On March 24, 2018, as a sociologist, I had the opportunity to visit the extermination camps of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II ( Birkenau ). The project “ In Train to Memory ” was born from an initiative by CGIL , CSL and UIL and is aimed at secondary school students. I was frequently asked the following questions: “ How was it possible? ”, “ How can human beings make such mistakes? ”, “ Why so much indifference? ”, all more or less summed up in the question: what is the origin of violent actions?
Violence is not innate but is socially learned
Il sociointuitionist model (Social Intuitionist Model: SIM) is structured on the assumption that moral beliefs come from feelings and that it is the latter that give us an intuitive understanding of what is right and what is not. It therefore does not matter whether he is reading a list of appetizers or whether he is involved in a fight: the individual will always put into action some immediate evaluations on what it perceives based on the dimension of good or evil. Human beings also, benefiting from the principles of collaboration and solidarity, they tend to act in compliance with socially constructed and shared norms. Lonnie Athens, American academic, identifies the sequential model of the “violence"(violentization). This neologism, coined from the adjective "violent" and the term "socialization," refers to the set of processes through which an individual develops learning and adaptation paths to cultural and normative systems based primarily on coercion. The "educational path" of those who engage in violent behavior consists of four "rooms": "brutalization," "belligerence," "violent performances," and "virulence."
The Birth of the Brutes Through Military Training
The crucial experiences are those in which evil, making its appearance, leaves palpable traces of itself in the subjects. brutalization, like all the lasting traces of this “passage”, contains a series of destructive experiences that thicken each other and around which what Athens defines as a “violent cosmologyBrutalization involves an individual being subjected to such coercive treatment that it becomes crystallized in the subject's emotional and experiential sphere. Directing a "novice" toward the achievement of a new self-image requires a precise process of socialization, called by Athens "coaching”, which involves a series of experiences by an authoritarian figure that take on the character of milestones, signs that indicate the overcoming of a phase and the passage to a higher level. The power to train in violence, in military and non-military contexts, embodies the moment of this phase of the process since it relies on particular tricks and techniques that consist, first of all, in attributing to the student apositive identity (altercasting). The curvature to motivate and induce violent action begins instead with the teaching that one's environment is dominated by evil and/or unworthy people and that in particularly hostile situations thephysical assault It is the most suitable means to prevail in the inevitable clash. The "trainer" demands that internalize the belief that there are people who must be attacked and therefore dominated because, by nature, they occupy a subordinate position or embody “inhuman” prerogatives.
The violent act and the violence perpetrated
Those who present themselves at the entrance to belligerence (or "challenge") are forced to endure conflicting thoughts and emotions arising from their traumatic experience. Amid this rubble, they wish to reconstruct a general framework capable of reorienting their relationships with the surrounding environment. It is in this phase that all the lessons learned during violent training find a space of internal resonance, since only now can one hear the precept that has been intimated for a long time: " In this world, sometimes, it is necessary to use violence ." This memory trace manifests itself in the form of a "revelation." In the belligerence phase, according to Athens, a " mitigated violent resolution " occurs , as, for the first time in their lives, they decide to physically attack those who have unjustly provoked them. The implementation of violent action occurs in the phase called " violent performances " or "violent clashes for dominance." To enter this final room, virulence , the individual must have achieved revenge against their opponent. In light of the violent act committed, opinions of the perpetrator change dramatically: the definitions given to the action by members of primary (and secondary) groups influence the individual's self-image. The new identity casts a sort of halo effect on everyone within their own groups: being "violent" encloses the individual in a repertoire of oversimplified images and stereotypes that draw their strength from the fact that they must be reiterated. By adopting this new resolution, one's attitude is therefore reshaped from "more or less defensive" to "decidedly offensive": the determination to no longer tolerate any provocation, even the mere presence of human beings "unworthy" of such consideration, gradually evolves into the belief that one is, in turn, a fundamentally dangerous individual. The process of rape thus finds its fulfillment in a tragic circularity: the actor, from victim of brutalization , becomes an unbridled aggressor.
Julia Marra
