The chapter provides testimonies of individuals who took part in a genocidal process in order to understand how mass atrocities can take shape across different human societies. Through the analyses of interviews conducted with former genocide perpetrators in Rwanda and in Cambodia, it appears that many of them reported that they participated because they simply followed orders. It thus suggests that obedience to orders strongly influences individual actions during a war or a genocide. The chapter also highlights the key role of other forms of social influence, such as conformity to a group and compliance. However, the interviews reveal that complex additional factors have influenced former perpetrators in their actions, such as elements of coercion, the fear for one’s own life, and hateful propaganda. This chapter illuminatesthe many reasons that can lead a human to perpetrate evil acts.

Hierarchical situations are a complex example for determining individual responsibility, as typically a superior communicates a plan, and a subordinate executes it. Thus, the superior bears responsibility for the decision but is distanced from the outcomes, while the subordinate experiences authorship over the action but may not experience responsibility for its outcomes. This chapter focuses on how authority is wielded and how decisions are made by commanders in order to understanding the dynamics of obedience. By reviewing the claims made by some leaders of genocide, this chapters show that despite their high position in the hierarchical chain, they are frequently trying to reduce their responsibility for the atrocities conducted. Neuroscience research further showed that giving orders leads to a reduction of the sense of agency and moral emotions towards the pain of victims. These results show how hierarchical situations can allow people to commit actions that could transgress moral conducts, as agency and moral emotions are split across two individuals.

The “just following orders” argument has been used across many documented wars and genocides around the world. It suggests that the justifications given by perpetrators perhaps reflect, at least in part, a reality in their brains that would be shared across all the members of our species. The brain is a complex structure composed of trillions of neurons that controls our thoughts, our feelings, our decisions, our memory, our senses, and that regulates our body. Even though a wide range of environmental and social factors can modulate how our brains process information and computes decisions, the brain is nevertheless the central processing agent. By providing a novel perspective on what is happening in the brains of those obeying orders, I seek to reveal the mechanisms leading to immoral behaviors under obedience at a deep and individual level – that is, at the neural level. This knowledge can be used to develop personalized interventions that take into account unique neurobiological profiles.

The sphinx is a good test case illustrating the complexities of studying Greek hybrids. The pronounced sexuality of modern sphinxes (notably those of Moreau and Ingres) sets them apart from Greek examples, which themselves are very different from the sphinxes of Egypt and the Ancient Near East. Common to all is the blurring of human/animal boundaries, a phenomenon going back to the Palaeolithic. Modern comparisons from New Guinea and Africa confirm that there is an animal dimension at the heart of being human. Hybrids, born of this mixing, are polymorphous, polysemic and polyvalent. Around the hybrid there lurks a host of questions: what bits have been mixed, how exactly are the parts combined, and is the mixture taxonomically fitting or anomalous? Each of these questions shapes our response to a hybrid, affirming the power of hybridity to challenge (or affirm) categories and taxonomies. And since taxonomies are the proof of our comprehending the world by classifying phenomena, hybridity represents a culture’s uneasiness with the limits of its epistemology. If such things exist, even if only in our stories and imagination, how certain is certainty?

This chapter focuses on the individuals who actively worked to protect and save members of targeted groups during genocides, often at great personal risk. By presenting sociological, psychological, and neuroscience research designed to understand better the profile of those who risked their lives to rescue strangers in times of war, this chapter asks what makes this small subset of the population react differently than others. By combining research and interviews with rescuers, the chapter shows that both individual processes and environmental factors contribute to risking one’s own life to rescue threatened human beings. People who engaged in rescue efforts during a particular event came from a range of different backgrounds, and no single factor can be reliably used to predict why they chose to help. Some rescuers were motivated by their religious or moral beliefs, while others were motivated by empathy or a desire to protect. The chapter also argues that even though rescuers are not numerous, they are nonetheless a living examples that another choice is possible, and that human beings may find the strength to overcome hateful propaganda. This raises hope of developing efficient interventions aimed at reducing susceptibility to blind obedience.

Humans have the ability to recognize that when they perform actions, they produce effects in the external world. Even though humans are not the only animalsl with this mental capacity, their ability to perform actions is accompanied by a feeling of authorship, a feeling that “I” am the one who did it. This is what academics have called the sense of agency. When individuals claim reduced responsibility because they were “only obeying orders”, this defense is often viewed with skepticism, because the defendant has a clear motive of avoiding punishment. However, scientific methods can now be used to investigate the experience of receiving orders and how it influences how the brain processes information. As this chapter shows, obeying orders impacts the sense of agency and the feeling of responsibility at the brain level. Further, working and living in some highly hierarchical and sometimes coercive social structures, such as the military, can also impact the sense of agency when people make decisions. It thus appears that hierarchies provide a powerful ground to obtain a reduced feeling of responsibility and agency in individuals.

After looking at the Mediterranean as a zone characterized by the movement of goods, people and ideas, this chapter examines the sea as the element from which hybrids arise, such as Skylla, Nereus, the Nereids and monsters of Hesiod’s Theogony. These hybrids give expression to the anxieties of Greek speakers on the move. Contact zones like Sicily stimulated a powerful response from Greek speakers, who were constantly faced with other people, other tongues and other habits. Hybridity emerges as a useful mechanism for envisaging otherness and rendering it manageable, either as monstrous threat or as something in a more muted register: similar, yet at the same time different. It is this polarity of similarity and difference that is the pendulum swinging through Archaic Greek culture. Two places of particularly rich cultural encounters, Naukratis and Samos, illustrate how the categories of exotic and hybrid overlap. Even more complicated is Cyprus, demonstrating the most intense cultural layering in the eastern Mediterranean. Here where EteoCypriots, Mycenaean Greeks, Assyrians and Phoenicians all mingle, hybridity was a recurring feature of the island’s culture.

Chapter 5 begins with griffins and gorgons, exploring the connections between wondrous objects and hybrids. Gorgons also prompt a discussion of gender and hybridity. This chapter juxtaposes the gorgon and other female demons who threaten mothers and children with the satyr, an exaggerated figure of the man identified by and with his penis. These matched exaggerations, by turns horrific and comic, illustrate the function of the hybrid as a projection of certain human anxieties: what if the man were no more than his erection? What if the woman were as dangerous as she is beautiful? What if a mother devoured her children instead of protecting them? Each caricature exists as a counterpoint to the ordinary men and women encountered in our daily lives, but in recognizing these alternatives the Greeks are also using the contrafactual to ask what exactly it means to be human. For this reason, transformation is a recurring theme in early Greek culture, with a wide range of applications from the stage to ritual initiation. Here too the cosmos is a space of entanglement. If a human shares some characteristic with an animal, does the divine also partake of this mutability?

Greek hybrids cannot be read in isolation. To understand them requires an examination of the Near Eastern antecedents. The Greek imagination was powerfully influenced by a creative engagement with other cultures throughout the eastern Mediterranean. These engagements were characterized by bilingualism, intermarriage and the movement of artisans, traders, poets and itinerant religious practitioners. Such a pattern of cultural exchange can be seen in the so-called International Style of the Late Bronze Age, which relied heavily on hybrid motifs to fashion a shared visual language for the elites of Egypt and the Near East. In this context, the significance of hybrids varied depending on audience or market. Taweret in Egypt was utterly transformed when taken up on Crete. Greek and Near Eastern cosmogonies shared many characteristics, but Greek speakers freely adapted old motifs. Wherever we find traces of cultural exchange, ideas and objects always take on new forms in Greek settings. Each instance of a hybrid emerging in a Greek context it is testimony to the flexibility of hybrids to convey new meanings in new settings. Hybrids gave a face to the shock of the new.