Obedience

Hola mi Gente,

I have to posts in mind: The biological hate crime in Flint, MI which has resulted in the poisoning of mostly people of color and one on the Bernie/ Hillary race.

I have a deep interest in moral reasoning, obedience, and authoritarianism because I have personally experienced what happens when these things go awry or are abused.

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A field lieutenant with prisoners picking cotton at Cummins Prison Farm in 1975.

Obedience

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

 -- Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority

Some of my work involves public speaking. Most of this work involves other professionals, but I am asked to address young people in school settings. A colleague once asked me to substitute for her at an elementary school. The topic was substance abuse and she had a plan all worked out. Of course, I discarded her curriculum and proceeded to wing it. LOL!

I’ve always been interested in group behavior and the following is how I “teach” about drug abuse.

Please do not try this at home, you’re not trained, and you can do more harm than good and might take your eye out!

I wait until students file into the class, those that are “late” (they are not late. I make an arbitrary decision to make them late) are asked to wait right outside the door. Before all this, I have taken the liberty of drawing three lines on the blackboard. One line is obviously shorter than the rest. It’s not blatantly shorter, but short enough to notice upon close inspection…

Before I allow the “late” students in, I address the class and tell them that they will be my co-conspirators in an experiment on social behavior. I point to the lines and ask, “Which of these lines is the shortest?” Of course, a few students raise their hands and correctly identify the shorter line. Once a consensus has been reached, I tell the students that I am now going to allow the “late” students in and ask them the same question. However, the class is instructed to say that the shortest line is not the shortest line, that it is, in fact, the same size as the other lines.

I allow the “late” students in and proceed to ask them the same question. Again, the late students are all in agreement as to which is the shortest line. Then I ask my co-conspirators and one by one, they all say that none of the lines is shortest, that they are, in fact, the same size.

I then ask the late students again, “Are you sure this line is the shortest?” What happens is that one by one, the late students experience pressure to fall in line with the consensus of the majority. I mean, conformity is somewhat hardwired into us as part of an adaptation for survival. The group is a powerful influence in our behavior. Back to my unfortunate students: Some will stick to their guns, but most will break under the pressure of the power of the group. At this point, I disclose our little conspiracy and then turn to the class and say, “This is what peer pressure feels like.”

The rest of the workshop is dedicated to exploring those feelings, and how that pressure can be used as a way to do almost anything against our will -- drugs, sex, violence, voting for conservatives, etc.

It’s a powerful way to illustrate the power of the group. Most people will tell you that they would never succumb to the group. However, studies show that the vast majority of you will obey authority even when it goes counter to your moral code.

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Obedience to Authority

Many of you already know I work with formerly or currently incarcerated men and women. I was formerly incarcerated, but I came about this work more through flow than an actual conscious decision. In fact, I was initially reluctant to work with this population because 1) It’s an extremely challenging group to work with, and 2) even those motivated to change face huge obstacles to successful social reintegration. However, nowhere is this issue of obedience to authority more clearly illustrated than in prison settings. One experiment, The Stanford Prison Experiment, led by social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, had to be abandoned because within a couple of days, randomly picked normal college students role playing corrections officers were abusing the students role-playing incarcerated persons, and the students role-playing the incarcerated were plotting a prison breakout. Totally engrossing study.

However, the study which I have found the most interesting is one you may have heard about. Anyone who has taken any psych 101 course will have heard of Stanley Milgram, who shocked the world in the early 1960s with his discoveries at Yale while conducting what became known as the obedience experiments. In brief, he found that average, presumably normal, groups of residents of New Haven, Connecticut, would readily inflict very painful, and even deadly, electric shocks on an innocent victim whose actions did not merit such harsh treatment.

The experiment, supposedly dealing with the effects of punishment on learning, required that the subjects shock a learner every time he made an error on a verbal learning task, and to increase the intensity of the shock in 15-voly steps, from 15 to 450 volts, on each subsequent error (the “shock machine” was a fake, with actors playing the tortured learners in a separate room). The results: 65% of the subjects continued to obey the experimenter to the end, simply because he commanded them to.

Groundbreaking and controversial, these experiments have had enduring relevance, because they demonstrated with stunning clarity that ordinary individuals could be induced by an authority figure to act destructively, even in the absence of physical force, and that it didn’t take evil or aberrant individuals to carry out mass actions that were immoral and inhumane.

Milgram’s findings have had the effect of making us more aware of our malleability in the face of social pressure, in the process making us reshape our individual morality. While I’m sure most of you reading this would like to think that when confronted with a similar moral dilemma we would act in line with our conscience. However, Milgram’s experiments taught us – in shocking, irrefutable detail – that, in a concrete situation containing powerful social pressures, our moral sense can become trampled underfoot.

And this is how evil happens, we allow it to happen through acquiescence, obedience, and not wanting to “rock the boat.” This how Black and Brown children get gunned down by police or corrections officers brutalize incarcerated people. This is how the twin Black and Jewish holocausts and the genocide of /First Nation are allowed to happen.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Conservative Mindset

¡Hola! Everybody...
Modern contemporary conservatism can be directly traced to Edmund Burke who promoted the (very conservative) idea that people are essentially evil and need a strong controlling force to prevent them from acting out their evil nature (that is, unless you’re rich).

Such a force, continued Burke, should (appropriately) come from those have inherited wealth or lawfully obtained wealth, religious, or political power. In addition, Burke believed that a permanent underclass with little power and a permanent power elite with great power would produce the greatest social good because it will ensure social stability. Conservatives want to conserve the status quo. Or as that fabulous racist, William J. Buckley, once asserted: conservatives “sit athwart history.”

My observation is that no one is fully conservative or liberal. Human beings tend to place themselves into various locations on the political continuum according to different situations. However, conservatism comes from somewhere -- it is founded on a certain worldview encompassing notions of the origins of human nature. What follows is an attempt to peek behind the curtain.

 

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The Conservative Mindset, pt. II 

Contempt is not a thing to be despised.

-- Edmund Burke (1729–1797) “Father” of conservatism

A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!

-- William F. Buckely, Jr. a conservative that opposed the Civil Rights movement

In 2003, a group of researchers published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003) that caused an immediate shit storm. Because some government grants were involved in funding the research, conservatives, who at the time controlled all branches of the US government, took an immediate and unfriendly “interest” in the paper. It would seem that they did not particularly care for the results of the research, and threats were made about preventing further “waste of government money” to fund research into the conservative mindset.

[Note: The papers are posted on the internet: click here and here to access PDF versions]

The study was “biased” against conservatives, they insisted! As usual, right-wingers went into their feces-flinging act, outraged that anyone would dare quantify the obvious and actually show they are an emotionally unstable group.

Well, it’s not as if we didn’t suspect all along that something was wrong with the likes of Dick Cheney, Glenn Beck, Lush Rimbaugh, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and the rest of the current cast of Flock of Fools.

The study, funded jointly by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and National Institute of Mental Health at the National Institute of Health (NIH), examined a mindset that the authors were polite enough to refer to as political conservatism. What they were really studying were the right wing wackos who had taken over the GOP and in the process threatening to turn America into a third-rate fascist state (stuff like condoning torture, the shredding of the Constitution, spying on US citizens, etc.).

Sensing that their study might cause a slight discomfort among the more sensitive of our conservative brethren (really: they lit up like rabid chimps going ape on considerate neighbors) went to great lengths to reassure one and all that they weren’t calling right wingers a bunch of sociopahtic, destructive nuts. Obviously, they weren’t studying the right-wingers we see most often on the internets. Essentially, the researchers culled through 50 years of research literature on the psychology of conservatism and reported that at the core of political conservatism is resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

• Fear and aggression
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Need for cognitive closure
• Terror management

The authors wrote, “Our first assumption, too, is that conservative ideologies -- like virtually all other belief systems -- are adopted in part because they satisfy some psychological needs. This does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false, irrational, or unprincipled.”

Still, that didn’t stop right-wingers from losing their minds and screaming for the scalps of the researchers. Right-wing radio hosts howled and frothed at the mouth, demanding an immediate investigation into the researcher's funding streams, and they were accused, with no regard to rhyme nor reason, of being anti-American and anti-Christian and probably for gay rights, killing babies, and gun control to boot.

OK, let’s try to forget Beck and Rush Limbaugh for the moment. Sure, there are conservatives who aren’t sadistic amoral sociopaths. Shit, in real life, I know some. I even have conservative friends, although I did warn my sister not to marry my former brother-in-law.

Seriously, what the researchers were investigating was what could be termed “political fundamentalism.” They tend to be reactionary, paranoid, authoritarian, intolerant, and contemptuous of rules that don’t suit them. While there are left-wing examples, the authors found that they generally gravitate toward fascism and call it conservatism, though it’s usually more correctly described as radical reactionaries. In any case, the researchers found that left-wingers are less likely to exhibit these traits.

The authors define the two core principles of conservatism as resistance to change, and acceptance of social inequality. Conservatives, they argue, cling tightly to a status quo (“traditional values”), real or imagined, and regard society as hierarchical. Not unsurprisingly, they tend to believe they have inherited and/or merited preferential positions in this hierarchy.

The authors address what they call the “conservative paradox” of radical reactionarism (e.g., Hitler, Mussolini) by pointing out that their calls for extreme inequality in the social order were superimposed with promises to lead the country back to an ideal past, one in which “traditional” values and morality reigned. It occurs to me that our present-day right-wing reactionaries continuously evoke a traditional America that never existed: where everyone was a god-fearing generic protestant, people with accents lived in the poor part of town and never bothered folks except to mow their lawn, and women and blacks knew their place. The code for this is embedded in the current caterwauling from conservatives who want to take their country back.

This goes with what I believe is a hallmark of the fundamentalist mindset: the ability to subsume a philosophy to suit personal needs. In Christianity and Islam, for example, you have religions that place high premiums on respect for fellow humans, peace, and personal integrity. Yet fundamentalists are frequently the most violent, dishonest, and intolerant people around. Furthermore, they often use their religion to rationalize their repulsive behavior. In conservatism, you often find people who champion the Bill of Rights, “small government,” and a laissez faire approach to economics, while loudly cheering for a gross militarism and tax structures that have been shown to benefit only the richest five percent of the population.

This emotional and intellectual contradiction is how conservatives are able to condemn what they perceive as dishonest and immoral behavior on President Obama’s part (i.e., “tax cheats”) while at the same time accepting an economic philosophy responsible for the most atrocious financial meltdown since the Great Depression. It’s how Republicans can damn Democrats as being fiscally irresponsible even whileevery modern republican president has bith grown the government and left us with record-breaking deficits.

One of the more interesting issues in the paper is “The Theory of RWA ,” in which the authors consider the Authoritarian Personality. They state, “harsh parenting styles brought on by economic hardship led entire generations to repress hostility toward authority figures and to replace it with an exaggerated deference and idealization of authority and tendencies to blame society scapegoats and punish deviants.”

Angry, repressed, passive-aggressive, with an overwhelming desire to punish those who don’t conform to the status quo or who disagree with them.

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Yup, sounds like our boys!

This may not stop people from growing up to be right-wingers. Many people can no more choose to be conservative than they can choose their sexual orientation. But hey, you can't say I didn't try.

Coming up next are treatments on black conservatives, and the genetic foundations of personality and political affiliations.

References

Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339-375.

Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003 ). Exceptions that prove the rule -- using a theory of motivated social cognition to account for ideological incongruities and political anomalies: Reply to Greenberg and Jonas (2003). Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 383-393.

Isolated Incidents? Right Wing Authoritarianism and Violence

¡Hola! Everybody…
I usually don’t merely cut-and-paste, but the following is much too on-point too valuable to simply link. For the full article, click here]

If you want an exhaustive documentation of not just the derailing of the rightwing, but how extremism has now become mainstream, read, Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane. It’s prescient that my friend Karen loaned me this book last week, right before the shooting in Arizona.

From the blog, Crooks and Liars:

Terror in Arizona: Just Another “Isolated Incident”

Funny how that list keeps mounting

Predictably, there’s the usual wringing of the hands from the faux liberal contigent concerned that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. For examples of this see Jon Chait at even the “liberal” New Republic, and Jack Shafer at Slate).

I call bullshit on that. For them this is just another “isolated incident” because Jared Loughner is just “a lone nut.” Sure, there are lots of complicating factors, not the least of which the shooter is clearly deranged. But there are also some factors that are simply undeniable. For example, over at Daily Kos, one blogger has started to document how many of the individuals targeted by Palin have actually been subjected to violence and/ or threats and intimidation tactics. What follows is merely the tip of the iceberg. But I challenge you to read this and tell me that the twisted motherfuckers on the right don’t have blood on their hands.

Just in the past two and a half years, here's the record of “isolated incidents” amassed so far:

July 2008: A gunman named Jim David Adkisson, agitated at how "liberals" are "destroying America," walks into a Unitarian Church and opens fire, killing two churchgoers and wounding four others.

October 2008: Two neo-Nazis are arrested in Tennessee in a plot to murder dozens of African-Americans, culminating in the assassination of President Obama.

December 2008: A pair of "Patriot" movement radicals -- the father-son team of Bruce and Joshua Turnidge, who wanted "to attack the political infrastructure" -- threaten a bank in Woodburn, Oregon, with a bomb in the hopes of extorting money that would end their financial difficulties, for which they blamed the government. Instead, the bomb goes off and kills two police officers. The men eventually are convicted and sentenced to death for the crime.

December 2008: In Belfast, Maine, police discover the makings of a nuclear "dirty bomb" in the basement of a white supremacist shot dead by his wife. The man, who was independently wealthy, reportedly was agitated about the election of President Obama and was crafting a plan to set off the bomb.

January 2009: A white supremacist named Keith Luke embarks on a killing rampage in Brockton, Mass., raping and wounding a black woman and killing her sister, then killing a homeless man before being captured by police as he is en route to a Jewish community center.

February 2009: A Marine named Kody Brittingham is arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate President Obama. Brittingham also collected white-supremacist material.

April 2009: A white supremacist named Richard Poplawski opens fire on three Pittsburgh police officers who come to his house on a domestic-violence call and kills all three, because he believed President Obama intended to take away the guns of white citizens like himself. Poplawski is currently awaiting trial.

April 2009: Another gunman in Okaloosa County, Florida, similarly fearful of Obama's purported gun-grabbing plans, kills two deputies when they come to arrest him in a domestic-violence matter, then is killed himself in a shootout with police.

May 2009: A "sovereign citizen" named Scott Roeder walks into a church in Wichita, Kansas, and assassinates abortion provider Dr. George Tiller.

June 2009: A Holocaust denier and right-wing tax protester named James Von Brunn opens fire at the Holocaust Museum, killing a security guard.

February 2010: An angry tax protester named Joseph Ray Stack flies an airplane into the building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas. (Media are reluctant to label this one "domestic terrorism" too.)

March 2010: Seven militiamen from the Hutaree Militia in Michigan and Ohio are arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate local police officers with the intent of sparking a new civil war.

March 2010: An anti-government extremist named John Patrick Bedell walks into the Pentagon and opens fire, wounding two officers before he is himself shot dead.

May 2010: A "sovereign citizen" from Georgia is arrested in Tennessee and charged with plotting the violent takeover of a local county courthouse.

May 2010: A still-unidentified white man walks into a Jacksonville, Fla., mosque and sets it afire, simultaneously setting off a pipe bomb.

May 2010: Two "sovereign citizens" named Jerry and Joe Kane gun down two police officers who pull them over for a traffic violation, and then wound two more officers in a shootout in which both of them are eventually killed.

July 2010: An agitated right-winger and convict named Byron Williams loads up on weapons and drives to the Bay Area intent on attacking the offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU, but is intercepted by state patrolmen and engages them in a shootout and armed standoff in which two officers and Williams are wounded.

September 2010: A Concord, N.C., man is arrested and charged with plotting to blow up a North Carolina abortion clinic. The man, 26-year--old Justin Carl Moose, referred to himself as the "Christian counterpart to (Osama) bin Laden” in a taped undercover meeting with a federal informant.

Finally Ms. Giffords own statements (months before the shooting) in the wake of Palin's targeting are poignant. Notice, the implication here is that the dems were trying to exploit the violence. Fuckin media whores...

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Many kneepad conservatives are attempting to paint the shooter as some kind of leftist, but even a cursory examination of the trail of videos and assorted writings he left behind in recent years, makes it abundantly clear that he's a devoted anti-government conspiracist. In particular, he seems to have developed an obsession with that classic right-wing conspiracy theory: the belief that American currency, since going off the gold standard, has become "fiat money" based on nothing. Likewise, he seems to have bought into beliefs about "government mind control" quite common to right-wing conspiracy theorists

My Name is Eddie and I'm in recovery from civilization…