The Monster Theory And Why It Fails

Picture the sort of person who takes part in a massacre.

Go ahead and let the picture form. Most people get some version of the same one. Something is wrong with the face. There is a hardness in it, or an emptiness. The person in the picture enjoys what they are doing, or feels nothing at all while doing it. They are not like you, and you would know one if you met one.

Now here is the difficulty. That picture has almost no relationship to the historical record.

The people who carried out the largest organized killings of the last two centuries were, in the overwhelming majority, unremarkable. They had jobs and families. Neighbors described them as decent. Many were religious. Many were kind to animals. A great number of them were, before and after, better than average citizens by every ordinary measure you could apply.

This is not a comforting fact and it is not meant to be.

Why We Believe The Monster Theory Anyway

We believe it because it does something for us.

The monster theory is a fence. If the people who do these things are a separate species, then the fence runs between them and everybody else, and you are on the safe side of it. So is your father. So is your daughter. So is the country you live in. The fence lets you look at an atrocity without any part of it landing near you.

It also gives you a clean emotional response. If they were monsters, then the correct reaction is disgust, and disgust is easy. It requires nothing from you but a face.

And it flatters. Every time you decide someone did something terrible because of what they are, you have quietly established that you would never do it, because you are not that. You have never actually tested this. You just know.

Three Reasons It Fails

It does not match what happened. Take the people who ran the German killing operations in occupied Poland. One of the best documented cases is a police battalion of middle aged men from Hamburg, most of them too old for the regular army, most of them with no particular political commitment. They were told what they were being asked to do, and they were offered the option to step out. A small number did. The great majority did not, and went on to kill enormous numbers of people over the following months. These were not selected fanatics. They were the men who were left after everyone else had been taken.

Rwanda in 1994 is the same story at greater speed. Much of the killing was done by ordinary farmers, in daylight, against neighbors they had known their whole lives, with farm tools, and then they went home for lunch.

It predicts nothing. This is the practical failure, and it is the one that matters for you.

A theory earns its keep by telling you something before the fact. The monster theory cannot do this. It identifies monsters only by their monstrous acts, which means it can only work backward. It has never once let anybody look at a country, or a town, or a workplace, and say what is coming.

Ask yourself what the monster theory would have you do. Watch for the bad people? You cannot find them. They do not look like anything. In every society that has produced mass violence, the people who went on to commit it were, the year before, indistinguishable from the people who did not.

A model that only explains and never predicts is not a model. It is a story you tell afterward.

Almost everyone doing it thinks they are the good one. This is the part that turns the whole picture inside out.

Go looking for the internal experience of people who have participated in political violence, in confessions, in interviews, in the letters they wrote home, and you find something consistent and strange. They are rarely gleeful. They are rarely indifferent. Very often they are morally serious. They describe duty. They describe having done something difficult and necessary that weaker people were not willing to do. They describe protecting their families.

Some researchers have made a strong version of this argument: that most violence between human beings is not a failure of morality but an expression of it. People hurt each other to punish wrongs, to defend their group, to enforce loyalty, to restore an order they believe has been broken. The violence feels, from the inside, like justice.

You already met the small version of this in Module One. Contempt does not arrive feeling like cruelty. It arrives feeling like clarity. This is that same fact at national scale.

The Sentence To Hold

Here it is, and it is the hinge the rest of this course turns on.

The danger is almost never people who want to do evil. It is people who are certain they are doing right.

Read that again and notice how much less useful it makes your instincts. You have been trained your whole life to watch for malice. Malice is rare and mostly small. What you actually need to watch for is conviction, and conviction looks exactly like virtue, because most of the time it is virtue.

What This Is Not

This is where a lot of writing on this subject goes wrong, so let me be exact.

Saying that ordinary people commit atrocities is not the same as saying nobody is responsible for them. It is the opposite.

If perpetrators were defective, they could not be blamed, any more than you blame a hurricane. Responsibility requires that a person had a choice. And we know they had a choice, because in every single one of these cases some people made the other one. In that police battalion, men stepped out. In Rwanda, people hid their neighbors at enormous risk. In every organized atrocity on record, there is a minority who refused, and their existence is the proof that refusal was available.

So the claim is not that anyone would have done it. The claim is that many ordinary people did, that they were not marked in advance, and that the ones who refused were mostly not marked in advance either.

Understanding how a thing happens does not excuse it. It is the only way to interfere with it.

One More Thing, About You

There is a version of this lesson that ends with a line like "you are capable of the same." Courses love that line. It sounds brave.

I am going to say something slightly different, because the dramatic version is not quite honest.

You do not know what you are capable of. Neither do I. Almost nobody who has ever done something terrible knew beforehand that they would. Almost nobody who refused knew beforehand that they would either. That uncertainty is uncomfortable, and it is the accurate position, and the whole rest of this module is about what you can do from inside it.

The people most confident that they would have refused have, on average, thought about it the least.