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Hungryjoe mentioned the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiment. At the very least I think they indicate that we can make a good person do bad things. Or at least SOME good people. 35% (or more, that number is disputed) did NOT administrate the final shock in the Milgram experiment.
The Stanford experiment was terminated early, but suggests that a person can be influenced into doing bad things given a particular set of circumstances.
In both cases there is also the factor of a trusted authority legitimizing the actions. There is also an age factor.
During World War Two, about 80% to 85% of American soldiers NEVER FIRED on an exposed enemy soldier. When soldiers did, it was generally only in the most dire of circumstances. And this was in a war responding to an actively aggressive enemy, where one might argue that there was a legitimate, ethical reason to kill.
In response to that, new, more aggressive psychological techniques were used to train soldiers for subsequent wars. 55% were ready, willing, and able to kill in Korea, and the number was up to 95% by the time we entered Vietnam Nam, and has stayed high ever since. It works. We can turn people into killers.
But one reason the military recruits kids just out of high school is because they are so impressionable and malleable. By the time a person reaches their late twenties or early thirties they have matured to the point where such psychological techniques are far less effective. (Consider the ages of the participants in Milgram and Stanford.) (This is also related to the reason car rental companies typically donât rent to people under 25.)
My understanding is that many of those working for Blackwater/Xe/Academi are former military, so these people are probably ones who adapted very well to the experience of war. Maybe they are good people deep down, but remember, â or more of the Milgram subjects never administered that final shock. Those that do pull the trigger should be held accountable, and those that manipulate the trigger-pullers, and who set up the circumstances for the triggers to be pulled should also be held accountable, and I think those actions are vastly more evil, if we are permitted the term.
Perhaps there is a difference between being innately good and superficially good? I believe it was the famous atheist Penn Jillette, who was asked by a Christian what it was that prevented him from raping and killing, since he didnât believe in any sort of wrath of God or threat of Hell to dissuade him. His reply was that he thought it was extremely frightening that it was only the threat of hell, apparently, preventing Christians from raping and killing.
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Maybe you could make a more compelling argument like this for draftees, whose circumstances were thrust upon them, but these guys donât even have the sheen of âI just wanted to serve my country and it all went wrongâ Weâre talking about straight up profiteers, working for murder, inc. Not that I think the actual military shouldnât be considered, at best, an ammoral killing machine, but these guys werenât just âgood people caught up in a bad situation.â They went looking for it.
This also isnât to say that âevilâ is the best definition, at least for the purposes of finding a solution to the problem of mass murder. Perhaps ending international conflict would ultimately be more numerically successful than finding the root of the kind of bloodlust/disregard for human life on display here, so circumstance is the right focus. If your argument, though, is that âany of us, or a significant portion of us would have/might have done the same thing in those conditionsâ again, we knew better that to become highly paid, corporate lawless mercenaries.
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So⊠when they get out, theyâll be good olâ boys.
Well if they are guilty as charged, put 'em away. Thatâs damaging to the overall mission.
I do notice that there is never anything on Boing Boing about the good soldiers who fought and even died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A lot of very pissed off and honorable men back home now. Whereâs the sympathy for them?
Feel free to submit a story that you think the editors would be interested in and would fit in with the general tone of the blog. Or start a thread. Up to you, really.
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If a good person is manipulated into doing bad things, isnât it incumbent upon them to recognise the bad person they have become and strive to no longer be that?
I think the underlying fixation with the idea that one can somehow still be a good person âunderneathâ if they are doing bad things is down to the fact that people feel uneasy about just how ditzy and malleable modern life has made them whilst they continue to do nothing about it.
Look to observe, with an eye to changing, your innate subservience to authority and authority figures, your wrote acquiescence to peer pressure, before striving to isolate the person from the action. It is likely that âthe maskâ you feel need only be pulled off is a more accurate representation of the âpersonâ than any fantasy of inner structure they posses.
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Thanks, Iâll keep that in mind.
Boing Boing often does good things for exposing crooked authoritiesâŠ
But there is a flip-slide to west coast leftism.
They tend to go overboard I think in criticizing our ownâŠ
We have - more or less - free speech and free enterprise, and donât have to answer or pay tribute to king or pope. Thousands of people of gave their lives for this. There are crooks in many places - domestic, Russia, Islamostan, China, elsewhere - who would love to take this away.
Thatâs not Republican drivel - thatâs historical fact. Hope we can keep this in mind.
Isnât this a victim blaming in essence? It is much easier to see the situation from the outside, or in the hindsight. Not so much in runtime from within.
The alternative explanation can be that the fixation with rejecting that idea is down to the fact that people feel uneasy that they themselves have the inherent capacity to do âbad thingsâ in the wrong situation, and want to distance themselves from that possibility because they âarenât badâ and the ones who werenât so lucky, situations-wise, âare badâ.
In that sense, no one is culpably responsible for any of their behaviours. Are not we all conditioned by our environment?
Awesome. No personal responsibility again. Twenties headonism, here I come!
Also, weâre obviously in some kind of misunderstood agreement as your alternative proposition appears to summate my intention quite accurately.
Hannah Arendt had somethings to say about this:
Which pissed people off because some interpreted what she said to mean that Eichmann was a âgoodâ person, rather than saying that he was a normal person who committed horrific acts. She points out that painting him as an inhuman monster, devoid of humanity, as a cartoonishly evil man means that the rest of the world/society is off the hook, that we canât probe further into the nature of morality because bad deeds are something that happens over there, and it is a function of someone else, bad people, not a function of the systems of power around us. Itâs the general problem with the âsonderwegâ thesis on the nazis, because it ignores the violence of implementing modern governments more generally and assumes that germany was some special case, something we can safely put away in history, or view through the lens of history, and ignore, because âwe know better now.â It assumes that the nazis werenât human, but inhuman. Itâs assumes it wonât happen again. How many acts of attempted genocide or ethnic cleasning has happened since?
If we assume that these guys are just plain evil (rather than their ACT was evil), it assumes that it was a special, extraordinary incident. Hence we can ignore the REST of the violence directed at the Iraqi people by the US military or other groups involved in the war effort. It allows us to sit high atop our moral perch and ignore the rest of the ongoing violence being done in our name. Our ongoing drone bombing in Yemen has destabalized that country into war, led by our pals the Saudis who donât want a shia government perched on their back door (wonder why). Weâre probably going to see Pakistan continue to deteriorate, and now that India has an ultra-nationalists Hindu in charge, itâs a dangerous situation (two nuclear armed countries, BTW). Afghanistan. Somalia. Israel. Libya⊠weâve stuck our nose into their affairs for years, supported regime change, and weâve made things far worse in the process.
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