Interview of the famous sociopsychologist Sergei Enikolopov:
I am engaged in the study of aggression, and in this area of war gave several impetus to the development of research. The First World War prompted an already quite adult scientist, Sigmund Freud, to change his views on his basic concept. Before World War I, he stood like flint and did not even include the word "aggression" in his vocabulary. The Second World War gave a new impetus to the study of aggression and violence.
After that, the experience of the 20th century brought new overtones to the study of the excessive aggression that manifested itself during military operations. First, the minimum after the Second World War, even less than after the Korean War, and a lot after the Vietnam War. What was hushed up: a huge number of people raped after the capture of cities, senseless murders, senseless cruelty - all these questions arose, but society did not react very strongly to them.
I would even say it reacted negatively, because all psychology students study the experiments of S. Milgram and F. Zimbardo, but Milgram was hounded for his experiments. A moratorium was introduced on the methodology used in such studies.
There are two terms that very often merge in the language and are very similar - "aggression" and "violence", moreover, it develops so that we know about some things: this is aggression, but we do not say "domestic aggression", we say "domestic violence ". Although we investigate it using the same methods as the murderers, hooligans and others. The confusion of aggression and violence is largely due to the fact that these problems are dealt with by people from different fields of science. Lawyers deal with violence, psychologists often say the word "aggression".
Recently, an attempt has been made to develop a general theory of violence. There are proponents of this theory who believe that it is possible to create a general theory - from child fights to state violence.
You mentioned the experiments of Milgram and Zimbardo, but it is necessary to clarify what it is about
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- I'll tell you about one experiment. Zimbardo made an agreement with the management of the prison near the university, took volunteer students, they were randomly divided into two groups. One group became “prisoners”, the other “overseers”. A few days later, the guards began to beat the prisoners and mock them. The experiment was interrupted, but the result was amazing - the simplest guys turned into villains.
At the same time, when they were asked why they beat the prisoners, someone said that the prisoner somehow bleakly and disgustingly looked at the bowl that was given to him, something else (and they were fed the same food as the prisoners) … After this experiment, an area in the area of aggression was identified, which was called "aggression on assignment."
That is, if a person is given a task, he can go “behind the flags” of the task, do more than is required of him, but completely calmly, because responsibility has been removed from him. He does what he was asked to do.
Milgram's experiments were a little earlier. There was such a procedure when, as it were, a "careless" student who was behind the wall had to be brought up with the help of an electric current.
Small values were usually given, but the subject felt them. By increasing or decreasing the punishment, it was possible to show the student how to solve problems or arrange letters. The subjects were given a rheostat, and there was such a red line on it - "lethal".
Actors were invited as "students" who, when they saw that the value was close to strong pain sensations, began to scream and "die" if (they) were "given" a lethal dose.
And when the “punishers” were asked why they crossed the “deadly” line, they replied that they saw in the experimenter's eyes that he supported them, allowed them, etc. After Milgram's work in the late 1960s, the American psychological the association banned these experiments and a moratorium was imposed. Moreover, it was considered bad form to mention Milgram, and now, for ethical reasons, a huge amount of this kind of research in America has stopped altogether.
If I remember correctly how Zimbardo explains it, he came up with some kind of explanation like "Lucifer theory" or something like that
-No, it's a beautiful book title. The real question is, are we the bearers of evil and cruelty, or can the situation lead to this? Zimbardo is the leader of the Situationists. Put a person in a certain situation - and people about whom we think that they are generally just angels with wings can turn into animals. And "Lucifer will kiss them on the forehead."
But Zimbardo has one more consideration, if I remember correctly: "God created hell." In one of the lectures he said so: “God created hell”
-To be precise, I will now give one quote of a slightly opposite sense. The man says: “I began to believe in God because in Rwanda I met the devil and shook his hand. If there is a devil, then God exists. For Zimbardo, these approaches are important, because he spoke in court and this is what the book about Lucifer is about. He defended the American soldiers who behaved very badly in the Abu Ghraib prison. The defense was very conditional, because he believed that all the people who created these conditions should sit in the place of these soldiers, where these soldiers could behave so ugly.
We are moving on to the second part of our conversation. As far as I remember, it will be dedicated to genocide
During the war, American lawyer Lipkin began to speculate that traditional legal concepts of mass murder were not suitable for applying them to the already known ones - primarily the Holocaust and, in general, the crimes of World War II. He began to develop provisions on the legal basis for genocide, after the war, in my opinion, in 1948, this provision was introduced. And further, Rwanda is the main model for studying genocide for psychologists, sociologists, and lawyers.
It highlights some very important elements of what stages a society goes through so that elements that contribute to genocide can arise in it.
I know a large number of psychologists who do not like to deal with these problems, explaining that in itself it is disgusting. There are indeed some very serious elements there. When you analyze such events, objectification gives a subjective feeling that perpetrators and victims are becoming equal in size. This is not a conversation about the fact that the victim is always good, right and so on. The researcher understands that the victim did not always behave adequately.
There are things that are present in the origins of genocide. Erwin Staub analyzed four genocides. Two - when one nation destroyed another nation, the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, and two others, when the state destroyed its own subjects in Cambodia and Argentina.
Staub showed that genocides almost always occur during some kind of powerful social change, as a rule, of a modernizing nature, when the inhabitants seem to have to compete who will be ahead as a result of modernization. And there is an attempt to find a laggard or a scapegoat - this figure can be called whatever you like. In states where there are several nations, they begin to choose a victim.
The role of leaders is very important here. What are the leaders on the one hand and on the other. And the leaders of the majority, that is, the leaders who will then lead to genocide, begin by spinning the map of the superiority of their country or nation over those around them. These are, as a rule, countries with an authoritarian culture. Typically, these countries have what might be called a “culture of violence”.
Very often what is called "heroic culture" of a masculine nature. But the main thing is that the role of leaders is that they enable all negative elements of this culture to unfold and point to the enemy. Then everything unfolds in an understandable way, the most vile is attributed to the enemy.
When the Tutsis and Hutu in Rwanda destroyed each other, they called each other "cockroaches", etc. This does not fall out of the general picture of propaganda, enemies are always portrayed as disgusting creatures. There is a work where military posters and cartoons of all countries that participated in the world wars and the cold war are analyzed. It turned out that in all cartoons there is an appeal to such a social emotion as disgust. There the enemy always acts as a cockroach, a rat, an amphibian. And the other side is noble people.
Therefore, very often there is a feeling that someone has stolen the idea of a drawing from someone. We are from the Germans, or we are from the Americans, or they are from us. "Have you signed up as a volunteer?", "Motherland calls!" etc. The similarity of a military poster and a caricature is largely due to the fact that it plays on the basic human emotions. We are good, so we protect a woman and a child, and from the opposite side - some kind of freaks. And this begins to manifest itself in public life and in state propaganda.
Then the search for historical examples begins. All kinds of genocide are almost always based on historical events. People interpret them at the moment of their readiness for genocide in such a way as to prove: a group of future victims is undoubtedly disgusting also because in history it either betrayed us, or was on the side of the enemy, or it is historically determined that it will be on the side of the enemy. and it must be destroyed simply because all the historical evidence suggests that it must be destroyed.
Here I would like to refer to the so-called "cultural violence", a term coined by Y, Galtung. When all aspects of culture and science, including mathematics, are used to justify direct and structural violence, These are racial signs, both historical, and literary, and musical - everything that can be used to triumph our spirit over the enemy.
I will give you a little, perhaps a comedic example. When I was a student, we were taught by Professor M. F. Nestrukh, one of the world's largest anthropologists. There was a legend that he was in the first hundred of the fascist list for destruction. We could not understand in any way what kind of threat this intelligent person posed. And then it turned out that he was the chief anthropologist in the Red Army and showed that many-sidedness occurs in our country less often than in the Wehrmacht.
Only for this could one turn out to be Hitler's enemy. It seemed like a funny story to me then. And when I began to deal with the problem of violence, it turned out that, generally speaking, all this kind of small things - how many nipples someone has, where their ears stick out. how many people have six-fingered, how many mentally retarded - go into action, the main thing is to prove that the enemies are different, that they are not people.
And the last problem I wanted to talk about is what they paid attention to when studying genocides. Observers. In most violent crime, fighting, and what we now call bullying, school fights, attention is drawn to the participants. The aggressor and the victim. And outside observers remain on the sidelines. But in reality, it often turns out that, generally speaking, this is being done for them. This is one side.
Second, the question arises: why did they not intervene? A question that always arose after the Second World War, after the Holocaust. How did the inhabitants react? How can in a short period of time quite intelligent German inhabitants be made either a silent majority or an accomplice? And when they turned to this, it became clear, firstly, the huge role of language. How euphemisms can remove responsibility from people.
Genocide in Cambodia
In April 1975, after a 5-year civil war, Khmer Rouge troops overthrew the government of General Lon Nol. Under the leadership of gene. Communist Party secretary Pol Pot (nast, name Salot Sar) began to implement the utopian idea of creating a society consisting exclusively of hardworking peasants. The forced relocation of city residents to special camps for the so-called. "Labor education". People were forced to work 12 hours a day without interruption, with strict food rationing, in appalling sanitary conditions. As a result, people were dying of hunger, exhaustion and disease.
The Khmer Rouge also fought against the "remnants" of the past: schools, hospitals, factories were closed. The monetary system was abolished, all religions were banned, all private property was confiscated. The systematic destruction of members of religious communities, intelligentsia and merchants began.
In total, approximately 1.7 million people were killed during the Khmer Rouge rule for three and a half years.
If to say that Jews are sent to a concentration camp in trains is one thing, but if they say that they are being sent to the East in trains - that is another. There are studies that have shown how important abbreviations played. When a person is designated by three letters, then he ceases to be Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, he becomes an III. And it turns out that in one case it is easy to commit violence, and in another it is more difficult.
Quite a lot of works on Germany, one of the works is even called "The Language of the Third Reich". This work shows how it was possible, by gradually changing words and designations, to lead a cultured country to the mass destruction of people. Indeed, in everyday language there was no Holocaust, there was “the final solution to the Jewish question”, and this already sounds “normal”.
The more we see a person, the more difficult it is for us to commit a crime against him.
How well do we now imagine how the genocide mechanism is triggered? It's not just to say “let's all kill Jews” or “let's all kill Armenians”. Nobody will go
-The question is how the atmosphere gradually matures in society. There is a group of people who stand out as "leaven", then others join them … A separate question is who participates. Another question is a certain general readiness of society. Indeed, in order for these people to run somewhere and begin to do something, it is necessary that there is a request in society: something needs to be done, A person has such a state, about which one psychologist spoke: “either he can smoke a cigarette, or he and his wife divorce”. And very often people make the wrong decisions. The equal size of such, at first glance, different outputs lies in the fact that there is a kind of free-floating anxiety. It is not yet objectified, because a person does not feel that the era of modernization has already begun, that "everyone will now rush forward, but I will be left here alone." He senses that there are some shifts taking place.
A normal man in the street, an ordinary average person, feels some kind of anxiety. How will this anxiety be determined? She can decide into something wonderful: "Let's build something new, let's move somewhere." But when he begins to feel that he is becoming an outsider, then a general atmosphere arises when anxiety can be turned into a pogrom.
Those genocides that we mention are not accidental. The Armenian genocide in Turkey, the Holocaust was accompanied by the feeling: “This minority lives better than we do. It takes some position. They became officers, engineers, financiers, something else. " It is striking that in genocidal societies there are many people ready to jump on the "train of modernization" or change. Cambodians destroyed not only the intelligentsia, but in general all reading Cambodians. It was just that one half of the nation was fighting against the other.
We are not very fond of, and in the West they are not very fond of remembering that when the French left Africa, almost all teachers and people with higher education were killed there. Several million people died there. Educated people were perceived with hostility. And here the question arises: how so? The layman, who until then was a completely normal person, went to work, did something, suddenly begins to participate in this movement.
And there are two very different "schools" here. One of which is more popular thanks to Zimbardo: she says that the situation is important. The second is that there are still personality traits. In the works of Zimbardo, by the way, his greater attention to situations is striking, but he never hid the fact that there is a small group of people who are ready to commit these crimes just like that. This is a crowd of bandits and criminals who were mercenaries in the old days.
Most interestingly, most of the people who commit these acts are not such villains. They do not have such a high level of aggressiveness, they are not so vicious, and the term that Hannah Arendt coined is completely not accidental. After she attended the trial of Eichmann, who was responsible for the extermination of the Jews, she called it "the commonplace of evil." An official sat in the dock, for whom these people were the same as for another - the number of nails, for example. He was more interested in how many trains need to be served in order to transport to one point, then to another, how is it going with gas, how many ovens …
One could easily imagine exactly the same one who is responsible for metallurgy - how to transport coal, ore and so on. She was so shocked that such a banal, petty person did so much evil. The most interesting thing is that many people at this time did not accept her point of view. She was accused of taking him out of the blow, because everyone would like to see a man with fangs, with blood dripping from his mouth, with blood on his hands - then everything is clear. How can an ordinary official commit such murders? But all further research shows that a large number of simple, trivial people can do crazy and ugly things.
The 1994 genocide in Rwanda was the actions of the interim government against the ethnic minority of the country, the Tutsi people, and against the moderate political Hutu. The number of those killed in 100 days was, according to various estimates, from 500,000 to 1,030,000 people.
There is a wonderful work in which a battalion of reservists of the German army is analyzed, for which documentation has been preserved. It is interesting in that the battalion turned out to be just a tracing of the social and demographic characteristics of Germany. By age, education, etc. (It happened so by chance). They served in Poland. The commander received an order to destroy one Jewish town. It is clear who is there: old people, women and children. At the same time, everyone was informed that they have the right to refuse. And several people refused, nothing was done to them. The rest went, killed everyone there, burned everything.
And the commander noted, and they noted in the documents: it was unpleasant, many were crying, someone shot in the air, then they all got drunk, vomited … In general, they worried. Then they received a second order, then a third. They did everything and cried less. When after a while they were transferred to Ukraine, the commander noted that several people approached him and asked: "When we are transferred to Ukraine, will we be able to do the same thing that we did in Poland?"
Other works also show: addiction sets in. And during the war it is. There are works where combatants were interviewed. Generals do not like these works very much, because they show that about 10% remember and know for sure that they were aiming and shooting at a particular person, they wanted to kill him. But a lot of people say that they shot in the air: an almost biological ban on killing works.
And then - yes, they got used to it, became good warriors, and this does not contradict the fact that well-trained military units experience PTSD less than military units thrown into battle that are not very well prepared.
But the first thing that turns a person into a killer is addiction. The second thing that is very important to note here is the lack of responsibility. There is a description of how the meeting at Wannsee took place. An American journalist was present. Hitler told the generals that the army should participate in the extermination of the Jews. The generals do not like this, they are still army generals who absolutely do not want to participate in this operation. Everyone crumples, shifting from foot to foot.
And suddenly Hitler says; "History is written by the winners, nobody remembers the losers and will not remember." And here is the famous phrase: “Nobody now remembers about the 1915 massacre of Armenians. I take all responsibility upon myself. " The journalist notes that everyone immediately cheered up, Goering performed some kind of Zulu dance, a pleasant, complacent state immediately set in, because the responsibility was removed from them.
And here is what Milgram later received in the experiments - if you can shift responsibility to someone, you can commit a huge number of bad deeds, this is present in genocidal readiness. And, of course, people looking for such situations cannot be ruled out. There are not many of them, but they are. These are people who are ready to participate in any act of violence.
Terrorism is another side of aggression. When, for the happiness of some people, some layer, some group, some religion, people are ready to sacrifice representatives of the same group, religion, etc., when for the happiness of the working people it is possible to send a this very working people, it is clear that some shifts are taking place in psychology. And here is the other side of what happened in Germany. After the war, so they cleared their brains in the opposite direction about that. that all Germans are guilty, that most of the German terrorists in the 70s, this entire company of the "Faction Army" ("Red Army Faction", RAF) accused their parents of complicity in the extermination of Jews and Hitlerism.
As the researchers later found out, the parents of the RAF members were dissidents. Either they were in prison, or were deprived of the right to work - for example, the preacher was deprived of the right to preach and so on. But the children did not accept all this. They saw only black and white. And in this black-and-white thinking they went to commit their crimes. Therefore, when we talk about this core of people who are ready to commit mass murder, then we must understand that one of the most serious problems is the problem of black and white thinking.
The first emotional reaction that I personally have: does this mean that, since there is a connection between the transitory, transitional states of society and the level of cruelty, does this mean that cruelty cannot be avoided?
- No, it doesn't mean at all. This means that transitional states in society must be taken seriously.
What do we have to do?
- First, society should control the state so that a culture of violence is not taught in schools. And this is quite real, this is not a utopia. An interesting thing: there are tragic events in history that are actually changed in interpretation. After all, the Russians lost the Battle of Borodino, Moscow was taken by the French. But this story emphasized the victory of the spirit. Hence the poem of Lermontov, hence the historical significance of Borodin, which is noted. For the country, this is becoming a symbolic thing.
I will give another example from Armenian history. Fifth century, the Persians are fighting for the Armenians to abandon Christianity and become fire worshipers. Battle of Avarayr - Armenians are trampled by elephants, they have lost. But the commander who commanded in this battle was canonized and became a saint. This battle is symbolic in the history of Armenia.
Why am I talking about this? Because the consequences of all these massacres and genocides are important. How do victims react? One part of the victims follows the path of revenge and revenge - terrorist organizations appear. Some people go to revenge, some - to revenge.
But revenge can be different. If anyone remembers Fassbinder's film The Marriage of Maria Brown, then the end of the film, when life is getting better, Maria Brown's meeting with her husband takes place against the backdrop of reporting on the 1954 World Cup final, when Germany became world champion. It was a symbolic act, while Germany was aware that it was a symbolic act. Life has improved. The devastation is over, the Germans are champions and a proud nation. You can be proud of such symbolic things, and it seems to me that it is better - it is better to be champions in football than to fight.
But the question of whether we, in the person of the state, in the person of society, can manage the processes that will mix or reduce the possibility of genocidal ideas emerging seems to me quite realistic.
You mentioned the biological prohibition on killing. Does such a prohibition really exist for the human species? Maybe it would be more correct to talk about a cultural prohibition - for example, about a commandment?
- With the commandments a little later, first about biology. In general, the guru in the study of aggression is Konrad Lorenz. He received the Nobel Prize in many ways for his research on aggressive behavior in animals; he argued that aggressiveness is instinct. By the way, because of him, the psychology of aggression was banned in the USSR. The ideological department of the Central Committee decided that we were fighting for peace, and it was pointless to fight instinct, so it would be better to ban Lorenz. And there was such a funny situation when, on the one hand, children's books by Lorenz were published, and on the other hand, the ideological department ordered a book from a Marxist that Lorenz was a fascist. Lorenz was not a fascist, he was an ordinary military doctor.
So, Lorenz just showed that most of the interspecies and intraspecific aggression - most of the aggression in animals is due to the fact that these interspecies and other fights are largely an indicator of strength. That. that animals die from wounds, from bites, scratches, rather a consequence of the absence of septic tanks in wildlife.
So that there are no illusions - everything that Lorenz said relates only to wild animals, 14 species of domesticated animals are the same bastard as a person.
Animals have no pursuit. An individual left the territory protected by another individual - no one will pursue her to the end to finish off. In principle, you can even name a symbolic image of the violation of this prohibition: David, who realized that you can spin a stone on a string and launch it at Goliath's head, and if you miss, then the distance is such that you can run away. Lorenz just noted the emergence of remote weapons. I pressed the button - and to hell with it, with Holland. You can't see who you are destroying.
By the way, if we talk about post-traumatism, there is a very interesting thing: the farther the military is from the real collision, the less the manifestation of post-traumatic stress. The pilots who bombed from a height have practically none. Some very conscientious people may have some remorse. And helicopter pilots already have post-traumatic stress.
Now about the commandments. Yes, in parallel there is that A. P. Nazaretyan calls it "socio-humanitarian balance". The idea is that for each of the weapons invented by man or methods of destroying other people, certain social prohibitions appear, techniques that prohibit this weapon from opening. Nuclear weapons appear - and after a while laws on nonproliferation, control over them, etc. are developed. Humanity understands that if it does not create socio-cultural prohibitions for itself, then, of course, people will gnaw each other …
What is the best way to deal with aggression in the family? How to deal with the practice of physical punishment of children? Do you think children should be punished?
- Should I flog? No need to whip. This is a very difficult problem. In fact, of course, there is bad behavior and it should be punished. On the other hand, if a person is punished, then he is shown an example of how to behave. School bullies are interesting because school teachers don't pay attention to them. Even when they are told: this boy beats the weak, extorts something, the teachers begin to defend him.
And not at all because they defend the "honor of the uniform", but because these boys, as it turned out in the studies, received very harsh punishment at home. And they learned that you can behave badly only outside the control zone of adults, Around the corner of the school, in the toilet - where no one will pay attention to him. And in front of teachers and other adults - these are good boys, the nicest people.
Therefore, the problems of domestic violence and the punishment of children overlap. This is called the “ring of violence”. Someone punishes, this becomes an example: moreover, there is a cultural understanding of when it is possible to show aggression and when it is not. You can rip off a neighbor's head, but so that no one sees or controls: so that there is no punishment for this.
Now about the punishment. You need to understand how to punish children. For what, to whom and how. For example, research shows that punishment from a mom is always perceived as less fair than punishment from a dad. I don’t know who put us in our genes, but the function of the father is a policeman. Let him be kind, good, but still a policeman, so his remarks, his punishments are more fair than those of my mother.
Second. The punishment should be immediate, especially for young children. You cannot punish on Saturday for what a person did on Monday. During this time, a huge number of events have already happened. And he does not understand why he is being punished now. It is clear that if he did something on Monday, and it was opened on Saturday, then he understands why. But here is the favorite pastime of school teachers to write everything in a diary - the diary falls into the hands of parents on Saturday! And then there is the one that disrupted the lesson on Monday. Well, I ripped it off. And he doesn't understand why he is being punished on Saturday. The lesson was canceled on Monday.
In fact, since I do not deal with child aggression very much, I cannot tell in detail and clearly the plan of how to live with a child who must be punished. I only know that there are limitations that must always be considered. Severe punishment will only lead to increased cruelty; you need to understand what the child actually did. If he is being punished unfairly, then this is not the case.
Can you list, recommend any research that could be the impetus for measures to reduce violence and aggression?
- It is necessary to study aggression. We do not just tear off the paw of a cockroach and check if it is deaf, as in the anecdote. All of this research is aimed at developing more accurate, evidence-based prevention methods. Because the current methods are just a quiet horror, you have no idea what it is. When I receive nominated works on the fact that aggression in adolescents can be reduced by playing "in streams", my first thought is: how can it be reduced? She can only raise, because someone is chosen, and someone is not, and how not to give after all this in the ear of a neighbor? What "streams" ?! This was invented by some aunt who has never dealt with aggressiveness and does not understand how to reduce it.
The decrease in aggressiveness is associated with a whole range of issues related to self-esteem, narcissism, mental disorders - with mild forms that do not reach the level of the clinic. But all this needs to be investigated.
Those who are older probably remember tube TVs. They rippled. In almost every family there was a specialist who knew exactly which place to hit - gently, with a pull or twice, so that the TV worked normally. This was one approach to dealing with some kind of negative phenomenon. The second - even the old women knew (they asked their grandson to remove the back panel) that if it starts to ripple, you need to come up and touch the light bulbs. Lost it, the contact has improved - and good.
The third approach is to take a tester and go through the entire circuit, see where you need to change the resistance, where else is there something else. I like the third way. The first two also have a right to exist, but they are less attractive to me.
Journal "Discovery and Hypotheses" December 2014