SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER

SOME OF THE INFORMATION IS MISSING OR HAS ERRORS. PLEASE REVIEW THE HIGHLIGHTED FIELDS BELOW.

Thanks for Subscribing!
  • Please check the corresponding box to confirm that you agree to the processing of your personal data by JOYCE (“we”, “our” or “us”) in accordance with our Privacy Policy, including the Policy’s Mainland China Notice (the “Privacy Policy”).





JOYCE papers presents a source of culture and inspiration in the form of pivotal literary and visual works.

How do we understand the violence that seems to have taken our society by storm? Is it mindless and irrational?

Author

Anthony Storr

Published Date

05-03-2020

Publisher

麥田

ISBN

9789863447450

"It did not make sense to suppose that all these people were sociopaths or sadists."

About this book

How do we understand the violence that seems to have taken our society by storm? Is it mindless and irrational? After watching the news of the British liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany at the end of WWII, British psychiatrist Storr asks himself how men and women could have been recruited to follow through such a policy which millions of human beings would be subjected to starvation, humiliation, degradation, torture and final extermination and he came up an appalling answer. "It did not make sense to suppose," he concludes, "that all these people were sociopaths or sadists. One had to accept that quite ordinary citizens of what had been one of the most cultured nations on earth could be persuaded, without too much difficulty and on an unprecedented scale, to treat their fellow citizens with barbarous cruelty." That is where he begins with an examination of the problem of aggression, drawing from studies of animals to understand the biological and social roots of aggressive behaviours in human beings.

You may also like