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In the movie The Dark Knight, the widely acclaimed and chart busting top grosser of last year, Batman’s closest confidante, his butler Alfred, describes the nature of the villain, The Joker thus: “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Batman does some unacceptable, and in my mind unheroic, things in his attempt to catch the Joker and save people from the mayhem that the Joker unleashes. Things such as torturing the Joker in an attempt to extract crucial information related to saving the life of someone close to him and widescale, warrantless surveillance. Some raved at how well these choices were shown, that they weren’t shown in black and white terms. But, the viewer had to concede that they were eventually acceptable because the movie intones several times (though not so in your face) that Batman is the hero who does the “right thing” even if it is not the culturally or legally acceptable thing. That they were acceptable because of the nature of the Joker, a man who just wanted to watch the world burn, a man to whom normal rules don’t apply.

Clint Eastwood, my favorite childhood Hollywood actor, did similar things in “Dirty Harry” because the villain (Scorpio in that case) was portrayed as a madman, randomly shooting people to spread terror and extract a ransom from the city. Villains in James Bond movies are also shown as madmen, willing to destroy anything that stands in their way of taking over the world. In Sholay (and in countless other Bollywood movies), the villain of villains, Gabbar Singh, is shown as a sadistic dacoit, willing to terrorize innocent villagers.

This depiction of villains as madmen, men who committed deeds well beyond the knell of acceptable, which therefore justified the unbelievable acts of violence unleashed against them by the heroes, has a long history in many cultures. In Indian mythology, demonic emperors such as Ravana, evil uncles such as Kamsa are shown as “being evil”. It is in their nature. Superheroes (and gods) exist because they have to battle such super villains.

In real life, people such as Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot are similarly portrayed as evil men, men who are the way they are because it is in them. While biographers may chart the lives of such people, in popular conception, they are just evil incarnates, nothing can explain things such as the Holocaust or Year Zero. Attempts to explain their actions are decried because they are seen as justifying the acts.

This view of things, of looking at people’s seemingly innate character as an explanation of their actions, has always struck me as being unsatisfactory and incomplete; maybe because the engineer in me hopes for solutions and no solutions can be found if people are simply evil. But this simple division of people into black and white, good and evil seems too simplistic. Gandhi’s view that we are each a mix of good and evil seemed more real to me. Jesus seemed to speak similarly when he asks only men who have not sinned to stone the prostitute they condemn to death by stoning. M.C.Escher’s famous painting depicts this incrementalist view, of angels springing forth from demons and vice-versa (picture courtesy of http://www.hnorthrop.com/escher.html).

Is there any evidence for this incrementalist view ? If we’re each a mixture of good and evil, then what makes some men commit despicable acts while most of us seem like good, law abiding humans ?

In 1963, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, conducted his landmark “Obedience to Authority” experiment, in which ordinary people were shown capable of subjecting others to shocking acts of violence in obedience to authority. Volunteers were divided into two groups, teachers and learners. Unknown to the teachers, only they were the real volunteers and the learners were actually part of the research team. A researcher provided word pairs to the teacher and told them to first read the word pairs aloud to the learner. After this, the teacher was asked to question the learner by reading the first word of a word pair and asking the learner to pick the corresponding word of the pair from one of the four provided choices. Each time the learner provided the wrong answer, the teacher had to administer an electric shock to the learner. The intensity of the shock increased each time the learner gave the wrong answer. The teachers were also administered a sample shock before the experiment began to make them feel the pain of the punishment. During the test, the learners would deliberately answer incorrectly in an effort to see how much shock the teachers were willing to administer. The learners were kept in a separate room from the teachers. Unknown to the teachers, when they twirled the dial administering the shock, no real shock was actually subjected upon the learners. But the learners yelped, moaned and pleaded in agony before seemingly lapsing into unconscious so that the teachers were aware of the consequence of their administering the shock. The result of the experiment was that most people were willing to administer the shocks despite the pleading of the learners and were willing to administer lethal doses (the dial indicated the voltage) of shocks. Those who wanted to stop when they heard the painful cries, continued when asked to do so by a monitoring researcher.

So, what makes authority figures whose demands make us indulge in such behavior ? In 1971, Philip Zimbardo carried out the now famous Stanford Prison Experiment. He and his associates selected twenty four graduate students from a volunteer pool at the university and randomly assigned them to be either prisoners or guards. These students were selected for their lack of criminal record and of sound mind and body. All came from white, middle class families. A prison was constructed and the guards were asked to maintain the prison. In less than a week, guards and prisoners adopted to their roles and the guards indulged in shocking acts of violence against the prisoners. One third of the guards indulged in acts that were considered sadistic. Zimbardo terminated the experiment six days after it began. Most of the guards were upset that the experiment was terminated early.

The lesson Zimbardo drew is that many of us can descend into violence due to just role playing. That the guards began to abuse their power because that’s how they thought guards ought to be, and the prisoners soon accepted their treatment more acceptingly because they felt like victims. Some questioned the breadth of this conclusion.

In 2002, two professors in UK in collaboration with BBC, attempted to duplicate the Stanford Prison Experiment. They reached different conclusions, but the conclusions did not seem to detract from the fundamental point that individuals do not work in isolation, but as part of a larger ecosystem and that different ecosystems engender different behaviors in individuals. In a paper published in 2005 titled “Psychology of Tyranny”, they write: “In general terms, we concur with Sherif, Milgram, Zimbardo and others that tyranny is a product of group processes, not individual pathology. …. We believe that people at every level of the group help to foster a collective culture of hate and are responsible for its consequences. … When a social system collapses, people will be more open to alternatives, even those that previously seemed unattractive. Moreover, when the collapse of a system wreaks such havoc that a regular and predictable social life becomes impossible, the promise of a rigid and hierarchical order becomes more alluring.”

A paper published in 2008, based on this experiment, identifies five steps in the creation of collective hate which enables people to carry out sickening acts: (i) Identification, the construction of an ingroup; (ii) Exclusion, the definition of targets as external to the ingroup; (iii) Threat, the representation of these targets as endangering ingroup identity; (iv) Virtue, the championing of the ingroup as (uniquely) good; and (v) Celebration, embracing the eradication of the outgroup as necessary to the defence of virtue.

Philip Zimbardo has written a book, “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil”, about the Stanford Prison Experiment, the lessons drawn from this and its application to real life incidents such as Abu Ghraib. He talks about how this tendency to seek answers for sadistic or heroic behavior in people underlies much of of how our world functions today: the legal system, medicine, psychology and even religion. They’re based on answers to questions of “who”. People like Zimbardo belong to a group of people called social psychologists who instead ask “what” questions: “What conditions contributed to the behavior, what circumstances, what was the situation. Social psychologists ask to what extent can an individual’s behavior be traced to factors outside the actor, to situational variables and environmental processes unique to a given setting ?”

Zimbardo also says that the “who” approach to evil allows “good people” to get themeselves off the hook. He writes: “They’re freed from even considering their possible roles in creating, sustaining, perpetuating, or conceding to the conditions that contribute to delinquency, crime, vandalism, teasing, bullying, rape, torture, terror and violence. ‘It’s the way of the world, and there’s not much that can be done to change it, certainly not by me.’”. Popular reaction to terrorist acts such as the WTC attack on 9/11 or the recent Mumbai attack show this kind of thinking in real life. We, ordinary citizens are not responsible for the violence unleashed by the terrorists. It is in their nature (or in this case, their religion). It is what allows us to attack Afghanistan and Iraq without a troubled conscience.

People like Hitler and Pol Pot do not arise in a vaccuum. Hitler rose in the ruins of post-WWI Germany, because of Germans ravaged by the unbearable war reparations thrust by the winners of WWI, and rampant anti-Semitism in Europe made it easy for the creation of an out-group to blame for all the problems. Hitler probably believed that he was achieving some good by his actions. George W Bush to this day proclaims that the invasion of Iraq was good because he rid the Iraqi people, nay the world, of a madman, Saddam Hussein.

In the Dark Knight, Joker tells Batman that he doesn’t want to kill him because they complete each other, as if without one, there would be no need for the other. In Dorothy Rowe’s book, “Friends and Enemies: Our Need To Love and Hate”, she quotes Martin Bell of BBC: “The American government seemed to crave tinpot dictators, whether it was Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, Noriega, Ortega in Nicaragua – and all these became hate figures. It was almost as if they needed them. Americans needed someone to denounce. They needed someone against whom they could parade their American values. I found it the same with Serbs. They believed themselves to be a heroic people and they needed a dark background against which to shine. They would if necessary create that darkness themselves”.

Richard Hofstadter writes in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”: “The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself, of deflects the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is in this sense distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will”. The Joker is a perfect example of such an enemy. The history of superheroes is filled with villains that fit this description to a T.

The world seems to be slipping into a chaos where the loudest voices are those proclaiming the supremacy of their specific in-group (be it religion or nation-state or language or culture), its inherent goodness and the need for defense against other not-so-good out-groups. In a world where natural resources are being depleted rapidly and where the near exhaustion of essentials as water, food and clean air has the potential to fuel more and more conflicts, it is left to us to decide the kind of world we want our children to inherit. To do so however requires us to question much of our world view, especially those which encourage us to construct arguments based on “who” instead of “what”, of enemies who just want to watch the world burn.

It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all of us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things
we live by. – William Stafford