The 3,000 Mile Wide Bubble

¡Hola! Everybody…
Today… we take a glimpse behind the veil. Just a little.

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-=[ Orphans of the Bubble ]=-

Once as a child my class was taken on a school trip. One morning, we all boarded the yellow school bus and headed to the Aquarium. I was fascinated by the menacing shark with the predatory smile. But even as a child, I understood that the shark lived in a world of its own, with its own reality.

Americans are a lot like that old shark -- they don’t see the people outside the glass. It’s as if America is a gigantic terrarium, and immense biosphere or bubble which has cut it off from the rest of the world. How else can we explain the characterization of a center-right, pro-corporate, pro-war president as a “socialist” a “communist” and a bone-the-nose bootleg video-selling Nigerian fascist? Only in the insular bubble of contemporary America could such a conservative president be deemed “radical” in any sense of the word. And I won’t even get into the whole “Iraq as menace” meme, which everyone else dismissed, but which we swallowed whole.

It seems to me that the only explanation for gap between reality and America’s perception of it comes from the film, The Truman Show. The plot of the movie revolves around the affable but naïve protagonist who goes about his daily activities without being aware that he is, in fact, in a gigantic soap opera. His hometown is actually a set for a TV show and from birth, he has been manipulated and controlled by the producer and the director. The gullibility of the American public would be better understood if we were all living on a stage set in a town called Freedom Fries and threatened by a roving hoard called Evil Brown People.

Not too long ago, it was the “Axis of Evil.” Americans believed, as they often do when instructed by their elected leaders the Television Machine, almost every scary reason cooked up by the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell. The rest of the world laughed. Their amateurish attempts at mass deception contained awkward truths that were surprisingly childish for a group that had access to the most massive propaganda machine the world has ever known. But they only had to utter their latest lie to be cheered by their subjects and disbelieved by non-Americans everywhere.

As a former con man, I can appreciate a good scam. I know how hard it is to pull off the Big Con. Rationalizing a war can’t be easy and takes a lot of skillful finessing and this one was complicated. There was the bait (“terrist”), then the switch (weapons of mass destruction), then another switch (kill the despot, make the world safer), and yet another (regime change).

Whew! That’s a whole stack of lying right there!

But these amateurs failed and they failed miserably. If you going to pull off the Big Con, the lie must be simple and it must repeated -- often. These neocons, already having proven their incompetence in matters economic (and almost everything else), fumbled, and their build up to the Iraqi invasion broke every rule in the con man’s game. Bush and his handlers fell into the trap of elaborating, backtracking, and adding on. Instead of the Big Con, simple and effective, their lies grew more and more elaborate and complicated. The result being that instead of one good reason to go to war, piles of bad reasons were offered, which gave the skeptics in other countries the opportunity to unmask the fables.

The other option for a good con is to refuse to offer evidence (where there is no evidence, there can be no refutation). Bush offered shit piles of it. He asserted that he had proof of warehouses full of evidence. Of course this evidence consisted of tons of soiled toilet paper and used Kleenex. Once exposed, the smoking gun was really a dribbling water gun. Most embarrassingly, there was the spectacle of Colin Powell, who a year earlier had said that Saddam was not a threat and “has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction,” explain to the security council that a photograph of what looked like a trailer park trailers were actually mobile war germ factories. These trailers he told the world (most of whom were probably pissing in their pants from laughter) were making biological weapons of mass destruction.

Adding insult to injury, he pulled out another photograph of what he said was an Iraqi airplane bearing Saddam’s deadly germs and lethal chemicals. To every non-American in his audience the object looked like the balsa wood model airplane boys glue together and fly in the park. After that came the aluminum tubes for non-existent nuclear factories, forged documents out of Africa, and fables of spies meeting in Viennese cafes. The more Bush and his handlers piled it on, the less the world believed them.

Americans, however, deep-throated the whole smear…

You might say this is old news and in our attention-span-challenged society, you are probably correct. But I mention all this because, like bad porn, the construction of American social policy is predictable. Last summer it was that Obama was going to kill granny, and “drill, baby, drill.” This summer Mexican immigrants are the new “terrists.” The weapons of mass destruction this year are brown people who come here to spread their infections and “drop” litters of future cop-killing, sex-crazed, drug-addicted sociopaths. But if one looks past the bubble even a little, you become aware that the hype about immigration is really today’s version of the Iraqi invasion, which, by the way, we’re still borrowing from the Chinese in order to fund it.

Americans can’t see past the bubble and it will be our undoing.

-- Eddie

Obedience to Authority

¡Hola! Everybody…
I’m running late. As usual, I’ll be in prison selling liberation for most of the day.

With the passage of the racist Arizona immigration law aka as SB 1070, I thought the following post on obedience studies was relevant. I realize that comparisons to Nazi Germany often kills an argument -- everybody does it. However, there are instances where the comparisons are not only well-deserved, but especially relevant. As I highlighted recently (click here), Arizona is now suffering the consequences of some of the most pathetic, ill-advised economic measures in recent memory. Today, the state of Arizona has codified the scapegoating of Latino/as, regardless of legal status, for those mistakes. That's how it starts...

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-=[ Obedience ]=-

Power abdicates only under the stress of counter-power.

-- Martin Buber (1878–1965)

I sometimes work as a motivational speaker. Most of this work involves other professionals, but oftentimes, I’m asked to address young people. A colleague once asked me to substitute for her at an elementary school. The topic was substance abuse and she had a plan all worked out.

Of course, I discarded her curriculum and proceeded to wing it. LOL!

I’ve always been interested in group behavior and the following is how I “teach” about peer pressure.

Please do not try this at home, you’re not trained, and you can do more harm than good if you practice without a license.

Normally, I wait until students file into the class, and those that are “late” (as defined by me) are asked to wait right outside the door. Before all this, I have taken the liberty of drawing three lines on the blackboard. One line is obviously shorter than the rest. It’s not blatantly shorter, but short enough to notice upon inspection.

Before I allow the “late” students in, I address the class and tell them that they will be my co-conspirators in an experiment on social behavior. I point to the lines and ask, “Which of these lines is the shortest?” Of course, a few students raise their hands and correctly identify the shorter line. Once a consensus has been reached, I tell the students that I am now going to allow the “late” students in and ask them the same question. However, I instruct the class to agree that the shortest line is not the shortest line, that it is, in fact, the same size as the other lines.

At this point, I allow the “late” students in and proceed to ask them the same question. Again, the late students are all in agreement as to which is the shortest line. Then I ask my co-conspirators and one by one, they all say that none of the lines is shortest, that they all are, in fact, the same size.

I ask the late students once again, “Are you sure this line is the shortest?” What often happens is that one by one, the late students experience pressure to fall in line with the consensus of the majority. Some will stick to their guns, but most will fall under the pressure of the power of the group. At this point, I disclose our little conspiracy and then turn to the class and say, “This is what peer pressure feels like.”

The rest of the workshop is dedicated to exploring those feelings, and how that pressure can be used as a way to do almost anything against our will -- drugs, sex, violence, voting for idiots, using immigrants or those we perceive as different as scapegoats, etc.

It’s a powerful way to illustrate the power of the group. If you ask, most people will tell you that they would never succumb to the group. However, studies show that the vast majority of you will obey authority. Even to the point of murder.

Obedience to Authority

I work with currently and formerly or currently incarcerated men and women. I came about this work more through flow than an actual conscious decision. In fact, I was initially reluctant to work with this population because 1) It’s an extremely challenging group to work with, and 2) even those motivated to change face huge systemic obstacles to successful social reintegration. Nowhere is this issue of obedience to authority more clearly illustrated than in prison settings. One experiment, The Stanford Prison Experiment (click here), led by social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, had to be abandoned within a couple of days because, normal college students role playing corrections officers were abusing the students role playing the inmates, and the students role-playing the inmates were plotting a prison breakout. It’s a totally engrossing study.

However, the study which I have found the most interesting is one you may have heard about. Anyone who has taken any psych 101 course will have heard of Stanley Milgram, who shocked the world in the early 1960s with his discoveries at Yale while conducting what became known as The Obedience Experiments (click here). In brief, he found that average, presumably normal, groups of residents of New Haven, Connecticut, would readily inflict very painful, and probably deadly, electric shocks on an innocent victim whose actions did not merit such harsh treatment.

The experiment, supposedly dealing with the effects of punishment on learning, required that the subjects shock a learner every time he made an error on a verbal learning task, and to increase the intensity of the shock in 15-volt steps, from 15 to 450 volts, on each subsequent error. The results: 65% of the subjects continued to obey the experimenter to the end, simply because they were commanded to.

Groundbreaking and controversial, these experiments have had enduring relevance, because they demonstrated with stunning clarity that ordinary individuals could be induced by an authority figure to act destructively, even in the absence of physical force, and that it didn’t take evil or aberrant individuals to carry out mass actions that were immoral and inhumane.

Milgram’s findings have had the effect of making us more aware of our vulnerability to manipulation in the face of social pressure, in the process making us reshape our individual morality. While I’m sure most of you reading this would like to think that when confronted with a moral dilemma we would act in line with our conscience, Milgram’s experiments taught us -- with shocking, irrefutable detail -- that, in a concrete situation containing powerful social pressures, our moral sense can get trampled underfoot.

And this is how evil happens; we allow it to happen through acquiescence, obedience, and not wanting to “rock the boat.” This how that Iraqi child today is killed through no fault of his own, it’s how some of us defend a law that targets people based on skin color; how the twin Black and Jewish holocausts come to be…

Love

Eddie