Psychological Investigation
of Political Violence
Dear Colleague,
The Press Release for my recently published NATIONS HAVE THE RIGHT TO KILL appears below (or CLICK HERE for the complete, online version of the Press Release).
Building on my book’s findings, I propose exploration of the psychological sources of collective forms of violence that have dominated the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries—posing a threat to the survival of the human race.
Below are a series of issues/questions that my research associates and I are addressing. Please respond by providing your own insights and observations. These will be appreciated and very helpful to us as we move forward with our project.
To provide your own reflections on any or all of these questions/issues, simply go to the bottom of the NEWSLETTER PAGE. We look forward to receiving your response.
(1) People examine in great depth the psychological sources of behavior in nearly every dimension of human existence. Yet when it comes to psychological motives underlying collective forms of violence, barely a peep. Isn’t this astonishing? Yet silence is taken for granted. Why do we hesitate to extend psychological concepts into the domain of politics?
(2) If an individual performs actions that result in destruction or self-destruction, we often assume the presence of psychopathology. Yet the term psychopathology rarely appears in relationship to the massively destructive and self-destructive actions performed by societies. Why is this case?
(3) Perhaps we hesitate to explore motives because institutional forms of violence such as warfare occur so frequently in the historical record. If a form of behavior is normal—or at least culturally normative—some people assume we do not need psychological explanations.
(4) Behavior in the political realm seems to emanate from an autonomous dimension of reality. Violent events seem to follow a logic or dynamic independent of willing agents. Yet we cannot deny that what occurs “out there” is initiated by human beings.
I’m looking forward to receiving your insights and reflections. PLEASE RESPOND by going to the bottom of the Newsletter Page.
Best regards,
Richard Koenigsberg
 Psychologist Investigates Why Human Beings Wage WarDr. Richard Koenigsberg has made significant, new discoveries about the causes of political violence. In his latest book, he reveals why nations go to war. Elmhurst, NY (PRWEB) July 31, 2009 — Well over 200 million people died in the Twentieth Century as a result of war and genocide. Journalists and historians document the carnage, but do we really understand why it occurred? Dr. Richard Koenigsberg is a psychologist who studies the causes of political violence. “Why do societies engage in activities that result in massive destruction and suffering?” Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil examine the psychological reasons why relationships fail and people gain weight. Political violence threatens to extinguish the human race. Where are discussions of the psychological sources of war and genocide? Dr. Richard Koenigsberg brings his unique perspective to bear upon the reasons nations engage in acts of violence against other nations and groups within nations. Koenigsberg’s latest book, Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War—recently released by Library of Social Science, Publishers—explores the ideologies and thought processes that led to the Holocaust and Second World War. What did Hitler believe he could accomplish by initiating the Final Solution? What motivated him to unleash a war that wreaked devastation and chaos throughout the world—and led to the destruction of his nation, his people and himself? Can the case study of Adolf Hitler and Nazism tell us something about other instances of political violence? Although Hitler is thought of as an aberration, Koenigsberg believes his thinking is not unlike that of other leaders—who identify a certain group as the nation’s mortal enemy and believe that their nation cannot survive unless the enemy group is eliminated. Koenigsberg asks: “Do wars occur against our will? Or have we human beings created the destructive political world that we encounter on a daily basis? If we understand the reasons why we have created such a world, might this enable us to awaken from the nightmare?” In her book review, lawyer and author Lee Hall writes about the potential impact of Koenigsberg’s insights: “Dr. Koenigsberg’s message is one that anyone with an interest in changing the course of human history should reflect upon. The striking lucidity of Nations Have the Right to Kill will be a catalyst for our collective evolution.” About the AuthorRichard A. Koenigsberg is a political psychologist, author and lecturer—formerly a college Professor—known for his research on collective forms of violence. His four books include Hitler’s Ideology—called an “instant classic.” He received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. Book Description/How to OrderNations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War by Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph.D. For Media InterviewsOrion Anderson For Sales or Review CopiesHugh Galford For further details and ordering information, visit: http://www.nationshavetherighttokill.com/ ### |
I’m not an expert in these areas, so please forgive any irrelevancies.
1. My impression is that there is a literature on psychological dynamics related to warfare, including group phenomena such as groupthink and individual factors, such as psychological profiles of various leaders (my colleague, Thomas Preston, has been doing some interesting work on developing psychological profiles of leaders).
2. There have been some works looking at psychological pathologies in people such as Adolph Hitler and Joe Stalin. The psychological work on Woodrow Wilson is indirectly relevant insofar as it may have affect the peace treaty of 1918, the League of Nations, and the subsequent drift to WWII.
3. The literature on democracy and warfare (finding that democracies rarely fight each other) has at least an implicit psychological element in it: ordinary people, who do much of the dying in warfare, press democratic regimes to stay out of wars from a recognition of the suffering they (the ordinary people) will undergo in a war. The old American Voter (Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes), which used a social psychological model, found that the antiwar group in the US in the 1950s was women who were old enough to have had brothers, husbands, or sons in WWII.
They knew what the fear and worry and sorrow were about. There is also a recent book published by the University of Kentucky Press about leadership (I forget the author’s name). He does a psychological assessment of a large sample of world leaders and finds that they pretty much all fit the Alpha male profile of primate leaders generally, including all sorts of dominance behavior, including warfare. Unfortunately, the warfare part of his findings is circular, for his sample was deliberately chosen from leaders who had fought great battles, typically including warfare. Peaceful leaders appeared not to interest him and so weren’t included.
4. Again , my impression is that at least some of the political psychological literature does look at warfare, including the role that perceptions of others plays in escalating conflicts to violence. I do wish that somebody could do an in-depth analysis of the psychological dynamics of the GW Bush Administration and assess what role those dynamics played in the multiple mistakes regarding the Iraq War, including the decision to torture some prisoners.
Good luck on the project.
Comment by David Nice — August 18, 2009 @ 3:58 pm
1. Psychological concepts seek objectivity in method through determinism. The domain of politics can only exist in a subjective environment fueled by emotion due to human limitation.
2. Because the subjective environment of the domain of politics disallows psychological definitions.
3. Psychological explanations are conceptual tools of the domain of politics. Psychology is featured as a component of mass behavior, not a solution.
4. The human being has a preset nervous system defined by evolution to respond to the behavior of the presenting environment. Any behavior perceived to originate as an autonomous dimension of reality, be it political or other can only be met with this simple human resource.
Comment by W. Michiel Hawkins — August 18, 2009 @ 5:10 pm
I believe the absence of psychological concepts and the notion of psychopathology from the discourse of war and political violence has a great deal to do with the role of power in discourse. the terminology of psychopathology is applied to those with the least power- individuals and , perhaps, small or weak groups. these terms help marginalize those entities. The use of this terminology makes it seem that it is a small minority of persons or groups holding these views or demonstrating these behaviors, and makes it easier to deal with these individuals in punitive and sometimes violent ways. The wishes of those who are labeled “pathological” are disregarded, since those wishes are considered pathological as well, and this makes it easier to impose measures upon these individuals or groups against their will.
When larger and more powerful entities act in ways that would usually be considered pathological, the entire set of ideas about dealing with those who are pathological – the clinical approach- is impracticable. There is no authority that can effectively restrain them and so we try to “reason” with them. We use the diplomatic approach, trying to use persuasion to influence them because we are unable to use force or unwilling to take the risks that a forceful approach would entail.
Comment by Patricia Akhtar — August 19, 2009 @ 12:23 pm
I am more interested in what we can do positively to reduce the incidence of political violence than in explaining it, but, having said that, understanding the psychological or spiritual causes of the (nastier, more a priori avoidable) forms of violence can probably point to steps that can reduce it. I say “or spiritual” because I doubt that primarily quantitative empirical studies can get to the heart of the matter, although such studies, pertaining to parts of a largely qualitative inquiry, can make the results a bit more persuasive. I think the work done by George Lakoff in metaphor theory and the relationship of family moral models to politics helps us understand the sorts of narratives whose acceptance promotes violent responses to problems as distinguished from responses involving mutual understanding, treating the others as having inherent worth themselves. Lakoff and others have provided cognitive science with a powerful new understanding of the nature of human moral and political thought, one that deserves to replace the model promoted in the twentieth century by analytic philosophy (itself heir to currently indefensible Cartesian assumptions about mind).
Another source of psychological wisdom about the roots of violence whom I admire is Michael Lerner, who has PhD’s in both philosophy and psychology. Years ago Lerner conducted, with his colleagues, extensive qualitative studies (as part of helping the subjects cope with stress) on large numbers of more or less normal people from a diverse range of vocations. His main publication in this area is Surplus Powerlessness. Lerner makes the case (which has persuaded me) that our socioeconomic system is kept in existence by distrust, which is reinforced by a not-entirely-conscious acceptance of the view of human nature that philosophers call psychological egoism, i.e., that everyone is out for himself only. Yet everyone in some sense or other wants to relate to other persons on in very different terms, more or less in the I-Thou fashion described by Buber.
The innate desire for recognition by others, however, tends to be thwarted from our earliest days, by others already more socialized in the egoist system than we are. Thus, parents encourage a child to excel at competitive activities; they tell themselves that this is in the child’s interest, but the child experiences the pressure as serving the parents’ agenda and not responding to his innate desire. To abbreviate a lengthy analysis, the result is that we internalize self-blame, and the message is that we are not worthy of equality with others.
This has the effect that, even if we get involved in progressive political activity, and start to be successful in promoting egalitarian values everybody at some level wants, the voice of our childhood (“you are not worthy of this”) speaks up and we start expressing doubts. The fall-back position is that genuine community is a pipe dream; the best we can do is the Hobbesian social contract, a mutual trade-off of egoists. The difference between what progressives could do and what they actually do, rooted in the tendency to self-blame, is surplus powerlessness.
In his other efforts Lerner has been working to find ways to go against this tendency, promoting spiritual and political values he associates with “the left hand of God,” the voice of hope, and the politics of meaning. These are almost identical with the values associated with Lakoff’s Nurturant Parent model of the family. What Lerner calls the right hand of God and the voice of fear corresponds to Lakoff’s Strict Father model of the family. It is clear that there is greater danger of intergroup violence where the national or religious community is gripped by the voice of fear, the right hand of God, or the narrative frame associated with the Strict Father model of the family.
Now, to go back to the question why psychology (as an academic discipline?) has not had much to say about the causes of political violence, the cases of Lakoff’s and Lerner’s research and activity provide points to an answer. Cognitive linguistics is perhaps not recognized as psychology, although this may reflect academic territoriality more than anything else. Also, precisely the part of Lakoff’s research that touches on moral politics is less quantifiably empirical than his earlier now-widely accepted results on conceptual metaphor. Lakoff’s civic concerns (he obviously favors what he calls nurturant parent values and the national politics that would express them) are confused by his critics with his explanatory theory of political discourse, so the latter is sometimes wrongly dismissed as biased and misusing what is presented as impartial science.
Lerner has, to his credit, never been very interested in doing a merely academic study although I think he may well have discovered, or at least cogently restated, some important truths about how human beings think and the role of the unconscious in preventing us from realizing what one might plausibly call our highest aspirations.
Comment by Jan Garrett — August 19, 2009 @ 8:53 pm
As a psychologist and sociologist I have been interested in war, violence and suicide. In the 1980’s I taught such a course which included stranger and acquaintance rape (date rape). Since that time I have noticed that early wars were violence in the sense of two conflicting sides each wanting possession of land, ideology, religion, whatever. In early times (several centuries ago) the focus was on ends.
Who won what. In more modern times we seem to focus more on the weapons of war (the means). We have fallen in love with complex knives, automatic rifles, drone airplanes that involve no humans or human casualities. Yes we are still fighting over land or terrorists or ideology but lately the focus seems to be “who has the upper hand” or who can do the “cleanist kill” without losing soldiers. We have become means obssessed. In some cases (but not all) whoever has the best armory seems to be ahead. We have become fascinated with weapons.
My belief is that people are carrying guns to political rallies because of a sociological concept called “reactance”. This is defined as a motivational force that tries to restore a threated freedom. People at these rallies feel powerless to the change they see occuring. So they resort to what is tried and true–carrying a gun. Notice we are falling back on means.
I think a fundamental shift occurred after 911. People are afraid of what they don’t know or what might happen. Chris Matthews on “Hardball” keeps asking the question “Why do people carry guns to political rallies? What he doesn’t understand is that there are “gun people” and “non gun people”. Just like the abortion debate the two sides can never (probably) find a common ground. If I were flying on a plane I would want every person who is legally allowed to carry a gun to do so. We have to out “means” the bad guys. Now to some people this will sound crazy. But I would submit to you that in uncertain times people buy and carry guns.
In a strange sense, we have passed the “ends” argument. Individuals want to control their own destinies. Could this be a partial explaniation of many people’s fear of government sponsered health care? I don’t know.
Comment by Loren Wingblade Ph.D. — August 20, 2009 @ 3:27 pm
Here is a quote from my own book (see below *) on a similar topic:
“Preconditions To Genocide (Section 1.8)
Are mass killings avoidable? Hitler’s holocaust was based on racism; Stalin’s slaughter was based on the concept of class struggle. Can we say that these two ideologies of intolerance are responsible for mass killings? Or should the tragedies be attributed to the evil nature of leaders? The two tyrants were not alone; it is impossible to kill millions without favorable social conditions. Can such conditions be identified? Can they be eliminated? How can this be done? I am not sure how to answer such questions. But I strongly believe that all occurrences of mass genocide should be analyzed and exposed, not hidden or forgotten.
Mass murder occurs when brutal and sadistic criminals, to be found in every society, are promoted to positions of dominance, when propaganda is used to dehumanize the targeted population and when children are inoculated with intolerance and hatred. It occurs when victims (“inferior races” or “class enemies”) are excluded from the norms of morality, when ideological totalitarianism is imposed and when freedom is suspended. Fear and violence, the preconditions of genocide, are likely to be found in societies with large numbers of thieves and informants. Stalin and Hitler were fanatical leaders inspired by a gang mentality and by the concept of “historic mission.” They believed that intolerance and large scale brutality were necessary ingredients of social order. Each of them was also supported by the ‘cult of personality.’ ”
* Book title: “Hell on Earth: Brutality and Violence Under The Stalinist Regime.”
Author: Ludwik Kowalski
email: kowalskiL@mail.montclair.edu
Additional excerpts can be seen at: http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/excerpts.html
Please share the above link with those who might be interested.
P.S.
I would be happy to exchange books with Dr. Koenigsberg. Each of us will probably be motivated to write a short review. Topics of our books deserve publicity. In fact, anyone interested in reviewing my short book about Stalinism should contact me. The review, either positive or negative, would be added to those already posted at:
http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/revcom.html
Thank you in advance,
– - – - – - – - – - – - -
Ludwik Kowalski, a retired physics teacher and an amateur journalist.
Updated links to selected publications and reviews are at:
http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/cf/
http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/my_opeds.html
http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/revcom.html
Also an ESSAY ON ECONOMICS at:
http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/economy/essay9.html
Comment by Ludwik Kowalski — August 23, 2009 @ 11:00 am
Psychology has focused on the individual human being, the “personality”, the identity, the physical entity and its relation to its mind, far more than on social systems. By looking to how individuals fit into their social contexts, are “adjusted” and “appropriate” or not, questions of how the social context itself is doing– sane or insane, violent or not, etc. have tended to be overlooked.
Comment by Erica Hollander — August 28, 2009 @ 3:48 pm
Here is an excerpt from my book coming out next month called, Healing Humanity: Life Without Shame. I would love to hear back on reader’s responses. I am in private practice in Camarillo, California.
All of us are medicating shame, and it feels best when we join with others to do so. We start with another person—a spouse or child or boss—and shame them to avoid our internalized shame. This helps, but it is more effective if done with others. Gossip was invented for this function—the two of us against them.
Even more effective is when one country goes against other countries, judging and criticizing them for being different and strange and wrong. This evolves into nationalism, and racism, where those who appear one way condemn those who appear another. This makes us believe that we belong, that we are connected to a large number of people. The larger the number, the more right we feel, as our views are reflected back to us by so many. The larger the condemned group, the greater the effectiveness in warding off shame. When one whole group shames another whole group, it is easy to rationalize being right.
The emotions that bind the attackers become infinitely stronger when they attack physically. The other group will, of course, attack back in self-defense. Then they, too, bond into a tight unit. Our “leaders” who start wars are offering up intense emotions that imitate intimacy. They hope to be valued for it. As physically abused children bind more tightly to abusive parents than do normal children?known as trauma bonding—war creates connection.
The human need to bond into community has been distorted by the need to medicate shame.
The natural, loving communion that would arise in shame-free families and a shame-free culture is a gentle bond, motivated by positive, loving feelings. It reflects who we are as humans. It is our humanness. It doesn’t need to be strong because it permeates our entire being. It leads us to work well with others. It isn’t a sacrifice that requires intensity for maintenance. It isn’t even discipline. Discipline isn’t needed. It is a forward draw that feels wonderfully good. Shame deprives us of living like this all the time. Shame deprives us of living without war.
Comment by Anne Stirling Hastings, Ph. D. — August 28, 2009 @ 4:02 pm