Tag: The West

The West’s slippery slope to sadism

20 May 1983, Civilians killed in Church St bomb attack, with the help of Britain, The Netherlands and Sweden

by Joseph Secrève

If one were to take a bird’s eye view of the changes that took place in Western nations over the past sixty years, one could only muse at the rapid shifts that have occurred in this short time. The dust of war had hardly settled and an invisible war on the Western soul has taken its place. In small increments, we have been fed slivers of violence, less dialogue and more action through the national media and entertainment industry. A sense of higher purpose has been clouded and narcissism has taken over. Remember the Cold War spy dramas where pistol-wielding protagonists held lengthy dialogues with their enemies at gunpoint? Especially in the case of Ian Fleming’s immortal superspy, a clear shift could be seen if one compares Connery with Craig. More often the use of violence has been promoted as a means of solving disputes and debasement has become acceptable under the guise of an ‘alternative lifestyle’.

In stark contrast to today, Truman Capote’s famous non-fiction novel In Cold Blood caused a national stir when it was first released in 1966. The book recounts the killing spree of two rogues who killed a Kansas farmer and his family after it was rumoured that they had a substantial amount of cash in their home. The killers got away with only a modicum of dollars, but the carnage they left behind traumatised a large section of rural America. To quote Capote: “Of what were they frightened? It could happen again.”

The intensity of Capote’s research in today’s terms would seem slightly out of place. Such levels of violence and cruelty have become an almost everyday occurrence, and in rural South Africa there are even multiple cases of torture, often leading to murder, with on average one murder per week. This carnage has spread like an inkblot over South Africa, fuelled by the “Kill a Boer, Kill a Farmer” slogan, and there appears to be no end in sight. Every subsequent president under the ANC is less reserved in either chanting or defending this bloodcurdling invective. In Capote’s interview with the accused Perry Edward Smith, the latter revealed that he had felt a deep sense of shame as he slit the throat of Mr. Clutter. Nowadays the mutilation of people and deliberate desecration of corpses unveils a motive of a different kind: sheer hatred! The intentional destruction of human life has become a goal in itself, especially when one considers that these savages…uhm…I mean “robbers” seldom steal anything valuable. Usually no more than a cell phone gets stolen to prevent the victims from calling someone or their car gets taken as a getaway vehicle, only to be abandoned a few kilometres down the road.

Our Marxist-inspired intellectuals and ideologues are eager to help defend these offensive acts, often rationalising the chaos away with their usual outmoded Freudian frustration-aggression or deprivation theories. This is their version of ‘supporting the oppressed’. Strangely enough, many people still buy it. The more savagery the murderers cause, the more warranted their grievances are held to be, especially from people who have no knowledge or experience of these communities. Filling their knowledge gaps with presuppositions then becomes a reality.

Fortunately our understanding of human psychology could help us show the way. In many respects the Arendtian concept of the ‘banality of evil’ clears matters up a bit. The everyday nature of these acts of cruelty makes them appear normal. Hannah Arendt however faltered in believing that people were entirely nonchalant when it comes to the killing of others. Research has shown that there is always an element of ideology present in these levels of appalling behaviour. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo demonstrated this in his Stanford Prison Experiment, which was later to be elevated to the ranks of classic psychology experiments. In this experiment a makeshift prison was erected on the university premises and student participants were randomly assigned to the role of prisoner or warden. It was the intention to run this experiment for a fortnight, but after six days the severe levels of abuse from the warden participants on the prisoner participants compelled Zimbardo to pull the plug prematurely. In fact, Zimbardo himself was moderately blinded by this experiment, and only started seeing the trees from the forest when a new participant entered the experiment and pointed out how badly abusive the wardens had become.

This convinced Zimbardo how easily a fabricated reality could alter the perception and behaviour of people, regardless of their deeper understanding that this ‘reality’ is only play-acting and not for real. What was more astonishing was the level of docility of the prisoner participants. Having to go to the bathroom with a bag over their heads and their ankles in chains; or having to do push-ups with one hand behind their backs were humiliations they fairly readily accepted.

In this sense, South Africa – like many communist-run countries – is a collection of all the evil psychology experiments raked together from times past. Farmers and other whites are considered to be fundamentally to blame for all social ills that have visited South Africa. The stoic acceptance of the fate of whites is further exacerbated by calls from intellectuals, with the likes of leftist author André P. Brink who mentioned that his people deserved to disappear. The reason why is not really important. The daily reality is clouded with the notion that they are unwanted to the extent of being outlaws. One doesn’t need to control human behaviour directly, as this would likely meet up with resistance. The better option would be to control the mental climate, ie. cast a stage where the actors are told to live this reality, and then slowly turn up the heat. By letting this severe debauchery creep in slowly has the additional benefit to cause confusion and paralyse the victim even more. Had the approximately 4 000 South African farmers lost their lives in, say a week or a month instead of twenty years, this would have been a sure-fire cause for war.

Unfortunately our powerful leaders, our presses and public intellectuals have the habit of denying certain aspects of daily life such as the abominable state of cruelty we have fallen into. Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker claims that we are living in a higher state of peace in the West than ever before. The impending genocide on white South Africans is primarily expounded by a small group of bloggers who are constantly facing a wall of denial or ridicule. Especially regarding South Africa, they are having a tough time in dealing with this frustrating Cassandra Complex.

As for communism, there were always the frontrunners who were obsessed with their brave new world ideology and who were capable of turning a blind eye to all the evils they personally witnessed. The Romanian communist leader Ana Pauker is a prime example, as she saw to the deportation of her own husband who later died in the gulags under Stalin’s orders, but did not shed a tear. Not to mention how cannibalism was justified and even rewarded with top jobs under chairman Mao’s command in certain Chinese provinces. Yet, all the while, the promised utopia did not materialise. The only real change that took place was to turn the situation awfully grim and harden people’s attitudes further, effectively closing themselves off from truly seeing each other.

If we want to understand this process in full, we would be misguided in believing that this sadism is due to some form of repression and is now undergoing a cathartic release. The reinforcement to do evil comes from outside and acts on the devil inside.

To return to the example of Capote: How many murderers in South Africa and elsewhere feel a sense of shame for their barbaric deeds? Probably not many, especially within the climate dictated by the media that such murders are not crimes but belated reactions to “suffering” from decades ago.

If Capote been alive and in South Africa, I’m sure he would have quoted instead: ”Of what were they frightened? It will happen again”.

Joseph Secrève was born in South Africa but lives in the Netherlands. He is a psychologist by training.

We need a new story

Every culture has a Story of the People to give meaning to the world. Part conscious and part unconscious, it consists of a matrix of agreements, narratives, and symbols that tell us why we are here, where we are headed, what is important, and even what is real. I think we are entering a new phase in the dissolution of our Story of the People, and therefore, with some lag time, of the edifice of civilization built on top of it.

Sometimes I feel intense nostalgia for the cultural mythology of my youth, a world in which there was nothing wrong with soda pop, in which the Superbowl was important, in which the world’s greatest democracy was bringing democracy to the world, in which science was going to make life better and better. Life made sense. If you worked hard you could get good grades, get into a good college, go to grad school or follow some other professional path, and you would be happy. With a few unfortunate exceptions, you would be successful if you obeyed the rules of our society: if you followed the latest medical advice, kept informed by reading the New York Times, and stayed away from Bad Things like drugs. Sure there were problems, but the scientists and experts were working hard to fix them. Soon a new medical advance, a new law, a new educational technique, would propel the onward improvement of life. My childhood perceptions were part of this Story of the People, in which humanity was destined to create a perfect world through science, reason, and technology, to conquer nature, transcend our animal origins, and engineer a rational society.

From my vantage point, the basic premises of this story seemed unquestionable. After all, it seemed to be working in my world. Looking back, I realize that this was a bubble world built atop massive human suffering and environmental degradation, but at the time one could live within that bubble without need of much self-deception. The story that surrounded us was robust. It easily kept anomalous data points on the margins.

Since my childhood in the 1970s, that story has eroded at an accelerating rate. More and more people in the West no longer believe that civilization is fundamentally on the right track. Even those who don’t yet question its basic premises in any explicit way seem to have grown weary of it. A layer of cynicism, a hipster self-awareness has muted our earnestness. What was once so real, say a plank in a party platform, today is seen through several levels of “meta” filters to parse it in terms of image and message. We are like children who have grown out of a story that once enthralled us, aware now that it is only a story.

At the same time, a series of new data points has disrupted the story from the outside. The harnessing of fossil fuels, the miracle of chemicals to transform agriculture, the methods of social engineering and political science to create a more rational and just society – each has fallen far short of its promise, and brought unanticipated consequences that threaten civilization. We just cannot believe anymore that the scientists have everything well in hand. Nor can we believe that the onward march of reason will bring on social utopia.

Today we cannot ignore the intensifying degradation of the biosphere, the malaise of the economic system, the decline in health, or the persistence and indeed growth of global poverty and inequality. We once thought economists would fix poverty, political scientists would fix social injustice, chemists and biologists would fix environmental problems, the power of reason would prevail and we would adopt sane policies. I remember looking at maps of rain forest decline in National Geographic in the early 1980s and feeling both alarm and relief – relief because at least the scientists and everyone who reads National Geographic is aware of the problem now, so something surely will be done.

Nothing was done. Rainforest decline accelerated, along with nearly every other environmental threat that we knew about in 1980. Our Story of the People trundled forward under the momentum of centuries, but with each passing decade the hollowing-out of its core, that started perhaps with the industrial-scale slaughter of World War One, extended further. When I was a child, our system of ideology and mass media still protected that story, but in the last thirty years the incursions of reality have punctured its protective shell and have ruptured its essential infrastructure. We no longer believe our storytellers, our elites. We don’t believe the politicians, we don’t believe the doctors, we don’t believe the professors, we don’t believe the bankers, we don’t believe the technologists. All of them imply that everything is under control, and we know that it is not. We have lost the vision of the future we once had; most people have no vision of the future at all. This is new for our society. Fifty or a hundred years ago, most people agreed on the general outlines of the future. We thought we knew where society was going. Even the Marxists and the capitalists agreed on its basic outlines: a paradise of mechanized leisure and scientifically engineered social harmony, with spirituality either abolished entirely or relegated to a materially inconsequential corner of life that happened mostly on Sundays. Of course there were dissenters from this vision, but this was the general consensus.

When a story nears its end it goes through death throes, an exaggerated semblance of life. So today we see domination, conquest, violence, and separation take on absurd extremes that hold a mirror up to what was once hidden and diffuse. The year 2012 ended with just such a potent story-disrupting event: the Sandy Hook massacre. Even realizing that far more, equally innocent, children have been killed in the last few years by, say, U.S. drone strikes, it really got under my skin. No one was immune. I think that is because its utter senselessness penetrated every defense mechanism we have to maintain the fiction that the world is basically OK. Unlike 9/11 or Oklahoma City, and certainly unlike the horrors that go on around the world, there was no convenient narrative to divert the raw pain of what happened. We cannot help but map those murdered innocents onto the young faces we know, and the anguish of their parents onto ourselves. At the base of our Story of the People is separation, of humanity from nature, of me from you, of each from all, and this event united everyone, of whatever culture, nationality, or political persuasion. For a moment, we all felt the exact same thing. For at least a moment, I am sure, most people were in touch with the simplicity of what is important; I am sure many people had that fleeting feeling, “It doesn’t have to be that difficult, if only we could remember what is so obvious now, that love is all there is.” We humans have made such a mess of things, forgetting love. It is the same realization we have when a loved one is going through the dying process, and we think, “Ah, how precious this person is – why couldn’t I see that? Why couldn’t I appreciate all those moments we had together? All the arguments and grudges seem so tiny now.”

Following that moment, of course, people hurried to make sense of the event, subsuming it within a narrative about gun control, mental health, or the security of school buildings. Maybe I am imagining things, but I don’t think anyone really believes deep down that these responses touch the heart of the matter. Gun culture, we know, is a symptom of something deeper, and the violence that finds expression through guns would, even in their absence, come out in some other way. Mental illness too is a problem so vast that it is essentially unsolvable in our current system; it too comes from a deeper source. As for school security, a Chinese saying describes all the measures proposed: they stop the gentleman but not the villain.

No one would say that Sandy Hook was more horrible than the Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, or the imperialistic wars of the 20th century and 21st, but it was less comprehensible. Try as we might, we cannot fit it into our Story of the World. It is the anomalous data point that unravels the entire narrative – the world no longer makes sense. We struggle to explain what it means, but no explanation suffices. We may go on pretending that normal is still normal, but this is one of a series of “end time” events that is dismantling our culture’s mythology.

The evident futility of the responses that we are capable of imagining also points to this deep ideological breakdown. The responses are all about more control. Yet control, as we may or may not realize, is a key thread of the old story of humanity rising above nature, imposing technology and reason on the wild world and the uncivilized human. All around us, we see our efforts at control backfiring: wars to fight terrorism breed terrorism, herbicides breed superweeds, antibiotics breed superbugs, psychiatric medications lead to explosive outbursts of violence.

Looking back on the community schools a couple generations past, where children and parents could walk in and out of any door, can we say that the inexorable trend toward fortress schools in a fortress state is something anyone would have chosen? The world was supposed to be getting better. We were supposed to be becoming wealthier, more enlightened. Society was supposed to be advancing. Here I am in America, the most “advanced” nation on Earth, yet even as our financial wealth has doubled and doubled again in fifty years, we have lost wealth of a more basic form; for example, the social capital of feeling safe, feeling at home where we live. Is more security the best we can aspire to? What about a society where safety does not equal security? What about a world where no human being wields an assault rifle? What about a world where we mostly know the faces and stories of the people around us? What about a world where we know that our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people? We need a Story of the People that includes all of those things – and that doesn’t feel like a fantasy.

Various visionary thinkers have offered versions of such a story, but none of them has yet become a true Story of the People, a widely accepted set of agreements and narratives that gives meaning to the world and coordinates human activity towards its fulfillment. We are not quite ready for such a story yet, because the old one, though in tatters, still has large swaths of its fabric intact. And even when these unravel, we still must traverse the space between stories, a kind of nakedness. In the turbulent times ahead our familiar ways of acting, thinking, and being will no longer make sense. We won’t know what is happening, what it all means, and, sometimes, even what is real. Some people have entered that time already.

I wish I could tell you that I am ready for a new Story of the People, but even though I am among its many weavers, I cannot yet fully inhabit the new vestments. In other words, describing the world that could be, something inside me doubts, rejects, and underneath the doubt is a hurting thing. The breakdown of the old story is kind of a healing process, that uncovers the old wounds hidden under its fabric and exposes them to the healing light of awareness. I am sure many people reading this have gone through such a time, when the cloaking illusions fell away: all the old justifications, rationalizations, all the old stories. Events like Sandy Hook help to initiate the very same process on a collective level. So also the superstorms, the economic crisis, political meltdowns… in one way or another, the obsolescence of our old mythos is laid bare.

We do not have a new story yet. Each of us is aware of some of its threads, for example in most of the things we call alternative, holistic, or ecological today. Here and there we see patterns, designs, emerging parts of the fabric. But the new mythos has not yet emerged. We will abide for a time in the space between stories. Those of you who have been through it on a personal level know that it is a very precious – some might say sacred – time. Then we are in touch with the real. Each disaster lays bare the real underneath our stories. The terror of a child, the grief of a mother, the honesty of not knowing why. In such moments we discover our humanity. We come to each other’s aid, human to human. We take care of each other. That’s what keeps happening every time there is a calamity, before the beliefs, the ideologies, the politics take over again. Events like Sandy Hook, for at least a moment, cut through all that down to the basic human being. In such times, we learn who we really are.

How can we prepare? We cannot prepare. But we are being prepared.

Charles Eisenstein is an essayist and author of the books Sacred Economics and The Ascent of Humanity. He is a contributor to Shareable, where this article first appeared.