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Saturday posts:
3. Milgram & Dr. Levin post-script, @c2w? more or less...(I wrote this like two days ago but never posted it...)
compared2what? wrote:I'm just not feeling the Milgram stuff, sorry. To me, an understanding of those experiments is something that just has too much integrity on its own for tossing it around like a rhetorical football to be altogether seemly.
I dispute this is what I'm doing. An understanding of those experiments begins with the reality that the subjects were a random sample of employed white male residents of Connecticut and that it took only a minimal presentation of authority to get 62 percent of them to push the buttons up to the full final shock despite the objections, screams and simulated death of Milgram's confederate "behind the wall." A mean joke by Milgram, to be sure. If I remember, the subjects were told that their participation was, of course, voluntary. Some of the shock-button-pushers were nervous, unhappy, unwilling and even showed signs of hysteria, but they followed the orders. Others seem to have taken it with more aplomb, or equanimity. That's the reality of obedience training in the majority of people, and perhaps also shows a more sinister drive at work in some of the subjects. That's no rhetoric. (Granted, all were taken by surprise and not given hours and days to reflect, or put through the corporate ethics training we have today that solves all inclination to follow orders blindly.)
The key question for our purposes is whether you think it's rhetoric that many of the reigning institutions of this society are dedicated to insane and/or destructive aims, and therefore require and rely on obedience of the kind seen in the Milgram experiment. Also, whether you agree that the 62 percent in Milgram's fake lab is also a “62 percent” in the world outside, at least (for a start) among the employed white male residents of a not-unusual place, like Connecticut.
Okay. Yes, I agree. And I certainly wouldn't maintain that Dr. Levin is, without qualification, powerless. Because that would be totally absurd.
However, I would (and, I had thought, did) maintain that there's nothing in the article (as well as nothing not in the article, afaik) that suggests that he's the power responsible for the sorry state of affairs depicted in the OP.
Nor did I remotely suggest that. Powerful corporations acting within a system that heeds the profit imperative above all human interests created the state of affairs. He's an autonomous, relatively empowered individual, one of thousands, who obediently conforms to the sorry state of affairs depicted in the OP by engaging in practices he acknowledges to be a disservice to his patients, finding rationalizations in the ostensible normality or inevitability of the sorry state of affairs (a form of authority) and his own self-interest (presented in the article as a form of economic compulsion).
Let's not call it despicable, that's a moral judgement. Let's call it the American normal. I’m saying Levin is a 62 percenter. (Of course allowing for variations by place and group and time in that total, and acknowledging that the real total is unknowable.)
compared2what? wrote:If the citizenry of a country is simply going to permit its government to institute illegal and atrocious policies that include torture, indefinite detention without charges or recourse to law, and unprovoked acts of military aggression that result in near-genocidal numbers of civilian casualties, then why bother with democracy at all? Isn't that in fact what is threatened by acquiescence like [YOUR NAME OR MY NAME]'s on a large scale?
IOW, have a heart, ffs. No one person can really be condemned for his or her failure to act as part of an organized, unified resistance that nobody knew how to organize and unite successfully.
Nor can anyone be condemned for choosing a public self-immolation as a message to the world, following the commission against them of the kind of injustice routinely aimed at members of their class.
And of course, no one should at all be condemned for not choosing such an extreme. An organized, unified resistance begins to come about when someone is willing to take actions that are lot less dire but indeed, possibly expose and even sacrifice themselves in the often useless-seeming first steps of resistance.
All doctors together are a very small, weak and poorly organized force
They have professional associations with a voice. Where did they go wrong, that they cannot express power on their own behalf but the trade unions of teachers can? I’m saying they did go wrong, because they should be able to express more power than they do. From appearances I suspect that they went wrong through general complacency; a preference not to question things let alone rock the corporatist boat that seems to be feeding them well too; satisfaction with themselves as persons of high status and respect; the competition amongst each other taking priority over other values; and satisfaction with their chosen self-interest of making good money in a society that, after all, is all about that.
I understand that's not a perfect analogy. But I'm willing to stand by it. I mean, personally, and speaking only for myself, I definitely do feel (and have always felt) strongly confident that I would never, ever compromise my values to the point of actively participating in something I knew to be ultimately corrupt and destructive. Despite which, I'd just be fucking lying to myself if I didn't admit that there have been times in the past when my strong confidence in my own ability both to recognize that I was approaching that point and to steer clear of it has been totally and wildly unjustified.
SNIP
...So I judge him somewhat, with compassion.
Does anyone have a problem with that?
It's all right. We've all been there. This is not about condemning. However, and this is important: it's also not about making excuses for ourselves when we know we are doing the wrong thing. It's about taking steps toward acknowledging that we have a “62 percent” problem, in a society dedicated to insane ends, ultimately to the destruction of most of the 62 percenters along with the rest.
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I'll tell ya what, I'm damn tempted to delete the thread and claim it was lost in an sql crash. 
People here have intense spats. Breath. Let it go. In a few weeks, you might find that you and c2w are actually having a laugh and if I said "Remember the psych thread" you might go "What psych thread?" Gnome sane? I used to have ding-dongs with Alice, but I tell ya, when the Egypt thing kicked off, the human side did too - and the thought of anything happening her and her family made me feel quite ill. I not even sure why Im writing this... it's kinda like seeing a fight in a bar and one person storms out. Im practicing my inner Guinan... Most of us I'm sure have acted in ways that later we might feel otherwise. 
