The Bell Curve of Good and Evil

Our most primitive, instinctive (and incorrect) emotions tell us to perceive good and evil like a continuum, with good on one end and evil on the other.

There are biological reasons why this is so. Our perceptions are first filtered through the emotional brain, before they arrive last at the rational brain. Because of this routing, there is no such thing as "objectivity," if by objectivity you mean "free from emotion" (consider this: if we were free from feelings, how could we tell the difference between right and wrong?). Because of our brain structure, we see everything through the filter of our emotions, and there is nothing that any of us can do about it.

When we become angry, or are under stress, or under attack, our first impulse is to see "good" and "evil" as a dichotomy, with good over here, and bad over there, with nothing in-between. This applies not only to individuals, but especially to groups, all of which, strictly speaking, do not think at all, but only feel.

Technically, the reason for this is because of our inborn narcissism. Researchers postulate babies and very young children can only perceive themselves, people and things -- indeed the whole world -- as either all-good or all-bad.

The word "narcissist" comes from the Greek myth of Narcissus, the story about a youth who spurned the love of a nymph called Echo. She appealed to the goddess Nemesis for revenge. Nemesis then cast a spell on Narcissus, causing him to fall in love with his own image in the water. The spellbound Narcissus pined away in a hopeless love of his own image and died from the terrible frustrations he suffered.

Narcissism is generally defined as an inflated self-love or self-absorbed love, although actually it is not self-love at all but self-absorption, just as Narcissus was absorbed in his own reflection and could see no one else. Narcissism involves an inordinate self-regard, self-admiration, self-celebration, and self-worship.

Although the Greeks apparently didn't notice it, that self-absorption is based on the feelings of "all-good" and "all-bad." The narcissist considers himself all good; everyone else, in varying degrees, is "bad."

You can see the narcissistic good-or-bad split in any children's fairy tale, or, for that matter, in many cartoons. The heroes are the whitest of whites and the villains are the blackest of blacks. In mature fiction, on the other hand, people are portrayed as a mixture of good and bad, a concept that young children can't truly understand.

We are ideally supposed to outgrow this split, but perhaps no one really does, especially, I must repeat, when we are under stress or angry. Then, emotionally, we see ourselves as "good" and the person we are angry at as "bad." Intellectually we know they aren't "bad," but emotionally we think they are.

For a while I thought good and evil were a continuum.

At first that made more sense, then I realized it couldn't be totally right, either. The main reason was that on such a continuum people would be equally spaced from the beginning to the end. There would be just as many evil people in the world as good people. Yet, we know that isn't true. There are only a small amount of "evil" people in the world.

I realized that what makes much more sense is a bell curve of good and evil, like a bell curve.

At one end we'd have an extremely small minority of very "bad" people and at the other an equally small minority of very "good" ones. The vast majority of people would be lumped in the middle.

This bell curve tells us something very interesting. There can be no one who is pure good, or pure evil. No matter how far you go to either end of the curve, there exists no one who is 100% good or 100% evil, just as when you look at the bell curve for intelligence, there is no one "perfectly" intelligent, someone with an IQ of, say, 10,000.

The worst person in the world has some good in him, no matter how tiny, and the most saintly person still has some miniscule badness in him. Even Jesus denied he was "good" when a woman referred to him as "good rabbi."

Brain structure is relevant here. Strictly speaking, the brain is not one organ. It's three, at least. At the bottom we have the most primitive part, known as the reptilian or r-complex. In it we find such traits as aggression/dominance/submission, sex, ritual, and the instinct to form ourselves into groups. It's the reason we form ourselves into tribes (or nations, which are modern-day tribes) and have the tendency to see those outside the tribe as dangers. It's what animals do, and we are partly animals.

On top of the r-complex we have the limbic system, or emotional brain. I have come to the conclusion that our narcissism must be located in the limbic system.

Here's why: nearly every tribe in history has narcissistically called itself "the People" or "the Humans." Tribalism is instinctive and is located in the r-complex. Animals form herds, but they don't see themselves as "the True Animals" or "God's Chosen Cattle." That can only come with narcissistic and grandiose feeling. Only people can label themselves with such names.

On top of the limbic system we have the cortex, or the thinking part of the brain. It as, as I pointed out, the last in line for perception.

This all-to-human (or perhaps I should say all-to-animal) tendency we have to perceive things as all-good or all-bad has probably caused more trouble than anything else in the history of mankind.

When we see ourselves as good, and others as bad, what then invariably happens is scapegoating. i.e, projecting our problems onto those we label as bad. Being bad, we must then, logically, annihiliate them. Then, in fantasy but never in reality, there wouldn't be any evil left in the world.

The psychiatrist M. Scott Peck called scapegoating "the genesis of human evil," and he was exactly right. We can use as examples both the Nazis and the Communists, the first of which who blamed their problems on Jews, and the second, on capitalists.

The 20th century, the bloodiest in history, can be called, for all practical purposes, the Century of Scapegoating. No one is quite sure how many people died, but the estimates range from 177 million to 200 million.

One of the oldest myths extant, that of the Garden of Eden, backs up the idea that scapegoating is what bought evil into the world. In the story, Adam blames Eve for his trangressions, and Eve blames the serpent, a symbol of envy. Their refusal to take responsibility for what they did is what, in some versions of the story, gets them kicked out of the Garden.

In a nutshell, Adam scapegoats Eve, and Eve scapegoats the serpent. And what the story tells us, quite perceptively, is that most scapegoating is based on envy. And that envy leads to people refusing to take responsibility for themselves, and blaming their problems on other people. Who hasn't heard the claim, "You made me do it?" In their minds they're not responsible; someone else is.

When we add the tribalism to the narcissism, the problems get even worse. Tribes arrange themselves into hierarchies of varying looseness, with the leaders at top. The fact that so many people look to the leaders to solve their problems -- to take care of them -- is one of the most firmly established principles in psychology. I'm going to repeat that: looking to leaders to solve the herd's problems is one of the most firmly established principles in psychology.

If you want to see a fascinating if ultimately horrifying example of this, watch the movie, Triumph of the Will, in which Hitler walks through a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people, who part before him like the Red Sea before Moses.

Perhaps what we are looking at here is the leader as father and the masses as children. Why else would people say such things as "my President"? What exactly is the difference between that and people in the past who said, "mein Fuhrer"? Is there any, really? Isn't it the same thing as saying, "Father, take care of me"?

This combination of narcissism and tribalism is also important because it's the basis of propaganda. As Herman Goering noticed, all leaders have to do to start wars is claim the tribe is under attack, denounce protestors as traitors, after which the leaders can drag the nation off to war. In other words, scapegoat both the protestors and the enemy -- and claim the enemy is insane and evil -- and the tribe, irrational, frightened and paranoid, will draw together, then attack the perceived enemy.

These propaganda techniques were used to induce Americans to go to war against Iraq. We were told Saddam Hussein was both insane and evil, and was going to fly Drones of Death across the Atlantic, or detonate nuclear weapons on our soil. Bush's handlers, who certainly know how propaganda works, had him speak of "the evil ones" and the "axis of evil," all of whom were dedicated to our destruction because of our "goodness."

Richard Perle and David Frum, using the same techniques, produced a book called, An End to Evil, in which they claimed the U.S. is "the greatest force for good in the world today," and because of that, is under attack by evil countries unalterably dedicated to our destruction.

Propaganda, once you understand it, isn't that hard. Mark Twain understood how it works, in this passage from "The Mysterious Stranger": "Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception".

One thing we can deduce from propaganda is that tribes must have enemies to maintain their cohesiveness. If none exist, the leaders must create them. The best way to do this, I believe, is to trick the enemy into attacking -- or else staging an attack and blaming it on the enemy.

I sometimes wonder if there are any such things as "good" and "evil." I know I have to be careful when I say that. But look at this way: there is a philosophical problem known as "concepts and their referents." It's really pretty simple: do the concepts in our heads refer to anything in reality?

When we use the words "good" and "evil," what exactly do they refer to? The only thing that can be considered evil are people. But since no one is perfectly good or evil, then why do we use concepts that inherently lead us to believe there is pure good or evil? Isn't that exactly what those two words mean -- that there are "good" and "bad," not "mostly good with a little bad" or "mostly bad with a little good"? And is the reason we use them perhaps because of our inborn narcissism? Could it be those concepts don't refer to anything that exists in reality?

An added problem is this: what definition of evil can exist that won't automatically lead to scapegoating? I can't think of one, and I've thought about it for years. I have been unable to find one, anywhere, no matter how long and hard I've looked.

People who claim someone else is evil can have that definition aimed right back at them.

Yet, we know intuitively there is something to the concepts of good and evil, inaccurate as they are. Perhaps the Greeks were onto something with their concept of hubris.

Hubris, which they considered a type of insanity, is based on the afflicted considering themselves god-like. In modern-day terms, it's an extreme form of narcissism (odd how so much leads to that term, and how much trouble is caused by it).

Hubris, for all practical purposes, is what the Bible calls "pride," as in the misquotation, "Pride goes before a fall." Grandiosity, narcissism, pride, vanity, meglomania. . .all the same thing. Russell Kirk used a term I prefer: "the monstrous ego."

Perhaps what really exists is a bell curve, not of "good" and "evil," but one with hubris -- "the monstrous ego" at one end. What would be at the other? Non-ego? Humility? That's what religion always tell us.

Buddhism even goes so far as to tell us we don't even have a self, although it means a permanent and unchanging one. Still, it means to give up the bloated idea of self -- again, what Kirk called "monstrous."

Object Relations Theory, the modern school of psychology that deals with narcissism, has also come to the conclusion people do not have a "self." Instead, they have perhaps an infinite number of "selves," all created by their relationships with the outside world. Hence the name: Object Relations Theory. In that sense, it backs up Buddhist theory.

Using Object Relations Theory, you can postulate people have a "tribal" self, a "paranoid" self, a "scapegoating" self, a "father self," and so on. All, although inherent, are activated by relationships with people and things outside the person.

Narcissism, I'd venture, is the exact opposite of humility. It is a wounded, false "self-esteem" absorbed in endless regret, resentment, and despair. Humility involves a healthy measure of self-forgetfulness of your self. The humble see themselves in their true relationship to the real world. A personal self has real value but it is modest in comparison to immensity of the cosmos. It is dwarfed by the greatness of the truth. Humility is realism.

Narcissism is envy, hate, rage, being unwhole, "dis-eased." The opposite of those things is gratitude, peace, love, being "whole" (which has the same root as "health," "hale" and "happy"), being at "ease." I am reminded of a quote by St. Augustine: "Love, and do what you like."

I suppose, then, we should give up our narcissism to the extent we can, and with it wouild go the scapegoating. Also there would go the paranoia, the irrational tribal fear of the Other, and the ability to be manipulated by propaganda.

Although I truly don't know what "objectivity" is, if I had to give it a definition, I'd say it is to give up anger, fear, paranoia and all the other things that come from splitting everything into all-good and all-bad. Then your feelings will not lead you astray.

Since that splitting is something that starts in us as infants, to give up that splitting means to grow up -- to start to see things clearly. If that ever happens, if humanity gives up being what it is -- half animal, half child -- then there exists the possibility we can instead, finally, become fully human, wholly grown up.