CHAPTER 1 In the Thick of It
In the mountain village of Levie, Corsica, during the 1840s, Anton-Claudio Peretti became convinced that his wife, Maria-Angelina, was having an affair with another man and that, even worse, their daughter was not his child. Maria told Anton that she was going to leave him, and she made preparations to do so with her brother, Corto. That very evening, Anton shot his wife and daughter to death and fled to the mountains. The bereft Corto sorely wanted to kill Anton, but he could not find him. In a bit of violent symmetry that seemed sensible to residents of the area, Corto instead killed Anton’s brother, Francesco, and nephew, Aristotelo.
It did not end there. Five years later, Giacomo, brother of the deceased Aristotelo, avenged the deaths of his brother and father by killing Corto’s brother. Giacomo wanted to kill Corto’s father too, but he had already died of natural causes, denying Giacomo the satisfaction.1 In this cascade of death, Giacomo and Corto’s brother were connected by quite a path: Giacomo was the son of Francesco, who was the brother of Anton, who was married to Maria, who was the sister of Corto, whose brother was the target of Giacomo’s murderous wrath.
Such behavior is not restricted to historically or geographically distant places. Here is another example, closer to home: Not long before the summer of 2002 in St. Louis, Missouri, Kimmy, an exotic dancer, left a purse containing $900 in earnings with a friend while she was busy. When she came back to reclaim it, her friend and the purse were gone. But a week later, Kimmy’s cousin spotted the purse thief’s partner at a local shop, and she called Kimmy. Kimmy raced over with a metal pole. She viciously attacked this friend of her erstwhile friend. Later she observed with pride that she had “beat her [friend’s] partner’s ass…I know I did something…[to get even] that’s the closest thing I could [do].”2
Cases like these are puzzling. After all, what did Anton’s brother and nephew and Kimmy’s friend’s friend have to do with anything? What possible sense is there in injuring or killing the innocent? Even by the incomprehensible standards of murderous violence, what is the point of these actions, taken one week or five years later? What explains them?
We tend to think of such cases as quaint curiosities, like Appalachian feuds, or as backward practices, like the internecine violence between Shiite and Sunni tribesmen or the cycle of killings in Northern Ireland or the reciprocating gang violence in American cities. But this grim logic has ancient roots. It is not just that the impetus to revenge is ancient, nor even that such violence can express group solidarity (“we are Hatfields, and we hate McCoys”), but that violence—in both its minor and extreme forms—can spread through social ties and has done so since humans emerged from the African savanna. It can spread either in a directed fashion (retaliating against the perpetrators) or in a generalized fashion (harming nondisputants nearby). Either way, however, a single murder can set off a cascade of killings. Acts of aggression typically diffuse outward from a starting point—like a bar fight that begins when one man swings at another who ducks, resulting in a third man getting hit, and soon (in what has become a clich? precisely because it evokes deep-seated notions of unleashed aggression) punches are flying everywhere. Sometimes these epidemics of violence, whether in Mediterranean villages or urban gangs, can persist for decades.3
Notions of collective guilt and collective revenge that underlie cascades of violence seem strange only when we regard responsibility as a personal attribute. Yet in many settings, morality resides in groups rather than in individuals. And a further clue to the collective nature of violence is that it tends to be a public, not a private, phenomenon. Two-thirds of the acts of interpersonal violence in the United States are witnessed by third parties, and this fraction approaches three-fourths among young people.4
Given these observations, perhaps the person-to-person spread of violence should not surprise us. Just as it is often said that “the friend of my friend is my friend” and “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” so too the friend of my enemy is my enemy. These aphorisms encapsulate certain truths about animosity and affection, but they also convey a fundamental aspect of our humanity: our connection. While Giacomo and Kimmy acted alone, their actions show just how easily responsibility and retaliation can diffuse from person to person to person across social ties.
In fact, we do not even have to search for complicated paths across which violence spreads, because the initial step, from the very first person to the next, accounts for most of the violence in our society. In trying to explain violence, it is myopic to focus solely on the perpetrator—his frame of mind, his finger on the trigger—because murder is rarely a random act between strangers. In the United States, 75 percent of all homicides involve people who knew each other, often intimately, prior to the murder. If you want to know who might take your life, just look at the people around you.
But your social network also includes those who might save your life. “On March 14, 2002, I gave my right kidney to my best friend’s husband,” Cathy would later note in an online forum that chronicles the experiences of people who become “living donors” of organs. The summer before, during a heartfelt chat, Cathy had learned that her friend’s husband’s renal failure had worsened and that he needed a kidney transplant in order to survive. Overcome with the desire to help, Cathy underwent a series of medical and psychological evaluations, getting more and more excited as she passed each one and moved closer to her goal of donating one of her kidneys. “The experience has been the most rewarding of my life,” she wrote. “I am so grateful that I was able to help my best friend’s husband. His wife has her husband back. His sons have their dad back…. It’s a win-win situation. We all win. I gave the gift of life.”5
Similar stories abound, and such “directed donations” of organs can even come to involve people who have rather tenuous connections, a Starbucks clerk and his longtime customer, for example. There can even be organdonation cascades that loosely resemble the Perettis’ murder cascade. John Lavis, a sixty-two-year-old resident of the town of Mississauga, Ontario, father of four and grandfather of three, was dying of heart failure in 1995. His heart had failed during triple-bypass surgery, and he was placed on a temporary artificial heart. In a stroke of unbelievable good fortune, a donor heart was transplanted into him just eight days later when he was on the brink of death. His daughter recalled: “We were a family of immense gratitude…. [My father] received the biggest gift he will ever receive—his life was given back to him.” Motivated by this experience, Lavis’s children all signed organ-donor cards, thinking that this symmetrical act was the least they could do. Then in 2007, Lavis’s son Dan died in a work-related accident. Eight people benefited from Dan’s decision to donate his organs. The woman who received his heart later wrote to the Lavis family, thanking them for “giving her a new life.”6 The same year in the United States, a similar cascade an amazing ten links long took place between unrelated living kidney donors (albeit with explicit medical coordination), saving many lives along the way.7
Social-network ties can—and, as we will see, usually do—convey benefits that are the very opposite of violence. They can be conduits for altruistic acts in which individuals pay back a debt of gratitude by paying it forward. The role that social connections can play in the spread of both good and bad deeds has even prompted the creation of novel strategies to address social problems. For example, programs in several U.S. metropolitan areas involve teams of “violence interrupters.” These streetwise individuals, often former gang members, try to stop the killing by attempting to break the cycle of transmission. They rush to the bedsides of victims or to the homes of victims’ families and friends, encouraging them not to seek revenge. If they can persuade just one person not to be violent, quite a few lives can be saved.
Our connections affect every aspect of our daily lives. Rare events such as murder and organ donation are just the tip of the iceberg. How we feel, what we know, whom we marry, whether we fall ill, how much money we make, and whether we vote all depend on the ties that bind us. Social networks spread happiness, generosity, and love. They are always there, exerting both subtle and dramatic influence over our choices, actions, thoughts, feelings, even our desires. And our connections do not end with the people we know. Beyond our own social horizons, friends of friends of friends can start chain reactions that eventually reach us, like waves from distant lands that wash up on our shores.
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