How Ordinary People Live With It

So far every mechanism has been told from one side only: what happens to a mind under pressure, how a nervous system gets trained, what an algorithm does to perception. This chapter asks the question from the other direction: what has to be true, inside a perpetrator, for any of it to feel survivable to do? A single thread runs through every part of what follows: at each layer — the perpetrator’s own mind, the institution around him, even the evidentiary record that historians and clinicians later rely on — the harm is kept deniable, deniable enough that some of the very sources meant to prove it dissolve under scrutiny too.

Albert Bandura, working at Stanford, spent much of his career on a version of this question and arrived at eight psychological maneuvers people use to cause serious harm without ever revising their own sense of themselves as decent.¹ Moral justification reframes the harmful act as necessary or even virtuous — not cruelty, but self-defense, discipline, or a greater good. Euphemistic labeling launders it through sanitized language, so what would sound monstrous in plain words sounds administrative. Advantageous comparison measures the harm against something worse, minimizing a real injury by pointing at a larger one someone else committed. Displacement of responsibility locates the true author elsewhere — an order from above, a policy, a system that supposedly left no other choice. Diffusion of responsibility spreads that authorship across enough people that no one has to own it. Distortion or outright disregard of consequences keeps the harm’s downstream effects out of view, unexamined and therefore unfelt. Dehumanization strips the target of the qualities that would make harming them feel wrong. And attribution of blame relocates fault onto the person harmed — she provoked it, she brought it on herself, she made me do this.

None of these eight operate by changing a person’s moral standards — the finding worth sitting with, because it is more disturbing than the alternative. A person using Bandura’s mechanisms remains, in their own account, someone who still believes cruelty is wrong, and simply arranges, through one or more of these maneuvers, to experience their own specific act as an exception to a rule they still sincerely hold. This is the interior software that lets an abuser, a state operative, and a complicit bureaucrat all sleep at night, and it runs on the same eight settings whether the harm is a single relationship or a national program.

Herbert Kelman, writing separately, supplied the other half of the answer — not what happens inside the perpetrator’s head, but what has to be true about the surrounding situation before ordinary people will do something extraordinary and terrible.² Kelman identified three external conditions. Authorization: a legitimate authority sanctions the act, shifting the actor’s felt sense of responsibility onto that authority — this is Milgram’s agentic state, examined in this book’s first chapter, now named as a structural precondition rather than a laboratory curiosity. Routinization: the act is broken into small, repeated, bureaucratic steps, none of which feels like committing an atrocity — a quota system, a checklist, a technique menu applied in sequence, each increment too modest to register as the thing it adds up to. And dehumanization: the target is redefined, at the level of category rather than individual perception, as something less than fully human, removing the ordinary restraint against harming them.

The three-phase model of identity change originates with Kurt Lewin, who named its stages — unfreezing, changing, refreezing — as a general theory of how any settled state is dislodged and reset. Edgar Schein applied that model to the mechanics of Chinese thought-reform programs run against American civilians imprisoned by the Chinese Communists, adding a related but distinct piece of architecture: not why a perpetrator tolerates what they do, but the process shape of how a target’s identity gets dismantled and rebuilt.³ The three phases give a clean, ordered spine to a process so far described mostly through its individual components: unfreezing an existing identity by undercutting its foundations, installing a new set of beliefs and behaviors in the space that opens up, then refreezing that identity through commitment and social validation until it holds on its own. It belongs beside Robert Jay Lifton’s work on thought reform and Biderman’s chart of coercive tactics as one of the field’s cleanest statements of how the breaking proceeds, in sequence, rather than merely which tactics are available.

Stanley Cohen’s States of Denial, published in 2001, addresses a more uncomfortable question: not how a perpetrator justifies their own act, but how everyone around them — the institution, the bystander, the nation — manages to know and not know at once. Cohen documented that governments frequently plan the very atrocities they will later deny, building maximum deniability into the design from the outset, and that bystanders develop their own parallel denial of any duty to intervene.⁴ This is the social half of the deniability traced at every scale: not simply that a perpetrator constructs an alibi, but that the system around him is frequently built, deliberately or not, to make not-knowing easy for everyone else too. It sits beside Jennifer Freyd’s concept of institutional betrayal — the injury done when an institution fails to protect the people who depend on it, and who were exposed in the first place only because depending on it was the arrangement. Freyd’s point is that the betrayal is a harm in its own right, distinct from and often exceeding the original offence, precisely because it comes from the body that was supposed to answer it.⁵ The chapters on the church and on the court meet that same failure from the other side.

One case welds several of these threads together clearly enough to deserve its own telling. In 1984, followers of the guru Rajneesh, known as Osho, led by his associate Ma Anand Sheela, contaminated ten restaurant salad bars in The Dalles, Oregon, with salmonella, sickening seven hundred fifty-one people. Their goal was not random cruelty but electoral: incapacitating enough local voters to swing an upcoming county election in the commune’s favor. The CDC matched the bacterial strain to samples recovered from the commune’s own laboratory; Sheela and a co-conspirator pleaded no contest and served roughly twenty-nine months.⁶ It remains the largest bioterrorism attack in United States history, and its value here is structural as much as historical: a closed community (the organizational layer) deploying a covert method of physical harm (the toxin-and-disease mechanism examined elsewhere) in pursuit of political control (reaching toward the institutional layer above it) — three parts of the model welded into a single, fully prosecuted, fully documented case.

Two of the most famous supporting sources here have not survived scrutiny intact, and both belong with their corrections attached.

David Rosenhan’s 1973 study “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” published in Science, became one of the most cited demonstrations in this literature: eight ostensibly sane people, Rosenhan among them, checked into psychiatric hospitals claiming to hear voices, then behaved normally once admitted, and staff continued to read their ordinary behavior as symptomatic throughout.⁷ For decades this stood as canonical proof that psychiatric diagnosis can swallow a person’s credible account of themselves whole. Susannah Cahalan’s 2019 investigation, published as The Great Pretender, could not verify the existence of most of Rosenhan’s other seven pseudopatients, and uncovered documentary evidence that at least one — writing under the pseudonym Rosenhan used — had a genuine prior psychiatric history that directly contradicted Rosenhan’s account of a healthy person merely feigning symptoms.⁸ Her conclusion, now widely accepted and not seriously disputed, is that the study likely involved significant fabrication on Rosenhan’s own part.

Hannah Arendt’s account of Adolf Eichmann’s trial, and the phrase she coined from it — the banality of evil, the idea that Eichmann was not a sadistic monster but an unthinking bureaucrat who enabled mass murder through careerism and cliché rather than ideological conviction — has proven similarly fragile.⁹ Bettina Stangneth’s 2014 study Eichmann Before Jerusalem, drawing on recordings and writings Eichmann produced before his capture, when he had no reason to perform for any court, found a far more committed and articulate antisemitic ideologue than the banal functionary who testified years later — strong evidence that Eichmann gave a calculated courtroom performance, and that Arendt, however astute an observer, was working from a managed presentation rather than the whole person underneath it.¹⁰

Both cases teach the same lesson: a claim being useful to an argument is not the same as a claim being true. Rosenhan’s underlying point — that psychiatric diagnosis can override a person’s testimony about their own reality — is independently well-supported by other evidence in this book. Arendt’s — that ordinary bureaucratic participation, not monstrous individual pathology, is how atrocity gets staffed — is likewise well-supported elsewhere. But the specific studies most famous for making each point do not themselves hold up as proof, and the correction belongs beside the original every time, rather than letting a flattering but shaky source carry weight it hasn’t earned.

The construct sometimes called parental alienation is this same mechanism’s live, present-day form, still operating in family courts today. Most mental-health professionals reject Parental Alienation Syndrome as unsupported by evidence, and it has never been accepted into the DSM; it is, nonetheless, heavily relied on in custody litigation. The documented pattern is precise: a mother’s allegation of abuse measurably raises her own risk of losing custody, and a father’s cross-claim that she has “alienated” the child roughly doubles that risk again — with courts frequently misreading a protective parent’s justified vigilance as “implacable hostility.”¹¹ This is DARVO, examined in the third chapter, operating inside a Layer 3 institution rather than a single relationship: a pseudo-clinical label, lacking real diagnostic standing, used to reverse victim and offender in a courtroom — the direct present-tense descendant of the psychiatric reframe the next chapter documents at full length.

If there is a single case that proves DARVO operates as institutional standing procedure rather than individual improvisation, it is the Catholic Church’s handling of its own abuse scandal — and the evidence comes overwhelmingly from the institution’s own paper trail, not from outside accusation. Florence Rush had already named the underlying pattern, disclosure met with denial, then an attack on the credibility of the child or reporting adult, in 1980, seventeen years before Jennifer Freyd coined the term DARVO for the same sequence.¹² The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer-winning Spotlight investigation, published in 2002, documented systemic cover-up in the Boston Archdiocese: priests known to be abusive were quietly reassigned from parish to parish rather than removed, victims were settled with confidentially, and records were sealed — institutional betrayal not as isolated negligence but as standing diocesan practice.¹³ The John Jay Report, commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2004, documented more than ten thousand allegations against over four thousand priests in the United States between 1950 and 2002.¹⁴ A Pennsylvania grand jury report in 2018 documented more than three hundred “predator priests” across six dioceses over roughly seventy years, supported by internal diocesan memos showing a deliberate strategy of avoiding police involvement and managing the scandal as a reputational problem rather than a child-safety one.¹⁵ What makes this the clearest large-scale proof is exactly what made the Stasi’s surveillance files so damning in an earlier chapter: the institution’s own internal records are the evidence. The paperwork proving it was generated by the people doing it.

A small number of jurisdictions have moved to criminalize the underlying pattern itself, not only the discrete violent acts that sometimes accompany it. England and Wales did so first, under the Serious Crime Act 2015, becoming the first common-law jurisdiction to criminalize coercive control as a pattern in itself rather than a collection of individually prosecutable incidents. Scotland’s 2018 Domestic Abuse Act went further, explicitly including a course of psychological abuse. Ireland followed in 2019, France strengthened its provisions in 2020, and Australian states have begun rolling out equivalent statutes since 2022, one jurisdiction at a time rather than nationally. South Africa reached a version of the same recognition by a different route: rather than a standalone crime, its Domestic Violence Amendment Act, in force since 2023, wrote “controlling” and “coercive” behaviour into the civil definition of domestic violence — a ground for a protection order that reaches, notably, harassment by electronic communication and can compel a service provider to name an anonymous online abuser.¹⁶ The United States, by contrast, has no federal offense of this kind, and most jurisdictions still require a discrete violent or threatening act before the law will recognize anything criminal has occurred — a measurable distance behind the UK and Ireland model. What makes the leading jurisdictions’ approach worth noting is not simply that they acted, but how: they took Evan Stark’s own academic framework, developed to name and describe this mechanism, and wrote it directly into criminal statute — one of the rare instances where an academic’s naming of a pattern became, in short order, the legal definition of the crime.

Notes

Albert Bandura, moral disengagement (eight mechanisms), Stanford University; Moral Disengagement, 2016. https://albertbandura.com/albert-bandura-moral-disengagement.html ↑
Herbert Kelman, “Violence Without Moral Restraint,” Journal of Social Issues, 1973; Kelman & Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience, 1989 — three conditions (authorization, routinization, dehumanization).↑
The unfreeze/change/refreeze three-phase model originates with Kurt Lewin (1947); Edgar Schein applied it to coercive persuasion. Edgar Schein, Coercive Persuasion (1961), study of Chinese thought-reform programs against American civilian prisoners in the early 1950s. https://archive.org/details/coercivepersuasi0000sche ↑
Stanley Cohen, States of Denial (2001). https://www.amazon.com/States-Denial-Knowing-Atrocities-Suffering/dp/0745623921 ↑
Carly P. Smith and Jennifer J. Freyd, “Institutional Betrayal,” American Psychologist 69, no. 6 (2014): 575–587 — naming and defining the construct: harm caused when an institution an individual depends on fails to prevent or respond supportively to wrongdoing committed within it, compounding the effects of the wrongdoing itself. Freyd’s DARVO, used elsewhere in this book, comes from the same research program. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037564 ↑
1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack, The Dalles, Oregon: followers of Rajneesh (Osho), led by Ma Anand Sheela, contaminated 10 restaurant salad bars with salmonella, sickening 751 people, to influence a county election; CDC matched the bacterial strain to the commune’s laboratory; Sheela and a co-conspirator pleaded no contest and served approximately 29 months. Thomas J. Török et al., “A Large Community Outbreak of Salmonellosis Caused by Intentional Contamination of Restaurant Salad Bars,” JAMA 278, no. 5 (1997).↑
David Rosenhan, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” Science, 1973.↑
Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender (2019) — investigation finding significant fabrication and unverifiable pseudopatients in Rosenhan’s 1973 study.↑
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), coining “the banality of evil.”↑
Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014), drawing on pre-capture recordings and writings to argue Eichmann was a committed, articulate antisemitic ideologue who gave a calculated courtroom performance.↑
Parental Alienation Syndrome in family court: not accepted by most mental-health professionals nor included in the DSM, yet heavily relied on in custody litigation; documented pattern that a mother’s abuse allegation raises her risk of losing custody, and a father’s alienation cross-claim roughly doubles that risk. https://www.propublica.org/article/parental-alienation-and-its-use-in-family-court ↑
Florence Rush, The Best Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children (1980), documenting the disclosure-denial-attack pattern seventeen years before Jennifer Freyd coined “DARVO.”↑
Boston Globe Spotlight investigation (2002), Pulitzer Prize-winning, documenting systemic cover-up in the Boston Archdiocese.↑
John Jay Report (2004), commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, documenting more than 10,000 allegations against over 4,000 priests in the U.S. between 1950 and 2002.↑
Pennsylvania grand jury report (2018), documenting more than 300 “predator priests” across six dioceses over roughly 70 years, supported by internal diocesan memos. Report of the 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury, Office of the Attorney General, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (2018).↑
Coercive-control criminalization: England & Wales, Serious Crime Act 2015, s.76; Scotland, Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018; Ireland, Domestic Violence Act 2018/2019; France, loi du 28 décembre 2019 (2020); Australian states rolling out equivalent statutes from 2022. South Africa took a civil rather than criminal route: the Domestic Violence Amendment Act 14 of 2021 (most provisions in force 14 April 2023) added “controlling behaviour” and “coercive behaviour” to the statutory definition of domestic violence as a ground for a protection order — expressly covering harassment by electronic communication and empowering a court to order an electronic-communications service provider to furnish the identity behind anonymous online abuse. https://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/acts/2021-014.pdf.↑

Notes

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