The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,338

reaction was a physical revulsion to what they were doing.251 The reservists did not recollect the trauma of their first murders in the morally colored ways we might expect—neither with guilt at what they were doing, nor with retroactive excuses to mitigate their culpability. Instead they recalled how viscerally upset they were made by the screams, the gore, and the raw feeling of killing people at close range. As Baumeister sums up their testimony, “The first day of mass murder did not prompt them to engage in spiritual soul-searching so much as it made them literally want to vomit.”252

There are barriers to sadism, then, but there must also be workarounds, or sadism would not exist. The crudest workaround is evident during rampages, when a window of opportunity to rout the enemy opens up and any revulsion against hands-on harm is suspended. The most sophisticated workaround may be the willing suspension of disbelief that allows us to immerse ourselves in fictional worlds. One part of the brain allows us to lose ourselves in the story and perhaps indulge in a touch of virtual sadism. The other reminds us that it’s all make-believe, so our inhibitions don’t spoil the pleasure.253

Psychopathy is a lifelong disabling of the inhibitions against sadism. Psychopaths have a blunted response in their amygdala and orbital cortex to signs of distress, together with a marked lack of sympathy with the interests of other people.254 All serial killers are psychopaths, and survivors of brutal government interrogation and punishment often report that some of the guards stood out from others in their sadism, presumably the psychopaths.255 Yet most psychopaths are not serial killers or even sadists, and in some environments, such as public spectacles of cruelty in medieval Europe, nearly everyone indulged in sadism. That means we need to identify the pathway that leads people, some more easily than others, toward the infliction of pain for pleasure.

Sadism is literally an acquired taste.256 Government torturers such as police interrogators and prison guards follow a counterintuitive career trajectory. It’s not the rookies who are overly exuberant and the veterans who fine-tune the pain to extract the maximum amount of actionable information. Instead it’s the veterans who torture prisoners beyond any conceivable purpose. They come to enjoy their work. Other forms of sadism also must be cultivated. Most sexual sadists start out wielding the whips and collars as a favor to the more numerous masochists; only gradually do they start to enjoy it. Serial killers too carry out their first murder with trepidation, distaste, and in its wake, disappointment: the experience had not been as arousing as it had been in their imaginations. But as time passes and their appetite is rewhetted, they find the next one easier and more gratifying, and then they escalate the cruelty to feed what turns into an addiction. One can imagine that when tortures and executions are public and common, as in the European Middle Ages, the acclimatization process can inure an entire population.

It’s often said that people can become desensitized to violence, but that is not what happens when people acquire a taste for torture. They are not oblivious to the suffering of others in the way that the neighbors of a fish-processing plant stop noticing the noisome smell. Sadists take pleasure in the suffering of victims, or, in the case of serial killers, positively crave it.257

Baumeister explains the acquisition of sadism with the help of a theory of motivation proposed by the psychologist Richard Solomon, based on an analogy with color vision.258 Emotions come in pairs, Solomon suggested, like complementary colors. The world as seen through rose-tinted goggles eventually returns to neutral, but when the goggles are removed, it looks greenish for a while. That is because our sense of neutral white or gray reflects the present status of a tug-of-war between circuits for the color red (more accurately, longer wavelengths) and circuits for the color green (medium wavelengths). When red-sensitive neurons are overactivated for a protracted period, they habituate and relax their tug, and the rosy tint in our consciousness fades out. Then when the goggles are removed, the red- and green-sensitive neurons are equally stimulated, but the red ones have been desensitized while the green ones are ready and rested. So the green side predominates in the tug-of-war, and greenness is what we experience.

Solomon suggested that our emotional state, like our perception of the color of the world, is kept in equilibrium by a balance of opposing circuits. Fear is in balance with reassurance,