Genocide of One: A Thriller (22 page)

He had seemed to be on the right track, but now Kento felt he had to discard that
hypothesis. He took a rumpled handkerchief from his pocket and polished his glasses.

The time had come to read through section 5. If he struck out here, he’d have no more
clues. His great adventure taking on the FBI would be over. He pictured how miserable
he’d look turning himself in to the police, a thought that put him in a dark mood.
He turned the pages of
Contemporary Politics Quarterly
. The section he was looking for began in the upper left-hand of the open page.

“We find problematic the statement that biological evolution occurs only when there
is a sudden modification in genes. The fossil record shows that biological evolution
is both gradual and intermittent. In the phenomenon of evolution lies an unknown,
hidden mechanism that both gradually and intermittently transforms species. Organisms
accumulate subtle changes over long periods of time, but also at certain times can
display sudden transformations. And this applies to us primates as well.

“In the book
Humans and Evolution
, Professor Georges Olivier of the University of Paris discusses human evolution from
the standpoint of physical anthropology. In his words, ‘Soon future human beings will
suddenly appear.’ Approximately six million years ago creatures branched off from
ancestors they share with chimpanzees. They evolved first as
Pithecanthropus
, then as hominids, Neanderthals, and Cro-Magnons, and this process clearly reveals
that evolution is speeding up. The further evolution of mankind could take place tomorrow.

“The next generation of humans that evolve from present-day man will have an enlarged
cerebral neocortex and possess an intelligence that vastly surpasses ours. Olivier
imagined their intellectual abilities in the following way: ‘They will have the ability
to perceive a fourth dimension, to immediately grasp complex wholes; they will have
a sixth sense, an infinitely developed moral consciousness—mental qualities that are
incomprehensible to us.’

“It is less likely that this next generation of humans will appear in developed countries
than in undeveloped areas cut off from their surroundings. It is easier for individual
genetic mutations to be established among the kinds of small groups that dwell there.

“What sort of action will these new humans take? One thing we can say with certainty
is that they will try to destroy us. Unless they eliminate us, they will not be able
to secure their own habitat. They will view us as extremely dangerous lower animals
that spend their time killing their own species and who possess the scientific technology
to destroy the earth’s environment. Creatures with lower intelligence and moral capacity
will be obliterated by those of higher intelligence.

“When human evolution occurs, we will soon vanish from the face of the earth. We will
suffer the same fate that befell Peking man and the Neanderthals.”

Right after Arthur
Rubens took the test to enter kindergarten, his parents were called into the principal’s
office and told that their son’s IQ was off the charts. “Off the charts” was meant
in a good way, and Rubens’s parents—his father, who ran a small chain of restaurants
in Maryland, and his housewife mother—were ecstatic.

When Rubens reached his teens his IQ was within measurable limits but still continued
to be at the upper reaches of the normal distribution curve. The graph of this curve
told the story—only one in every ten thousand people possessed his level of intelligence.
Assemble all the people in America who had the same IQ level or higher and they wouldn’t
even fill a baseball stadium.

Contrary to the expectations of those around him, though, Rubens himself soon gave
up on his ability. By the time he was in his midteens he already knew he was not very
creative. Assimilating the academic achievements of his predecessors was no problem,
but he couldn’t add anything innovative to the pool of existing knowledge. In the
history of mankind flashes of inspiration from geniuses have built science and civilization,
and from an early age Rubens knew he lacked the kind of antennae that could pick up
those kinds of divinely inspired revelations.

So when he entered Georgetown University at age fourteen, he no longer saw himself
as a child prodigy but merely as a brilliant person. He wasn’t interested in money
or power. The only desire that set him apart was a burning zeal for knowledge, which
led him to sit in on a wide variety of classes. What interested him most was the history
of science. For him, tracing this history, from natural philosophers of the sixth
century
BCE
to developments in theoretical physics in the twentieth century—the entire journey
down the paths of human knowledge—was a kind of pleasure that nothing else could match.
From a scientific perspective, the most regrettable period in human history had to
be the Dark Ages, when Europeans put a halt to this march of knowledge. If this period
hadn’t happened, mankind would have made it to the moon in the nineteenth century
at the latest.

Rubens enjoyed his studies, but the rest of his student life was awful. His youth
and intelligence, and his blond hair and handsome features, were more than enough
to rouse the jealousy of older students. When his classmates bullied him their eyes
were full of malice, but what really annoyed him was how they kept bringing up the
fact that he was a virgin. As he saw the ugly faces of these jealous men jokingly—but,
deep down, seriously—show their contempt for him, Rubens noticed a certain trend:
the less intelligent men were, the more superior they acted when it came to sex. Whenever
Rubens tried to be friendly with any coeds, the harassment would get even more intense.
The idiots around him reminded him of male animals butting their huge horns together
in a battle over females.

The experience turned Rubens into a cold observer. If he played dumb and pretended
not to notice the spitefulness of others, they got carried away and revealed their
brutish nature all the more. Without realizing they were like an open book to him,
they showed themselves for what they truly were—nothing but animals.

Competition in society, he concluded, came down to two things: food and sex. In order
to eat more than other people, to store away more goods for themselves, to grab the
most attractive members of the opposite sex, people easily grew contemptuous of others
and abused them. People who maintained this animal brutishness used intimidation and
intrigue to rise to leadership positions. The free competition that capitalism guaranteed
was a clever system to sublimate this violence and direct it instead into the energy
behind economic activity. Without laws or the welfare state, the animal appetites
of capitalism would never be held in check. At any rate, the animals called human
beings were, he concluded, deceitful, using intellect to prettify and conceal their
primitive desires and justify their actions.

Six years after entering the university Rubens obtained a PhD in foundational mathematics
and experienced for the first time, physically, the beauty and grace of a woman. Then
he left Georgetown behind. He got a postdoc at the Los Alamos National Laboratory
and then a position at a research facility in Santa Fe in order to study the new field
of complex systems. At a café there he happened to run across a psychologist who told
him an interesting story, one that determined the course his life would take. The
story was about research into the firing rate of American soldiers.

“During the Second World War, when US soldiers came face-to-face with enemy troops,
at what rate do you think they actually pulled the trigger and fired?”

The question was asked casually, over coffee, and Rubens answered without giving it
much thought. “About seventy percent?”

“No. Only twenty percent.”

The psychologist, seeing the surprise and doubt in Rubens’s face, went on. “The other
eighty percent said they ran out of ammo, or made up some other excuse, to avoid killing.
This percentage didn’t change even in the face of banzai charges by Japanese troops.
For soldiers on the front lines, the stress of killing someone else was evidently
greater than the fear of being killed themselves.”

“That’s surprising. I always figured human beings were more savage.”

The psychologist grinned. “There’s more,” he said. “This report confounded the military.
Can’t have the troops becoming moralistic, right? So they conducted psychological
research to see how they could raise the firing rate. By the time of the Vietnam War
they’d gotten it up to ninety-five percent.”

“What did they do?”

“It was simple, really. They replaced the round targets on the shooting ranges with
targets in the shape of humans and had them pop up like real people. And they instituted
a system of rewards and punishment based on how well soldiers did at the range.”

“Operant conditioning?”

“Exactly. Like training mice to push the lever that provides them food. However,”
the psychologist said, his expression turning a little downcast, “this reflexively-shoot-the-enemy-when-you-see-him
method of training had a huge defect. They’d removed the psychological obstacles for
the soldiers up to the point of shooting, but they hadn’t considered post-shooting
trauma at all. The result was massive numbers of returning Vietnam vets with PTSD.”

“Okay,” Rubens said doubtfully. “But if human beings hate murdering that much, why
don’t wars disappear? And how could the United States win the Second World War with
a firing rate of only twenty percent?”

“First of all, two percent of all male soldiers are what you’d call born killers.
Psychopaths, people with no psychological compunction about killing. Most of them,
though, when they return to civilian life, lead normal lives. Only when they’re in
the military are they ‘ideal soldiers’ who kill without regret or a guilty conscience.”

“But you can’t win a war with just two percent, can you?”

“They discovered it’s easy to make the remaining ninety-eight percent into killers,
too. You start by training them to obey authority figures and identify completely
with the group in order to wrest away their individuality. Then you work to put a
distance between them and the people they kill.”

“A distance?”

“Right. In two senses of the word. A psychological distance and a physical distance.

“If the enemy is from a different race,” he explained, “with a different language,
religion, and ideology, then there’s already a psychological distance, which makes
it all the easier to kill them. In wartime it’s easy to change people into killers
if they’re the kind of people who ordinarily put a psychological distance between
themselves and other races, who see their race as superior and other races as inferior.
Look around and I’m sure you’ll find a couple of people who fit that description.
Teach people that their opponents are morally inferior brutes and you wind up with
slaughter in the name of justice. This sort of brainwashing takes place both in peacetime
and wartime. Calling the enemy derogatory terms like Jap and Dink is the first step.

“To maintain a physical distance,” the psychologist went on, “you need advanced weapons
technology.

“Even soldiers who hesitate to shoot the enemy close up don’t hesitate when they can’t
see the enemy directly and are given ever more destructive weapons that allow distance
killing—trench mortars, naval artillery, bombs dropped from planes. Soldiers who are
traumatized for life by shooting the enemy right in front of them can kill hundreds
of people in bombing raids with no lasting scars.

“Some scholars say that what separates humans from animals is the power of imagination.
But when people use weapons like these, any imagination they might possess is paralyzed.
They drop bombs on people but can’t see the horrible deaths of those below them trying
to escape. And this sort of perversion is not limited to soldiers. It’s a universal
psychology found in ordinary citizens. Do you see my point?”

Rubens nodded. People look askance at a soldier who bayonets an enemy but treat a
pilot who shoots down ten enemy aircraft as a hero.

“Weapons of mass destruction try to distance the enemy and create as many victims
in the easiest way possible. Instead of beating a person to death with your fists
we’ve moved to using a knife, then a gun, then a cannon, a bomber, and finally nuclear
intercontinental ballistic missiles. In the United States, creating these weapons
has become one of our key industries. That’s why war will always be with us.”

As he got more into this kind of research, Rubens realized all modern wars share a
common structure. Those involved in war are the people with the cruelest wills. In
other words, the leaders who decide to go to war are the ones farthest from the actual
war, psychologically and physically. The president of the United States attending
a banquet in the White House hardly has enemy blood spurt over him and never hears
the gut-wrenching battlefield cries of a buddy whose body is torn apart and is dying
in agony. The president is swathed in a protective cocoon, where he feels almost none
of the psychological guilt associated with murder and can give free rein to his innate
brutality. As military organizations have evolved into this sort of structure, and
as science and technology have further refined weapons, the slaughter of human life
in modern warfare has intensified. The decision makers in war can, without a twinge
of a guilty conscience, order massive air raids that kill untold thousands.

Are a country’s leaders, who order wars knowing they will lead to the deaths of tens
of thousands of people, normal persons in terms of cruelty? Or are they rather abnormal,
hiding their excessive aggressiveness behind a pleasant smile?

Rubens decided it must be the latter. People who are obsessed with power, who have
survived the political battles that got them into their current positions, have to
have a belligerent, combative quality far beyond the norm. Still, since in a democracy
the will of the people determines the system by which the leader is chosen, any leader
emerging from it must embody the will of the majority. That being the case, it is
possible to replace war psychology with the psychology of those in power. In order
to answer the question of why people fight wars, Rubens found it essential to throw
light on the psychopathology of the person who orders a nation to go to war.

As he deepened his insight into complex adaptive systems at the Santa Fe lab, in his
spare time he enjoyed pursuing this line of reasoning. Even after he returned to the
Los Alamos facility, where he worked, his desire to inquire further into the war psychology
of leaders never lessened. He quickly mastered psychopathology and clinical psychology
and, using these and the methods of pathography, analyzed the personalities of the
two main US presidential candidates. He concluded that the election of Gregory S.
Burns would lead to a higher chance of war. Half a year later, when Burns won the
presidential election, Rubens decided that human history was moving in a bad direction
and that he wanted to see this process from the inside. He was in his late twenties
by then and had opted out of the scholarly life. The time had come for him to leave
the ivory tower and get out in the open sea of the world at large, filled, as it were,
with the living creatures called humans.

He started by using connections he had at the Los Alamos lab to look for a job that
would place him close to the White House. Rubens’s exceptional intellect was highly
attractive to government agencies. Both military intelligence and DARPA, the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, tried to recruit him, but just then he learned
about a think tank he’d never heard of before. The Schneider Institute, headquartered
in Washington, DC. It was one of many think tanks established in the wake of World
War II, and while other think tanks focused on such areas as economics, diplomacy,
and military strategy, the Schneider Institute worked on information strategy. Officially
they were a private PR firm, but their biggest clients were the CIA and the Defense
Department. The institute did its best to keep a low profile and was much less known
than think tanks such as the RAND Corporation.

The Schneider Institute maintained a neutral position, neither conservative nor liberal,
and thus had good relations with every administration. Rubens decided it was the perfect
place for him, and he went for an interview and was hired.

Rubens was given his own office and the title of researcher at the institute, which
occupied an unassuming six-story building near the Potomac. Other than the miscellaneous
work he was compelled to do, he was told he could pursue any sort of research he wanted
to. He found out later that this was a probationary period. He was given a battery
of psychological tests and lie detector tests and underwent a thorough background
check by the FBI, during which agents visited his former places of residence. A year
later, after they’d determined he had no financial difficulties, no foreign relatives,
didn’t participate in any antigovernment movements, had no criminal record, and had
no perverted sexual inclinations, he was granted TS/SCI-level security clearance.
And he immediately became much busier. He was promoted to analyst and was dispatched
to the front lines of the information war the Pentagon was leading.