Holocaust Day: Is man's nature evil from his youth? And maybe better than his youth?

Following the Holocaust, studies were conducted in social psychology that shed light on the human being and raise a well-founded fear that we have very destructive tendencies. But does this mean that man's creation is indeed bad? Does the human race have hope?

As every year, this time also around Holocaust Day I gave a lecture called "Is man created evil from his youth?" The idea of ​​the lecture is that the Holocaust that happened to the Jewish people revealed something deep about our essence, of human beings in general. After this planned genocide that worked like a ticking bureaucratic machine, in which masses of people cooperated or knew and did nothing against this mighty machine of evil, difficult questions are asked: How could so many people take part in this evil? Is human nature simply bad from youth? And maybe the Germans are simply too obedient a people? And what are we doing now, is it possible to do something so that such an evil does not happen again?

A few years ago I wrote a post called How we missed one of the most important lessons from the Holocaust In it I told that after World War II many experiments were conducted in the field of social psychology trying to shed light on these questions. One of the famous experiments I detailed in the post is Stanley Milgram's experiment, in which people were asked by the professor to give electric shocks to other subjects and to increase the intensity of these electric shocks with each mistake of the other subjects. Although they heard through a loudspeaker the screams of the subjects, they continued to administer the electric shocks and increase the intensity of the shocks. Most of the subjects, approximately 65%, reached the maximum intensity even though it is defined as dangerous and despite the screams of pain and requests of the subjects to stop the experiment. Here is a video summarizing the experiment:

Another experiment I listed, the fire experiment, shows that we are very conforming creatures. The social consensus is so important to us that usually most of us will change our behavior and adjust it according to the behavior of the rule, even when we know that the rule is wrong. From these experiments it seems that the answer to the question "And if everyone jumps off the roof, will you jump too?" she Yes:

The third experiment in the post, Zimbardo's prison experiment, shows how a group of students arbitrarily divided into prison guards and prisoners escalates their behavior. Completely normal people who entered the role of guards slowly became more sadistic while the prisoners felt their humanity was being trampled on and they were losing their personality. As if they had always been dangerous prisoners. It is interesting to note that recently evidence was discovered that the experiment was not conducted properly and therefore its conclusions should be taken with a limited guarantee. On the other hand, somewhat surprisingly, in 2002 an experiment with similar characteristics to Zimbardo's prison experiment was conducted in England in a study called The BBC Prison Experiment. The results of this experiment were also published in several articles in scientific journals. The experiment and its results were more complex than the original experiment, but one result was distinctly repeated. In both experiments, the experimenters had to stop the experiment before its end out of fear for the safety of the subjects in the experiment.

This experiment joins a long line of experiments that have since been recreated in many different places in the world which repeat and reveal the same number of disturbing characteristics of the human being. From all these experiments a very gloomy picture is obtained. It seems that we would prefer to follow consensus and authority, even when we know that this is bad or wrong. We also tend to label and generalize and enter into roles that superiors order us to perform. Many times it seems that in order to feel good about ourselves we will use the power we have to humiliate and bring down others around us.
 

From all the experiments carried out since then it seems that there is no unusual evil in the German people and they have no increased tendency to obedience. Instead there seems to be a banality of evil (as the philosopher Hannah Arendt suggested even before all these experiments), most people just do their job and keep their heads down. You know the well-known phrase "all that is needed." For evil to win Is that many good people will do nothing" (Edmund Barak)? Well, this is just the beginning. It seems that in order for evil to win, you don't need many "bad people" or too many malicious intentions, it is enough to reach a consensus that harms a certain group, give people defined roles and be authoritative and it seems that most of us will follow suit, harming others and exaggerating their bad behavior over time. None of us is immune to the banality of evil.

Now we have to stop for a moment and ask, do these explanations absolve the Nazis of guilt?

No! The whole idea is that these are just tendencies and not something that cannot be changed. Whoever chooses to act according to these tendencies, has responsibility for his actions and is guilty. To clear a person of guilt, it is necessary to show that there was no choice. A baby, for example, who makes the table dirty is not guilty because he does not yet understand what he is doing and therefore he cannot choose another behavior. However, as adults, we have the ability to understand the consequences of our actions and consciously choose our actions. Even when it comes to innate tendencies. We all have an evolutionary tendency to want to eat sugar and fat, but that doesn't mean we don't have the ability to choose whether we want to eat the ice cream in front of us or not. We are certainly able to overcome these evolutionary tendencies and avoid eating ice cream to maintain our diet. Similarly, we discovered that humans have tendencies towards conformity and obedience, but we have enough mental and emotional capacity to overcome these tendencies. The more important question in my opinion is, can we do something so that such cases do not happen again in the future of the human race? 

The power to say no!
Hamburg 1936 Celebrations in honor of a new ship. The circled man does not do the well-known Nazi trick.
The man's name is August Landmesser who was sentenced to two years of hard labor for marrying a Jewess. He chooses not to follow the consensus and the enthusiastic crowd.

So that such atrocities do not continue to happen in the future, we first need to be aware of these tendencies and then we can try and overcome them.

In other words, education. First of all, awareness needs to be developed, children need to be educated and taught to recognize these tendencies. After we are aware of these problematic tendencies, we can give tools on how to overcome them. in the post How do you prevent a holocaust from happening again? I suggest that any human education system must focus on a number of important values ​​and tools and actively educate them. Humane values ​​of recognizing the other, understanding opinions and values ​​different from your own and developing emotional tools such as empathy and sympathy even for someone different from you and the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes. In addition, tools of skepticism, questioning authority and creating an authentic and unique personality should be taught. It is very important to develop depth of thought and the ability to search for independent knowledge. I call it education for philosophical thinking - lateral thinking that connects fields of knowledge and morality. As Hannah Arendt wrote, knowledge itself is not enough, we need to develop the ability to evaluate our knowledge and our choices. Appreciation of truth and falsehood, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. This is the only way we can get rid of the human tendency to obedience and small-mindedness and the excuse "I just followed instructions" will lose its validity.
In order for all the previous values ​​and tools to be successful, another set of mainly emotional tools must be taught, how to build courage and inner confidence in yourself to follow your own path and take responsibility for both your life and the society around you. That way we might get more developed men and women who create themselves\n, take responsibility for society, think deeply and don't immediately fall for the easy and shallow way of the norm and consensus. The hope is that this way the number of those who obey will decrease when there is an authority that wants to commit crimes and on the other hand, in days of peace and quiet, the number of men and women who utilize the high abilities that man has will increase.

In the end, in my opinion, the question of whether man's nature is bad from his youth is a wrong question. We have neither a bad nature nor a good nature. We have evolved to survive, there are no questions of morality in the nature around us. Only the human mind knows how to ask about good and bad. When a snake eats a mouse in the field we don't shout that the snake is immoral. Like the baby, he does not have enough abstract understanding to understand the consequences of his behavior. He only acts out of evolutionary drives on how to survive and reproduce. With us the situation is different, thanks to the brain development throughout the evolution of the great apes, we have much more developed abilities than any other animal around us. Biologist Frans de Waal demonstrated how monkeys already have a certain concept of fairness. In an experiment that has become very famous, researchers give monkeys a cucumber when they succeed in a task. But, if suddenly one of the monkeys receives a much more valuable reward, such as grapes, the other deprived monkey will get angrier and angrier until it finally refuses to do the task. The researchers noticed that sometimes the monkey who received grapes will offer the deprived monkey some of his grapes when he sees that the monkey is angry:

It is quite amazing to see the development of the concept of fairness throughout the evolution and development of the brain. In certain types of monkeys you can already see basic concepts of decency, in the case of humans, not only are we aware of the environment, ourselves and decency, but also the human monkey has the ability to use language in an abstract way. Usually other animals only use language to communicate with each other about tangible things - here is food, there is a predator, etc. We also have the ability to understand, experience and communicate about ideas that are not here and now, ideas like the self, like love, meaning, good and bad. As far as we know today, these abilities are most developed in the human race. These abilities have opened up a wide ocean of possibilities and new choices for us at a level that no other animal can. With their help we can not only live, multiply and survive but also reach meaning, create values ​​and morals and choose our path in a more informed and conscious way. On the one hand, these abilities have turned man into a powerful creature with incredible potential. Thanks to them we have greater choices and greater freedom of understanding and action. We can understand the edges of the universe, what matter is made of and ourselves, we can expand our perception of reality and act and create according to these insights. Our technological ability is developing at an increasing rate and we can also shape our lives and choose how we want to live them. But with freedom there is also responsibility and the more freedom and potential we have to realize, the more responsibility we have. The tremendous power that has opened up to us obliges us to assume a tremendous responsibility. A responsibility beyond any other animal on the planet.

Thanks to that jump in abilities, we expanded our reality to deeply understand that not only we exist, but also the "other" and we developed morality. We developed a moral awareness such as "Don't do to your friends what they hated about you" or "Whoever saves one soul is as if he saved the whole world". Unlike most animals, we understand the full consequences of our actions (at least potentially...), therefore we understand, for example, the severity of actions such as murder or rape. With the abstract understanding we lost the ability to say that we simply behave like all the other animals in nature. Let's go back to the baby again, when he dirty the dining table it will seem cute to us, but when an adult behaves like that we will ask what is wrong with him because he is supposed to be more developed than the baby. In exactly the same way, we have the ability to understand and act according to the values ​​of good and bad and therefore we cannot behave like the baby who does not understand the consequences of his actions. We should continue to develop, continue to realize our strengths and aim for the infinite, but part of this journey is also to take greater responsibility for the consequences of our actions and consciously choose to live as moral people. It turns out that the evolutionary process, thanks to which our brain developed so much, also left us with some problematic tendencies that probably helped us during evolution. For example, the tendency to follow the leader or the alpha male with closed eyes or the tendency to follow the opinion of the group. Because it is much easier to survive as part of a group than to survive alone, one can understand why throughout the process of natural selection the tendency to follow the opinion of the group has survived. But now we see that this tendency actually stops us from developing. It makes us conformists and can lead us to do things we don't believe in and to do cruel things to others. Now it is our job to take full responsibility for ourselves and fight these tendencies with the help of those developed brain mechanisms that opened us up to the spectacular abilities we have.

It sounds difficult to fight innate tendencies, but with the help of awareness, education and correct norms it is possible. As the biologist and neuroscientist Steven Pinker mentions, when you look at human history you see how we are moving towards a less violent world. Although our personal feeling may be different, Statistically speaking, today there are fewer wars in the world, less violence and less killing than any other period in history. There seems to be something we do do well. An interesting example of an event where attention and emphasis was given to humanistic and individualistic values ​​was the Woodstock festival held in the summer of 1969. About half a million people gathered and formed a huge community for three days. The festival is considered by many to be the peak of the counterculture and hippie culture that developed during the sixties. These cultures aspired to a society that freed each person so that he could realize his power. To achieve this, they fought for individual freedom and equal rights and tried to live in different ways of life that were against the social norms of those years. The rock music that began its journey in those years became an experiential tool for spreading these values. The Woodstock Festival was a culmination of this movement. The interesting thing is that very quickly the festival got out of the control of the organizers. Many more people came than expected until the organizers decided to remove the fences so that anyone who wanted could enter and thus prevent a disaster. All road traffic in the festival area has come to a standstill and the area has been declared a disaster area. The infrastructure could not provide an answer for this amount of people and helicopters dropped food, groceries and medical equipment in the stage area. In addition, the weather was not kind and on the second day winds began to threaten to knock down the columns and the stage and rain that covered everything in mud. Sounds like a recipe for disaster and we wouldn't be surprised to hear if they told us that very quickly the incident degenerated into another case of "man vs. wolf" in which our bad tendencies rear their heads. But surprisingly, not only did such a thing not happen, but instead a kind of utopian community was created. The audience took responsibility, together with the organizers and everyone together acted and helped to ensure the peace of the community and the enjoyment of the festival. Together they strengthened the stage and pillars, prepared meals and gave medical aid and made this small town function. I see this case as evidence of the human potential to reach a better and more developed society that is based on the values ​​we discussed:

An interview from the movie "Woodstock" with the organizers of the Woodstock festival, Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld, about the decision to open the gates of the festival to the hundreds of thousands of people who came to it. The organizers describe the cultural experience of the festival visitors and what motivated them to make this decision as organizers

Man is not born with a bad or good instinct, instead he has the ability to perform acts of great good and the ability to perform acts of great evil out of the ocean of possibilities and choices that opens before him. Following the Holocaust and the various studies, we discovered that we have evolutionary tendencies that can sometimes lead to atrocities. Now with the help of our awareness we can and must choose which tendencies should be cultivated and which tendencies should be overcome. In the end it is about our ability to go on a journey to expand our awareness. During this journey we are more and more aware of the reality we exist in, what our place is in reality, what tendencies are inherent in us and what potential we have and how we must live in order to realize this power. An important part of expanding this awareness is taking full responsibility for our behavior and the consequences of our actions. This is the journey in which the human race must walk in order to develop itself and realize the vast ocean of abilities spread out before it while consciously choosing the good, the true and the beautiful.

And if we've already mentioned the Woodstock festival, we'll end with Joni Mitchell's optimistic and beautiful song "Woodstock". A song that describes the ideal and values ​​that can help us overcome our problematic tendencies and realize the power inherent in us and how they were expressed in the summer of 1969 at the Woodstock Festival:

Matthews Southern Comfort – Woodstock

I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, "Where are you going?"
And this he told me

"I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm
I'm gonna join in a rock 'n' roll band
I'm gonna camp out on the land
I'm gonna try an' get my soul free"

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

"Then can I walk beside you?
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning"

"Well, maybe it's just the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who I am
But you know, life is for learning"

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration

And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation

We are stardust
We are golden
Back to the garden

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• אHow did we miss one of the most important lessons of the Holocaust? How do you prevent phenomena like the Holocaust from happening again? (first part of the series)
• How do you prevent phenomena like the Holocaust from happening again?(the second part of the series)
• Science, race and politics
• The state of Holocaust research and studies in Israel is deteriorating
• Following a visit to the forest where my mother hid: How did the Jews live before and during the Holocaust? (by Avi Blizovsky, editor of the knowledge website)