Oddly I was thinking about this experiment this morning. Perhaps I opened HN and forgot.
My thinking was along his lines. Now I think that I was in denial. In The Banality of Evil book, the main clerk of the genocide had "the personality of a mailman." He had "winged words." He fuggedaboudit. He forgot what his mind wanted to.
The Nazis were not sorry for their genocide victims. They were only sorry for themselves that they had to be the bad guys. De Nile runs deep.
Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing (Sargant, 1957) says that you need total neurological collapse to convert someone. I guess this is why the book of Nash the mentally ill math genius has better information than the misleading movie that people take seriously. He never got better until he was in a cheap state hospital and they broke out old fashioned insulin comas and such techniques on him. Total brain shock.
There is a debate now about whether torture works. It is all wishful thinking. People are innately convertable. There was a k5 essay about this. Slavery from raids used to be common. The adaptive behavior is Stockholm Syndrome -- you break down and reintegrate to the new tribe. Like Blue Jacket play (no longer being shown since it is ahistorical like the Simpsons play).
Hannah Arendt is widely praised and its Jerusalem book is often quoted all around the world, yet this portrayal of a "mailman" is more than dubious. The historian Hermann Langbein, who survived Auschwitz and later wrote the authoritative "Men and women at Auschwitz", showed that her ideas didn't match the facts. Recently, the first integral study of Eichmann's papers completely broke this "mailman" picture: he was a typical intellectual, who read philosophy books and even poetry, and liked writing. This "personality of a mailman" is a nonsense, unless writing long commentaries of Hegel's philosophy is "banal" for any "mailman".
Taking the Nazis as a whole is another big mistake. Some were sorry, some tried to mitigate the violence, at different levels. Primo Levi (also very critical of Arendt) remembered a young woman that became a guardian: at first she was horrified, she couldn't stand the violence and felt ill the first days, she tried to resign. A few weeks later, she was accustomed and hit prisoners. It's a pity his "grey zone" concept is despised by our Manichean world.
Apart from this, I totally agree with the denial aspect. The Standford experiment was very probably a trauma for this former guard, and his denegating discourse seems strongly biased by this. His main claims are:
- This experiment is a fraud, it claims to prove that we, the guards, became "evil" (his term), but that's wrong.
- The experiment was biased because the main experimenter made some important decisions along the way.
- We, the guards, did not loose our humanity, the material settings were inhumane and made us behave like this. For instance, we were sleep deprived.
- If a guard became violent, it's not because he was violent, it's because he was an amateur actor that had endorsed a violent role just for fun.
- The experiment author manipulated the students into saying things they didn't thought, and he kept their identities secret to give him "more control of the narrative".
Sure, this experiment is morally questionable and it's hard to build strong conclusions upon it, but if it was a fraud, why wasn't it debunked long ago? Why didn't most of the students protest they were wronged? Why caricature it with notions of good/evil? And would actors play a "violent cop" role for many days just on an impulse, with graduating violence? And, most of all: if an inhumane setting made them behave with less empathy, less humanity, isn't that a very interesting experimental result?
The Stanford Prison Experiment was debunked long ago. It's mostly taught today as a cautionary tale of how not to do psychological research, and as a case study in research ethics demonstrating why we have IBR's.
People are convertible, but I don't think they are convertible under torture. I think the tribe you are supposed to convert to must seem like they would actually accept you somehow, not just dump you in a cell for the rest of your life and kill your former friends.
Maybe not under torture alone, but my guess is that torture can be effectively used as a part of the equation. Otherwise Obama would have closed gitmo.
> my guess is that torture can be effectively used as a part of the equation. Otherwise Obama would have closed gitmo.
There are plenty of other explanations, given that it is such a political issue. By that argument, the "War on Terror" and the TSA must be unarguably effective, despite all evidence to the contrary, or otherwise we would have abandoned them.
The torture report released in December, as well as the information we already had about waterboarding even a decade ago, show that most torture is by and large not effective at extracting information[0].
Which raises the question: what is the real goal of practices like "rectal feeding", or allowing these abuses to continue[1]?
[0] Though even if it had been, this wouldn't be an acceptable defense of the practice.
There are plenty of other explanations, given that it is such a political issue.
Well, I don't know. It made a liar out of Obama, and I think that if he thought he could close it he would.
I believe it is the US military's best interest- for the well being of any US soldiers that might be caught by the enemy- that the world be assured that torture doesn't work.
But I really suspect that the numbers are different from what we hear, and somebody showed Obama an estimate of lives saved from the practice, and he decided that he couldn't be the one to pull the plug.
TSA is another case in point. They are expensive and people complain. But if they has techniques that worked they would probably keep them quiet.
I saw this kind of deception decades ago. The DIA assured us that certain techniques of getting information (spying) didn't work. It later famously came out that they indeed did, and quite well at that.
I hope I'm wrong about this. And I have no inside information. Just a hunch.
Beria of the NKVD tortured. His torture wouldn't have been public knowledge as much as Gitmo is. Why did he beat people on the feet unless it was useful?
Before the USA tortured directly, we had other countries torture terrorists for us. Some of these guys were released and then went on to do further terrorism. So that is in agreement w/ what you are saying.
My thinking was along his lines. Now I think that I was in denial. In The Banality of Evil book, the main clerk of the genocide had "the personality of a mailman." He had "winged words." He fuggedaboudit. He forgot what his mind wanted to.
The Nazis were not sorry for their genocide victims. They were only sorry for themselves that they had to be the bad guys. De Nile runs deep.
Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-Washing (Sargant, 1957) says that you need total neurological collapse to convert someone. I guess this is why the book of Nash the mentally ill math genius has better information than the misleading movie that people take seriously. He never got better until he was in a cheap state hospital and they broke out old fashioned insulin comas and such techniques on him. Total brain shock.
There is a debate now about whether torture works. It is all wishful thinking. People are innately convertable. There was a k5 essay about this. Slavery from raids used to be common. The adaptive behavior is Stockholm Syndrome -- you break down and reintegrate to the new tribe. Like Blue Jacket play (no longer being shown since it is ahistorical like the Simpsons play).