On Sun, 9 May 2004 snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com wrote:
> on another list, I've taken to calling the people that voice these kinds of
> attitudes "mushrooms" They have the self-reflective capacity of a 'shroom:
> they grow in the dark and stand on a pile of shit.
I don't think this is a fair description of all these people who are excusing the mayhem and torture in Iraq. It's not that they are incapable of self-reflection and base their ideas on misconceptions. Rather, like Jon mentioned, they are trying to resolve cognitive dissonance: "The U.S. is a beacon of freedom and democracy" idea is inconsistent with the torture reports, and that kind of cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable to people. How can they resolve it?
1. They can change their behavior: join the anti-war movement, criticize the Bush cabal, get into cranky family arguments.
2. They can alter their attitudes: "it wasn't really torture", "isolated case" (or the other way--"the U. S. is an enemy of freedom and democracy").
3. They can add new ideas: "Iraqis would have done it too", "Look at the mutilated contractors", "Look at 9/11".
--Given the different possibilities, how will people resolve the dissonance? In general, we tend to be cognitively conservative: we change the attitude or behavior that resolves the dissonance and least disturbs our system of attitudes and beliefs.
Taking all of this into consideration, people's responses to the torture are not surprising. --Why do people make up these justifications? It's not their ignorance or lack of insight; rather, it's the most straightforward way of maintaining their deeply held, core beliefs and getting rid of the dissonance. --If "America is always on the side of freedom and democracy" is an idea you hold dear, you are proud of being an American who supports freedom, and you think that Bush is a strong president fighting against terrorists, developing justifications for the torture allows you to keep your deeply held beliefs about America and being an American.
The thing I want to stress is that this is not a tendency of ignorant or nonreflective people; this is a basic cognitive tendency (at least in industrialized societies). We all do this; it's just that the deeply held belief system that LBOers justify is not the same as that of a Bush conservative.
Miles