Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing Quotes.

1. "A myopic focus on the proposed psychopathology of perpetrators, or on their alleged extraordinary personalities, tells us more about our own personal dreams of how we wish the world to work than it does about the reality of perpetrator behavior."
- James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

2. "A myopic focus on the proposed psychopathology of perpetrators, or on their alleged extraordinary personalities, tells us more about our own personal dreams of how we wish the world to work than it does about the reality of perpetrator behavior. In that role, such explanations satisfy an important emotional demand of distancing us from them."
- James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

3. "Apparently, according to the criterion of consistency across targets, a prejudiced personality does indeed exist. Prejudice appeared to be less an attitude specific to one group than a general way of thinking about those who are different."
- James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

4. "Prejudiced individuals, according to the four researchers, were the children of domineering fathers and punitive mothers who engaged in unusually harsh child-rearing practices. These practices involved a combination of threats, coercion, and the deliberate use of parental love and its withdrawal to promote obedience. In other words, authoritarian parents are not able to show their children affection without reservation; it is contingent on the child’s good behavior. The result is children who are decidedly insecure and, paradoxically, extremely dependent on their parents. Moreover, such children fear their parents and experience unconscious hostility toward them."
- James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

5. "Adorno and his colleagues identified nine a priori clusters of personality dimensions—many surprisingly similar to Dicks’s High F Syndrome—that made up the authoritarian personality: 1. Conventionalism: Rigid adherence to conventional middle-class values. 2. Authoritarian Submission: Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the in-group. 3. Authoritarian Aggression: Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish, people who violate conventional values. 4. Anti-Intraception: Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded. 5. Superstition and Stereotypy: The belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories. 6. Power and Toughness: Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis on the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness. 7. Destructiveness and Cynicism: Generalized hostility, vilification of the human. 8. Projectivity: The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outward of unconscious emotional impulses. 9. Sex: Exaggerated concern with sexual goings-on."
- James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

6. "What else do we know about a person when we know his or her score on the F scale? Research utilizing the F scale suggests people who are high on authoritarianism do not simply dislike Jews or dislike blacks, but, rather, show a consistently high degree of prejudice against all minority groups (including, recent studies indicate, AIDS patients). Any selection of a particular hate target is guided by convenience and social convention."
- James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

7. "The problem of response set is particularly relevant to the F scale because all of the items were worded in the same direction. In other words, all items were worded so that agreement indicated a high (or prejudiced, fascist, authoritarianism) score. As a result, it was easy for researchers to demonstrate that the scale did not measure ideological content but only a tendency to agree—with anything."
- James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

8. "In short, the scale encouraged a response set of positive answers. Instead of identifying genuine authoritarians, perhaps the F scale simply singled out some very agreeable persons without strong opinions."
- James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

9. "Thus, we are wise to at least consider orientation to authority as one of several factors—including low intelligence, low education, lack of political sophistication, and external threats of specific kinds (for example, economic threat)—predisposing people to accept fascist ideology."
- James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

10. "To bluntly suggest that all Nazis had a common, homogenous extraordinary personality that predisposed them to the commission of extraordinary evil is an obvious oversimplification."
- James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing