Reading 14

“It is always the enemy who started it. Even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.”

- Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (1960)

“Children learn to justify their aggressive actions early: They hit a younger sibling, who starts to cry, and immediately claim, ‘But he started it! He deserved it!’ Most parents find these childish self-justifications to be of no great consequence, and usually they aren’t. But it is sobering to realize that the same mechanism underlies the behaviour of gangs who bully weaker children, employers who mistreat workers, lovers who abuse each other, police officers who continue beating a suspect who has surrendered, tyrants who imprison and torture ethnic minorities, and soldiers who commit atrocities against civilians. In all these cases, a vicious circle is created: Aggression begets self-justification, which begets more aggression. Fyodor Dostoevsky understood perfectly how this process works. In The Brothers Karamazov, he has Fyodor Pavlovitch, the brothers’ scoundrel of a father, recall ‘how he had once in the past been asked, Why do you hate so and so, so much? And he had answered them, with his shameless impudence, I’ll tell you. He has done me no harm. But I played him a dirty trick, and ever since I have hated him.'”

- Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (2007)