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Who Are the Scariest People in the World?

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Preface

So who are the scariest people in the world? Or is there any individual who gives you the heebie-jeebies the most?

Warning: The scariest people are not those who wield guns and swords; they are definitely not those who are clothed all in black and wear ski masks; they are not the army in Manipur or those behind the IT cell of the present regime; and visually they are not even close to Norman Bates (Psycho) in a bathroom or Jack Torrance (The Shining) shattering a door with an axe, and grinning and glancing at you. 
On the contrary, Arendt’s concept of the ‘banality of evil’ and the contentious Milgram experiment tell us clearly who the scariest people are, and illustrate their identity—and you don’t have to look far to find them. For a hint, what do Adolph Eichmann, Hannah Arendt, 1963, Stanley Milgram and obedience have in common?

 

Who Are the Scariest People in the World?
The banality of evil is built on the assertion that depravity and hostility drive absolute evil but our actions are not driven by depravity and hostility alone. Conformity and complacency equally create actions that are pure evil.
 

Introduction

Who do you think are the scariest people in the world? Or is there any individual who scares the bejesus out of you? Spiders, snakes, spectres and spirits will not be considered for the sake of our own comfort and confidence. To narrow down the parameters, by scary people, let us refer to an individual or a group of them. You know, when they are around, they make your flesh crawl. If not, their mere presence sucks the last ounce of energy that would normally improve the scale of our audacity in times of General Scary and Frightening Moments (GSFMs).

In politics, the 20th century had seen Idi Amin, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot a.k.a. Saloth Sâr, and their ilk, whose names are bracketed with brutality. Their ruthlessness is matched only by those of fictional characters in films, novels and mythologies. Those in mythologies can again be clubbed together with spectres and spirits; and those in films and novels have been found from numerous researches that they do manipulate our brain activity. In fact, studies have also unsparingly theorised why some people prefer watching horror movies: that it creates intense emotion and relatable experience while knowing it is just a film or a novel and the viewers get a kick out of it. But we are not considering them today as we will focus only on real people. 

More than political figures, the Pol Pot & Co has become more of a history now. For as long as we have emotions, we have to put up with ghosts and gore. However, these are also extreme examples in the sense, a Pol Pot would come into this world rarer than a pandemic. The other examples of horror and horrifying elements, as we have seen, are often merely fictional. So, let’s keep all of them aside. Let’s talk about real people. 

So Here They Are: Fitting In

We will be missing the woods for the trees if we overlook one group of people who are not related to any Sâr, Amin or Hitler, or the Dracula and Co, but nonetheless who are as real as coronavirus. 

For that matter, they can be scarier than they actually are because they are also the one who executes the plans made by the Pol Pot & Co. They are none other than people who conform, people who obey and people who are a sucker for rules. 

So, let’s name names: the scariest people are the conformists—people who follow the conventions and rules, who comply, and who obey, whatever the cost is. All for the sake of fitting in. Yes, they do. They will jump off a clip when others do it. They will shoot you if a leader asks them to do it. In comparatively normal time, they will bang utensils to drive away coronavairus. If asked, they will tickle your ass even if they are a moralistic individual; you know, those kind of people, who would feel awkward just in hearing the word ass. And the more I see of them, the more unbearable are the GSFMs.

You might say that they will act and behave responsibly if they are intelligent and not necessarily do something which is outrageous. Rethink about it if you feel that way. And this is where I would like to bring in Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), one of the most celebrated philosophers of the 20th century, and her concept of the banality of evil.

Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichman walking in yard of his cell in Ayalon Prison, Ramla
Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichman walking in the yard of his cell in Ayalon Prison, Ramla (Image: Flickr - Government Press Office, Israel)

1. Banality of Evil

To summarise: One of the architects of the Holocaust, Adolph Eichmann, a Nazi Obersturmbannführer (equivalent to a senior assault unit leader) was standing trial for war crimes in 1961. Hannah Arendt was covering it for The New Yorker and found one simple thing. Eichmann was a terrifyingly normal bureaucrat. But what does it mean?

Read the first in the five-part Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt series that was published in the 16 February 1963 issue of The New Yorker. If you are interested, there is also a book titled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The hardcover version is only ₹9,485 only!
 

Any case of genocide demands condemnation and it also desperately needs a legal solution that provides justice in the strictest term. The perpetrators must pay for the crime against humanity and surviving victims must be well compensated. That’s a given.

In the course of the trial, the more Arendt found out about Eichmann, the more normal the latter became; and normal in the sense he was a law-abiding German citizen and just another government official, whose aspiration was to climb up the bureaucratic ladder; and also normal, as Arendt mentioned in her writing: ‘Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified Eichmann as normal’ during the trial. He had also made statements that would only describe him as a normal human being, but even so, who had been captured for and was found guilty on several charges of crime against humanity and affiliation with illegal organisations.  

Like any normal individual, he tried many times in explaining his plea. Regardless of his claim for innocence, it was found that he was directly responsible, amongst other reasons, for instructing the deportation of Jews and giving orders to the army and the military, and eventually he was sentenced to death. Here, our takeaway is that such a normal human being is responsible for the death of million of people belonging to a particular race.

Banality as Opposed to Absolute

The banality of evil is built on the assertion that depravity and hostility drive absolute evil but our actions are not driven by depravity and hostility alone. Our ignorance and weaknesses or even complacency equally create actions that are pure evil. In other words, absolute evil is caused by depravity and hostility. But depravity and hostility alone do not necessarily create evil; but rather our stupidity, shortcomings and smugness do, and hence the banality of evil, as opposed to an absolute evil. 

I read it as an evil act that is committed for the sake of atrocity is absolute evil. Yet that is rare though not uncommon. Instead, our banal action or a banal attitude or a banal worldview is sufficient to create evil that can wreck the world. Conformity and complacency can also create pure evil. We can take reference from Arendt’s writings and put it this way: what the Nazis did was absolute evil while what Eichmann demonstrated through his collaboration was the banality of evil. 

The Nuremberg Trials, which were one of the watershed moments in the history of law and jurisprudence, had 199 defendants and we can safely round off that 99% of them must be, just like Adolph Eichmann, normal human beings. The only abnormalities were the death penalty, how Eichmann was abducted from Argentina by Nazi hunters and the Mossad, and the issues of a State performing acts against sovereignty of another State and which arose following his abduction (that can as well be considered a case of Shanghaiing).

To refer to Eichmann again, he cited, as Arendt reported, the concept of Kantian ethics that ‘the rightness or wrongness of actions does not depend on their consequences but on whether they fulfill our duty.’ Well, a philosophical argument sounds convincing but at the root of the problem lies the fallacious notion of morality, which conformists excel in endorsing. 

You follow the rules, and you fulfill the duty, because that is the job profile, because that is also what everyone does. That is Conformism 101. Only the sight of Dracula on a dark, deserted street in wee hours will be scarier than this. And my point is that the conformists have blind loyalty and as always, they would go to the extent of killing another human being albeit they would defend legally and philosophically. In the case of Eichmann, he would first hide like a rat if he knew his conformity had had grave consequences.

Usually, these people are the patriots, the nationalists, the believers, whose common middle name is Normal. Their concept of evil is the lack of abstract ideas like patriotism and faith, when in reality evil is the thing that they do. To quote WH Auden: ‘Evil is unspectacular and always human / And shares our bed and eats at our own table.’  


Usually, these people are the patriots, the nationalists, the believers, whose common middle name is Normal. Their concept of evil is the lack of abstract ideas like patriotism and faith, when in reality evil is the thing that they do. To quote WH Auden: ‘Evil is unspectacular and always human / And shares our bed and eats at our own table.’ It is worthwhile to mention that two shortest routes to become a human being is through humanity and rationality; while other factors, such as rules, nations, religions that we consider are the routes are mere social constructs that change from time to time.

The fact that, with such ease, conformity can bring out the monster in us is terrifying. Sometimes, when you are in your professional environment, you go through an existential crisis because it does not make sense that even education cannot help here. The fact that people always prioritise rules to reason is frightening. This is not even an exception but a rule because, quantitatively, most people do these annoying and dreadful things all the time. 

In the end it turns out it is part of human nature to comply, conform and be complacent. That is also apparently how normal is defined or it has come into existence. It only terrifies me more. On one hand, deviations cause anxiety and awkwardness but there must be a middle ground. On the other, monsters and devils in literature and any form of fiction, be it it books or films, are a reflection of our own image. After all, they are a product of human imagination as much as evil is inherent in us.

Now that Arendt’s concept of the banality of concept has set the ground for our understanding of the scariest people, let’s see another topic that hit us quite close to home. The Milgram experiment. While Arendt’s is ideologically controversial, a series of experiments conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933–1984)—in the same year in which Eichmann in Jerusalem was published though it had started two years earlier—had put a question mark over research and ethics. It was so serious that his application for membership in the American Psychological Association was hold up for a year. However, the experiments gave disturbing yet compelling insights into blind obedience and conformism, and became a seminal work. Milgram was also conferred with the AAAS Prize for Behavioral Science Research in 1964.

Ten years later, Milgram had published the reports as a book titled Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. The hardcover is only ₹6949.99 only. By the way, both this book and Eichmann in Jerusalem do have more afforable paperback versions. Check links below.  

Milgram’s Electric Box
Milgram’s Electric Box at the Ontario Science Centre (Image: Isabelle Adam/Flickr)

2. The Milgram Experiment

Before we see how this experiment is related, here is a brief introduction: Stanley Milgram was then a psychology professor at the Yale when he conducted a series of experiments to study when and why we obey in general and after the Holocaust in particular. Reports suggest this study on social psychology started three months after the trial of Eichmann began in Jerusalem. He was driven by one of the profound questions of those post-war days:

Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices? 

— Obedience to Authority, Milgram

These two questions have prompted many people to write books and conduct a number of researches, including Milgram who initiated the study to find the relationship between conscience and conformity. So, he called for participants and made them believed that the experiment was for ‘a study of memory and learning’. The real objective, as we know today, was to see how far a participant would submit to an authority figure even if it involves harming another individual and is completely against their morality. It was also to find how we are influenced into committing, so to say, the banality of evil. 

‘You Have No Other Choice, Sir. You Must Go On.’

To briefly explain the procedure, there are three people in a session: (i) a learner (an actor who pretends to be a volunteer); (ii) an experimenter dressed in a gray lab coat (playing an authority figure who was also another actor); and (iii) a teacher who is the participant/subject and in charge of the session. (Note: All of them were male.)
 
The learner is strapped to an electric chair after he has been asked to memorise a list of word pairs. Now, the teacher administers an electric shock that increases 15 volts for every mistake the learner makes, from a shock generator having 30 switches with volts ranging from 15 to 450 . 
 
The learner gives wrong answers intentionally and the teacher has to increase the electric shock for every wrong answer. If the teacher refuses, the experimenter gives a series of orders: (i) Prod 1: Please continue; (ii) Prod 2: The experiment requires you to continue; (iii) Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue; and (iv) Prod 4: You have no other choice but to continue.  

Guess how many teacher gave the maximum shock. 65% of them! That is, 26 out of the 40 participants. Well, the first conclusive remark that Milgram made out of this finding was that we are likely to follow orders if those are given by an authority figure. In many cases, we would even go to the extent of killing another human being and that is what he deduced from the experiments about the Holocaust. 
 
In the introduction to The Perils of Obedience, Milgram wrote:
Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the person dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, with defiance or submission, to the commands of others. For many people, obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct.

(Source: Harper’s; abridged and adapted from Obedience to Authority)

He further mentioned, which is now referred to as the ‘agentic state theory’, that:

The essence of obedience is that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred, all of the essential features of obedience follow.
Conformity implies that we are always inclined to identify ourselves with a group. This is an innate human nature; and it is quite evident from our nationalities and religions, and other factors such as profession and areas of interest that give us an identity. In the background, the iconic Pale Blue Dot demonstrates that we are just a speck of dust, and so insignificant in the grand scheme of things and the best we can do is to relate ourselves to others.  

Run in the Other Direction!

Academic studies have shown as well that conformity serves social and psychological functions beyond those of identity. For instance, the concept of normative social influence in psychology further reinforces that ‘the influence of other people that leads us to conform in order to be liked and accepted by them’ (Social Psychology, 5th Ed 2005; E Aronson, TD Wilson, and AM Akert). 

Prior to the Milgram experiment, the groundbreaking Asch conformity experiments also explain how we are always under the influence of social pressure. It has also shown that the bigger a group is, the more we conform; that the harder a task is, the more conforming we also become; and that the higher the social status of the group members is, the further and more we conform. And for me, the more the people conform, the more frightening a situation becomes.

Besides Solomon Asch’s work, there have been a number of studies: among others, the Crutchfield Situation, the Stanford Prison Experiment and Sherif’s Autokinetic Experiment, which have contributed to the study of conformism. On one hand, we can understand why people comply and conform but that is not the issue. The socio-psychological reasons for conforming only explain or justify the action but not the consequence. 

Hannah Arendt and Stanley Milgram have come the closest to explaining that consequence, yet the fact remains that humans are a conforming being, who is capable of committing even murder and genocide. This is contradictory to the maxim that we are an intelligent being. Perhaps this is the yin and yang that guides our existence and the universe. Albeit it still does not justify particularly groups actions that are evil and criminal in nature. It will be only supercontradictory to state that some sort of abnormality can make us more humane.    

It might be difficult to change human nature. The least we can do is to think critically, question the status quo and develop healthy skepticism. This is a lot of preaching in one sentence, but apparently these are the only things that we can do to get rid of scary people and save ourselves from GSFMs. 

Of course, a society is extra generous when it comes to obedience. Incentives abound when we obey: from families and neighbourhoods to schools and colleges. We are always rewarded, come what may, when we obey. The government is also delighted when the citizens are obedient for one and only one reason: it ensures that nothing disturbs the power structure that they would literally kill to maintain it as is. 

Adjectives such as law-abiding and respectable are used to drape well-planned occasions of rewarding obedience masterfully. For that matter, one of the main objectives of our schools, colleges and universities is to instill the idea of obedience among the students. It is the epitome of discipline to comply, conform and be complacent. The death of critical thinking is another story. It is also a different story when it becomes excessive while observers and bystanders start using words like bootlickers and sidekicks. And we know it. This happens all the time everywhere.


A society is extra generous when it comes to obedience. Incentives abound when we obey: from families and neighbourhoods to schools and colleges. We are always rewarded, come what may, when we obey. The government is also delighted when the citizens are obedient for one and only one reason: it ensures that nothing disturbs the power structure that they would literally kill to maintain it as is.

 

When Milgram showed us that we don’t even have to look far to find these people, we become more conscious of their presence. They are all around us; and it will be ironic if, after all these deliberations, we find out that we are one of them ourselves! Remember that saying that is pregnant with meaning: when we point one finger at others, the other three point back to us. In my defense, however, I would say I live by the philosophy of Charles Bukowski, who once put it succinctly: ‘Wherever the crowd goes, run in the other direction. They’re always wrong’. And I would run even farther because they are also scary. 

In the End 

If we have to rank the people in degrees of being the scariest, obviously, conformists will occupy the top slot and very close to them, in the second position, are the people who always stand for the government and authority, and who prefer rules to reason.

Further Reading

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