Abuse seen as "a labor of love" - a new take on the Milgram experiments

I wrote about the Milgram experiments in reference to why people engaged in Flirty Fishing in the COG here.  

This speaker talks about revisiting those experiments and coming to a slightly different conclusion - one that is even more terrifying - people harm others when they believe they are doing it for love. Shades of the Manson Family killings.

Mother May I?

I always felt that before I could do anything - anything at all - for myself, I needed to get permission. Was it so that I did not sin by selfishness? All I know is that I needed approval before I would act.

Therefore, seeing a doctor about a health issue was not something I did - not unless that issue was so serious that it could not be ignored. Buying clothes? No. Just make do. Eat in a restaurant by myself? Perish the thought! What an extravagance! Better to go hungry.

I think it's about time for me to realize that a grown woman does not need to get permission and validation before doing something for herself.

Baby steps.

Vicious Cycle of Outrage

Who bothers to fact-check? “The catchy, click-bait headline confirmed what I already thought of that other political party, I’ll share it,” subconsciously rationalize too many social network users, unwittingly embracing their own confirmation bias.

On it goes, spreading ill-will like a virus from person-to-person, fed by the cortisol being pumped out by those busy, indignation-activated adrenal glands.

So much negativity.

“Today’s world is such a horrible place, gun deaths, ISIS, terrorism,” the US has even been likened to “a war zone,” by some of the more alarmist types. But is it?

Clearly bad news makes news. Stories about good deeds and calm neighborhoods don’t sell.

But let's stop and take a breath.

Stephen Pinker clearly elucidated in his 2011 book, The Better Angels of our Nature, that the world today is much less violent than it has ever been, even the United States.

Likewise, who can deny that our moral evolution has made things repugnant today that were accepted as normal in the not so distant past:  slavery, public torture and executions, and the subjugation of women, to name just a few of the most obvious. Even animals rights is a thing now; not so when those of my generation were growing up in the 1960’s.

Perhaps even greater than the threat of violence today is the encroaching psychological danger that much of humanity is embracing with joy:  the ever-increasing availability of information and its ability to surreptitiously transform our mindsets. The mind-boggling numbers of television channels, the nearly ubiquitous internet connectivity, the countless radio shows and podcasts - even clothing and bags are emblazoned with brand names - all feeding us with information.

Having the wealth of man's knowledge at our fingertips is a marvelous thing, but the downside is that news outlets, both spurious and legitimate, have a tremendous influence on us via an availability cascade of stories and memes that give us a very distorted sense of reality, danger, and truth. Obviously, the most effective memes and the most attention-getting, share-worthy stories are those that arouse emotion. This incentivizes people to write articles and headlines using more and more emotion-laden terms, in an ever escalating battle of one-upmanship. From hyperbolic memes complete with spelling errors to actual news articles, the more emotion their creators can arouse in their readers, the more widely their piece is apt to be read and shared. Are we nearing a crescendo in this vicious cycle?

One of the daily challenges of the modern world is to be aware of the power of availability to influence us. We naturally deem things that are easily called to mind as being of more weight and importance, especially those that are emotion-laden, but being readily called to mind does not speak to their value. As Daniel Kahneman wrote in Thinking Fast and Slow, his groundbreaking book on behavioral economics, "A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”

Is it too much to wish that reporters today would take an evidence-based approach in their writing? Surely that would be a positive step towards bringing the world a bit closer to the safe haven of kindness and hope that the majority of humanity strives to embrace.

Written June 2016

The Ragman Fallacy

Throwing things away has been hard for me for years. I felt I almost had a moral imperative to keep things that were still in a usable condition, whether I needed them or not. I was not a hoarder - I didn't have that much stuff - but the consumer mentality was very far from my mind.

"Waste not, want not." "Be a good 'Ragman,'" Berg admonished in his Letter of that name. In it, he went so far as to say, "God will hold you accountable not only for every word and deed wasted, but everything you wasted and threw away which you could have saved or given to somebody else who needed it!"

Is that where this idea came from? More dregs of cult teachings rising to the surface?

Only this past month have I realized how ingrained that attitude of scarcity was. I was downsizing, and I needed to get rid of years of accumulated things.  

First, I wanted to sell or give things away. That worked for a while. Then, when I had no more takers, I started to think... I live in a wealthy country where if someone needs something, they usually just go to the store and buy it. Not so much me. I rummage about and make do with what I have: a daughter's left behind clothes, a son's old track suit, 20-year-old kitchen utensils, etc.  

Finally, the light dawned. If I don't need it, if I'm not going to use it, throw it away. I made numerous trips to the dump, where I witnessed other people throwing things away as if it was completely normal. Something no longer needed? No need to keep it.

Such a basic concept. But not a basic concept for one coming out of years of cult-imposed poverty and scarcity.

This is not to cast aside all frugality. In the cult, we had very few personal belongings. I lived out of a suitcase, and I learned to improvise. Economizing, saving, and avoiding unnecessary waste are still worthy qualities. But no more unwittingly clinging to over-the-top parsimony and being weighed down with unneeded stuff.

Stanford Prison Study

In 1971, Dr. Philip Zimbardo wanted to study the psychological effects of prison life. He advertised for volunteers and, with the help of consultants (one of whom was a former prisoner who had spent 16 years behind bars), prepared the basement of the Stanford Psychology building to be as much like a prison as possible. In order to be as true to reality as they could, he arranged for the randomly chosen Prisoners to be "arrested" by actual city policemen. 

After a surprise visit by uniformed policemen, they were handcuffed, taken to the police station, fingerprinted, booked, blindfolded, and placed in a holding cell. Soon they were transferred to the "Stanford Prison" where they were further dehumanized by being stripped, doused with anti-lice powder, and given a gown bearing their prison number, a stocking hat (made from ladies' nylons), rubber sandals, and finally were fitted with a locked chain around their right ankles. Their prison number was now the only thing they were to be known by; no more using names.

The humiliated Prisoners were placed 3 to a small cell. A tiny closet was prepared for "solitary confinement."

Meanwhile, the other half of the volunteers had been randomly given the job of Guards. They also were dressed the part, with uniforms, mirror sunglasses (so as to not show their eyes, making them more intimidating), and billy clubs.

The Guards were to keep law and order and to command the respect of the prisoners. Other than that, no specific instructions were given. 

The Prisoners were awakened throughout the night for arbitrary number checks. At first, the Prisoners did not take the Guards seriously, and the Guards retaliated by becoming more authoritative. As rebellious behavior escalated, so did the retaliations. The Guards made disobedient prisoners do push-ups (even stepping on their backs while they did them), demanded that all the Prisoners be naked, and put one particularly rebellious Prisoner in the 2X2 foot "solitary confinement" dark closet for hours at a time.

Prisoners were denied access to toilets on the whim of the Guards - just given a bucket to use which they were not always allowed to empty. Other times, the Prisoners were marched to the toilet down the hall, bags covering heads, chains on ankles, arms on the shoulders of the ones in front. At night, the Guards relieved their boredom by even more sadistic - and pornographic - treatment of the Prisoners.

Meanwhile, some of the powerless and frustrated Prisoners were variously rebelling, having breakdowns, screaming, crying, and refusing to eat, although most learned quickly to quietly comply. 

Even Dr. Zimbardo began to lose sight of his experiment and became embroiled in the drama of running the Prison. When faced with a rumor of an upcoming escape attempt, he tried to enlist the help of the police to "contain his prisoners," and when they refused, he covered the Prisoners' heads in bags and moved them all to a different floor of the building to thwart their plans.

He wrote, "It wasn't until much later that I realized how far into my prison role I was at that point -- that I was thinking like a prison superintendent rather than a research psychologist."

The planned two-week experiment was ended after only six days, largely as the result of a comment from one of Dr. Zimbardo's colleagues. When she witnessed the Prisoners marching chained and bagged to the toilet, she made no secret of her outrage, "It's terrible what you are doing to these boys!" Its morality seriously called into question and the obvious psychological distress of the participants marked the end of the "Stanford Prison." "We had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation -- a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically. Even the 'good' guards felt helpless to intervene, and none of the guards quit while the study was in progress," later wrote the doctor.

The participants' sense of reality had shifted. The "prison" became their reality. When interviewed two months after the experiment, the Guards were dismayed at what they had done. At the time, they felt no guilt or shame, but afterwards, back in the real world, they were alarmed to see what they had been capable of doing.

This is the fundamental danger of the false reality of cult life. Its own skewed morality becomes the accepted and practiced norm, and in such a situation, anything can happen.

See also: More on the Stanford Prison Study and Why didn't we balk at the Mo Letters?