,500 kids, but what she did—and this is critical—she organized the network.
So one of the principles of the talk, heroes are most effective not alone, not the, the
soldier in, in battle who takes a bullet for his buddy, but forming a network.
Now, the other thing is the evil of inaction. We said few people do evil, fewer
act heroically. Most people, most of the time, do nothing. And that’s the ones we have
to focus on.
Both the greater good and our heroic imagination project. Dante says, “The hottest places in hell
are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
Martin Luther King
says, “We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system
were forced to watch Serbs brutally rape gypsy girls, and they were not allowed to
intervene. I met one of these guys who still has, years later, post-traumatic stress disorder.
Canadian forces in Rwanda witnessed the same thing and because they were peacekeeping
were not allowed to intervene, and many of these people have long-lasting psychological consequences.
Here’s a very different kind of hero. “On the New York City subway,
it’s hard enough finding someone who will give up his seat to a stranger, let alone be willing to
give up his life for one. ‘The train was coming in like that. It happened just ...'
50-year-old Wesley Autrey—a construction worker and navy veteran—was standing on a subway platform
with his two little girls when right in front of them, a man started having a seizure.
'He kind of stumbled off his own
feet and fall backwards. I see the train coming, but the train is so close. I’m like,
what do I do?’
Wesley jumped onto the tracks and thought if he could just lie on top of the man, keep
him from
flailing, maybe the train would roll right over them. The clearance was exactly 21 inches.
and the man? 20 and a half. ‘There’s no way the train can stop before this gentleman
him up off the tracks, so he covered him with his body and pushed him down to a point where the
train wouldn’t hit his head and held him down under the tracks while the train came
and rolled
right over the top.’ It gave Wesley’s children the scare of their young lives. ‘I
was scared he was
going to get killed.’ And Wesley, the scare of his, too. ‘I’m like talking to him, sir, you can’t move, I got two
kids up here looking for their father to come back. I don’t know you, and you don’t know me,
but don’t panic. I’m here to save you.’ As for the guy Wesley saved? He’s 20-year-old
Cameron Hollopeter, and other than a few scrapes and bruises his father says, he’s doing fine.
'Mr. Autrey's instinctive and unselfish act saved our son’s life.’ You know, the word hero gets thrown around
a lot nowadays. 'What a better a way to start off the New Year than to say you saved a life.'
Nice to be reminded of what one really looks like.” Steve Hartman, CBS News, New York.
So what, what it looks like it's the most ordinary person in the world, he’s 50 years
old, he’s never done anything like that. There were 75 people on the platform, and the
question to
psychologists is, could you have picked him out, and I don’t think so.