(This is discarded text from the non-fic book I’m working on, and should be treated as such. I offer it because I think my regulars might find it interesting.)
When we say humans are weak, what we mean is that they tend to do what they’re told to do, and tend to follow the roles and norms of their society and peer group. We’ll explore this by touching on two famous experiments: the Milgram electroshock experiment and the Stanford prison experiment.
In the Milgram experiment subjects were told to administer painful electrical shocks to another person when that person answered a question wrong. Each time an answer was wrong, the amount of the shock was increased. Sixty-three percent went all the way up to a 450 volt shock, continuing after the person being shocked started screaming, begged them to stop and told them they had a heart condition. With variations, the number who would go all the way could be increased to 91% or go as low as 28%. This result has been replicated time and again since the original experiment in 1963, and has been found to be true in multiple cultures
The sixty-three percent compliance rate was a surprise to psychologists when the result was first published, despite the world having recently seen the Nazi death camps. Perhaps this is because death camp guards were under military discipline and could expect harsh punishment for refusing orders. Or perhaps it is because Americans assumed it was a cultural thing: Germans would do it, Soviets would do it, but Americans wouldn’t.
The students in the Milgram experiment were American and faced no consequences for refusing to shock a screaming man. Most of them shocked the man anyway.
Americans would. People of every culture would.
Milgram’s subjects almost all felt that shocking the subject was wrong. They did it anyway.
Most people will do something they believe is wrong if told to by a figure in authority.
If you read the results of the variations on the Milgram experiment three things stand out. First, that you can get the compliance rate very high, to the point where about nine out of ten people will torture. The second is that no matter what you do, you can’t get everyone to continue shocking victims. The third is that even if you do everything you can to make rebellion more likely, some people will still shock the subject as often as they can.
People will do things they know are wrong if told to do so by an authority figure. After the financial crisis, firms hired hourly wage employees and had them sign documents stating that homeowners were in default of their mortgage, that the bank owned the mortgage, and that the person signing had reviewed the necessary documents to know this well enough to swear to it. The people signing had not reviewed the documents and thus could not swear. They signed anyway, at a rate of about 30 seconds per signature.
As a result, people lost their homes. It was wrong, the people doing it had to know it was wrong. They did it anyway, and for very little money.
Let’s move on to our second experiment. In 1971 Phillip Zimbardo set up a mock prison and divided eighteen college students into nine prisoners and nine guards. The guards had never been prison guards, the prisoners were guilty of nothing.
The experiment was due to run two weeks. It had to be stopped in six days. As Zimbardo himself says, “our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.”
Why, specifically, did it end after 6 days?
First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was “off.” Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners.
Second, Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw our prisoners being marched on a toilet run, bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other’s shoulders. Filled with outrage, she said, “It’s terrible what you are doing to these boys!” Out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its morality.
Guilty of nothing. Put in solitary confinement, held in prison even when they begged and wept to be let go, made to push ups while someone sat on them, deprived of food, sexually humiliated, a boy sobbing unconrollably while other prisoners chant he is a bad prisoners.
And only one outsider finds anything wrong?
Something else: when the experiment ended most of the guards wished it hadn’t. Zimbardo felt the guards fell into three groups: the ones who seemed to enjoy using their authority, the ones who went by the rules the guards had agreed on, and the guards who tried to treat the prisoners well, especially when other guards weren’t around.
People don’t just do what they’re told to do, they do what they’re expected to do. We all know various roles: we know how to act like a brother, a sister, a student, a teacher, a father, a mother. We know how to act like a prisoner, a prison guard, a husband, a wife. We know how to act while on a plane, while going through pre-flight screening, while being questioned by a cop. We know how to be an employee and we know how to be a boss. We know how to do many of these things even if we’ve never done them before, because we’ve seen other people doing them, or we’ve seen it on TV or read of it or know people who have done it. And if we don’t know, then we follow the cues of the people around us, and we do what we’re told to by those in authority over us.
The findings of social psychology about compliance, rebellion and role-playing take up many books, and those books are worth reading, but let’s go back to our initial comment on human nature, that people are weak.
Weak doesn’t mean bad. If you were to take those same 9 boys who played prison guards in Zimbardo’s prison experiment, and you were to put them down in the middle of a disaster where people needed help and they could choose to help or they could choose to loot, most of them would help. If you were to give them medicine and medical training and put them amongst injured people, they would heal. We know this, too, because studies of great disasters show that people spontaneously come together and help those in trouble (which, as an aside, is why forbidding civilians from helping disaster victims is a bad idea).
Told to be prison guards, they acted like most prison guards and became brutal. Told instead to be a nurse, most would act much more kindly (though a few would abuse the power nurse’s have.)
Some people are bad. Some people are rotten. Some people will do the wrong thing whenever given the least chance. And some people are good. Some people won’t shock another person, no matter who tells them to. Some people will risk their lives to create an underground railroad for slaves or will hide Jews and Gypsies so they can’t be killed by Nazis, even at great risk to themselves. Some people will see boys being treated horribly, and will speak up even though they’re only a recent Ph.D. and the person they’re telling off is a professor.
But both the truly good, who will do the right thing if at all possible and sometimes even if not, and the truly bad, who enjoy hurting other people, are fairly rare. From reading the psychological literature I’d put each group at somewhere between five to fifteen percent of the population.
The rest of the population is weak. They do what they think they’re expected to do. They can be good, and do good, if that’s what is expected, and they can be bad, and do evil, if that’s what is expected of them. If there is a bias, I think it is slightly to the good. Most people think of themselves as good, and would rather do good. But this bias is slight, and people will do the wrong thing if it is encouraged.
And, generally speaking, when it comes to economic activity, we encourage bad behaviour.
This starts with our every-day economic ideology. Economic activity is primarily carried out by two types of organizations: governments and corporations. Our explicit ideology for corporations, which is codified in law, is that a corporations only responsibility is to maximize profit. Greed is good. We could go into a long discussion of the rise of this ideology and talk about Calvinist predestination (if God loves you he’ll make you rich) and misunderstandings of Adam Smith, as if the man who wrote an entire book on morality thought that greed was a good thing except under very limited and accidental circumstances, but the point is, this is our ruling economic ideology in the West: maximize profits.
It isn’t even, any longer, “maximize profits so long as you stay within the law.” The run up to the financial crisis saw widespread fraud, including the use of what were, at the time, called liar loans. After the crisis we saw companies hiring people to sign affidavits which would cause homeowners to lose their homes, and systematically lying on those affidavits (the so-called robosigning scandal.) Companies attested they had properly transfered ownership of mortgages when they hadn’t. Companies sold financial instruments to clients whom they had a fiduciary responsibility to while betting those instruments would fail, and in their private emails called those clients idiots.
The rule today is that you break the law if breaking the law maximizes profits and you won’t go to jail as a result. Fines are considered a cost of doing business, the legality or illegality is irrelevant.
This flows from the very top of our society. It is how our CEOs and executives think, and as our politicans and prosecutors refuse to investigate or charge those who are guilty of widespread fraud, it is clearly how our political and legal class thinks.
Authority, in other words, says that it’s all right to do illegal and immoral things in pursuit of profit.
Well, so long as you’re told to do so by someone important.
Humans are weak. They do what authority figures tell them to do, they do what their peer group values, they do what the incentives reward.
Celsius 233
Ian Welsh
Humans are weak. They do what authority figures tell them to do, they do what their peer group values, they do what the incentives reward.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Which is why I lead/have led a fairly cloistered life.
Nothing really new for me, but; what you’ve done with it is a pov I hadn’t considered.
It does seem to speak to today…
Morocco Bama
Excellent, Ian. It’s as though you’ve pulled it right out of my head….again. I’ve been saying this same thing for years now, incessantly, to mostly deaf ears. We can quibble about terminology, but it won’t detract from the thrust and sentiment. For example, weak can also be labeled malleable. I think most humans are infinitely malleable, meaning they can be molded and shaped into most anything, metaphorically speaking, and perhaps even literally speaking.
Pursuant to that, I think the following fits nicely with your analysis. I’m surprised you’re treating it as a discarded text. What’s the reasoning?
What Happened When I Got a Job at a Soul-Crushing, Abusive Warehouse
This system is such, that anything you do these days, you’re shocking and/or abusing someone and/or something. If you ponder it deeply enough, and honestly, it’s positively diabolical, and there are moments of doubt for me, when I truly feel there is No Way Out. Those moments are fleeting, but in the last several years, they occur with greater frequency, regardless of their fleeting nature.
Anyway, enough of that. I have to run……I have an Amazon order I need to place. 🙂
Lisa Simeone
Yep, you’re preaching to the choir. As you know, I’ve been talking about Milgram and Zimbardo till I’m blue in the face. The sheeple don’t get it. They don’t want to get it. And the hyper-educated are even worse. They think they’re too smart for this stuff.
Most people — no matter how “ordinary,” no matter how “good” — most people, when put in a position of absolute power, will abuse that power. It’s that simple.
someofparts
Chimps R Us
MontanaMaven
Scott Adams, creator of the cartoon “Dilbert” wrote a book called “Way of the Weasel”. He speculates that 5% of the population are criminals/bad people and 5% are good people and the rest are weasels.
ohollern
In today’s economy people are also desperate. They might be willing to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily consider in order to survive, like the hourly-wage robo-signers you mention above. Since our so-called elites display zero ethics or morality and yet still thrive, the little guy at the bottom scraping to get by says fuck it, why not? It’s trickle-down moral decay.
Petro
While there is no disputing the data presented by the Milgram and Stanford experiments, may I suggest that the question, and therefore the conclusion, is poorly framed?
I would like to say that I’m reluctant to buck the trend here as framed by Ian, and by my friends in this thread – all of whom I hold in great respect (this includes you, Celsius, MB, Lisa, Maven, not to mention others who have yet to weigh in, but who I’m sure will be by soon for such a meaty topic). But I am not reluctant, and it is relevant to the subject-at-hand for all of you to consider why that might be so.
I’m no stronger (or “weaker”) than any other human being. Yet I can state with no reservations that I would not have shocked anyone at Yale that day, nor abused a prisoner at Stanford. The results of those experiments remained restless in my mind for many years – decades, really – after I first heard of them.
Of course, the answer is staring us in the face, and of course Mr. Welsh documents it, but then it gets lost in the “weak”/”strong” frame. What really can these terms mean, when discussing a human being? What exactly is one “strongly” holding on to, or “weakly” abandoning, in themselves in this frame? Is it a sense of identity, of a well-developed inner… wait for it…
Authority?
OK, not to go on about it – I just want to reintroduce the question with this frame.
Rather than measuring the strength or weakness of some inner moral authority as set against an external one, isn’t the measure of true moral strength the rejection of authority altogether, within you and without you?
This is not a trivial semantic proposition I put forth. As I said, I would not have shocked or abused, and I can say that it is not because I have some stronger inner light guiding me… it is because I congenitally reject authority of all kinds. I admit that this has been a rather strange “natural” feature I’ve had since, well, since forever (just ask my mother and teachers), but it is my contention that we are poorly-educated from a very early age to identify and measure against authority, with the only schism/choice being whether it is internal (“I am strong”) or external (“I am weak.”)
It is my contention that the strength of an inner moral authority does nothing more than give permission to the very concept of authority.
There is a “third way,” that rejects all authority, that profoundly alters one’s stance vis. the world, and is extremely difficult to ken all the while authority frames one’s mind (not to preemptively weigh the “strength” of my friends’ counter-arguments with such a pejorative, heh.)
So I would not indict human nature here, but contemporary human culture.
(I would like to admit that, yes, in contemporary human culture this tendency of mine can be a liability – which goes a long way to explaining why the cult of authority is so easily accepted. It would be – will be? – so much nicer if the pernicious nature of authority is more widely understood.)
mediabob
Thanks, Ian. I’d say these are the first lessons to be learned when attempting change. If the weak are to ever believe we can select our own leaders through the “democratic” process, and thus have real change, we’ll have to have use the same principles. Ergo, nothing changes.
MontanaMaven
@Ohollern
My father used to say “The fish stinks from the head”. When we have weasels at the top running things from the politicians to the variations of vampire squids, yes, many of the little people say “fuck it, why not?” I’m one of those people though that prefer to do the right thing with as much integrity as I can. When I encounter weak or weasel behavior, I try to find another person in the production company that I can deal with instead. It’s also why I left a large company to run my own business. Less money but also less instructions from higher ups to do bad things.
S Brennan
It shows important big Media is in setting social norms and why Murdoch values the authority that comes with it.
It also show how small of a minority sites like this are.
My father speaking of the WWII experience, said it only takes about 20% of the country to dedicate itself to evil. There may more good than bad, but evil has more effective tools to influence the minds of the great majority.
StewartM
Well, I’m the dissenter here. Well, maybe with Petro.
The Milgram experiment? Performed in a culture where individuals are taught, from childhood, to obey and “respect” the directives issued by authority figures. Not every culture known teaches this, though I’ll admit that all state-level cultures do.
The Zimbardo experiment? That’s more difficult to explain, and I’m less familiar with it, but I note it too was performed in an authority-respecting culture. Moreover, it was done using college students, and I believe the truism that young people more malleable than those older. In that way it reminds me of the experience of the WWI generation, expressed in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, about generational differences among soldiers–the young ones are more likely to see soldiering and violence and death as “normal life” whereas the older ones saw military as an interruption to and an exception from “normal life”.
Moreover, these young people (again in an authority-worshipping culture) who had been for most of their lives up to the experiment on the receiving end of arbitrary authority and had not experienced what it was like to be on the giving end. As warlike cultures know, brutalizing young males is the first step in teaching them how to be brutal themselves when they hold power, so it’s not surprising perhaps that kids who have been taught to shut up and obey arbitrary power are eager when it’s *their* chance to dish out arbitrary power.
In short, these studies may show a lot about how humans act in *this* culture, this authority-driven top-down hierarchical culture, and those like it, but it does not say anything about the human animal per se, except the unfortunate fact that we’re malleable.
My own experience and observation, is that people can buck authority-backed consensus and peer pressure, but when it happens it’s because the person or people doing it have confidence and a degree of security. That confidence often arises on education (and not necessarily formal education) and experience—which is why it’s older people, moreso than younger ones, who are more likely to speak up. And when it happens there’s almost a palpable sensation of relief upon those who were silently going along.
-StewartM
StewartM
Delete the first of the two comments; alas there is no “edit” function on this page.
-StewartM
Barry
If it’s the condition of 90% of people everywhere, it’s normal. To me, “weak” is a term that implies a condition relative to the norm.
I think it’s true that people behave in accordance to their roles, and they respond deferentially to authority.
So if we want to have a more just and equitable society, we need to think more in terms of reworking systems and reining in authority — rather than appealing to people’s better or worse character. Think checks and balances.
StewartM
Yep, and mostly bonobos.
I believe that there IS a human nature, that we’re closet to bonobos. I hold that humans come into this world with an rather outstandingly good set of innate instincts. But unfortunately we’re too malleable, and all these instincts can be overridden, at cost, just like people can be socialized into relishing alcohol and hot and bitter foods that infants reject.
I said “at cost”. Yes, you can teach people to be violent, cruel, ruthless, and very unbonobo-like. But if you notice, doing this requires taking youth (particularly young males) and putting them through a period of brutalization, deprivation, and desensitiviation, all the while indoctrinating them into how “noble” undergoing all this is. In this culture, we call this “boot camp”.
Again, back to the Zimbardo experiment–this smacks of “badge envy”, which has been recently highlighted in the George Zimmermann/Trayvon Martin case. But not everyone has badge envy. Most people don’t. Not everyone wants even to be in management or supervision–many or most don’t, and I’ve known plenty who were in positions of authority over others who gave it up, and did so because they didn’t enjoy the experience.
The very belief that the Zimbardo experiment promotes, that most people are power-hungry, abusive, prison guards just waiting for their chance–is in itself a narrative that finds a receptive audience amongst a power leadership which wants to believe that everyone is just the way they are.
-StewartM
Morocco Bama
A good starter course for the nature of humans is Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, if you dare. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s a haunting, multidimensional, brilliant piece of art that explores the nature of man and woman and their relationship to one another and to nature. It’s genius, and will have you thinking about it for days…weeks….months, even. Be sure to watch it in natural high definition, if you have it.
Come to think of it, it’s really not a starter course, but perhaps a course for completion of a doctorate on the subject.
Petro
MB – “Antichrist” has been sitting on my hard drive for awhile now – not being much of a horror fan, I’ve been putting it off. Thanks for reminding me why I got it in the first place – I’ll screen it soon.
StewartM – You got it! My only quibble is that I don’t think you need to get as brutal and purposeful to “un-bonobo” (to use your characterization) people as you think. Personally, I think it begins around infancy, through a kind of “soft” training by parents that believe in authority and hence project their own authority upon the hapless child. This chain has to be broken, in much the same way more overt parent-child abuse cycles are generationally overcome.
Ian Welsh
Stuart,
the Millgram experiment has been repeated in many countries. In not one were the results significantly different. It has also been repeated for over 4o years now, again, results were not significantly different.
Certainly the young are more vulnerable, but it’s not the young doing horrible things and destroying our world right now, not even close. The people doing it often know they’re doing it and don’t give a shit, and they are not young.
Even in war, the young may be the front line, but the sergeants and the senior officers are older. Furthermore, the idea that war is a young man’s game is a modern thing. Pre Napoleonic war, average soldier ages were in the thirties, spiking as high as 40 or so. They committed plenty of atrocities back then.
Humans are weak, not bad. These are two different things. Sure, people would like to be nice, but under the slightest pressure, or the weakest set of incentives to do bad, they do bad.
Morocco: I rewrote it because I didn’t think that the experiments needed long explanations. It should be self evident that most people do what they’re told to by authority figures or what is rewarded by incentives, even if it it’s immoral, unless we skipped the twentiet century’s multiple genocides, the day to day experience of working in most industries and the systematic fraud leading up to the financial crisis.
Yes, there are some good people, but 5 to 15% more than covers the number of people who have to be explained.
As for Zimbardo, I find it entirely believable. He ran psych tests on the guards and prisoners, they were entirely normal and NO part of the psych profile of any of them predicted which ones would behave how except that authoritarian prisoners put up with abuse better. People forget that evil can be seductive. It’s fun to have power over other people, it’s fun make them squirm and hurt them. It’s fun because it is transgressive. People deny this, because they don’t want to believe it about themselves, but I’ve seen it over and over and over again. Abusing other people is thrilling and a lot of people get off on it, far more than would ever admit they would, even to themselves. Denying it, they cannot fight it when the temptation occurs.
Bonobos are only one of our cousins. Chimps are absolutely brutal to each other and live in a culture of power and fear. Humans are neither chimps nor bonobos, but humans.
Finally, even if human nature was “good”, human nature as it exists in our cultures is not. We are not dealing with humans tabula rasa, we are dealing with humans as they have been in virtually every human society since the rise of agriculture and horticulture.
Notorious P.A.T.
Say, did you hear about the party that used to oppose stuff like pre-emptive war, drone strikes, and indefinite detention until their own politicians started supporting them, and then they changed their minds?
Celsius 233
Notorious P.A.T. PERMALINK
May 18, 2012
Say, did you hear about the party that used to oppose stuff like pre-emptive war, drone strikes, and indefinite detention until their own politicians started supporting them, and then they changed their minds?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Yes. And thank the gods there are those of us who have/would never follow authority down those dark alleys.
Alcuin
Surely folks here are familiar with Robert Altmeyer’s work on authoritarianism and Robert Hare’s work on psychopaths. If not, it wouldn’t hurt to read their work. I’d like to see someone (Ian?) explore the topic of how an anarchistic society would work in the presence of authoritarians and psychopaths. Or, if this topic has already been explored, perhaps someone will point me in the right direction.
Petro
MB – I just watched “Antichrist.” A very intense and effective horror movie, but I would say that it explores the depths of obsessive delusion, rather than making any definitive statement about human nature. It was *very* disturbing, and props to von Trier for being such a fine provocateur – the world would be poorer without them – but I could’ve missed this one. (I did enjoy his “Melancholia.”)
Alcuin – Psychopaths (or sociopaths) comprise, I understand, approximately 5% of the population – and there are some who believe that this is a rather high proportion, symptomatic of sick culture (I don’t know if I agree with this last, but I’m inclined to. Sorry no links for this quick comment, but I’ve read some books on the subject). In any case, they are outnumbered, and would not be able to “blend in” as well as they do in a culture like ours, where many sociopathic tendencies (i.e., wealth over people) are exalted.
“Authoritarians” are even more easily seen as a byproduct of poor cultural education, which would by definition be less of a problem in anarchistic society.
Morocco Bama
Petro, obsessive delusion is certainly one of the dimensions of that movie, but not the only one, imo. I spent a fair amount of time researching reviews of it after I watched it several times to see if other people were struggling with it, as I was. I will post some of those reviews in a bit to support my point.
tom allen
“Say, did you hear about the party that used to oppose stuff like pre-emptive war, drone strikes, and indefinite detention until their own politicians started supporting them, and then they changed their minds?”
But the other party is evil, and must be punished, humiliated, and kept from power. Thus it is acceptable to do the wrong thing — just for the time being — because the other guy is even worse. At least, so I’m told.
Not that this has anything to do with Milgram or Stanford.
Alcuin
@Petro – It’s been a few years since I read The Authoritarian Specter, by Robert Altemeyer, but here is an excerpt from the book jacket blurb:
“…Based on results from a prize-winning research program, this book gives insight into how authoritarian minds are created and how they operate, and how their failings and vulnerabilities produce submission and aggression. A search for authoritarians on the left finds very few. Instead, studies reveal a strong concentration of authoritarians among religious fundamentals and conservative politicians.
“These and many other powerful findings explain a persistent sentiment in our democracy to submit to ‘a man on horseback,’ to attack those who are different, to march in lock-step. This compelling, timely work advances our scientific understanding of authoritarianism on many fronts and deserves a wide readership.”
Ian, you must know that Altemeyer is at the University of Manitoba.
Petro, I’d submit that authoritarianism, like psychopathy, is rooted in genetics and not so much in culture. Unlike a lot of leftists, I don’t have a lot of faith in the power of education to bring people to their senses, if they ever had any. I’ve seen too many college-educated bigots in my life. Gingrich and Santorum are only the most recent examples.
So my question stands: how do anarchists deal with psychopaths and authoritarians?
Morocco Bama
“Say, did you hear about the party that used to oppose stuff like pre-emptive war, drone strikes, and indefinite detention until their own politicians started supporting them, and then they changed their minds?”
Such a thing never existed. If you think it did, you’re delusional, and what Ian is discussing here goes well beyond partisan politics, so why bring it back to that slime pit?
Alcuin
@ tom allen – “lesser evilism” as herd behavior? Good point.
Morocco Bama
A search for authoritarians on the left finds very few.
Bullshit!
Morocco Bama
So my question stands: how do anarchists deal with psychopaths and authoritarians?
A total commitment to decentralization and diversification, for starters. They can’t be allowed leverage of any sort.
Morocco Bama
Petro, here’s one of the reviews I read that somewhat penetrated the depths of Antichrist.
http://unrealitymag.com/index.php/2010/04/01/review-of-antichrist-movie/
Petro
Alcuin:
If by “education” you mean the conventional idea of teaching in classrooms, etc., then I share your skepticism. I, however, mean education in the broader sense, specifically what is embedded in a mind in its earliest, formative years. Information that is not so much explicitly transmitted, but implicitly – how those first, wordless questions are answered (e.g., “What is it to be a human being in this world?”) These answers are given by nuanced observations of the world around them. If you believe in God and the hierarchical family structure, this will be transmitted to your children well before the development of language.
Petro
MB: – Your reviewer writes (my emphasis):
Wow, that’s quite a generalization. I would say that if the reviewer believes that, then he himself has a bit of a delusion going on – though I’ll give him (some) points for qualifying it with “Western cultures.” But Western cultures are themselves somewhat delusional on this point, insofar as they buy into the good/evil schism. I don’t think a Buddhist sees the “amorality” of Nature in quite the same way. I certainly don’t.*
This is not to say that the reviewer is necessarily wrong – certainly that’s the fulcrum upon which von Trier was leveraging his horror show – but it goes back to my original thought that it had less to do with human nature than delusion – cultural delusion as framed by the reviewer you cited.
That was my only point – outside of that, it was a fine film, and that, an astute review.
—
*This is perhaps TMI, but I used to have a recurring nightmare as a child – it was *very* abstract, involving an inexorable rhythmic “breathing” in a dark and infinite space. It was horrible to me. I think it communicated the amorality of the universe to my young mind, which was at the time being raised in a Catholic environment. It went away – in retrospect perhaps when I had finally rejected the dualistic dogma of the Church. I don’t know.
Morocco Bama
Great commentary, Petro. Perhaps there is no human nature. Perhaps it’s all delusion. Perhaps the most that can be said of human nature and existence, in general, is that it is infinitely malleable, like a constantly rewriting computer program, so there is no fixed, static description, but rather a dynamic, animated description that changes with time. It will always be a question, what were we, what are we now, and what will we be…..not, what are we.
Oh, and by the way, the reviewer was a female, FYI.
And finally, your comment to Alcuin is superb. I agree with you wholeheartedly. It’s the crux of the theory behind Montessori.
StewartM
Ian:
As I said–I suspected that you’d get the similar results among *state-level* cultures, as these teach authoritarianism and a “respect” for authority from the cradle onwards. Pre-state cultures are my beef, as you’re making claims about what human nature inherently is. Among hunter-gatherers start walking around and issuing orders and demanding “respect”, they look at you like you’re crazy.
Peer pressure amongst these cultures? Maybe that’s a point, I wouldn’t exclude that. But the Milgram doesn’t measure the results of peer pressure, just the obedience to vested authority figures.
Warfare is not my beef per se, as it’s been demonstrated in all cultures that people do horrible things in war. But excepting perhaps a small minority, people have to be socialized into warfare and brutality, be in by boot camp or indoctrination rituals with gangs. Most humans don’t make particularly good soldiers out-of-the-box.
But the Zimbardo experiment does not measure of warfare, or others socialized into brutality. It measures a response among young people who have been granted sweeping authority over others, in most cases for the first time in their lives, and moreoever people who have been on the receiving end of orders up until then. It measures “badge envy”.
To me the Zimbardo experiment fails the common-sense/common observation test, as I know plenty who don’t want to exercise power over others, don’t lust for it, and indeed turn down opportunities for it. These people aren’t saints, they’re not morally “strong” or exceptional, they just don’t care to exercise such power. I would therefore limit the conclusions to be drawn for it.
As for “weak” as in “resisting peer pressure” or social ostracism, I might agree with that. However that comes with the territory as we are social animals.
But unlike common chimps, we share uniquely features with bonobos. Bonobos have genes to make vassopressin, believed to be involved with bonding and empathy; bonobos have been observed to care for other injured animals. Bonobos developed their own sign language, related to sex. Bonobos are uniquely similar to humans in that both species have no mating season, females are receptive year-round. I can think of no similar unique features we share with common chimps.
If one accepts the truism that similar traits in related species evolved to serve similar ends, and that all the above in bonobos evolved to soothe over at least intra-group conflicts, then you accept that humans evolved all these for the same reason. Moreover, in regards to bonobo sexuality, human sex organs are bigger in relation to overall body size than those of bonobos, so if anything our biology took things a step further.
Mind you, I don’t necessarily differ with you on the facts. But all these awfulisms are the result of human cultural evolution, not of human biology. While our cultural evolution is a bleak tale, our biology gives me a little faint hope. The problem as I see it as that our biology is too-easily overridden by our cultural indoctrination.
-StewartM
Alcuin
@MB: – “If you want Unauthoritarians on the political left, I have found plenty. If you want nonauthoritarians on the right, I have found some. If you want authoritarians on the right, I have found tons. But if you want a living, breathing, scientifically certifiable authoritarian on the left, I have not found a single one.” – Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, pp. 229-230.
Before you denounce an author’s conclusions, you really need to read and understand what he is writing about.
Alcuin
Petro:
Interestingly, after re-reading portions of Altemeyer, I found that he agrees with your position, to a degree. What is interesting is that he posits that in times of high social stress, societies become more authoritarian. Also, that individuals with a high RWA (Right Wing Authoritarian) score who completed college had substantially reduced RWA scores. But when those same individuals became parents of little devils, their RWA scores soared back to where they started. Altemeyer has been studying authoritarianism for 30 years and The Authoritarian Specter has a number of chapters filled with deadly boring statistical models and explanations of his methodology. He isn’t a popularizer of others’ research.
MB: I’d submit that any parent who enrolls their child in a Montessori school is already an “unauthoritarian”. You won’t find a religious fundamentalist’s child in a Montessori school. If you aren’t familiar with Altemeyer, I think you really should, at a minimum, do an internet search on his work. What you find might surprise you.
Morocco Bama
Before you denounce an author’s conclusions, you really need to read and understand what he is writing about.
No. An author shouldn’t make statements that he contradicts in his treatise.
Majority Rule equals the Authority of the Majority. It’s still Authority, just not as closely held, but equally as powerful.
Morocco Bama
Alcuin, I will put Altemeyer on my list of authors and works to review, but I’m sorry, that statement about the “left” rankles me, nonetheless.
Like Petro, I’ve always had issues with Authority from early on. There may be something innate in me that compels it, but also life circumstances have helped shape it. I’ve led a similar life to that fella in Catcher In The Rye, and my perspective overlaps with that character’s, substantially.
I’m not discounting Altemeyer’s valid points, I just take umbrage with that one….so far.
For example, could anyone dare contend that Castro is not an Authoritarian? They’d be insane to assert it. Yes, I respect what he, Che and the people of Cuba have accomplished, but in order to hold onto to it, Castro became Authoritarian. And what of Lenin and Stalin…and Mao? These are all renowned “Leftists” and yet they are as Authoritarian as any on the “Right”, imo. Couple that with what I mentioned about the Authority of the Majority, meaning Authority comes in many forms, shapes and sizes, and it throws his statement into question.
Ian Welsh
Sorry Stewart you can’t pull “common sense” on this. I live in the world too, and what I see is that most people will abuse others given the chance and just a small bit of direction or peer pressure. You give any group of people power without responsibility and they will abuse it. And all it takes is to say “you won’t be held responsible”. ie. all it takes is for someone to give orders or for the people there to think there’s no accountability, and they will do it, and the people who don’t like it will stand aside and let it happen.
As for tribal societies, there are some pretty brutal nasty ones too. But even if you’re right, and I have some sympathy for the argument, it doesn’t matter. Those societies have not ruled the majority of the human population in thousands and thousands of years. They aren’t going to rule human society again, unless we drive ourselves to the brink of extinction, which isn’t an acceptable solution.
Humans can be good, humans can be bad, most humans are WEAK. That’s the argument. It takes very little social pressure/permission/encouragement for humans to start doing horrific things to each other.
On the other hand, it takes very little social pressure/permission/encouragement for humans to do good things for each other.
That’s the other side of the argument. But we don’t do that. We systematically don’t do that.
Declan
Interesting post Ian, and I generally agree with your take.
I think it’s worth distinguishing between our innate tendency towards hierarchy, which goes back thousands of years to the Pharoahs and beyond (although not into our tribal period), and the more modern (as you say, traceable back to Calvinism) ‘spirit of capitalism’ that Weber described so well.
It seems to me that both of these values have their place (for hierarchy think of a military unit in which the soldiers will sacrifice their self-interest to obey orders, and the captain will sacrifice his self-interest to protect his soldiers as an example of the power of this moral value when done correctly; for capitalism see the numerous advances in technology that have resulted from the competitive pursuit of self-interest unleashed by capitalism) but my feeling is that over time (centuries), the capitalist values have been corroding the earlier, less self-interested values we had and that this corrosion is most prevalent at the elite levels of society.
As you say, the result is that in most of our current hierarchies, the lower levels are still in their mode (weak, in your view) of obedience and following the rules, while those at the top of the hierarchy have abandoned their traditional role of noblesse oblige and are instead exploiting those below them in the hierarchy and gambling that the short term benefit to themselves will outweigh any long term damage to their organization or society.
To some extent, I’d say that even for those elites that do want to do the right thing, the irrepressible force of competition that pervades our society makes it difficult to impossible for them to do so without finding themselves removed from their position or finding the organization they lead losing ground to rivals willing to break the rules in order to make short term gains.
In ‘The Republic’, Plato argued that democracy would eventually give way to tyranny as the citizens in a democracy became so feeble and self-interested and so fixated on their own personal freedom to do what they wanted regardless of the consequences. Seems about right, but it is a slow process.
Alcuin
MB: – I completely understand your visceral reaction to the idea that there are no left wing authoritarians. But to understand that statement, you have to understand Altemeyer’s definition of an authoritarian, which essentially is that those types of people believe what authorities say, no matter what it is. Authoritarians have a limited ability to think critically and for themselves. Authoritarians also have compartmentalized minds that enable them to hold diametrically opposite thoughts and still assign them validity – they speak out of both sides of their mouths very convincingly. When Altemeyer writes that there are no left wing authoritarians, he is not taking a political position. Just because Mao, Stalin, Lenin, and Castro were “Leftists” does not also mean that they were not authoritarians – they were (and are). But that is Altemeyer’s point: there is no equivalency between a political position and the designation of being an authoritarian. Without re-reading Altemeyer, I suspect that he would designate those who shocked the Learner in the Milgram and Stanford experiments as authoritarians and that those who resisted as not. His work is interesting and a bit hard to grasp, at first. His work really should be required reading for those who are interested in building a more just society. Most interestingly, he shows that every one of us have authoritarian portions of our personalities – just that some are more authoritarian than others.
I’d still like to know how anarchists would deal with authoritarians and those who fall into relationships with psychopaths. Shoot them? Psychopaths, as you must know, are masters of manipulation. Anarchists are the ultimate in anti-authoritarianism – how do they deal with their polar opposites?
Morocco Bama
Alcuin, here’s a discussion about Altemeyer’s methodology in arriving at his conclusions. I will have to look further into it, but at first blush, it appears Altemeyer started with the conclusion and worked backwards, and if he didn’t, he should have, because the result would have been the same. Whether he wants to admit it, or not, his test was purposely designed to give him the conclusion he sought. What I noted in previous posts was indeed a valid Red Flag, and this smells of partisanship, once again. Why must we do this? Why does this shit consistently devolve into partisanship? Partisanship is a quagmire….an impediment, and so long as everything is viewed through that lens, it will be distorted, and any potential for progress smashed.
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2007/07/loaded-dice-professor-altemeyers.html
Alcuin
MB,
I’m still reading David Friedman’s post and the comments, but here is something that leapt out at me:
“Suppose, for instance, that one of the questions asked whether a worker should be willing to cross a picket line and go to work if he disagreed with the decision to call a strike. Labor unions are established authorities, so someone who disagrees is demonstrating RWA as the book defines it.”
Friedman is just plain wrong here. If labor unions are established authorities (and I agree), then someone who crosses a picket line to go to work is demonstrating low RWA, not high RWA. If you are high RWA, you agree with authorities and you follow their lead; you do not do what they do not want you to do. If you are lowRWA, you do what you think is right in your own lights; you do not follow established authority.
Another glimpse into Friedman’s “analysis” of Altemeyer’s ideas:
“Bob suggests I read more of the book. The problem is that, from what I have read, I have already concluded that I cannot trust the author’s judgment, that he does things that it seems obvious to me consistently bias his results without realizing it. Under those circumstances, reading the book and trying to figure out what parts I should believe would be a lot of work.”
Later on, Altemeyer responds to Friedman:
“I suggested David read the rest of my book to get an idea of what has been found, but he said he won’t because he doesn’t trust my judgment. (Ouch! I don’t think I said anything mean like that during our discussion, and when someone reacts that way, I always wonder what was going on in his head that produced the comment.) Well, even if one thinks my judgment stinks to high heaven, one can still look at what Mother Nature said when various experiments were run. If one thinks that is untrustworthy too because those were my experiments, then one can see what other researchers found (as my studies have enjoyed a very high rate of replication). Unless one believes all the researchers have been wrong all of the time.”
As far as I’m concerned, this seals the case against Friedman. How can a person who has not read much of the author’s work make a case against it? Friedman does say that he is a Libertarian. Unlike anarchists, who originally coined the term “libertarian” (it was stolen by Milton Friedman for the modern libertarian right-wing movement), libertarians now are predominantly right-wingers, not left-wingers.
And then the comments veer into a discussion about AIDS. Sad. RWA’s have a big problem with homosexuality.
Altemeyer does address your concern about left wing authoritarians, though:
“And as you clearly know, I call people who submit to established authorities “right-wing authoritarians,” and people who submit to authorities who want to overthrow the established ones “left-wing authoritarians.” There may even be “middle of the road” authoritarians, but that will be for someone else to investigate.”
If you click on Friedman’s profile, you will see that an interest of his is “anarcho-capitalism”, which is Austrian economics, von Mises, etc. More proof that he is a right-wing libertarian and not to be trusted.
You might also want to go to his web page:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com to learn more about this man. He is not an anarchist, as he claims. At least not an anarchist as I define anarchism. Nor an anarchist as David Graeber would define an anarchist.
If you want to know more about Altemeyer, I’d suggest you go to his web page:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
You could also investigate Social Dominance Theory. The definitive text in that field is, I think,
Social Dominance, by Sidanius and Pratto.
Lisa Simeone
The rightwing/leftwing dichotomy is increasingly useless, not only in this discussion but in general. I have found more common cause on civil liberties, for example, with self-described rightwing conservatives than I have with my circle of so-called liberals.
The whole partisan left/right thing has become a sham (maybe it always was?) that serves to divide us. Tribalism is tribalism, no matter where it comes from.
On to some particulars:
That’s not how I read the Zimbardo experiment. On the contrary, it’s not that “most people are power-hungry, abusive prison guards just waiting for their chance,” it’s that most people, given the right circumstances, will behave like power-hungry, abusive prison guards.
That’s how fascism arises. That’s why it’s not limited to “those” people. Hasn’t the 20th century shown us this?
I'm seconding Ian on this. I have as much "common sense/common observation" as anyone (we could fight about this all our lives — how common is common sense?), and what I have observed in life, going back to my earliest consciousness of such things, comports with what Zimbardo found. When I first learned of the Stanford Prison Experiment, I found it — how to put this? — unsurprising. Bu I'd found a scientific basis for my "common sense" observations.
Sorry, I call bullshit. Again, it doesn’t help that Altemeyer is using the left/right thing. Get rid of it. It not only isn’t accurate, it’s going to turn off a lot of people who would otherwise be allies. And while I’m not afraid of pissing off people, I don’t believe in doing so just for the hell of it. See my first paragraph about self-identified rightwingers.
Look, I know it’s handy, I still fall into it myself, but the left/right paradigm is a trap. Authoritarians come in all stripes.
Lisa Simeone
Oh, for god’s sake, my “blockquote” HTML got all fucked up. Sorry. You’re going to have to figure it out yourselves. I can’t edit after the thing posts. I thought I’d checked it carefully, but obviously I missed something.
StewartM
Ian Welsh:
What you and Lisa are telling me–that people turn down management jobs, or other positions where they have power over people, or when having been put in them they become uncomfortable in them and voluntarily ask to relinquish them–doesn’t happen very often. I see it happening all the time, even when the person doing so takes a pay cut (a tangible loss) As for the “no responsibility” catch, there is always some responsibility (though remote) and in these instances the risk for fallout for bad decisions was meager.
Heck, from history, to cite a famous example: George Washington. It was widely believed that Washington could have been president for much longer or have assumed greater power. But he chose not to do so, and to retire after two terms. In the cases I’ve observed involve not such demands of lofty character.
First of all, you measure human cultural variation by the number of cultures, not by the number of members in those cultures. By the latter standard, people not speaking Chinese are odd. Every culture counts equally, whether it involves dozens of people or more than a billion. They count equally as they all give us data points for what variation in human behavior can be possible given a certain set of infrastructural conditions.
(As for the brutal nasty ones, it’s important to note that ‘tribal societies’ is an imprecise descriptor and that virtually all the ‘barbaric Stone Age primitives’ that people bring up are actually horticuluralists or primitive agricultural cultures, not hunter-gatherers (the Yanomani being one such example)–and no one has accused *those* as being peaceful. I say this as someone who does not deny intergroup conflict among hunter-gatherers, though their “wars” are more on the scale of “homicides”.)
Secondly, and related to that above, the question (as I see it) involves what the human animal is all about. In that I see no Nietzschean “Will to Power”, at least in regards of holding power over others (a desire for self-autonomy is a given). It’s probable that a few may be born with that and it’s certainly true that we have a need for social acceptance and love which by itself is not a bad thing, but which cultures hook into and utilize to get us to accept awful things. But a universal desire to be dictators and to hold absolute power over others? I don’t see it, either academically nor in my personal life.
Lastly, I want to bring up cultural narratives. One of the ways that cultures control their members is by their narratives. Cultural narratives, the cultural superstructure, say a lot about how the elite at least in that culture want things to be viewed. For instance, one of the things that wow’ed me listening to Cherokee tales was how incredibly democratic and egalitarian they were compared to ours. Unlike Greek myths, populated by heroes and gods, Cherokee stories took pains to emphasize how even the apparently smallest and weakest among us were important too, and how much a mistake it was to treat them badly or overlook them.
In Western civilization, several narratives reoccur. One is the myth of the great man or men (the hero), the one who towers over ordinary men. Another is the story that primitivism is barbarism, a Hobbesian “law of the jungle”, inferring that the present state of affairs, no matter how crappy, is the best one can hope for. And a third is that every person secretly harbors some “will to power” to dominate others.
As I said, I see lots of comfort here in all these narratives for our sociopathetic elites. Hey, great men dominate things (and of course, they are great men!) so that’s just the way it is. Hey, this raw deal you guys at the bottom are getting is the best deal you can hope for, so shut up and live with it! Hey, if you were in my place and I in yours, you’d be doing the same to me, so you’re not any better than me and certainly don’t expect me to relinquish power. And don’t ever thing of changing anything, because this is just the way that humans come wired, it’s “human nature”.
But none of that is true. Our cultural narratives are self-descriptors of our elites; nothing more, nothing less. It’s not the way that most humans are, not the way that humans have always interacted with each other, and certainly not the way things “have” to be.
-StewartM
Lisa Simeone
Again, that’s not what I’m saying. It’s not what I see the Stanford Prison Experiment as saying.
We seem to be talking at cross-purposes here.
Morocco Bama
What you and Lisa are telling me–that people turn down management jobs, or other positions where they have power over people, or when having been put in them they become uncomfortable in them and voluntarily ask to relinquish them–doesn’t happen very often. I see it happening all the time, even when the person doing so takes a pay cut (a tangible loss)
If I read Alcuin correctly in his interpretation of Altemeyer, such people can still be considered Authoritarians….they just prefer someone else to be locus…or in some cases, the scapegoat and/or foil. They’ll support that person and all that person does, then they’ll hide-out and claim innocence when, and if, the shit hit the fan. Correct me if I’m wrong, Alcuin, but that still makes them an authoritarian. Most people fall into that category, leaving left and right out of it, imo. That’s been my observation….and experience.
Alcuin
I have a couple of reactions here, but I’ll work backwards.
@MB: – I’m far from an “expert” on Altemeyer – he would be the one to respond to your thesis, not me – but from my understanding of his theory, what you are describing would be a low RWA vs. a high RWA. You see, we all have RWA traits – some of us just have more prominent strains of it than others. I’d venture a guess that those who turn down management positions do so for a variety of reasons, among them being time constraints, lack of people skills, and a preference for “productive” work with their hands versus “mental” work. So yes, to the degree that someone who turns down a management position then supports the person who does take the position could be considered an authoritarian, after a fashion. I suppose it would depend on how strongly that person supports the person who took the position. One way of looking at it is that a low RWA could ameliorate, by virtue of his influence, the high RWA of the person who took the position.
@LS: – I surely agree with your annoyance with the “left/right” distinction. I would point out that Altemeyer is an academic and that he likely took his classification from political science, in which the right side of the National Assembly in France in 1789 supported the King and the left side supported the revolution. The classification does make for some confusion and generates a fair amount of hostility, on both left and right. It doesn’t help that Altemeyer apparently switches tracks and uses a different definition of “left” when he says there is no such thing as a left-wing authoritarian. I’m assuming (but would leave it to him to clarify this point) that when he says there is no such thing as a left-wing authoritarian that he means that anarchists can’t, almost by definition, be authoritarians. But I don’t really know.
I’m re-reading Social Dominance, by Sidanius and Pratto right now – their introductory chapter, where they group theories, including Altemeyer’s, is quite informative. Nothing like a little structure to make sense of the chaos out there!
Petro
Just wanted to weigh in with a data point regarding turning down management positions, FWIW.
My iconoclastic, “unreliable,” character has been pretty quickly recognized during most of my working life, so rare it has been that management has been offered to me. There have been a few occasions, however.
Being perennially critical of the behavior of (most) people when given petty positions of power, I have always felt it would be an abdication of duty to not accept such a position – so I could put-up or shut-up, “show them how it’s done” and all that.
Of course, such a decision is not a lark – it involves employment and income – so one puts some thought into the decision. I have always found, in each particular case, that I could not ken a decent way to behave towards my nominal charges once given this (petty) power, without violating the charter of the one(s) above me.
Hence I have, in the end, turned down these infrequent opportunities. And to address StewartM’s “no responsibility catch” – keep in mind that turning down an advancement offer almost always sours to some degree one’s relationship to his/her employer. So I have done so in spite of this as well.
I really have no taste for authority – either over myself or over others, from inside or from outside. All of this talk of human nature and the inevitability of authoritian impulse makes me feel like something of a ghost, or non-entity – is something wrong with me?
If I were to take it seriously, that is.
(No one should take this personally, BTW – I’ve been dealing with this my entire effing life.)
Lisa Simeone
Petro, those of us in these discussions are probably all outcasts in one way or another; that’s why we come to Ian’s and find each other! That’s how I feel, anyway. (And I, too, have stayed far away from management. I would stink as a manager. Too bad not enough people recognize that about themselves.)
P.S. Ian, thank you for fixing my formatting.
Petro
That was very kind, Lisa.
StewartM
We may be indeed talking at cross-purposes. My initial take was that Ian’s point was that people leaped to embrace power over others. That I dispute and still do.
Wikipedia’ing it, it seems that one criticism leveled at this study is that it in essence repeats the conclusions of Milgram study. The guards were given instructions to (in essence) oppress the prisoners. There may have been a self-selection bias to the study as well (the people who signed up to be “guards” may have been disposed to abusive behavior; once again, ‘badge envy’).
-StewartM
StewartM
Petro:
You share a big boat with many. I know people who have turned down offers to take the managerial career track, not once, but repeatedly, and by doing so turn down the increase in pay. As I said, some who said “yes” later asked to be moved back into the role of individual workers/contributors, just because they did not enjoy the hassle of dealing with employee gripes and they didn’t like exercising power.
The bad thing is, there’s a self-selection process going on in management in most companies. Managers look favorably upon new applicants who express an interest in going into management (LOL, when I have any sayso, that’s a minus in my book). Because the see their own jobs as the most-important ones (they’re the “heroes” who make the smart and “tough” decisions). In fact, there are many practical advantages to a managerial job, among these being not only perks and control, but also job security: they (in my experience) are *less* likely than to be laid off if they screw up; at most, they get shifted to a highly-paid staff position if they stink at being a manager (and at that, they are usually given several management jobs before higher-ups admit that making them a manager was a mistake).
With all the practical benefits, it’s rather amazing that so many wouldn’t touch a management job with a ten-foot pole.
-StewartM
StewartM
Aleuin:
My first reaction to this is that if “supporting” (whatever that means) one’s supervisor makes one an authoritarian, then 99.99999 % of us are authoritarians. In short, the term loses its discriminatory powers.
Most people in state-level cultures are taught from the cradle onwards that some must give orders and the rest obey them. Most people accept this unthinkingly, especially in the workplace. (This is why I maintain that capitalism is antithetical to democracy, and that most in the US would acclimate to a real, live, dictatorship just fine–after all, it’s just like their jobs. People who have come from real dictatorships and when asked “How do you like the ‘freedom’ we have here?” usually give the their questioners the unwelcome and chilling answer of “Really, I can’t see much of a difference”).
It’s also true they turn down management jobs for a variety of reasons. The single biggest one doesn’t involve “mental work” vs “working with their hands”, it involves technical work and using technical skills vs people interaction skills (indeed, the former involves more mental work than the latter). A manager’s job can involve a lot of what be called creative lying, and many aren’t comfortable with that. It also involves treating employees as if they were children, and many aren’t comfortable with that either. They mete out awards and advancements on some while withholding them, even dishing out punishment, on others. Many don’t like that either.
It can involve during downsizing making decisions of who stays and who goes. I’ve gone through several of those, and one thing it told you about middle management at least was that you found out who had a heart and who didn’t. Some managers seem to age visibly during this process, they tore themselves up inside agonizing over the list of people to be laid off. The best (and I’m thinking of one guy in particular here) went so far as to tell everyone not to get angry at their immediate supervisor if they got the axe, but to blame him, as he was the one who made the final decision. No buck-passing for him. (I’m glad to say that because of his efforts, the layoffs in his area were kept to a minimum because he went to bat for his employees, and he was successful in protecting *all* of his lower-paid and more economically vulnerable ones). The most talented and humane managers I’ve seen in action took pains to justify all their employees and to document what they did, and why they were important, to head off severances in such times.
Finally, being in a position of power over others erects a communication barrier between people. If you say something nice to your boss, then he/she wonders if you are “sucking up” or flattering to gain advantage and you wonder if you sound like you are. Real, human, contact between subordinate and superiors is difficult.
So–you can see the job can involve a lot of moral angst, at least among people who have human decency within them. You can also see that some people tire of filling out HR forms and evaluations and whatnot, even for the money. It can involve increased social isolation. You can see that some people tire of this, even for the additional money.
But the problem is that there is a self-selection process going on. The people untroubled by all the above are the ones who stay, and some of these by luck of the draw get promoted further upwards. By the time you reach the top, the people for whom control and power and authority trumps humanity is near-universal.
-StewartM
Alcuin
StewartM: –
A couple of points in response to your excellent comment: (1) We all have authoritarian portions of our personalities, as Altemeyer defines RWA – respect for established authority. So supporting a manager doesn’t necessarily make one an authoritarian. There are degrees of authoritarianism, from low to high. (2) I used “mental work” vs. “working with their hands” as a short-cut. I’m not management and I do a lot of technical work, so I understand where you are coming from. But there are jobs out there that do not involve much technical work – rote tasks like assembly line work, for instance. Or packing books at an Amazon.com warehouse. Managers don’t typically do that kind of work – that’s the distinction I was trying to make. You are correct about managers needing people interaction skills – skills that I don’t have. I have a lot of sympathy for my manager – he is in an impossible situation and yes, he has aged dramatically over the last few years, as have a lot of other managers that I know. (3) Your point about self-selection for promotion could easily lead to a discussion about the prevalency of sociopathy in the ranks of higher management, don’t you think?
Petro: – I’ve turned down management twice. The first time with great angst and the second time in 5 minutes with a hearty laugh. As Lisa says, it is too bad that more of us don’t realize that we aren’t cut out to be managers. A friend of mine describes herself as a “no-fit”. I told her better a no-fit than a no-count! I am finding that Social Dominance is quite an eye-opening read. I didn’t understand it the last time I read it (it’s a Cambridge University Press book) but having been involved in so many discussions in the interim, much more is making sense. The pieces of the puzzle are falling into place. I’d recommend it.
Morocco Bama
I disagree, Alcuin, and now I believe you’re being contradictory. Those who adhere to and abide by authority are equally authoritarian as those who actually hold power in an authoritarian social structure. It seems a number of you are missing the point….the point that ties in with what Ian has contended here. For an authoritarian social system to flourish, it takes not only the “leaders” but the “followers”. Both are needed for the formula to work, and both are equally culpable. Just because someone avoids a management position, but yet supports and adheres to whoever does hold that position, doesn’t render them low on the authoritarian scale. IMO, it’s quite the opposite, and Alcuin, if you believe that Altemeyer would label it as low authoritarian, then I’m not sure I agree with his methods and/or interpretations. What about Authority by Proxy and/or Surrogate?
And, I would venture to say that not all authoritarians are sociopaths/psychopaths, and not all sociopaths/psychopaths are authoritarians. It appears those two terms were being used interchangeably in earlier posts.
Also, I think you’re mistaken about what Friedman was contending when he said:
Your reply to Friedman’s comment was as follows:
The operative phrase in Friedman’s comment is “as the book defines it.”
According to Friedman, Altemeyer has structured his methodology in such a way that it will label someone high RWA even when they clearly are not, and he provided that example to prove his point. Friedman agrees with you, I’m sure, that the scenario he painted should be considered low LWA, but Altemeyer’s methods preclude that.
Petro
StewartM –
Your comments about layoffs triggered another memory for me.
I once experienced a rather massive layoff at a data processing firm. When it came to my turn and I was ushered in for the axe, I saw that the poor chap that was tasked with this unhappy business was visibly shaken. Before he could speak, I piped up (as well as I can remember):
“Before you say anything, I understand how hard this must be, and I just wanted to let you know that I’ve got no problem with it and you don’t have to feel bad about letting me go. Let’s just say you’re on break for a minute.”
He literally burst into tears, and thanked me profusely.
I’m thinking he was one of the ones with a heart…
Alcuin
@MB: – Well, all I can say about Altemeyer is that you need to read him before drawing any conclusions about his work. Also, his work has been replicated by many social scientists around the world and his work is also validated by those who work in the field of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). Friedman, by his own admission, didn’t read much of Altemeyer before deciding that he was all wet.
I’m not trying to be contradictory, though it might seem that way. I’m struggling, like everyone else, to make some sense of hierarchy, how it works, and how authoritarianism fits into the bigger picture. I’m finding a lot of answers by re-reading Social Dominance Theory, by Sidanius and Pratto. They describe, in chapter 2, just how their theory explains hierarchical social systems.
MB:
“For an authoritarian social system to flourish, it takes not only the “leaders” but the “followers”. Both are needed for the formula to work, and both are equally culpable.”
Precisely. And Social Dominance agrees. It points out that Altemeyer’s theory is a part of SDT, as is SDO. SDO and RWA share similarities.
Altemeyer was a start for me – I’m moving on to learning about a theory that incorporates Altemeyer’s ideas, plus a whole lot of other thinkers. Men like Pareto, Mosca, Marx, Durkheim, Adorno, Gramsci, and E.O. Wilson. SDT incorporates four broad areas of theoretical investigation: psychological theories (Altemeyer is a psychological theorist), social-psychological theories, social-structural and elite theories, and evolutionary theory. It attempts to integrate all of these into a new theory that explains hierarchy and its prevalence.
Ian Welsh
Hah. Very good Stewart. And that’s in the complete chapter, that the morally strong are selected out of the leadership class, especially the senior executive class.
15% is a lot of people, Stewart. And weakness is relative, even the weak will often refuse, depending on the circumstances. The numbers are in the post – the # can go from 30% to 90%. To get 90% compliance you have to push every button.
Morocco Bama
Pareto? Now there’s a friend of the Elite, if ever there was one. He is perfect justification for the Elite’s Malthusian intentions. 80% of the value creation of this world is created by a mere 20% of the world’s inhabitants. That 20% also happens to be the wealthiest 20%. The remainder of the world’s inhabitants are useless eaters and an ever increasing nuisance that must be dealt with, definitively. And don’t tell me this thinking is not true. I have seen it applied judiciously and ubiquitously in my travels in the corporate world.
With Ernst & Young, there was no selection process. You automatically became a manager due to years of service. You couldn’t avoid it. Consequently, you had people managing who quite simply couldn’t manage. Not because they weren’t authoritarian, because many of them most certainly fit that description, but because they lacked the basic raw material to mold into an effective manager…..and so, we suffered them. And don’t get me wrong. I only offer this up considering that “management” has been discussed. My statement isn’t meant to lend legitimacy to the notion of “management” and all that implies. “Management” is a manifestation of the authoritarianism we are discussing, and merely because I discuss it in its context, that shouldn’t be construed as me accepting it as legitimate.
Lisa Simeone
No, Stewart. Nobody “signed up” as either guards or prisoners. They were assigned at random by Zimbardo.
And he didn’t tell them to “oppress the prisoners.” He told them to be guards.
Ian Welsh
Zimbardo’s spent his entire life on the subject of evil. He’s not a stupid man.
StewartM
Lisa Simeone:
Wikipedia says not so:
Moreover:
I also note that it says that the BBC tried a similar test (“The Experiment”) which did not replicate the Stanford results.
The article also draws similarities to Abu Ghraib, which I buy. There you had government officials shifting the blame to a few bad apples, whereas the torture techniques used on the prisoners were those devised by professionals, used by torturers the world ’round. Or, as one said “Kids in Iowa don’t sit around dreaming up these kinds of things up on their own”.
StewartM
StewartM
Petro,
The manager I spoke of had more than a few people tell him (including myself) that “If I get the axe, there’s no hard feelings”. He also made it clear that whoever would be let go was not being let go because they were in some way a “bad employee”, but because of an arbitrary quota he had to meet. He tried to soften the blow.
He was a good and decent man, and in that way a real “leader”.
-StewartM
Treese
I was lightning struck when I learned about Milgram and it was a turning point in my life.
Before that I was pleasantly optimistic and believed that humans were basically kind enough, even though the evidence was begging me to conclude otherwise. People have a lot invested in believing in goodness.
I was raised in a strict Left environment and it was, in its own way, authoritarian. I was forced to hate Republicans, and to adopt the belief in moral superiority. I came to see that liberals mostly “help” others or spout grandiose opinions about social justice out of feelings of guilt or in an attempt to be perceived as “good” by the group and keep down their own murderous impulses. There were none better than my family members, but they weren’t nice to me. I had a habit of commenting on their hypocrisy. They never complimented me, other than to say I was honest. Fair enough. The whole idea that people can be categorized by the strength of their moral fiber is ludicrous. You can’t determine that, as these experiments point out. It’s like comparing degrees of suffering. People think they can rise in stature by saying that their personal suffering is more valid than another’s. The same way that poverty is held up as something virtuous, the fatal flaw of the current liberal argument. And obviously, all political persuasions joined in the torture during the experiments which serves as a great equalizer. That reality deserves some attention.
There are many factors in play. I don’t think conclusions about human nature can be successfully drawn. It seems like no one’s been able to do that, probably for good reason. The moral hierarchy is just as potentially dangerous as the economic one. One thing to keep in mind is the probably sadistic personalities of the experiments’ creators. That helped set the tone. I read part of Zimbardo’s book, but I was just as disturbed by his behavior as that of the subjects.
I think it might hinge on collective need and memory in the face of a vast and threatening universe. Group cohesion apparently ensures our survival. We were once preyed upon. And it took a village to bring down a mastodon. We seek protection within the group and we must be in the good graces of the leader, since excommunication is unbearable. Or the concept is. Those of us who have come to prefer separation know its value.
There’s also the fact of a dark and infinite world beyond us, so we huddle in fear like we always have, doing what the others do, buying safety. But it’s a microcosm, so the dangers manifest within the so-called safe unit, and the same rewards and punishments determine behavior.
So is this massive entity that rules humans an oppressive malevolent thing, or is it kind and forgiving, as people try to project? Neither, I surmise. The moral dilemmas are a fabrication and can be excessive and faulty. Part of freedom is being liberated from relentless restrictions of judgement.
That’s what got to me about these experiments. It doesn’t look good, except for the exceptions. What re-ignited my hope was that fact that a tiny few refused to comply despite the overwhelming social pressure. The seed is there. In the face of the unknown we are small and insignificant, which, I think, translates into allowing ourselves to be humiliated, as if buying protection. The abuser also buys protection. Punishment buys good time. Pain is delicious.
The glorification of suffering is one of my major studies, and naturally, I have concluded nothing.
But I do conclude that people vacillate between strength and weakness as circumstance dictates. Something’s got to be in charge. This “who and what we are” business is just mental gaming. The Milgram and Stanford experiments seemed to alter my perceptions, but in retrospect, as I’m old now, I think they merely brought me home to my natural misanthropic state. I no longer have to be liked so much by others, especially since so much of my compassionate liberal family is gone now. I even live amongst Republicans, quite comfortably I might add.
Morality can’t be measured. Probably the truly moral wouldn’t even try. People behave the way they do for reasons no one else can determine. And know one knows the answers, particularly the experts. That’s the good part. We’re on our own.
StewartM
Morocco Bama
I guess I am reminded of leadership roles amongst hunter-gatherers, who could be said to practice a form of anarchism. They have leaders too (“headmen”) albeit informal ones who don’t have coercive power.
How does one get to be such a leader? By consistently exhibiting that you know what you’re talking about, by consistently doing the right thing, and by consistently putting the welfare of others above oneself. They get it by setting a good example by their own behavior. The best hunter among them may bring home the most game, but choose to sit and eat *last* after everyone else.
In historical examples, people who seemed to be “natural leaders” (a George Washington or Robert E. Lee, to use military examples) often combine elements of this; those who are failures (a Braxton Bragg) exhibit the opposite.
To me, this highlights an important point. We recognize that a willingness to set aside our own viewpoints or needs or interests to go along with the consensus or needs of a larger group is “good”. That’s not really a bad thing in itself; as social animals, we couldn’t get along without it. And in fact that’s precisely what sociopaths DON’T do; with them there’s no setting aside at all, life’s all about numero uno.
The problem is when the consensus, either real or manufactured (by elites) wants to make us tolerate or engage in what our empathetic bonobo-like natures tell us we should not do.
So I don’t see it as a matter of “strength” vs. “weakness” per se, but one of trying to cope with two ideals of what being “good” is all about (“playing nice” vs “not hurting others”). The latter occurs because our cultural evolution has resulted in sociopaths getting put in charge in the political leadership roles of derived cultures, who justify awful things with mystified solutions to try to pretend something is the exact opposite of what it materially seems to be (such as carbonizing a ‘witch’ alive is actually an act of mercy, doing her or him a *favor*).
In my eyes, it’s our need to be social animals, and our ability to buy abstract rationalizations, is the “hook” by which cultures get us to accept such things. What’s ironic about this is that the people in charge have very interest in “playing nice with others” but are perfectly happy to utilize this facet of human nature as a “hook”.
-StewartM
StewartM
Treese:
One of the disturbing things about sociopaths-potentially-in-the-making is how they justify their actions in the name of “science”. One kid cut off his family cat’s tail, piece by piece, claiming a “scientific interest” in studying it.
I don’t want to go too far with this, but the capability for justifying abuse in the model of investigator and ‘object-to-be-investigated’ and the cold calculating personality that sociopaths exhibit is not comforting.
I believe that a genetic predisposition to sociopathy likely exists, but like schizophrenia it is probably triggered by developmental and/or environmental cues. The childrearing practices of authoritarian cultures may well be one such cue (look at Hitler’s and Stalin’s abusive fathers).
From a NYTimes article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/can-you-call-a-9-year-old-a-psychopath.html?_r=4&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all
-StewartM
StewartM
Make my earlier comment:
“What’s ironic about this is that the people in charge have very *little* interest in “playing nice with others” but are perfectly happy to utilize this facet of human nature as a “hook”.”
Editing error.
-StewartM
Alcuin
Here is what Sidanius and Pratto have to say about hierarchy in hunter-gatherer societies:
“It is widely assumed that one major reason for the lack of arbitrary-set, group-based social hierarchies among hunter-gatherer societies is because such societies lack sufficient economic surplus. The technologies of food production and storage within hunter-gatherer societies do not permit long-term storage of food. Similarly, because hunter-gatherer societies tend to be nomadic, people within such societies are not able to accumulate large amounts of other, nonedible forms of economic surplus such as animal skins, weapons, and armaments. This lack of economic surplus does not allow for the development of highly specialized social roles, such as professional armies, police, and other bureaucracies facilitating the formation of expropriative political authority. Because of the absence of military and ‘coercive specialists’, all adult males within hunter-gatherer societies are essentially the equal of all other adult males. Therefore, the extent to which political authority among adult males exists, this authority tends to be based on mutual agreement, persuasion, and consultation rather than coercion.”
Once an economic surplus develops, in whatever manner, impersonal authoritarianism increases and egalitarianism decreases. Seems like a good argument for decentralization to me!
Off-hand, not having finished the book, it seems to me that Sidanius and Pratto are pointing out a truism that many leftists do not want to confront or admit: that humans have hierarchy wired into their genes and that there will always be a struggle between people who favor Hierarchy Enhancing (HE) policies and people who favor Hierarchy Attenuating (HA) policies. Stable societies exist when there is a balance of some kind between HE and HA. Those who favor HE policies will almost always prove to be the high RWAs of Altemeyer or the high SDOs of Sidanius and Pratto while those who favor HA policies will be the various flavors of the left.
As far as Pareto is concerned, from what little I know of him, he appears to have his feet solidly grounded in the earth. He may well be a friend of the Elite, but it doesn’t help to ignore reality. Hierarchy and authoritarianism exist – the question is, what do we do about it? Seems to me that first, we take off our rose-colored glasses and take a real hard look at what exists instead of continuing to live in the dreamland that generates so much ranting and raving by leftists.
Morocco Bama
Interesting animated vignette here with Zimbardo entitled the Secret Powers of Time. Interesting, because it ties nicely with what we’re seeing unfold in the European Union. The Southern Nation-States are the ones that are bearing the brunt of this crisis currently to include Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Does it have anything to do with the sense of time Zimbardo discusses? I think it does have some influence.
http://boingboing.net/2010/06/11/philip-zimbardo-on-t.html
Morocco Bama
It was found that students volunteering for a prison life study possessed dispositions toward abusive behavior
I’d love to see how they came to this determination.
Ian Welsh
If the majority of humans were good, and morally strong, the 20th century would not have occurred as it did. If they were not plastic, able to easily be convinced to support or at least tolerate massive evil, human history would be so far different from what it is as to be unrecognizable.
Living in America, after 9/11, it amazes me that anyone will even argue this.
Oh yes, humans are good. Yeah.
Not. Almost everyone will do or tolerate evil under the right(wrong) circumstances. One of my friends and mentors in my early 20s was a man named Peter who had been a child soldier for the Nazis. We spent a lot of time talking. One thing he was clear on was this “we knew, we all knew.”
Virtually every job in America is entwined in doing evil. You cannot work for a megacorp which is not evil, you cannot work for a fast food joint which is not evil, the main retailer in America is so fucking evil it isn’t even funny (Walmart). People do evil every goddamn day, they tolerate it and many of them even revel in it. You re-elected George Bush, children. Most “left wingers” pretend Obama isn’t a monster. You spent ages talking about the horrors of American soldiers dying, but most Americans didn’t give two shits about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis they killed.
You live in a monstrous society, you tolerate it, you embrace it, you even tell yourselves you’re the best society in the world. You treat even your own people like dogs once they aren’t useful to you, as we see repeatedly with the way the poor are left to suffer and die due to their poverty if they get ill or the way “veterans” whom you care to love above all others, are left to rot once they’re not useful to you. Let’s not even talk about what you’re doing to the children you claim are more important to you than anything else – the way you are systematically destroying their future with your pollution and the massive student debt you are chaining them with.
It is so easy to get humans to do or tolerate evil that it takes immense work to pretend otherwise.
It is also, imo, not that hard to get them to do good.
Morocco Bama
The latter occurs because our cultural evolution has resulted in sociopaths getting put in charge in the political leadership roles of derived cultures, who justify awful things with mystified solutions to try to pretend something is the exact opposite of what it materially seems to be (such as carbonizing a ‘witch’ alive is actually an act of mercy, doing her or him a *favor*).
Isn’t that a description of what Lee did in the Civil War? I think it is despite the glorifying historical rhetoric. Or how about Lincoln’s part? Lincoln, after realizing Lee is a greater threat than he initially imagined, ups the ante and issues the Emancipation Proclamation, thus ensuring that Lee fights to the last man, or nearly the last man, because now there’s not much else to lose, besides face. And my oh my how the blood did flow. And for what, when it’s all said and done? For this? Really? Was it worth it? If the answer is yes, then there’s more of it to come, you can be sure of that.
Morocco Bama
Alcuin, yes, I have been saying this for years now. Accumulation is at the heart of the matter. It is the root. It’s where we must focus our efforts. That’s why the talking and the ranting is important. That’s why these discussions are vital. Before anything substantial can be undertaken and accomplished, the effort must be properly directed, and we have to ferret that out in dialogue, so don’t dismiss all of this as unnecessary and futile cyber jousting.
Petro
Just a quick word on the “genetics” and sociopathy – I believe the word we’re looking for when talking nature vs. nurture here is “innate,”, not “genetic.” As far as I understand, there is no genetic factor – as in there is no indication that the condition is inherited or inheritable.
It can crop up in any family.
Alcuin
MB: – I’m not dismissing the jousting on this forum as unnecessary or futile at all. I’ve learned a lot here. I just do not have much energy for all of the ranting and raving that takes place on other fora, though (Alternet, in particular). I think it is so very important to establish a “baseline”, if you will, of how these abuses to human dignity can take place – that isn’t happening, so far as I can see, in many places. It is just one continuous, tiresome rant about the various horrors that take place on a daily basis. There is no attempt to understand why these horrors take place – just excuses. As in, “oh, Obama can’t do anything because of those mean Republicans.” Bullshit. Obama is Mr. Authoritarian enthroned. I fell for Obamney’s horseshit in 2008 but I sure won’t make that mistake again. Not that Robama is any better.
I think it helps greatly to have some framework or theory that enlightens, rather than obfuscates, the daily happenings. Anything that gives us a chance to increase the signal-to-noise ratio from .01:1, where it is these days, to something higher is most welcome.
Ian, do you really think that Canadians, if they had the economic power that the United States does, would do any better? If the tar sands oil isn’t transported to the Gulf for refinement, the backup plan is to transport it to BC, no? Unfortunately, those sorry savages, lacking the moral guidance of Europeans, are not happy with that idea. I hear the Chinese are really stellar in their treatment of ethnic minorities … I’m sure the Tibetans wouldn’t want to have any other government telling them how to live their lives. And, of course, the Chinese have a pristine environment with all workers making a living wage. And Iran is a humane society filled with exemplars of decency, as is Afghanistan. Not.
Ian Welsh
Alcuin,
Canadians are humans too, last time I checked, meaning they’re as weak and good/bad as anyone else, if pushed.
The culture is, however, currently less evil than American culture. Canada has a major party which thinks that the cost of the oil sands should be internalized and that polluters should pay, and that party genuinely believes it as does its leader (that’s what the post above this one is about.)
In general, every nation in the developed world is moving in the same (bad, wrong, evil) direction, the question is speed and where they started from and what the chances for reversal are.
However, as it happens, I have some hope for Canada, because it has 3 real parties and the leftmost one is actually left wing. The game is not lost here yet, though it looked like it might be for a while.
We’ll see.
Saying everyone is equally bad is simply not true, btw, and I find it tiresome. Some cultures are clearly sicker than others. Most countries don’t lock up as much of their population as the US (you lock up more than the goddam USSR did!), no other developed nation lets people die and suffer from lack of health care in anywhere near the numbers the US does and on and on. Your pathologies are off the chart for a developed nation.
Celsius 233
Morality; I’m not even sure what that means. Having lived abroad for a decade and done a bit of traveling; is morality the common thread that connects us all; that which evidences the similarities across cultural norms?
No, that’s something else, IME.
From the moment of birth we begin the training/indoctrination/culturalization and that necessarily means acceptance of authority. In the unhealthiest demonstration of that, we never develop the ability of critical thinking or questioning our surroundings/teachings/mores/norms and most importantly; who/what are we.
Further evidence of the acceptance of authority by us (individually) is our constant quoting of “authoritative” sources for affirmation of our opinions/words. This obviates our own autonomy.
Isn’t it better to inquire, look (see with a capital S), listen, and then, with our own words and thoughts, speak to what we see? Knowing something; understanding from personal experience isn’t the same as knowledge gained from books and others; it’s something else.
Authority can only exist in an atmosphere of permission; implied or enforced.
Without self knowledge; all the gnashing of teeth is just and only that. What I see going on today is the result of ignorance on such a basic level, that it makes optimism all but impossible.
…and the beat goes on…
Lisa Simeone
Seconding Ian.
And Stewart, if you’re going to talk about Zimbardo, at least read what he says rather than what Wikipedia says.
http://www.zimbardo.com/
http://www.prisonexp.org/
viajera
@Petro:
Just a quick word on the “genetics” and sociopathy – I believe the word we’re looking for when talking nature vs. nurture here is “innate,”, not “genetic.” As far as I understand, there is no genetic factor – as in there is no indication that the condition is inherited or inheritable.
Actually, the latest research shows that there is a genetic component to sociopathy, clinically known as Antisocial Personality Disorder. Here’s a ScienceDaily summary of a twin study identifying two distinct genetically-linked components: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120207100008.htm If you prefer to go straight to the literature, here’s a study identifying specific genes related to APD: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20363030
@Ian and all:
Re: Some cultures are clearly sicker than others. Most countries don’t lock up as much of their population as the US (you lock up more than the goddam USSR did!), no other developed nation lets people die and suffer from lack of health care in anywhere near the numbers the US does and on and on
Yes, and within the US, Louisiana is arguably one of the worst. It has the highest incarceration rate in the US – triple Iran’s and 7x China’s (http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/05/louisiana_is_the_worlds_prison.html). LA has the 2nd highest poverty rate (after Mississippi), and one of the highest proportionso f people without health insurance. The school system is atrocious and has been since the white flight of the 70s. The racism here is out-of-control. I’ve lived all over the US and Central America and have never experienced anything like it.
Yet…what happened after Katrina? Everyone thought there was going to be race riots, massive looting, and violent raping- and murdering- gangs roaming the streets and the Superdome. All the news channels were spreading rumors of all the alleged violence, which was then used to justify bringing in the National Guard (after the feds refused entry to non-profits and other groups who were trying to deliver food, water, ice, and other critical supplies – but that’s another story). But what was actually going on? Sure, there was some looting – though most of it was for essential food and water. But for the most part, everyone kicked in and helped one another. People piloted boats through the streets to rescue friends, neighbors, and complete strangers off rooftops. People brought food and water. The only deaths in the Superdome were of natural causes (4), an overdose, and a suicide – no violence, despite the atrocious conditions. I was living in New Orleans at the time, and while I evacuated for the storm, many of my friends stayed – so I’ve heard this from people who were there, not just the news reports.
I know you addressed this above, Ian, with your paragraph about people doing “good” when in crisis situations. But I just want to highlight this because I think it shows some hope – that even in the most “pathological” state in arguably the most “pathological” country, when the proverbial sh*t hits the fan, people helped one another instead of looting. This gives me at least some hope. While I don’t trust the people in power (be it governmental, corporate, etc.) to do good, I do hold out some hope that when they finally go too far and the people wake up and realize that the sh*t has hit the fan again, many of them will help rather than turn on one another. I share your pessimism on most matters, but this is one area where I hold onto at least a shred of hope.
ks
Thirding Ian and Lisa,
Ian’s running into the “But not me!” pushback that usually comes up when this subject is broached and it’s understandable that good people wouldn’t want to fully confront the stripped down reality of what the US does and is and our participation in that culture. After all, it’s a bleak portrait.
To add to his litany of evil, I’d say in about a decade, probably less, some version of drones will be used openly and regularly in the US. There will be a few test runs for special events like the G8/NATO meeting in Chicago, then political conventions, then benign events like Superbowls then “just in unruly minority neighborhoods…” before they are fully implemented but, once they are that will be close to the final nail in the coffin.
Ché Pasa
The Human Weakness Trope is a popular one for both condemnation and exculpation of all manner of sins, errors and calamities. “We are weak, ergo, something-something-something…” ie: not meeting whatever standard God or someone else or society has set for us. We are “weak” compared to what? Weak compared to whatever standard we haven’t met.
I think Ian gets close to the nub of the issue here:
Harsh, true, but it has its points.
We all live in some kind of society. To someone looking in from the outside, many aspects of another society will be seen as monstrous. For example, I have little but contempt for the utter monstrousness of Tibetan society prior to the exile of the Dalai Lama. But all I know of it is what I read in dozens of National Geographic Magazines from the early 20th Century. In other words, I know nothing much about it at all. I don’t doubt that most Tibetans at the time didn’t see themselves as members of a monstrous society. And the Dalai Lama himself is so sweet and wise, how could he have been titular head of a truly monstrous society?
We all live in some kind of society, or we don’t live. We do tolerate them often more than we should according to standards we have little or no say in. We don’t have the option of living truly apart from society. Sometimes we celebrate whatever society we live in. Sometimes we try to reform them.
All societies are flawed to a greater or lesser degree in the eyes of someone looking in from outside, just as they are in the eyes of critics within society. From time to time, those flaws in our own society or in others becomes intolerable, and beating of chests and wielding of clubs becomes mandatory. We have discovered Our Bounden Enemy whom we must destroy. We are weak, you see.
Most Americans are nowhere near the level of intolerance for the flaws in our own society needed to break the chains of cultural conditioning and social expectations, but more and more get closer to it every day. There will be a tipping point.
But in the meantime, we’ll muddle along. We’ll make changes in our own lives — or have changes forced on us — before we attempt to change the lives of others.
We are weak, after all.
Petro
@viajera – Your links, along with some others I found, show that I’m to wrong rule out genetics after all.
Cheers
Petro
*wrong to
Alcuin
@Ian,
Oh, I certainly agree that some societies are sicker than others and I also agree that the United States is vastly sicker than its inhabitants think. You certainly won’t see me reciting the Pledge of Allegiance or singing the Star Spangled Banner. But that’s what entertainment is for, isn’t it – to keep the minds of the peasantry off their plight? And isn’t that what “education” is for – to teach Creationism and Patriotism? I’m reading the chapter in Social Dominance dealing with “justice” and the pieces of the puzzle are starting to fit together. What Sidanius and Pratto are essentially writing is that the more hierarchical the society, the greater the disparities are regarding education, employment, health care, “justice”, and housing. I don’t think there are many leftists, certainly not on this blog, who would agree that there is little discrimination in any of those areas. Discrimination is the means that social groups use to enhance hierarchy. Next chapter: “Oppression as a Cooperative Game”. Very interesting reading.
@ks: – I’m not playing the “But not me” game at all. I was just pointing out that there are other societies which are not so great, either.
@Ian (again):
“… you tolerate it, you embrace it, you even tell yourselves you’re the best society in the world.”
You’re addressing the most entertained and least educated population in the world, a population drowning in popular culture with their brains rotted by excessive exposure to television. Not that they have the slightest idea who you are or that their brains are, indeed, rotted. Ian Welsh? Who’s he?
ks
Alcuin,
@ks: – I’m not playing the “But not me” game at all. I was just pointing out that there are other societies which are not so great, either.
I didn’t mean that as a personal attack and I think Ian would agree with the latter point as would I but, in the end, that’s besides the point, no? Especially when you consider the outsized effect the US has on the rest of the world.
Morocco Bama
ks, this is not aimed at you or Ian or Lisa or anyone else here, for that matter, but it is something I see all too often at other cyber repositories. Much of the thinking at these other locales centers on the pestilence that is the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel….at the expense of all else, including what we’re discussing in this thread. That’s a dangerous and ineffective strategy, imo. If the focus becomes that trinity of Imperialism, whilst ignoring the underlying causes that are firmly rooted everywhere these days, not just in the United States, the U.K. and Israel, then even if you succeed in deposing the trinity, the roots are still in tact to sprout again and again. Fascism wasn’t defeated with the defeat of Nazi Germany. It just found cover until it could rise again, new and improved. Hitler’s extermination of the Jews wouldn’t have improved Germany’s situation…..other scapegoats would have been found until they turned on each other and devoured themselves whole.
Sure, the substantial purveyors are easy targets and it’s easy to get bogged down in reaction to the daily myriad atrocities and injustices. Yes, the United States is malevolent, and so too is the U.K. and Israel, but they’re just substantial tentacles of a larger octopus, and lopping one of them off, or all of them, still leaves the octopus.
Morocco Bama
I’ll tell you what. The Plutocrats are building their own gallows. They’re going to make it the only option left to bring them down to size. Out of their cold, dead hands.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-23/wealthy-americans-turn-to-trusts-to-shield-assets.html
As Ian has often said, the Plutocrats are sending the message, and that message is “what are you going to do? Nothing, that’s what…”
Alcuin
@ks: – And I didn’t interpret your comment as a personal attack, either. I haven’t see that kind of behavior here, as far as I can remember, which is such a refreshing change from other “repositories”, as MB calls them. Indeed, the United States has an outsized effect on the rest of the world – that seems to go hand-in-hand with the surplus economic value that this country has harvested, legally or illegally.
@MB: – Are you sure you didn’t mean “suppositories” when you used the word “repositories”?
This quote from Henry David Thoreau is appropriate: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”
I love the dig at philanthropy …
Alcuin
@MB: – The word “smile” was supposed to be after the comment about suppositories, but I included it in chevrons and the website stripped the word out.
Lisa Simeone
Zimbardo and Milgram writ large:
. . . Frost, a British expatriate, claims that before his 14 years as a police officer — nine of which involved participation in a SWAT team for the Metropolitan Police — he served in the British Special Air Service. According to the Phoenix New Times, Frost told a Gilbert PD investigator that “he had been trained his entire life to meet conflict with violence, which was creating a problem now that he was a civilian… Karl said he `struggled with inner demons’ over his ability to enforce laws as he used to.”
There are at least two critical disclosures in Frost’s account. First of all, he was trained to be a law enforcer — a violent, armed emissary of the political state — rather than a peace officer committed to the protection of life and property. Second, his law enforcement background left him with a lingering addiction to power – and made him a danger to others . . . .
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/112602.html
Morocco Bama
Yes indeed, Lisa, it’s quite clear that the quality of the soil determines the character and make up of the manifesting flora and fauna, meaning if the system (the soil) is harshly authoritarian, the flora and fauna (we the people) will reflect that. And your example supports that thesis. Ans so too does The White Ribbon, which I watched this past weekend per your suggestion.
What struck me about the movie, assuming the children did it as is implied, is that the violence inflicted was not administered out of revenge or a sense of justice. It appeared to be violence for violence’s sake, some of it random, and some it purposely inflicted on the weak and/or innocent, but the theme remained, violent authoritarianism begets violent authoritarianism. A better question is, is the term violent authoritarianism redundant? I think it is, meaning a strong case can be made that authoritarianism is innately violent to one degree, or another.
What’s amazing, and shows there is still a crack that allows a bit of light, is the fact that the man in your example was capable of recognizing the mechanism at play. That is an increasing rarity. Reflection and introspection are on the verge of extinction, and that is by design, I believe.
Lisa Simeone
MB, also Rod Serling’s masterful work from — good grief, now over 50 years ago. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” spelled all this out in a different way. Fear as the guiding factor in people’s decisions and actions. That’s what we’ve seen in this country post-9/11, and it’s only getting worse.
Morocco Bama
Yes Lisa, “remember, damaged people are dangerous, they know they can survive.” We could have an entire thread about that very statement alone, and how it relates to what we’re discussing here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK5bbwPqT-Q
It’s an excellent movie, for anyone who cares to know.
Formerly T-Bear
A 2¢ opinion. Morality has always seemed inextricably involved in value judgments, quite often of dubious genesis (the value judgments) or value. Occham’s razor cuts well here. Instead of moral deficiency, the simple lack of stature to meet the requirements and obligations needed for people to adequately function in a complex world are simply not there. The education system is notorious for accommodating the lowest common denominator, to the point that it produces no educated product. Complex systems require complex education to function. The disappearance of history from the curriculum effectively retards the ability to know where one has been, what one has done, or when a solution may have been found; without history, there is no anchor and all else is adrift. The induced fear of numbers let alone the fear of using them as well as the use of logic, of comprehension, of critical thinking obliterates the frameworks or structures of law, of medicine, of the mechanical and physical sciences, of economics.Language has become unmoored from meaning. In the end the only structure that survives this maelstrom is belief, which, like a flag, follows the direction of the moment’s wind. Opinion has become the only actual currency, belief its only value. Popularity has triumphed over either knowledge or experience, excellence is damned, wealth is despised, the superficial honored as profound. Such conditions give genesis to incapacity, incapacity reduces choices, dearth of choice impairs survival. It is not that people are weak, it is that people have become unprepared to bear the responsibility required of them, that failure is the foundation for the evil of the age, look no further.
Ian Welsh
Introspection requires time alone. Our society makes it out that something is wrong with a person who spends time alone.
Celsius 233
Formerly T-Bear
May 24, 2012
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Very, very well said.
It’s apparent I need to post less and consider more…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ian Welsh *
May 24, 2012
Introspection requires time alone. Our society makes it out that something is wrong with a person who spends time alone.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Living where I do; solitude is easy and not judged as anti-social.
Morocco Bama
Yes, Ian, with the invasive nature of the virtual world, you can no longer be truly alone. In the least, it makes the challenge much more difficult. And when this is the case, people are no longer moored in anything but the belief (hat tip to T-Bear) that the Technotopia will take care of them, one way or another, and so they become feathers in its winds of cyberspace and beyond. It reminds me of this scene from Forest Gump, and the description of how the feather scene was fabricated by the Technotopia and isn’t really random afterall. What’s ironic is that in this short clip, those who fabricated it don’t see that the world they are creating is increasingly not random at all….quite the opposite. As we approach the Singularity, these instances of irony are occurring with much greater frequency. Things are becoming so complex, and moving so fast, the human mind, which is being stunted through mass-produced educational indoctrination, is not only unable to keep up, but also unable to comprehend its increasing incapacity to keep pace.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ2SWXwoYwQ
Soon enough, we’ll no longer be Dust In the Wind, but rather Bits and Bytes In the Wind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH2w6Oxx0kQ
StewartM
Uh, Lisa, like I’m going to find criticisms what Zimbardo’s work on his site?
-StewartM
StewartM
MB:
I was talking about why Lee’s soldiers followed him as they did, and adored him. As did Washington’s. Both men exhibited leadership traits that made many *want* to follow them. The stick only takes you so far.
As for your point about the possibility of these being turned to bad ends, I think that niches well with what I’ve been saying. Heck, successful military organizations create social models that mimic the family; as the saying goes, you don’t risk your neck for your country, you risk it for your buddies.
-StewartM
StewartM
Ian Welsh:
I think we both agree about the plasticity. However, I just don’t call the human desire for socialization, a desire to subordinate our personal beliefs to go along with the group, “weakness”. We subordinate our own desires and beliefs to accommodate others all the time, and usually for ends which are good. We’ve all known how intolerable individuals for whom every little iota of existence is a matter some non-compromisable “principle” that can never be trespassed. It’s a necessary social lubricant.
The difficult bit is when our socialization is used as a ‘hook’ to get us to do or accept evil things, by social betters. Then I see it as a case of our instinct to be go along with the group opinion (which in hierarchical societies is heavily dominated by elite opinion) vs one of heeding our empathetic nature. Ideology (or religion) is nearly always a component of this evil when it occurs; its purpose is to bolster submission to the group opinion by denying the ugly material reality of what is being done (which is why such ideologies, and religions, elevate ‘ideals’ and idealism over materialism). Carbonizing a witch alive, after all, was doing them a *favor*, according to the cultural superstructure of the 1500s.
-StewartM