Reply #7: Split feelings. [View All]

On the one hand, it's good to finally be in the majority (or rather, to see the majority catch up to me).

On the other hand, we're still basically saying that almost half of all Americans are basically unsuited to live on a planet with other human beings, by the standards we established at Nuremburg. At this point, I don't think there's a person over 18 years and 80 IQ in the country who sincerely believes that Iraq posed an actual threat to American lives that necessitated using our military to defend against -- which is the only acceptable justification for using military force. What we're basically saying is, 44% of Americans don't care if they're responsible for the deaths of thousands as long as it's nobody they know. And that scares the f*** out of me.

There was a flurry of discussion after Abu Ghraib concerning the psychological experiments on authority where something like two-thirds of test subjects showed little compunction about apparently torturing someone (via electric shocks) just because they were told to by someone else. This is generally presented as a warning about the effects of authority -- "there's about a two in three chance you could be manipulated into doing bad things. It could happen to anyone!" -- but I've begun to suspect over the course of the last year the more parsimonious explanation is that it's a warning about the epidemic nature of human indifference. In short: how do we know it's not always going to be the same two-thirds, that the third who 'passes' won't always pass under similar circumstances? Is it really that so many people are being swayed by percieved authority, or just that 66% of us are basically bastards?