Every time we witness an act that we feel to be unjust and do not act we become a party to injustice. Those who are repeatedly passive in the face of injustice soon find their character corroded into servility. – Julian Assange,
explaining why he leaks national secrets to the world
In my last OP, which I titled “
Someone Asked me Why I Hate my Country”, after noting that the question is far too abstract to be meaningful, I discussed several things that I hate about my country.
Those things include: a justice system that produces the
largest imprisonment rate of any nation in the world and is
pervaded by racial bias and
torture; such extreme influence of money in politics that it is
built into our system and legalized; such rampant militarism that it spends on “defense”
almost as much as the rest of the world combined,
has more than 700 military bases scattered throughout the world, and
engages in violent interventions against other nations more than any other country in the world; contributes to global climate change so disproportionately to its population that it is responsible for approximately
one quarter of all world-wide carbon dioxide emissions; regularly violates international law and
believes it has the right to do so, and: is characterized by the
greatest level of income inequality of any of the rich nations of the world.
I will add here one more thing, which summarizes so much of what I hate about the elites who exercise so much control over what our country does. This is a quote from the
National Defense Strategy of the United States of 2005:
Our strength as a nation-state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes and terrorism.
Thus it is that our nation’s leaders contemptuously refer to judicial processes and international organizations constructed over more than a century for the purpose of maintaining world peace as a “strategy of the weak” – and they lump them together with terrorism in that regard.
What kind of person, organization, or nation considers the rule of law and institutions designed to secure peace as the enemy – other than thugs, bullies, thieves, outlaws, sociopaths, etcetera?
How has the United States of America Come to This? As I think about these things that I hate about my country the obvious question that comes to mind is, How did this happen? Surely, most Americans are decent, peace loving people who have no wish to destroy the rest of the world. Why do they tolerate a government that does all these things in their name, with so little protest?
That is a question of monumental importance because it is the passive acceptance or support of all these things that allow them to continue. I strongly believe that if most Americans felt like I and most other DUers do about these things, a small minority of sociopaths wouldn’t be able to continually perpetrate them. Just as Hitler’s Third Reich required the passive acceptance and support of large portions of the German population in order to carry out its Final Solution, so does the current leadership of the United States – or any other country – require at least a minimum degree of acceptance and support for its policies by a critical mass of its citizens in order to sustain its preferred activities.
I can think of three major reasons for this passive acceptance and support for what should be recognized as widespread and continuous sociopathic behavior carried out in the name of the American people.
REASONS FOR PASSIVE ACCEPTANCE OR SUPPORT OF SOCIOPATHIC BEHAVIOR
Obedience to authority and other aspects of authoritarianismThe Milgram experimentsIn an effort to better understand the many atrocities committed by Hitler’s Third Reich, Stanley Milgram examined justifications for participating in genocide by accused war criminals who testified in the
Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. Because the most common justification for their acts was “obedience to authority”, Milgram devised and conducted his now famous
obedience experiments in order to develop a deeper understanding of how obedience to authority is able to over-rule conscience.
In the most famous of these experiments, men were recruited for the experiment through newspaper ads. They were told that they were participating in a “memory” experiment, in which they would play the role of “Teacher”. Their job was to deliver electric shocks to a “Learner” whenever the Learner gave the wrong answer to the memory test. The Learner’s role was to purposely give wrong answers, thereby necessitating that the Teacher deliver progressively higher voltage “electrical shocks” to the Learner with every wrong answer. Unknown to the Teacher, who was actually the subject of the experiment, the Learner was part of the research team, and the “electrical shocks” were fake, as were the Learner’s reactions to the “electrical shocks”.
At 75 volts, the Learner gives a grunt, simulating pain. By 120 volts, the Learner shouts “Hey, this really hurts”. By 150 volts, the Learner shouts “Experimenter! Get me out of here. I won’t be in the experiment any more. I refuse to go on”. By 270 volts the Learner is hysterical, screaming “Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Do you hear? Let me out of here.” At 345 volts the Learner fakes unconsciousness or death, but the experiment continues. After 450 volts is used three times, the experiment ends.
If the “Teacher” at any time during the experiment turns to the Experimenter (who is the authority for the experiment) and suggests that the experiment stop, the Experimenter explains in no uncertain terms that the experiment must continue. The purpose of the experiment is to see how far the “Teacher” will go before he puts the welfare of the “Learner” above obedience to the Experimenter and refuses to go any further.
Prior to conducting his experiment, Milgram asked 39 psychiatrists how many
“Teachers” would go all the way to the third use of 450 volts. They all said that nobody
would do that. Yet, of 40 “Teachers” participating in the experiment, 85% of them went past 150 volts (the point at which the Learner demanded to be let out of the experiment), and 62% went all the way.
Milgram also conducted variations of the experiment. If the Learner was seated right next to the Teacher (thereby increasing the potential for empathy), the percent of Teachers who went all the way was reduced from 62% to 40%. And if the Teacher was allowed to observe a fellow teacher refusing to participate, the percent who went all the way was reduced to 10%.
InterpretationThese findings were revolutionary and mind blowing. The fact that 100% of the psychiatrists whom Milgram consulted prior to his experiment were so far off in their predictions means that these findings were entirely unexpected, even among so-called “experts”.
It is important to note that these experiments were conducted in the United States – on Americans, not Germans. It would be perhaps understandable to conclude from reading the history of the Nazi Holocaust that there is something evil about the German character – as I thought when I was a child. But the Milgram experiments, as well as other research and a review of 20th Century and earlier world history contradict such a conclusion. The tendency towards extreme obedience to authority seems to be a very widespread human trait.
The fact that 62% of participants in Milgram’s experiment demonstrated no limit whatsoever to their continued torturing of their pretended victims suggests an explanation for the widespread acceptance and participation of the German people in the Nazi genocide (and other people in other genocides): The need to obey authority often trumps matters of conscience, even in respect to torture or murder.
If there is a silver lining to the results of Milgram’s experiments it is the ameliorating effects that he demonstrated. The fact that the percent of “Teachers” who “went all the way” was reduced from 62% to 40% when the “Learner” sat next to the “Teacher” means that the empathic impulse has the potential to play an ameliorating role. The fact that the percent who “went all the way” was reduced to 10% when the “Teacher” observed a fellow Teacher refusing to participate means that excessive obedience to authority can be ameliorated through exposure to those who set a good example.
Bob Altemeyer’s study of authoritarianismBob Altemeyer is a retired psychology professor who spent most of his life researching authoritarianism. He describes this research in his book, “
The Authoritarians. There are authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders. Both are required in order for a nation to go down the road to genocide and other crimes against humanity – the leaders to pave the way, and the followers to vote the leaders into power, do the dirty work, and otherwise support their leaders. Altemeyer defines authoritarian followers as having the following three core characteristics:
1) High degree of submission to authority
2) Willingness to attack other people in the name of the authority
3) Highly conventional attitudes
He provides a 22 question personality survey that measures a person’s right wing authoritarian
follower propensity. He calls it the
right wing authoritarian (RWA) scale because in the United States the great majority of authoritarians are politically right wing.
I discuss authoritarian followers (RWAs) in detail in
this post, specifically their tendency for submission to authority, conformity, hatred, cruelty, and cowardice. Altemeyer sums up RWAs like this:
If illogical thinking, highly compartmentalized ideas, double standards, and hypocrisy help one to be brutally unfair to others, high RWAs have extra helpings in all those respects. If being fearful makes one likely to aggress in the name of authority, high RWAs are scared up one side and down the other. If being self-righteous permits one to think that attacks against helpless victims are justified, authoritarian followers have their self-righteousness super-sized, thank you…. If being defensive, blind to oneself and highly dogmatic make it unlikely one will ever come to grips with one’s failings, authoritarian followers get voted “Least Likely to Change”.
Altemeyer comments on the highly depressing results of the Milgram experiments in an attempt to explain the phenomenon of an excessive obedience to authority:
The bigger reason has to be that the vast majority of us have had practically no training in our lifetimes in openly defying authority. The authorities who brought us up mysteriously forgot to teach that. We may desperately want to say no, but that turns out to be a huge step that most people find impossibly huge – even when the authority is only a psychologist you never heard of running an insane experiment. From our earliest days we are told disobedience is a sin, and obedience is a virtue, the “right” thing to do…
We as individuals are poorly prepared for a confrontation with evil authority, and some people are especially inclined to submit to such authority and attack in its name.
Altemeyer’s findings are highly consistent with what Milgram found, and the findings of the two researchers help explain what each other found. The traits Altemeyer identified in authoritarians, individually or in combination, help to explain the results of the Milgram experiments, the Nazi Holocaust, other genocides, and much of the passivity of the American people in the face of atrocities committed by our government in our name.
Basic human psychological needsIn his book, “
The Sane Society”, the humanist psychologist Erich Fromm discusses among other things the five human psychological needs that differentiate us from animals. It seems to me that three of the five apply directly to this discussion:
RootednessHuman beings throughout history and over the course of their lives are faced with the choice of clinging to what is familiar versus going out on their own to develop their own individual personalities. Another way of looking at this choice is security vs. independence. Fromm singles out nationalism and racism as the two most common strategies that Americans (and others as well) use to cling to the familiar to an extent that is very unhealthy:
Man – freed from the traditional bonds… afraid of the new freedom which transformed him into an isolated atom – escaped into (a state) of which nationalism and racism are the two most evident expressions… Along with the progressive development… went the development of the negative aspects of both principles: the worship of the state, blended with the idolatry of the race or nation. Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism are the most drastic manifestations of this blend of state and clan worship, both principles embodied in the figure of a “Fuehrer” (Fromm wrote this in 1955)…
The average man today obtains his sense of identity from his belonging to a nation… His objectivity, that is, his reason, is warped by this fixation. He judges the “stranger” with different criteria than the members of his own clan. His feelings toward the stranger are equally warped. Those who are not “familiar” by bonds of blood… are looked upon with suspicion, and paranoid delusions about them can spring up at the slightest provocation. This… not only poisons the relationship of the individual to the stranger, but to the members of his own clan and to himself… his capacity for love and reason are crippled; he does not experience himself nor his fellow man in their – and his own – human reality.
Nationalism is our … idolatry, our insanity. “Patriotism” is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by “patriotism” I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one’s own nation…
Thus it is that man’s need to “belong” can lead to his “worshipping” of his country. Fromm notes the most dramatic manifestations of this insanity to be racism, Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism. He also equates it with “patriotism”, which many people from many different nations equate with blind loyalty to their country.
Perhaps this goes a long way towards explaining the excessive obedience to authority identified and described by Milgram and Altemeyer. If a person, in his need to “belong” comes to worship and exhibit blind loyalty to his country, then it stands to reason that he would feel the need to be
obedient to it under any and all circumstances.
Sense of identityFromm says:
In the development of the human race the degree to which man is aware of himself as a separate self depends on the extent to which he has emerged from the clan and the extent to which the process of individuation has developed. The member of a primitive clan might express his sense of identity in the formula “I am we”; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an individual, existing apart from his group… When the feudal system broke down, this sense of identity was shaken and the acute question “Who am I?” arose…
Many substitutes for a truly individual sense of identity were sought for, and found. Nation, religion, class and occupation serve to furnish a sense of identity… In the United States… the sense of identity is shifted more and more to the experience of conformity.
Inasmuch as I am not different, inasmuch as I am like the others, and recognized by them as “a regular fellow,” I can sense myself… Instead of the clan identity, a new herd identity develops, in which the sense of identity rests on the sense of an unquestionable belonging to the crowd. That this uniformity and conformity are often not recognized as such, and are covered by the illusion of individuality, does not alter the facts.
In the last paragraph of this section, Fromm sums up the problem with present day sheeple:
(Humans) are driven to do almost anything to acquire this sense (of identity). Behind the intense passion for status and conformity is this very need, and it is sometimes even stronger than the need for physical survival. What could be more obvious than the fact that people are willing to risk their lives, to give up their love, to surrender their freedom, to sacrifice their own thoughts, for the sake of being one of the herd… and thus of acquiring a sense of identity, even though it is an illusory one.
Fromm’s discussion of the human need to develop a sense of identity sounds to me very similar to his discussion of man’s need for rootedness. And the consequences appear to be quite similar.
The intense need to develop a sense of identify leads to identification with various superficial and unearned labels, pertaining to race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, or class. With the intense need to feel that one fully “belongs” to these various groups, one is driven to conformity. Extreme obedience to authority would seem to be the natural consequence of that.
Fromm notes that so strong is this need that people are willing to give up their independence of thought, their freedom, and even risk their lives to acquire this sense of identity. If they’re willing to give up all that, then it seems logical that the dictates of conscience would be expendable.
RelatednessThe need for relatedness to other human beings is as great as the two needs discussed above. Fromm discusses two unhealthy means by which humans seek to establish relatedness and one healthy one. The two sick means of establishing relatedness are domination and submission. The one healthy one is love – not necessarily in the sexual sense, but rather:
Love in this sense is never restricted to one person. If I can love only one person, and nobody else, if my love for one person makes me more alienated and distant from my fellow man…I do not love….
Some form of relatedness is the condition for any kind of sane living. But among the various forms of relatedness, only the productive one, love, fulfills the condition of allowing one to retain one’s freedom and integrity while being, at the same time, united with one’s fellow man.
Of the three ways of satisfying the need for relatedness, love is the healthiest and most difficult. If one is incapable of that, then the pathologic alternatives available are domination and submission. It is interesting that these are the two paths that correspond to Altemeyer’s authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers, respectively.
Denial Denial is a very common psychological defense mechanism that people use in order to avoid the psychological pain of having to face something that is very unpleasant to them. It is so common that
all humans use it to one degree or another on occasion. But as we grow we learn to face things that were previously too difficult for us to face, and that is part of the process of emotional maturation. Mastering this process gives us the strength to face the world as it really is, rather than as we would like it to be.
Denial at the individual levelWith regard to our need to think well of people we know, Laura Knight-Jadczyk
explains:
Human beings have been accustomed to assume that other human beings are – at the very least – trying to “do right” and “be good” and fair and honest. And so, very often, we do not take the time to use due diligence in order to determine if a person who has entered our life is, in fact, a “good person”.
That helps to explain why innocent people deny the bad things that certain
other people do. There is a somewhat different explanation for why people deny their own murderous actions. Noam Chomsky explains that in his book, “
What we Say Goes”:
When you conquer somebody and suppress them, you have to have a reason. You can’t just say, “I’m a son of a bitch and I want to rob them.” You have to say it’s for their good, they deserve it, or they actually benefit from it. We’re helping them. That was the attitude of slave owners. Most of them didn’t say, “Look, I’m enslaving these people because I want easily exploitable, cheap labor for my own benefit.” They said, “We’re doing them a favor. They need it.”
Denial regarding the truth about our countryWilliam Blum speaks specifically of the
American tendency to deny (or be willfully ignorant of) the immoral international acts that its government commits in their name, in "
Freeing the World to Death":
I believe that the main cause of this ignorance about foreign policy among Americans has to do with the deeply held belief that no matter what the US does abroad, no matter how bad it may look, no matter what horror may result, the United States means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are always noble. Of that Americans are certain… They see their leaders on TV and their photos in the press, they see them smiling or laughing, telling jokes; they see them with their families, they hear them speak of God and love, of peace and the law, of democracy and freedom, of human rights and justice… How can such people be moral monsters? They have names like George and Dick and Donald, not a single Mohammed or Abdulla…
Psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson discuss much the same concept in their book, “
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by me) – Why we Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts”:
Most people want to believe that their government is working in their behalf, that it knows what it’s doing, and that it’s doing the right thing. Therefore, if our government decides that torture is necessary in the war against terrorism, most citizens, to avoid dissonance, will agree. Yet, over time, that is how the moral conscience of a nation deteriorates. Once people take that first small step off the pyramid in the direction of justifying abuse and torture, they are on their way to hardening their hearts and minds in ways that might never be undone. Uncritical patriotism, the kind that reduces the dissonance caused by information that their government has done something immoral and illegal, greases the slide down the pyramid…
Former US Senator William Fulbright, an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War,
explains the phenomenon (page 51) in a more generic way:
Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations – to remake them in its own shining image.
SOME CONCLUDING THOUGHTSSo it is that a variety of human traits converge to make possible citizen support for all manner of atrocities and other despicable behavior by their government that many of them would never think of engaging in individually.
The human need for rootedness, a sense of identity, and relatedness to other humans can lead us to feel a great need to closely identify with and support the actions of our leaders no matter how despicable. For individuals who are not mature enough to find more constructive means of dealing with those needs, they can lead to such a strong tendency towards obedience to authority figures that it becomes almost impossible to resist them.
The psychological defense mechanism of denial greatly facilitates this process. None of us like to believe bad things about ourselves. Few of us can easily believe terrible things about our government. For example: The weapons of mass destruction that were used to justify a war don’t turn up? Well, there was probably some other good reason for the war. Or at worst our leaders were ignorant or inexperienced or just mistaken. Only a “wacky conspiracy theorist” could believe that they had evil intentions.
The existence of a national media controlled by a small handful of ultra wealthy individuals and corporations contributes tremendously to this problem. When we are constantly bombarded by messages designed to convince us of an alternative reality it can be very difficult to sort out facts from propaganda. Millions don’t even try. When the messages are comforting (e.g. the purpose of this war is to protect the American people) the desire to accept them at face value can be very strong. When they are consistent with what we’ve repeatedly heard since we were small children, challenging them can be unthinkable.
Can the human race ever evolve beyond this psychopathology to unite together to produce a world community of peace and justice for all? I believe they can. But is there enough time before world-wide catastrophe due to rapidly changing climate – largely the result of a rapacious quest by a small but powerful minority for more wealth and power – destroys human civilization as we know it? And what can we do to counter those who now have such disproportionate control over world events? These are very difficult questions with very complex solutions. Here are some comments on this issue by some people who have given a lot of thought and time to it:
Components of a solutionHoward Zinn – from “Failure to Quit” On the need for
disobedience:
Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running and robbing the country. That's our problem."
Bob Altemeyer – from “The Authoritarians”On the need to
question authority rather than render blind obedience to it:
The social dominators want you to be disgusted with politics, they want you to feel hopeless, they want you out of their way. They want democracy to fail, they want your freedoms stricken, they want equality destroyed as a value, they want to control everything and everybody, they want it all. And they have an army of authoritarian followers marching with the militancy of “that old-time religion” on a crusade that will make it happen, if you let them.
Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson – from “Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)”On the ability of human beings to overcome their weaknesses
if they choose to do so:
The need to reduce dissonance is a universal mental mechanism, but that doesn’t mean we are doomed to be controlled by it. Human beings may not be eager to change, but we have the ability to change…. Is the brain designed (for self-justification)? Fine – the brain wants us to stock up on sugar, too, but most of us learn to enjoy vegetables. Is the brain designed to make us flare in anger when we think we are being attacked? Fine – but most of us learn to count to ten and find alternatives to beating the other guy with a cudgel. An appreciation of how dissonance (and associated self-justification) works, in ourselves and others, gives us some ways to override our wiring – and protects us from those who can’t.
Erich Fromm – from “The Sane Society”On what humans must evolve towards:
Nationalism and state worship became the symptoms of a regression… Only when man succeeds in developing his reason and love further than he has done so far, only when he can build a world based on human solidarity and justice, only when he can feel rooted in the experience of universal brotherliness, will he have found a new, human form of rootedness, will he have transformed his world into a truly human home.
Knowledge and exposure to alternative ways of being and thinkingI believe that our best hope is increasing human knowledge, and exposure to other cultures and points of view that cause us to expand our thought systems. More and more people are
using the Internet, which provides a much less centralized and more democratized source of information. It provides a great means of circumventing the knowledge and thoughts that our elites want to force down our throats.
The part of Stanley Milgram’s experiment where the likelihood of following an authority’s orders to the point of killing someone was reduced from approximately 62% to 10% by virtue of observing a single additional person resisting the authority provides great hope in my opinion. It means that our tendencies towards the terrible can be reversed simply by observing another person challenging the system.
That reminds me that I know a lot more today than I did ten years ago (or even one year ago). Innumerable times in my life I’ve read something or heard something that I knew to be true upon reading or hearing it, but I had never previously recognized it as such, simply because it was unthinkable. I had to know that at least one other person believed it to be true before I could even consider it. But once I did, it seemed so obvious to me that I couldn’t understand why I had to hear it from someone else before I could consider it myself. Such is the power that our society holds over our thoughts. And such is our ability to break loose of the chains that bind our thoughts, under the right circumstances.
On the slippery slopeIt is important to understand the quote by Julian Assange at the beginning of this post. Why is it that repeated passivity in the face of injustice leads to corrosion of character? The explanation is that when a person does something wrong, the wrong must be justified. Justifying the wrong makes it easier to repeat the next time the person is faced with a similar situation. A vicious cycle is set in motion that makes it so easy to give in to the dictates of malevolent authority that it becomes automatic and reflexive. At that point, one’s character is corroded.
Yet, it can also work the other way. Once a person begins to acknowledge his faults he can begin to atone for them instead of seeking constant justification for them. It can be an extremely difficult process to start, but once started it can feel quite liberating. When enough people do this, the world will become a better place. A recent quote by Jonathan Schell, from an article titled “Three Good Men”, bears on this idea:
Perhaps here in the United States, when the country has found its moral bearings again, there will be recognition of the integrity and bravery of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. For now, the war- and torture-system rolls on…
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