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Both of you have fixated on delivering Alice Miller to me. Fine. She's a great child psychologist who delves deeply into causes of behavior, if they happen to be causes that occur in childhood experience. She and Darius Rejali differ quite strongly on root causes for torture. Of the two, I prefer to listen to Rejali, he has studied torture. When I wish to study child psychology, then maybe it's Miller.
I'm not understanding what is so hard to comprehend in my arguments except that you need to have her be right, to be quite honest. And your arguments that people are more affected by their childhoods than they seem (AKA Smith), or that all levels of the food chain in systematic torture must be equally twisted initially (AI) aren't effective because they don't seem to fit the facts. Instead of picking apart my arguments word by word looking for the place where you can convince me that Alice Miller knows more than all the others about torture, why not try to understand that maybe she doesn't understand torture, because she is enlarging her own expertise to encompass it without really studying it?
She doesn't seem to understand adult influences on life, nor does she really appreciate, in the writings Associative Individualist keeps quoting over and over, the social forces involved in the prison in which the torture occurs.
The reasons I am separating the people at the top of the food chain from those beneath should not be so obscure that you cannot see them, unless you are determined to make everyone who inhabits that chain fundamentally different than yourself, which they are not. They are not all sworn soldiers in the authoritarian brigade, determined to implement a regime of suffering and control mankind. Besides, one should always separate the decision makers from the workers, the former are accountable for what happens, the latter only responsible for what they have done. That's basic organizational understanding.
Rejali spends more than a page or two on the Japanese police. Is Japan an example that Alice Miller accomplishes well? Does she have case data from the Japanese male lower middle class? Are you going to now extend that all Japanese policemen from the 1990s had childhood trauma that made them behave in ways different from the general Japanese society?
Besides, just look at where that logic would take you: Is the mental state of the victim of psychological deprivation tortures a result of childhood trauma? You can argue that, but the Istanbul Protocol people would not agree.
If you want to find ogres in torture chambers, look at the people who have been there a while. You're barking up trees if you think everyone was like that from childhood. And how about the most insidious (for American history anyway) of quiet, clean tortures, prolonged strict solitary confinement? Childhood trauma among the inventors and jailers? Who knew the Quakers were such monsters!
AKA Smith, your pagination is not the same as mine if that's what your book says. Please re-read the chapter. Look carefully at his "Ten Step Program" (p.451ff), the charts beginning p. 468, etc.
What I'm seeing is a mix of things: a desire to differentiate yourselves fundamentally from those who end up being jailers at places like Bagram, a desire to promote arguments that make you eligible to make choices for other adults, a desire to link torture to authoritarianism, and a desire to understand torture in terms of other forms of abuse.
The reality for torture isn't quite like that. It does follow Zimbardo's three way distinction of the types of evil, but doesn't quite fit as a simple extension of his Stanford experiment. It has some players who may be influenced by childhood trauma or authoritarianism, but it occurs quite easily in free societies (the penitentiary system from the 1820s) or as a frustration solution of a group of well adjusted adults.
My own assessment of bringing children up properly to create a society with no torture? Teach them that it is wrong. Teach them that it is their civic duty to demand an end to it whenever it happens. Teach them that if social factors create torture, those social factors must be changed for the good of the society. And most especially, as adults they should follow the ideas put up by Barbara Olshansky: Question your civic leaders before they become too big to be distant. Ask the people running for PTA what they believe about torture and the rule of law. If ten years from now they're running for president and nobody's asked them yet, the result is your own fault.
But don't bother trying to mold them into individuals that would resist the order to torture. It will work as well as SERE worked to mold individuals that could resist the torture itself. Torture stops when the society decides it will not do torture, and that it will change or dismantle all institutions that cause it to happen. That always starts with prosecuting the torturers, but believing they are fundamentally different from the rest of us is like believing the enemy isn't human.
