Alice Miller (1923–2010), the preeminent and influential Swiss psychologist, devoted her life to spreading this message: The roots of violence are known. No child, she says, is ever born violent. Violence is driven by nurture, not nature. Violence exists because most children on this planet are raised in violence … often beaten, humiliated, and broken in the first years of their lives.
Consider the options available to a battered child. If a child runs away, who will provide food and shelter? Self-defense is no option because fending off an overpowering adult is more likely to result in further mistreatment. How can a child resolve the contradictory experiences of adult as caregiver versus adult as tormenter? A child may try to be perfect, but perfection never works.
In most corners of the world, child abuse is sanctioned - even held in high regard as long as it is defined as child rearing. Thus, abusive practices are allowed to originate, flourish, and pass from generation to generation often under the cover of righteous piety and administered with this injunction: This is for your own good.
The normal emotional release for anxiety, pain, and resentment is forbidden to battered children, who will suppress their feelings, repress all memory of trauma, even put their abusers on pedestals and idealize them. The life of an abused child turned adult may take many paths. Some may turn their repressed rage against themselves in the form of addictions, anxiety disorders, and depression, even suicide. Others may turn their suppressed rage against their own children ... or against society as criminal offenders.
The issues raised by Alice Miller have social and historical implications. Sometimes abused and traumatized children reenact their childhoods on the political stage and turn themselves into tyrants or become the adherents, adulators, and henchman of tyrants and lunatic ideologues. Systemic child abuse is the wellspring of injustice, ignorance, and evil in the world.
If we write a history of tyrants through the ages - along with their adherents, adulators, and henchman - what should we write about them? Shall we focus on recorded events, on the mass murder of their victims, and their legacy as villains of history? Or might we gain more insight in studying the abuse and violence that shaped their lives?
Joseph Stalin. From historical accounts, Stalin’s father, Vissarion, was a cobbler whose alcoholism led to business failures, domestic violence, and frequent relocations that left his family in poverty and deprivation. A family acquaintance recalls: “Those undeserved and fearful beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as the father.” Thus, the brutal and ruthless dictator remained faithful to his father’s example.In the biographies of dictators, there is a consistent thread of early abuse in the lives of Ceausescu, Franco, Mao Zedong, Idi Amin, and Saddam Hussein, as examples. Furthermore, brutal tyrants have an uncanny ability to mobilize the suppressed rage of followers, presumably abused as children, who become their adherents, adulators, and henchman.
Adolph Hitler. Numerous biographies recall the Führer’s obsession with doubts over his family lineage - the illegitimate birth of his father, Alois Schicklgruber, and the true identity of his paternal grandfather. The presumptive fathers of Alois were two brothers, Johann Hüttler or Johann Georg Hielder. A third possibility was a Jewish family from Graz who employed the maternal grandmother during her pregnancy and paid her support money for 14 years. For Alois, the stigma of being born illegitimate, and part Jewish in a time of rising anti-Semitism, was a source of intolerable shame. Alois projected his self-loathing upon his sons, especially Adolph, in the form of daily beatings that once left the boy unconscious and near death at 11 years old. Later, Adolph Hitler would write:
More to the point, Hitler avenged his father’s shame upon the political stage … culminating in the Final Solution.I want the young to be violent, domineering, undismayed, cruel (…) They must be able to bear pain. There must be nothing weak or gentle about them.
It should come as no surprise that brutal tyrants and serial killers share common traits. Neurologist Jonathan Pincus interviewed violent criminals on Death Row to study the long-term consequences of severe childhood mistreatment. His findings:
- Every perpetrator had been exposed to extreme physical and emotional abuse by at least one parent or caregiver;
- Each homicide reflected the same kind of brutality that the murderer had endured in childhood;
- Those who experienced extreme cruelty as children directed their anger at others as a form of retaliation;
- None of the convicts incriminated their abusers, even when consciously aware of the abuse;
- The pathologies of convicted murders were similar to the pathologies of their abusers;
- The biography of each and every convict represents a feedback loop of terror directed back at society.
Is it possible for a nation, a society, and a culture to follow a similar path? When demagogues and hacks strut their hypocrisy, hysteria and lies upon a national stage, why shouldn’t we regard these as analogous to abuse? When citizens brandish guns, or imply Second Amendment remedies as an alternative to civil discourse, why shouldn’t we assume their purpose to bully, stifle debate, and suppress the rights of others? Does the impulse to win by any means and win at all cost remind you of the tactics of tyrants? Are these the signs and symptoms of Abused Nation Syndrome?
Don't Retreat, Reload.
(chilling - have a listen.)
(chilling - have a listen.)
Is this the kind of society in which we want to raise our children - and the legacy we want to leave for future generations?
Open for comments …
I hate to be the one offering hope - it goes against my innately digital nature: but perhaps certain people are innately far more vulnerable to harm from an environment that also turns out saints. Even the monstrous abuses of slavery turned out some remarkable people.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the idea that people are born as blank slates with personalities only determined by the environment is as accepted as it was a generation or two ago. Miller was of my parents' generation and I'm already outmoded!
That insistence that children are born an absolute tabula rasa seems to have been peremptory in the child-rearing books I read when I was rearing children in the 60's and 70's. I think many parents will confirm that their offspring, even twins, are almost opposites from birth. Mine were.
Some even ventured to tell us in stern tones that all gender differences were learned behavior while attempting to suppress any research that might corroborate or weaken the idea. I think experience weakens that idea without much help.
I think the current thought has changed and I think that some people are born aggressive, wild, with difficulties in impulse control and some are born with very little in the way of conscience or concern for what others think of them. There's certainly much data from animal studies that strengthens that idea.
Of course that's not an argument against what you're saying here. I just hate to be fatalistic or deterministic and prefer to hang on to a bit of hope for personal and national redemption. A horrible background doesn't condemn every individual it produces and some pretty horrible people emerge from kind, caring families.
People are resilient, people sometimes learn from their past. There's hope, or at least I hope there is.
I think both Octo and Capt. Fogg are right. Abuse is no doubt a key factor in some cases, but the Freudian theory that humans are shot through with primal aggression from birth also makes sense and is pretty hard to deny.
ReplyDeleteAt a different level, I think cultural transmission or non-transmission of values has a lot to do with the coarseness of our political and civic life today. We wouldn't want every generation to be a carbon copy of the previous one, but it seems as if what happens is that one generation follows a certain set of rules of conduct and holds certain expectations, but they don't fully articulate them for the next. Civic-mindedness, like civilization itself, is fragile and not to be taken for granted; it's the labor of each generation to pass along the best values and the highest expectations it can. That doesn't happen if one assumes the kiddies will just pick it all up from "society" or breathe it in with the air. It requires reflection and articulation. So today we have millions of citizens acting like boorish yokels in the public square. If they don't get what they want – and they really don't seem to know what they want anyway – they sling garbage and threats in all directions. Moreover, they have the Internet to connect them to millions of similarly crude people: a society for the antisocial and the uncivil – how's that for you?
A worthwhile analogy for this failure in articulation and transmission might be literacy's decline in recent decades: a long time ago, writing a decent sentence seems to have been taught in a way that linked the act with basic self-respect. If you didn't know how to say or spell something, you asked, or you looked it up. Many young adults today are as shameless as squirrels about expressing themselves in writing – not only don't they know how to write a single paragraph without violating every known law of grammar and syntax, they don't care. It doesn't come near their sense of self, as it might come near an older person. You might say that to make up for it, being connected to writing and the written is almost ubiquitous – everybody's twittering away out there. But without at least a little training in writing and speaking, what exactly one can "express" seems greatly impoverished. Well, that's all I have time for at the moment. K! C U LTR dudes.
My wife, having worked half her career in child protective services, has often noted that abusers are highly likely to have been victims of abuse themselves. But the lines of what is abuse are not always clearly defined.
ReplyDeleteTake for example the two young perpetrators of the Columbine shootings; two young men who were raised in a middle class, and supposedly, nurturing environment. Were they raised in an environment where they were protected from consequences, where parents mitigated and excused behaviors? Were they raised to believe they were not responsible for their actions, that they were somehow entitled? What was the origin of their violence, their disaffection with any sense of empathy? We want simple answers but there are infinite shades of gray on issues such as these.
Severe abuse can lead a child developing violent tendancies but not all severely abused children become violent offenders. So, does that mean I disagree with your analogy? Not necessarily.
ReplyDeleteAbused Nation Syndrome or maybe a better label would be Sick Nation Syndrome I think is upheld by the two examples you cited, Hilter and Stalin.
Hilter by most accounts was an abused child and took his violent tendancies to the extreme, focusing all his hatred on Jews. And why did a nation of Germans participate or stand silently by while millions of people were murdered?
Because Hitler spent the first years after he came to power cementing his power base and creating an atmosphere of hysteria, threats and suspicion. He made it acceptable to punish and torture a group of people where no one need fear their lawless behavior as long as it was directed against Jews.
Stalin also created an atmosphere of fear and suspicion in order to carry out his own horrors uncontested.
I have feared for some time that the pervasive atmosphere of intolerance, hate and suspicion being nutured in this country is taking us down the same path.
All,
ReplyDeleteTo assuage some concerns raised by Captain Fogg 2.0, Bloggingdino, and Robert the Skeptic, first a few points on the nature of historical, clinical, and cumulative case studies. Everyone can point to exceptions (i.e. a kid raised from hard beginnings who achieved fame, fortune, or sainthood, or the seemingly normal kid from a seemingly normal family who went awry); but in doing so we ignore patterns and tendencies, and a preponderance of research data.
As I mentioned in the above post, the life of an abused-child-turned-adult can take many paths. Some may turn their suppressed rage against themselves. Some may turn their aggressions against others. Most will find a mentor (i.e. other parent, a friend, a sibling, a teacher, a neighbor, a member of the clergy) who reach out and help them in a significant way.
Consider this logic: All dogs are animals but not all animals are dogs. Similarly, not all formerly abused children turn into criminals, tyrants or mental patients; but all serial murders on Death Row have abuse histories. Thus, my purpose here is not to cast suspicion on every adult who has an abuse history but to offer a psychosocial perspective that we dare not ignore. Again, think in terms of patterns and general tendencies, not exceptions to causality.
(continued …)
A comment on accountability: If perpetrators were once victims, there are always axe grinders who accuse the psychosocial profession of coddling criminals; and admittedly hardcore determinism offends our notion of free will and responsibility. Again I say, we ignore causal tendencies at our peril.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, in matters of law and morality, we do not necessarily declare perpetrators innocent by reasons of insanity, or grant leniency due to extenuating circumstances, or leave them factitious wiggle room. A plausible explanation is not an excuse; all actors are held accountable for their actions.
(continued …)
Again, please consider another example. In his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage said:
ReplyDelete"I'll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is. (…) They don't have a father around to tell them, 'Don't act like a moron. You'll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don't sit there crying and screaming, idiot' … You're turning your son into a girl, and you're turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men. That's why we have the politicians we have."
Perhaps this account may explain the source of Michael Savage’s anger:
“Benny [father of Michael Savage] had a chip on his shoulder and was always mad at the world, and he was tough on Michael. There was nothing Michael could ever do to please him," recalls Alan Zaitz, who has known the radio talker since the two of them were in Hebrew school together as second-graders (…) Benny Weiner verbally abused his son and didn't hesitate to embarrass him in front of his teenage friends, Zaitz says. "Michael would have on tight black jeans and a boat-necked sweater and his dad would say, 'I don't like the way you're dressed. You look like a fag,' stuff like that," he recalls.”
As the saying goes, the apple does not fall far from the tree. This vignette tells me much about the relationship of childhood verbal abuse transformed later in life onto the political stage.
Rocky,
ReplyDeleteI recall your weekend work at a juvenile detention center. My question is this: Does this post and some of the cited references confirm your impressions?
OCTO - I actually worked in the big boys' and girls' detention center but we did handle older juveniles who were charged as adults do to their chronic recidivism or escalating violence to their crimes.
ReplyDeleteFirst let me just say that Robert the Skeptic brings up a valid point in that the pendulum can swing to the other end of the spectrum and be just as damaging. Although even with kids we perceive as overindulged there can be chronic neglect of their emotional needs and so we come back to abuse.
As for my little jailbirds; I'm no expert in the field and so I say these things ancedotally and without authority. I can tell you that some of the scariest inmates I had to deal with were the juveniles - they were operating with no moral compass and without compassion. Of course, the majority were out of the ghettoes where they have known neglect and abuse from an early age. They are also exposed to drug use and gang activity at a young age. When society ignores your pain and hunger but the gang leader or drug dealer feeds you and offers you friendship, then you will gravitate toward whoever helps you survive and make no mistake, it's a jungle out there for these kids. With no parent or teacher or community group to care for them, they are quickly indoctrinated into gang life. Many suffer from developmental difficulties due to poor nutrition and lack of nuturing.
I was stunned on day when a juvenile came to my medicine cart and requested something from me using 3 or 4 garbled words. As I tried to get through to him that he needed to make a complete sentence if he wanted my help, I realized he wasn't capable of doing that.
Make no mistake, as bad as I felt for some of them, I was glad they were locked up because I know they will one day soon take a life or cripple someone.
Bottom line; by the time I'm seeing them in jail, it is far too late to help them. They have lost all sense of right and wrong - if they ever had it. Look into their vacant eyes and realize no human being lives there any more. They have been turned into gangland killing machines.
But Octopus, I think we have two different conversations going here. We are talking of individual children being corrupted by abuse and then we are talking about a pervasive theme of violence, suspicion and intolerance running through a society.
Children, even those who suffer abuse, can be turned around if relocated to a sane nuturing environment soon enough. But when we talk of the ills of a society, it is not only children who can be adversely swayed but also those who are mentally unstable or pliable or any age. An then the downright opportunistic evil will take advantage and reak havoc.
I think you should clarify and colasce your thoughts so we can follow along. The topic as it stands is much to broad.
Octo,
ReplyDeleteFollowing on what the ever-sagacious Rocky writ, I agree with what you're writing from the get-go about the origin of individual pathologies. My interest is mostly in how entire societies become as messed up as some of them do – and increasingly, that "some" looks to include our very own Glorious Nation of US & A. That's what led me to bring up the concept of cultural transmission of values – I think we have lots of citizens who have little or no idea what civic responsibility entails, and the farther down the rabbit hole we go, there are fewer good examples to go by. The public response to the Tucson killings was mostly heartening, though – such extreme violence really does seem to have come as a shock, in spite of the rhetoric of violence everywhere around us. When people see it, they shudder – that's as it should be because if assassination becomes "normal," we're sunk.
"not only don't they know how to write a single paragraph without violating every known law of grammar and syntax, they don't care."
ReplyDeleteWow - is there an echo in here? No, they don't care, they see all rules as objectionable, from wearing no shirt and a greasy backwards hat in a nice restaurant, to speaking a deliberately unintelligible patois.
And didn't we see this coming down the road that was marked with "grammar has to be descriptive?" you don't put vulgarity on a pedestal and dismiss all else as "elitist" without consequences.
Welcome to the consequences.
Again, I'm offering a dim ray of hope because nothing changes until the car goes off the road or the ship hits an iceberg. Even those who insist their rhetoric had nothing to do with that killing are toning it down if for no other reason that the public has begun to recoil from it and they don't want to sound too much like the Unabomber for whom assassination was quite normal.
Certain people are resilient and inherently stable. perhaps certain countries are too.
Not that I actually care as long as they keep the power grid up and my power supply humming - slip the juice to me Bruce!
Rocky - I think you should clarify and coalesce your thoughts so we can follow along. The topic as it stands is much too broad.
ReplyDeleteI can always count on our wise and clever Waschbär to point out a problem I have been wrestling with for over a year and half. Alice Miller was also aware of the problem. Allow me to elaborate.
The problem is one of testing for statistical validity across variables observed independently. Simply stated, if A correlates with B, and B correlates with C, a multivariate analysis of A versus C would produce different results compared with a study that tested AC directly. One would need to perform three separate studies, AB, BC, and AC to determine an accurate strength of association - even if one understands these phenomena intuitively.
Alice Miller was impatient with statistical research methods because she understood these relationships intuitively and considered the implications too important to withhold and too important to await confirmation. Lets just say, she was very empathic and felt a sense of urgency.
Since I am more empirical in my approach, I struggled with the idea of this post for a long time but decided, in the end, that Alice Miller is right. Perhaps the Tucson shooting rampage was the turning point; we deserve a forthright discussion even if the research never seems to catch up with events. Perhaps this post is more about pattern recognition than empiricism.
Is it the equivalent of Freakonomics? Not in my opinion.
Bloggingdino,
Although this is more your area expertise than mine, let me venture a comment on how certain folks perceive language. The words ‘target’ and ‘crosshair’ are used in common parlance often subconsciously and without forethought as to origins or precise meaning. Until last week, I used these words too without thinking.
The difference is in figurative versus literal usage. We know language can be metaphorical and symbolic. Without the benefit of a research study to back my assertion, I will make the claim that literalists are more likely to be ultra conservative, fundamentalist, tenther in their reading of the Constitution, authoritarian social controllers, strict disciplinarians in their approach to child rearing, and generally not the kind of people I want to share lunch with. See what I mean about pattern recognition?
Octo,
ReplyDeleteMakes sense to me. I find it hard to believe that even the dumbest people really believe a crosshair image on a map means "go out and murder politicians xyz." I think they know it just means, "send us your money and go out and vote against these candidates." Our appreciation of metaphor seems to be something we possess in common, as a primal and valuable dimension of language.
But sure, literalists seem to find it hard to deal intelligently with the complexities of language and with the intentionality (apart from specific intentions on the part of specific people) that underlies it. I suspect that such complexity frightens or addles them: human language, as even a simple dino like myself knows, is a slippery thing and is not reducible to "the author or speaker's intentions." Besides, the concept of "intention" is itself fraught with difficulty, and as I type this an image of Nietzsche arises before me, telling me I'm a foolish lizard for even invoking it.
Octo and all,
ReplyDeleteI meant to add something to that last remark: I've been hearing a lot about how some people might take certain kinds of speech and writing literally, but I think the danger could lie in another direction -- it may be rather that ill-educated, hostile individuals and groups take such speech as a loose incitement to general licentiousness and violence. In other words, it might go towards establishing an "anything goes" ambiance, which could bring out the worst in some otherwise more or less rational people (I'm not referring to the Tucson attack) and at least indirectly (very indirectly) move them to do things they wouldn't ordinarily be bold enough to do.
Bloggingdino,
ReplyDeleteYour comment gave me another idea, one that hasn’t been discussed (at least not to my knowledge).
Please recall the tactics used by the Pro Life movement. They would identify abortion doctors, post their photos, home addresses, and workplace info on the Web. All done in the name of free speech, of course, their purpose was to mobilize crowds to hound and harass. The not so subliminal message of a crosshair superimposed over a photo was open invitation for any crazy person to stalk them too … for a hit. Every time an abortion doctor was murdered, the Lifers would make pious noises about the sanctity of life and condemn the act with a crocodile smile (no offense intended to distant cousins).
What I am alluding to is this. Does the Tea Party movement, specifically their bullets over ballots mentality, remind you in any way of the tactics employed by the Pro Lifers?
Octo,
ReplyDeleteI don't see any similarity there -- if we take as an example the fellow who was convicted of killing a prominent doctor a few years back, one element of the extreme pro-life movement is by no means averse to killing their opponents: they may even consider it a sacred duty.
I don't see any murderous bent amongst the Tea-Folk in general -- I think their rhetoric is just "stupid stuff," and I don't believe they consider it some kind of duty to harm their opponents. There could be some who really would welcome extreme violence (the idiots many of us have seen waving overtly racist signs are a fair bet--I wouldn't put anything past racists; they're a low lot), but I don't believe such evil intent really characterizes a loose movement like "the Tea Party."
"A third possibility was a Jewish family from Graz who employed the maternal grandmother during her pregnancy and paid her support money for 14 years. For Alois, the stigma of being born illegitimate, and part Jewish in a time of rising anti-Semitism, was a source of intolerable shame."
ReplyDeleteThis is absolutely false, and is simply a right wing lie intended to somehow blame the Jews for their fate. Obviously, Octopus, I am in no way suggesting that you would ever deliberately propagate such a deception. However, a deception it is, and a very malignant one. In fact, the dates that Hitler's maternal grandmother was in Graz do not correspond to the time of her pregnancy, and no record of a family with the name commonly given exist for Graz at that time.
There have been several allegations that Hitler was partly Jewish; none of them have ever proven to have a shred of substance.
Hitler's antisemitism is, in fact, traceable to his associations in the period around World War I with Thule Society members like Rudolf Hess, and the noxious propagandist Dietrich Eckart, who I have had occasion to refer to before, as his writings are still cited by some far right groups. The Thule Society's doctrine included the notion of Aryan supremacy, mixed with highly toxic anti-Semitism. They also preached that a "redeemer" would arise to restore Germany to its pre-World War I glory. After Hitler became involved with members of the society they coalesced around him as that redeemer.
I think Dino and Green Eagle have touched on the direction my thoughts seem to flow - and that is whether a person has suffered abuse or grown up in a healthy environment, the prevailing societal atmosphere can greatly affect the actions of not only the unbalanced and ignorant but also those we would consider sane and rational.
ReplyDeleteOnce it became a Presidential directive under the Patriot Act, torturing people being held without charge became acceptable to many, including those who one would consider to be "normal" Americans.
So, I think this discussion is not only about abuse but also prevailing trends and indoctrination. And, yes, I can see where images like the crosshairs fit in to the theory that violence begets violence but not by itself. There must be verbal accompaniment in order to further the agenda and then a graduation of actions until society will accept what which was once the unacceptable.
It is the road that took Germany from Kristalnacht to the mass genocide of the Holocaust.
"she understood these relationships intuitively and considered the implications too important to withhold awaiting confirmation. Lets just say, she felt a sense of urgency."
ReplyDeleteGROAN - Sort of like how the Republicans just intuitively know Obama's from Kenya and heavy objects fall faster?
"Hitler's antisemitism is, in fact, traceable to his associations in the period around World War I with Thule Society members like Rudolf Hess, and the noxious propagandist Dietrich Eckart"
And to the Roman Catholic church who had been preaching hatred and carrying on exterminations against them since it's inception -- made anti-sematism an integral part of European culture and mythology?
"...I think the danger could lie in another direction -- it may be rather that ill-educated, hostile individuals and groups take such speech as a loose incitement to general licentiousness and violence. In other words, it might go towards establishing an "anything goes" ambiance, which could bring out the worst in some otherwise more or less rational people (I'm not referring to the Tucson attack) and at least indirectly (very indirectly) move them to do things they wouldn't ordinarily be bold enough to do."
ReplyDeleteFor me, bloggingdino's point is central to this subject. And, sadly, not new to our American culture.
I also direct you to the Glenn Beck interview by Meredith Vieira on this morning's "Today" show, where he tries to slither out of any responsibility for any of his violent, murder-inciting rhetoric.
I've also reported on my blog a June 2010 episode in which Beck urges his listeners to "shoot 'them' in the head."
I believe that repeated calls to violence and repeated violent images directed at politicians and our government do trigger the aggrieved and the weak-minded to action.
And, sadly, we will not see the sort of violence that took place in Tucson end.
I don't think ever.
"And, sadly, we will not see the sort of violence that took place in Tucson end.
ReplyDeleteI don't think ever. "
I most sadly agree and I think our efforts are best directed against hate speech and against the kind of forces that stratify our population and perpetuate organized crime. I do not believe our freedom of speech protects calls to violence and particularly to the violent overthrow of our government.
But no,
Hello Folks,
ReplyDeleteMuch to ponder in this comment thread.
While reading everyone's thoughts - a thought kept coming to me - a nuance perhaps - there is a difference between actual, physical violence and emotional violence. Yes - I doubt many people took Palin's map's cross-hairs literally, i.e. to mean physical violence - but I do think it subliminally communicated emotional violence - something I think is more toxic and frightening because it is hard to quantify and qualify. Beck and co.'s use of violent language and phrases about physical violence - "shooting in head' etc - is coy - they claim they are not being literal - but they surely know they are stirring the emotional pot of the electorate which, in turn, shuts down brains and leads to a reactionary electorate.
Analyzing how symbols, metaphors communicate is what I do - they can be MORE powerful when they are NOT literal. When a playwright displaces the context of her/his story into another time and place - it actively requires the audience to draw the connections, to recognize the similarities of the displaced world with their own world by themselves - Shakespeare did it all the time. A thus actively engaged audience gets the message, arguably, more intensely than if the story, the themes, were directly spoon fed to them. Symbols, metaphors such as cross-haired maps - I think - function in this way. Palin and Beck etc are extremely savvy in this regard. They communicate their messages successfully to folks who would otherwise balk if they were told point blank to go shoot a politician. That's not what Sarah and Glenn want - literally - but it is what they want figuratively. And they seem to be getting it as the anger and hate level in this country rises.
I hope maybe some of this makes sense.
Green Eagle,
ReplyDeleteHaving lost ancestors in the Holocaust, I would be the last person to propagate an anti-Semitic deception. Let me clarify. Suspicions over Hitler’s lineage need not be true or false: What matters is the delusion inside the mind of the madman. Delusions may have no basis in reality, but a delusion is a fact when accounting for the beliefs and actions of a madman - whether the delusion is real or not. My apologies if I did not make this distinction clear in my post; I wanted to keep this topic uncluttered of digressions and qualifications as much as possible. Recapping a right wing talking point doesn’t mean it is MY talking point.
Rocky,
Lets recall Stanley Milgram’s controversial experiments on obedience to authority. On the surface, these experiments confirm your point about how seemingly ‘normal’ people can perform unconscionable acts ordered by an authority figure. Variations of the experiment have been repeated over the years in different countries and cultures - all with identical results. Milgram and others have concluded that these results are attributable to a 'universal human condition.'
Alice Miller approaches the same phenomenon from another perspective, one that does not accept the “universal human condition” hypothesis. Why is it that some people but not others are capable of following unconscionable orders? The difference, she says, lies in “poisonous pedagogy” that inflicts abuse and humiliation on young children in order to teach them obedience. “Spare the rod, spoil the child” as the saying goes. Harsh pedagogy and blind obedience to authority are correlated, according to Miller.
Miller’s point, which I fully accept, is that you don’t need a rigorous research study to confirm the obvious.
Captain Fogg 2.0 - GROAN - Sort of like how the Republicans just intuitively know Obama's from Kenya and heavy objects fall faster?
I am surprised that you of all people would make such a sour grapes false equivalence. I recall one of your best catchphrases, the one about the USA looking more and more like late stage Weimar Republic. I quote you often.
Certainly, you must have been thinking of demagogues, fear tactics, wedge politics, Glenn Beck, and right wing hysteria when you made this equivalence between early 1930s Germany and contemporary America. Did you base this on a research study or on intuition?
Please refer back to my comment about Michael Savage (@ 4:02 PM, January 18, 2011) as an example of “childhood verbal abuse transformed later in life onto the political stage.”
Rocky, Shaw, and Squid,
ReplyDeleteVery fine comments. I think we are partly discussing how actions that used to be almost unthinkable become thinkable, sayable, and even doable. Words and what Octo has sometimes called "framing," I think, have much to do with that process.
Octo, what a fascinating discussion you have engendered.
ReplyDeleteI would suggest that Miller's "poisonous pedagogy" and Milgram's "universal human condition" hypothesis aren't contradictory but are both valid. Milgram's test subjects weren't picked based on some history of abuse. What made his behavioral experiment fascinating and disturbing was that the subjects were everyday people. All of those who turned a blind eye to the Holocaust aren't readily explained by Miller's hypothesis. Miller explains Hitler and perhaps others but not all the people of all the nations who ignored the horror in their back yards.
Certainly, "poisonous pedagogy" is a contributor to the evils that we perpetrate on each other, and I suspect that it is a powerful component in creating the "monsters" that we commonly identify as such. However, there is a rottenness within us that doesn't need abuse to bring it out. It's what allows us to turn away from those who need our help because they are not us or we don't think that they deserve help. It's what causes us to inflict pain simply because we can.
I find the concept of the universal human condition more perplexing than poisonous pedagogy. There is a path to resolution when it comes to poisonous pedagogy; we have some notion of what we should do when it comes to nurturing and raising our children to be human beings who embrace Donne's philosophy that no man is an island, that we are all a part of the whole, and that the death of any person diminishes all of us. It's the universal human condition that gives me pause. What makes us capable of great cruelty, of intentionally causing pain to others because someone with apparent authority tells us to act? That's the question that we must answer in order to understand how we can become better than we are. The scariest thing about us is that we are the monsters.
Squid - “ That's not what Sarah and Glenn want - literally - but it is what they want figuratively”
ReplyDeleteMakes perfect sense to me, and after explaining it in these terms, I prefer your analysis to mine. I also prefer your term, emotional violence, which captures the essence of what I am trying to convey. In our reactions to Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin, perhaps we feel violated in the way we used to feel as children when confronted by a schoolyard bully. Emotional violence can be just as soul murdering as actual physical abuse. If bullying is considered unacceptable among children in the schoolyard, then why should we tolerate it in our public discourse!
Perhaps the point I am trying to make remains unstated. For more than a decade, the right wing has pushed civility and decorum further into wilderness to the point that we now perceive their rhetoric as emotional violence. Is emotional violence considered free speech?
As Bloggingdino describes it, “ I think we are partly discussing how actions that used to be almost unthinkable become thinkable, sayable, and even doable.” Exactly! By framing right wing abuses as “emotional violence,” then perhaps it is possible to change the conversation and move these abuses back to the “unthinkable” where they belong.
I like this statement:
ReplyDelete"When society ignores your pain and hunger but the gang leader or drug dealer feeds you and offers you friendship, then you will gravitate toward whoever helps you survive and make no mistake, it's a jungle out there for these kids."
Societies are organisms. To paraphrase Ian McHarg from his 1969 book, Design with Nature, to see a human city from space is to see a cancer eating the planet. To get this, we need to shift our perspective from the personal to the macro.
What happens to a society in decline? What happens to a society that has offshored its production, transferred its wealth to a small elite and denied a third of its population affordable health care, quality education and hope for the future?
THAT is what the Allies did to Germany after the First World War. They punished the Germans and created the social pressure, the spiritual deadening and anger, that allowed for a messianic solution.
While Hitler's origins may have an attachment to Miller's theory, the actual "abuse of politics and politics of abuse" usually originate from the abuse of shared resources, i.e. greed and opportunism. When the commonwealth withers, so too does the society.
The rest, as they say, is symptomatic. That includes recent events in Tuscon, as much as the two ongoing wars in the Middle East (which in themselves present an unspeakably evil political abuse).
An appreciation of the underlying political—and personal—motivation is the only way to approach this topic. Why are our two countries in the Middle East? What are we doing to redistribute wealth? Why don't we reeducate our population so that they may actively and knowledgeably reengage in serious political debate? Why can't we move away from linear corporatism toward a more creative and open society?
Why? Because there are interest groups that actively furthering their own ends over those of the public's. For the rest of us, (that is, society in general) we will "gravitate toward whoever helps [us] survive."
So, yes. We can see the origins of the abuse. They are hiding in plush office towers and gated communities around the world... collecting million-dollar bonuses as people continue to lose their homes. While the rest of us patiently wait for the leader of the next Campaign of Hope to solve the problem.
The real question is: where is the justifiable, outraged anger and the unified voice of the people? We, the people, are being abused by our own corporations—and our complicit BELIEF that unregulated free market economics take precedence over any other political system—while too few of us are doing anything about it.
Forget politics. How does one deal with a cancerous, abusive, self-serving corporate ruling class? Especially when it now runs our governments...
Edge and all,
ReplyDeleteI think one of the best things Dems could do is revive the language of "socioeconomic class," but in terms that appeal emotionally and commonsensically to a majority of the country. It's true that we have a moneyed elite that pursues its own interests -- they need not care what happens to the country, so long as whatever shakes out (be it anarchy or theocracy or dictatorship) benefits them and their corporate selves. Even working class stiffs perched precariously between a respectable life and sleeping on a park bench think of themselves as "middle class." Howsabout our liberal politicians start finding ways to break down that bit of false middle-class consciousness and inculcate a more honest, accurate self-assessment of where each of us stands? They would, of course, have to run the gauntlet of right-wing liars who will scream "class warfare," but that's always been the case. The Right has managed to banish the very word "class" from political discourse, and "poverty" is a dirty word these days, too. Until such a transformation in individual Americans' self-image occurs, mostly we will get only comforting lies and policies that perpetuate the further enrichment of the already rich.
I know there are nuances to be observed -- you could take my case, for instance. By taste and education, I would qualify as an elitist bastard in almost anyone's book: I read classical languages, study literature, and am (for a dinosaur) deplorably erudite even by academic standards. But by socioeconomic status, I would still describe myself as working class, or perhaps at best lower middle-class. I don't lead a life of moneyed leisure, and never will unless that MacArthur Genius grant arrives in the mail. But of course, they don't give you a MacArthur Grant for being a big stupid dinosaur who reads Homer and Aeschylus in Greek, so I may be in for a long wait. Life is so unfair!
Perhaps this difference in sensibility and actual, material class-facts on the ground is the fissure that allows the real elite class to keep us all down on the farm. Many of us think of ourselves as something that we really aren't, and that is a potentially lethal trap for us as individuals and for the nation collectively.
And there, Dino, is where it all comes together: the use of belief, myth and ideology to keep us down on the farm. Nouveau elites such as Rupert Murdock are most visibly and deeply into that game. But it's a long game that has been managed elegantly and surreptitiously for centuries.
ReplyDeleteOur delusions and illusions are our chains. It's always back to the three temptations of the Buddha: mythologies and beliefs that tie us to fear, desire and duty.
"I don't lead a life of moneyed leisure, and never will unless that MacArthur Genius grant arrives in the mail. But of course, they don't give you a MacArthur Grant for being a big stupid dinosaur who reads Homer and Aeschylus in Greek, so I may be in for a long wait. Life is so unfair!"
ReplyDeleteLife isn't unfair, people are unfair and do I detect scorn for the idle rich? I could take offense at that even though I'm otherwise distinctly underclass. I can only watch Homer Simpson in the original language, but of course I did eat a Gyro last week.
Useful links from David Neiwert, author of the The Eliminationists:
ReplyDeleteLoughner's rampage was a clear act of political terrorism directed at a liberal 'government' target
An interactive map of terrorism directed at 'liberal' and 'government' targets since July 2008