Miles Jackson wrote:
>This is exactly why I disagree with this use of mental disorder terms
>to make sense of social events. You make it sound like the soldiers
>were swept up in some type of mystical and irrational group mind
>that allowed them to act in evil ways.
>
>I have a simpler explanation. Milgram's work on obedience clearly
>demonstrates that people will tend to do what an authority figure
>asks them to do. Their moral beliefs, their personalities, male
>or female, rich or poor, do not seem to matter much. If we are
>asked by a legitimate authority to do something, we will usually
>comply. --and the sad irony is that most people think they would
>not do "horrible things": it could only be due to some kind of--
>mental disorder.
Milgram, the authority figure, instructed people to subject an individual with what they believed to be tormenting and even lethal pain. There was no such authority figure at MyLai. No one told the soldiers to massacre unarmed civilians. The instructions given by the senior officers to the junior officers, including Lt. Calley, were ambiguous. It would be as if Milgram had told the test subjects they could decide for themselves whether or not to push the torture button. Do you really think anyone in that experiment would have pushed that button with ambiguous instructions from Milgram? The only parallel here is that Milgram provided the test subjects with an excuse. He told them the process of selecting victimizer and "victim" was entirely random. So, the subjects in the booth could rationalize their "torture" by thinking, "It could just as easily have been me." At MyLai the troops could rationalize their actions by saying, "These gooks are killing our buddies." But that's where the parallel ends. What happened at MyLai was a spontaneous mob action. The authority involved is not an individual but the mob itself. It's the group-mind that gives rise to incidents like MyLai. And it's not simply a question of the "herd mentality." As in, "everyone else is doing it, so I guess I will too." There are very powerful emotions at work here, vastly more powerful than the urge to conform. I think everyone has experienced getting swept up in overwhelming emotions in the context of a group. Barbara Ehrenreich discusses this in *Blood Rites*. War fever does not happen to individuals. It happens to groups. Normal individuals experience the killing fever only in the context of the group. (From a materialist perspective, the group mind is no more "mystical" than the individual mind, since niether one makes any sense.)
Individuals will sacrifice their ability to function morally (what Ken M. refers to as "psychosis") due to several factors, including rationalization, authority, and group-think. All of these are involved in typical instances of social evil. Take, for instance, the bombing of Yugoslavia last spring. Anyone who saw the news on TV or read the papers was aware that the large-scale ethnic cleansing of Kosovo occurred after the bombing began. Yet, within a week or two, the corporate press and the White House and NATO were "informing" us that the bombing was a *response* to the large-scale ethnic cleansing. The only way people could believe this obvious lie is if they wanted to. Americans are pre-disposed to believe that we are virtuous, and the other guy is evil. This is narcissistic. Narcissistic Personality Disorder involves the ability to recreate "reality" according to one's own wishes and to maintain that "reality" in the face of exposure to the facts. Two of my friends, neither of whom has a trace of pathological narcissism, refused to concede that the bombing triggered the ethnic cleansing, not the other way around. In the context of the general insanity of America, these otherwise normal people were completely irrational. This kind of thing is common among groups of any size, though it's much worse in some cases, such as the "US." Rationalization was a factor-- "those Serbs are evil and deserve it"-- and authority was a factor too, but given the general lack of respect for Clinton, it couldn't have been very important. At any rate, there's no way of explaining the sheer weirdness of numerous American policies, domestic and foreign, except according to the model of mental illness. Since not all of our leaders are nuts, that means there's a group-based pathology at work.
>Note what happens when you smuggle in mental disorders here: people
>turn their attention away from the important social issues of
>the power of conformity, the influence of authority figures, the
>role of hierarchical bureaucratic organizations in producing
>human behavior. Psychologizing events like My Lai is a very
>effective strategy for obscuring the power of the social
>context.
>
I'm not trying to obscure the role of power. I'm trying to fully understand social evil. I want to understand it from both the political and the psychological sides. It's very useful to recognize that we're up against a wall of insanity here. They're not just a little bit wrong-- they're completely out-of-their-fucking-minds wrong. I think you're more likely to argue aggressively when you come in to a debate with that attitude. You're less likely to start giving ground, as liberals are wont to do. (And of course it's equally important to be aware of when that's not the case, and we do have something to learn from our opponents.)
Let's face it: either we're nuts or they're nuts. Unfortunately, there's a lot more of them than us. So, if mental illness is strictly a function of the individual mind, then it's got to be us: We are unhinged, and the masses of pro-Americans are the ones who are normal. Unless we accept the existence of mass-based mental illness, we concede our own lunacy. (Of course, group-based mental disorders occur on the left as well. Witness the RCP.)
--Ted