Can Science Explain the Evil of October 7th?

Three years after the October 7th massacre, the images and acts of that terrible morning still disturb anyone with a basic moral compass and human compassion, and it is impossible not to wonder when confronted with the horrifying deeds:

How are human beings capable of carrying out extreme, systematic and uninhibited cruelty?

Political experts and social researchers can provide a partial answer, and so brain researchers, psychologists and sociologists have tried over the years to crack the scientific and biological mechanisms that form the basis of human evil, from the horrifying acts the Nazis committed in the Second World War to the atrocities of crime and terror organizations exposed in the global media.

What goes through their heads (Photo: Srugim Studio)

The brain behind the cruelty

From a neurological perspective, brain imaging studies (MRI) led by scientists such as Professor Simon Baron-Cohen from Cambridge University found that practical human evil is accompanied by disruption or "shutdown" of the emotion of empathy in the brain, which in professional terms includes the areas controlling the nervous system in the prefrontal cortex and the insula. In these extreme states, the seemingly normal person loses the ability to perceive the other as a subject with feelings and gradually becomes what is colloquially called a "monster."

Studies in the field of psychopathy conducted among subjects who lost control over themselves point to erosion or damage to the function of the amygdala, the brain area responsible for processing fear and identifying distress in others. The absence of an empathetic emotional response to another's suffering (which requires constant training, great patience and high-level self-control) allows terror operatives, for example, to act with absolute cold-bloodedness when carrying out an act of torture or destruction of another person, without feeling moral inhibition or any emotion of compassion and mercy toward the victim or target of elimination.

Nazi propaganda and brain scans (Yad Vashem Archive, Photo: Amel Uzunovic from Pexels)

Group blindness and obedience

In an attempt to decipher how seemingly ordinary people integrate into terror organizations and after prolonged training and significant brainwashing carry out horrifying acts like machines without emotion, psychological researchers invested time, money and deep thought in analyzing personality tests and scientific experiments on the human brain.

Analyses of Rorschach tests (inkblot), conducted on senior Nazi regime officials at the Nuremberg trials, showed that most of them did not suffer from chronic psychotic mental illnesses, but rather displayed high degrees of conformism and narcissism and also achieved very high results in psychotechnical tests for determining IQ.

Stanley Milgram's famous experiment from Yale University and Philip Zimbardo's study known as the "Stanford Prison Experiment" proved that under conditions of authoritarianism, de-individualization and removal of all personal responsibility and moral emotion toward the other, the average person is capable of inflicting severe and extremely cruel suffering even on his close family members.

The main process such a terrible and fearsome person undergoes is called "dehumanization," a psychological process in which the victim of atrocities is redefined as less than human, and this terrible definition completely neutralizes natural conscience barriers and mechanisms.

Terrorists and weapons (Musaib Mushtaq/Shutterstock, IDF Spokesperson)

Sadism as a tool of control

In examining the atrocities carried out by crime organizations worldwide (such as drug cartels in Mexico) or international terror organizations, science identifies a combination of natural or acquired practical cruelty with empowering group sadism. Criminological studies show that the use of extreme violence, beheadings and public documentation of atrocities do not stem only from individual pathological impulses, but serve as a planned psychological tactic for paralysis and helplessness of a single opponent or an entire population. This is the basic infrastructure for operations called "terror," from the word dread.

At the organizational level of absolute evil, internal social norms of cruel "rites of passage" create deep cohesion among the perpetrators through shared guilt, and turn sadism into an accepted norm that grants senior status and exaggerated power to terrorists capable of easily disconnecting themselves from any basic human emotion known to the normal person.

Light from the darkness (Photo: Shutterstock)

Victory of spirit and faith

To end on a good note, facing the scientific mechanisms investigating the root of evil stands a simple and ancient truth. Within the framework of the ongoing and unceasing struggle between light and darkness, all that remains for the simple person is to pray and hope that believers in good and light will defeat the forces of darkness on all fronts and in all rounds. This is a struggle that does not depend on science, but on complete faith that the best is yet to come.