Sunday, November 02, 2008

Deep thoughts on war

I'm currently reading an advanced readers copy of The Weight of a Mustard Seed an Iraqi General's Moral Journey During the Time of Saddam. I am nearing the end of the book and I just finished one chapter that has very effectively summed up some thoughts that I've had lately. The chapter describes a scientific study done at Yale University where people were told that they were testing shock therapy and that when the other participant got a question wrong they were to shock them. With every question wrong they were to increase the intensity of the shock from 15V, "slight shock", to 375V "danger: severe shock", and then finally 450V labeled "X X X". In the study the participant getting "shocked" was the control (he was in on it and actually just acting, he wasn't getting shocked). So the study was really testing the "shockers" to see how far they would go. This study was administered all over the world to many different types of people living in varying cultures.

Across the board over 60% of the participants "continued to administer increasing amounts of clearly painful electric shocks, even as the subject appeared to lapse into unconsciousness, until the end of the switches and 450V had been delivered [many times]". They concluded that "obedience to authority was a learned cognitive behavior that ran through almost every society." And that "most people do what they are told for no other reason than they were told to do it". One of the characters in the book goes on to say "I am beginning to see that perhaps Iraqis are not crazy Arabs after all... they might be just ordinary human beings!" And then, "... human nature is the same, people are not good because they are taught in school to be good, there is a cultural impart over generations to make people comply, certain things are not acceptable, these norms are sanctioned under authority... Iraqis are repressed and exposed to violence..."

I think that the majority of who we label "terrorists" that are fighting against us in Iraq are probably not evil, but are just following their authority figures, just like over 60% of the participants did in the study. How we label everyone who fights against us as "evil" is just too easy; too black and white. They are scared, don't know who to trust, and are likely just trying to protect their families, religion, and way of life. All they have to go on is the propaganda that their authority figures are feeding them. I'm not proposing that we are evil for fighting them, I think we are the same; our troops are the same 60% who fight because authority tells them to.


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