The Root of Exceptionalism
by Monolycus
(lifted from a comment)
Stanford University’s Philip Zimbardo makes the case that it wasn’t inherent rottenness, but the "Lucifer Effect" which turned all those good, honest, God-fearin’ US soldiers into sadistic, twisted tormentors at Abu Ghraib.
"The Devil made me do it." Yeah. In a Christian theocracy, that defense will, nauseatingly, go pretty far. At least it’s slightly less patently disgusting than "These were just frat pranks."
Why doesn’t anyone twig on to the obvious answer that the culture produces sick, twisted fucks? Oh, yeah… this is an election year and we don’t won’t want to actually tell anyone that their baby is ugly.
But the apologist Dr. Zimbardo comes tantalizingly close to making a very genuine observation while pussyfooting around with the trite rationalizations: "If you give people power without oversight it is a formula for abuse."
Now, where-oh-where can we look for people given "power without oversight"…? I’m sure the dank, dungeons of Iraq or some other third world hole will give us all manner of "powerful" and "unsupervised" folk.
No need to look for that in your own backyard. No need to apply that formula to the TASER-happy cops on every street corner of the USA or the bullying TSA agents waiting in every airport to flex their authoritive muscles. We should certainly not apply that maxim to a demonstrably corrupt executive, legislative and judicial branch of US government who only classify something as torture if it might be applied to them.
Let’s keep coming up with excuses about how what happened at Abu Ghraib is exceptional and does not represent who we are. And, you know, I’m aiming this scattershot at non-US citizens and governments as well.
Western culture produces sickness… maliciousness… inhumanity… exceptionalism… and all the rest. US citizens are not psychologically, genetically, culturally or in any quantifiable way special enough for this to only apply to them. Every new piece of data which points to the inescapable conclusion that humans are disgusting causes us to jump through new hoops to point to why it is "those guys" that are really the disgusting ones… or "that circumstance" that caused them to be that way.
The root of exceptionalism is that we don’t see any of this as applying to us.