War Transforms

Lucifer Effect Series

On Killing Series

The Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts

War provides the institutionally approved permission to kill or wound one’s adversaries. Most wars are about old men persuading young men to harm and kill other young men like themselves. A key ingredient in transforming ordinarily non-aggressive young men into warriors who can kill on command if first to change their external appearance, altering their usual external facade by putting on military uniforms or masks or painting their faces. With the anonymity thus provided in place, out go their usual internal compassion and concern for others

In all wars, at all times, in every country, wars transform ordinary, even good men into killers. That is what soldiers are trained to do, to kill their designated enemies. However, under the extreme stresses of combat conditions, with fatigue, fear, anger, hatred, and revenge at full throttle, men can lose their moral compass and go beyond killing enemy combatants. Unless military discipline is strictly maintained and every soldier knows he bears personal responsibility for his actions, which are under surveillance by senior officers, then the furies are released in unimaginable orgies of rape and murder of civilians as well by enemy soldiers. We know such loss was true at My Lai and in other less well-known military massacres, such as those of the “Tiger Force” in Vietnam. This elite fighting unit left a seven-month-long trail of executions of unarmed civilians. Sadly, the brutality of war that spills over from the battlefield to the hometown has become true again in Iraq.

Wartime atrocities occur in all wars and are committed by most occupying forces, even high tech ones. Combat is about stress, and criminal behavior toward civilians in a classic combat stress symptom. If you get enough soldiers into enough combat, some of them are going to murder civilians.

We must acknowledge that soldiers are well-trained killers who have successfully completed an intense learning experience in boot camp, with the battlefield as their testing ground. They must learn to suppress their prior moral training guided by the commandment “thou shalt not kill.” New military training is known as the science of “killology.” This term was coined by LtCol Dave Grossman, now a West Point professor of military science, is elaborated in his book On Killing.

 Photo Credit: Francoise Demulder 1976 Palestine

Power Elite Propaganda

Lucifer Effect Series

The Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts

“The power elite is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women; they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences. They are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of power and the wealth and celebrity which they enjoy.  Whether they do or do not make decisions is less important that the fact that they do occupy such pivotal positions: their failure to act, their failure to make decisions, is itself an act that is often of greater significance than the decisions they do make.” [The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills, 1956]

When a power elite wants to destroy an enemy nation, it turns to propaganda experts to fashion a program of hate. It requires a “hostile imagination,” a psychological construction embedded deeply in their minds by propaganda that transforms those others into “The Enemy.” That image is a soldier’s most powerful motive that loads his rifle with ammunition of hate and fear. The image of a dreaded enemy threatening one’s personal well-being and the society’s national security emboldens priorities to turn plowshares into swords of destruction.

It is all done with words and images. The process begins with creating stereotyped conceptions of the other, dehumanized perceptions of the other, the other as worthless, the other as all-powerful, the other as demonic, the other as an abstract monster, the other as a fundamental threat to our cherished values and beliefs. With public fear notched up and the enemy imminent, reasonable people act irrationally, independent people act in mindless conformity, and peaceful people act as warriors. Dramatic visual images of the enemy on posters, television, magazine covers, movies, and the Internet imprint powerful emotions of fear and hate.

Enemies of the State

Lucifer Effect Series

The Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts

Among the operational principles we must add to our arsenal of weapons that trigger evil acts by ordinarily good men and women are those developed by nation-states to incite their own citizens. Nations prepare their young men to engage in deadly wars while also preparing citizens to endorse engaging in wars of aggression. Propaganda helps accomplish this difficult transformation. Images of the enemy are created by national media propaganda, in complicity with governments, to prepare the minds of soldiers and citizens to hate those who fit the new category “your enemy". Such mental conditioning is a soldier’s most potent weapon. Without it, he might never put another young man in the cross-hairs of his gun sight and fire to kill him.

In creating a new evil enemy in the minds of good members of righteous tribes, “the enemy” is: aggressor, faceless, rapist, godless, barbarian, greedy, criminal, torturer, murderer, an abstraction, or a dehumanized animal. Scary images reveal one’s nation being consumed by the animals that are most universally feared: snakes, rats, spiders, insects, lizards, gigantic gorillas, octopi, or even “English pigs.”

In the News:

US military apologizes to Afghans over offensive propaganda leaflet

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/06/us-military-apologises-to-afghans-over-offensive-propaganda-leaflet

07 Sep 2017

The US military in Afghanistan has apologized for distributing propaganda leaflets featuring a passage from the Qur’an superimposed on to the image of a dog, considered unclean in Islam, which causes offence to Muslims. The leaflets depict a lion chasing a dog bearing a Qur’anic passage that appears on banners used by Taliban militants. The recent leaflet reads: “Take back your freedom from the terrorist dogs and cooperate with coalition forces so they can identify and eliminate your enemy.” Dropping propaganda leaflets is a basic part of military psychology operations, and has been widely used by coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Moral Disengagement

Lucifer Effect Series

The Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts

Most people adopt moral standards undergoing normal socialization processes during their upbringing. Those standards act as guides for pro-social behavior and deterrents of antisocial behavior as defined by their family and social community. Over time, these external moral standards imposed by parents, teachers, and other authorities become internalized as codes of personal conduct. People develop personal controls over their thoughts and actions. They learn to sanction themselves to prevent acting inhumanely and to foster human actions.

Individuals and groups can maintain their sense of moral standards by simply disengaging their usual moral functioning at certain times, in certain situations, for certain purposes by:

·       Redefining our harmful behavior as honorable, creating moral justification for the action by adopting moral imperatives that sanctify violence.

·       Minimizing our sense of a direct link between our actions and its harmful outcomes by diffusing or displacing personal responsibility.

·       Changing the way we think about the actual harm done by our actions.

·       Reconstructing our perception of victims as deserving their punishment, by blaming them for the consequences.

·       Dehumanizing them, perceiving them to be beneath the righteous concerns we reserve for fellow human beings.

·       Ignoring, distorting, minimizing, or disbelieving any negative consequences of our conduct.

Conformity

Lucifer Effect Series

The Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts

We conform first out of informational needs: other people have ideas, views, perspectives, and knowledge that helps us to better navigate our world, especially through foreign shores and new ports. The second mechanism involves normative needs: other people are more likely to accept us when we agree with them than when we disagree, so we yield to their view of the world, driven by a powerful need to belong to replace differences with similarities.

Pressures to conform are enormous, to be a team player, not to rock the boat, and not to risk the sanctions against confronting a system. Those forces are often coupled with the top-down power of authority systems to convey expectations indirectly to employees and underlings that unethical and illegal behavior is appropriate under special circumstances which they define.

Our sense of identity is in large measure conferred on us by others in the ways they treat or mistreat us, recognize or ignore us, raise us or punish us. Some people make us timid and shy; others elicit our sex appeal and dominance. In some groups we are made leaders, while in others we are reduced to being followers. We come to live up to or down to expectations others have of us. The expectations of others often become self-fulfilling prophecies. Without realizing it, we often behave in ways that confirm the beliefs others have about us. Those subjective beliefs can create new realities for us. We often become who other people think we are, in their eyes and in our behavior.

It is only by becoming aware of our vulnerabilities to social pressure that we can begin to build resistance to conformity when it is not in our best interest to yield to the mentality of the herd. Societies that promote individualism, such as the United States and other Western nations, overemphasize personality in explaining behavior while concurrently underemphasizing situational influences. An individual is constantly engaged in a two-way exchange with society – adapting to its norms, roles, and status prescriptions but also acting upon society to reshape those norms. All of the major Western institutions of medicine, education, law, religion, and psychiatry collectively help create the myth that individuals are always in control of their behavior, act from free will and rational choice, and are thus personally responsible for any and all of their actions.

Role Based Actions

Lucifer Effect Series

The Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts

People can do terrible things when they allow the role they play to have rigid boundaries that circumscribe what is appropriate, expected, and reinforced in a given setting. Such rigidity in the role shuts off the traditional morality and values that govern their lives when they are in “normal mode.”  To the extent that we can both live in the skin of a role and yet be able to separate ourselves from it when necessary, we are in a position to “explain away” our personal responsibility for the damage we cause by our role-based actions.

In addition to the power of rules and roles, situational forces mount in power with the introduction of uniforms, costumes, and masks, all disguises of one’s usual appearance that promote anonymity and reduce personal accountability. When people feel anonymous in a situation, as if no one is aware of their true identity, they can more easily be induced to behave in antisocial ways. This is especially so if the setting grants permission to enact one’s impulse or to follow orders or implied guidelines that one would usually disdain.

In the Stanford Prison Experiment, the power that the guards assumed each time they donned their military-style uniforms was matched by the powerlessness the prisoners felt when wearing their wrinkled smocks with ID numbers sewn on their fronts. The guards had billy-clubs, whistles, and sunglasses that disguised their eyes; the prisoners had a chained ankle and a stocking cap to contain their long hair. These situational differences were not inherent in the cloth or the hardware; rather, the source of their power is to be found in the psychological material that went into each group’s subjective constructions of the meaning of these uniforms.