Roy F. Baumeister Quotes

A second relationship between advertising and identity is seen in the growing exploitation of desirable identities. Farberman and others have described how advertisers have marketed their products less and less on the basis of the product's merits and more and more by associating a "dream identity" with a possession of a given product. The suggestion is that the possession of a particular brand of car or cigarette will furnish you with the identity of a successful, attractive, worthy person. The message is clear - accumulating things is an effective means of achieving identity and actualizing one's potential.

There is ample reason to question whether low self-esteem is to blame for violence. Think of the obnoxious, hostile, or bullying people you have known - were they humble, modest, and self-effacing? (That's mainly what low self-esteem is like.) Most of the aggressive people I have known were the opposite: conceited, arrogant, and often consumed with thoughts about how they were superior to everyone else.

Illusions, distortions, and self-deception appear to be integral to the way normal, well-adjusted people perceive the world. Seeing things as they really are is associated with depression and low self-esteem.

Because of the importance of perceiving the means as morally acceptable, there may be a strong ongoing need for justification in idealistic evil. The person is doing something that would normally be regarded as wrong, such as killing or hurting people. Somehow, the person must sustain the belief that it is right. This is often done by focusing on the goodness of the overriding goal.

Many research findings show that most Americans already hold inflated opinions of themselves.

More recently, studies by social scientists have emphasized that most people in modern Western society go through life with strong positive beliefs that the world is basically a nice place in which to live, that life is mostly fair, and that they are good people who deserve to have good things happen to them. Moreover, these beliefs are a valuable aid to happy, healthy functioning. But suffering and victimization undermine these beliefs and make it hard to go on living happily or effectively in society. Indeed, the direct and practical effects of some trauma or crime are often relatively minor, whereas the psychological effects go on indefinitely. The body may recover from rape or robbery rather quickly, but the psychological scars can last for many years. A characteristic of these scars is that the victims lose faith in their basic beliefs about the world as fair and benevolent or even in themselves as good people. Thus, evil strikes at people's fundamental beliefs.

Religion deals with the highest levels of meaning. As a result, it can interpret each life or each event in a context that runs from the beginning of time to future eternity. Religion is thus uniquely capable of offering high-level meaning to human life. Religion
may not always be the best way to make life meaningful, but it is probably the most reliable way.

Evil is but rarely found in the perpetrator's own selfimage. It is far more commonly found in the judgments of others.

Just as serious modern literature does not have plain old bad guys, sophisticated movies may also avoid such stock figures.

Most people who perpetrate evil do not see what they are doing as evil. Evil exists primarily in the eye of the beholder, especially in the eye of the victim.

Advertising is psychologically intrusive; it aims to make people want a particular product. Advertising must be considered as one of the most influential institutions of twentieth century America. By mid-century the country was spending more on advertising than on education or religion (Potter, 1954, p. 178). Unlike other major social institutions like education and religion, advertising has a nearly complete "lack of institutional responsibility" - that is, it has "no motivation to seek the improvement of the individual or to impart qualities of social usefulness" (Potter, 1954, p.177; also see Henry, 1963). Thus advertising is an enormously powerful institution that is largely indifferent to its effects on humanity and society, except for its concern to get people to buy more things.

The use of violent or oppressive means to solve problems is a common feature in both instrumental and idealistic evil. There is an important difference, however, and that is the extent to which the ends justify the means.

We can understand instrumental evil as the use of a particular set of means to pursue goals that, alternatively, might be pursued with acceptable means. The key question for understanding this form of evil then becomes: What makes people choose evil means rather than other, more acceptable ones?

What stress really does, though, is deplete willpower, which diminishes your ability to control those emotions.

The challenge of this book is to understand how perpetrators come to do things that others see as evil.

The result suggests that telling yourself 'I can have this later' operates in the mind a bit like having it now. It satisfies the craving to some degree - and can be even more effective at suppressing the appetite than actually eating the treat...the ones who'd postponed pleasure ate even less than the people who had earlier allowed themselves to eat the candy at will.

Evil is not likely to result when people firmly believe that ends do not justify means. If they evaluate their methods by the same lofty standards by which they judge their goals and purposes, evil will be held in check.

The reliance on judgments by others is essential. Indeed, if we limited our examination of evil to acts that perpetrators themselves acknowledge as evil, there would be hardly any such acts to examine.

The magnitude gap is also reflected in different time perspectives. Oppression, violence, and cruelty fade much faster into the distant past for the perpetrator than for the victim.

The goals of instrumental evil are generally acceptable ones, such as the desire to have money or power, but they are not normally endowed with sufficient moral force to make people think that it is right and good to use violent means. Idealism can make the methods seem right and good, or at least acceptable.