5. Why is psychological torture perceived by Americans to be more socially and legally acceptable than physical forms of torture?
It appears that the American public grossly underestimates the harm associated with psychological forms of torture compared to physical forms. Many are were convinced that techniques like sensory deprivation are more innocuous than physical techniques, whereas released detainees consistently say the opposite is true, that the psychological abuse is the most unbearable. Although ethical constraints prevent us from tackling this question directly, social psychologists may be able to devise stimulus materials and experimental designs to better understand these perceptions. Such studies could begin to understand more about our beliefs and attitudes around psychological versus physical harm. For example, is psychological harm perceived as less harmful because it’s invisible, thereby reducing natural human tendencies toward empathy?
Elena:
Psychological torture is perceived by Americans to be more socially and legally acceptable than physical forms of torture because when we come to understand the mechanisms that make psychological torture effective we’ll realize that we’ve been psychologically submitting each other to different forms and levels of psychological torture for decades in our regular societies and that the mechanisms of those forms of social torture are at the peak of confronting the semi-democracy with the option of fascism.
Isolation is psychological torture and it is the first ingredient in a process of brainwashing and vulnerability of the individual so that he cooperates with the guards and power behind them. There are various ingredients to isolation worth looking into. The “personality” of individuals is made up by the reflections on it from the people around them. Those that they love and don’t love are equally necessary in its makeup. The ideals, the illusions and the overall make up of personality depend on the multiple references. When an individual is imprisoned and isolated his personality is gradually “deconstructed” and it is reconstructed and brainwashed into “doing” what the authorities want him to do through conditioning his need for human contact and allowing for it as long as he or she cooperates. The Stocholm syndrome well explains the process. The individual becomes emotionally connected to those torturing him because THAT IS THE HUMAN CONDITION: TO BE HUMANLY CONNECTED! The need for that contact is so strong that most individuals give in to the torture and end up cooperating with the torturers. This process can also be clearly studied in cults. The “torture” process in cults is not physical, the isolation happens through psychological separation from the rest of humanity who are “sleep”, families and society making the adept totally dependent on the guru and the cult.
Isolation as torture proves how humans are dependent on other humans not just physically but psychologically. That connectedness that is widely taken for granted is nevertheless what the best expressions of capitalism as much as communism, have run over. Individuals are not physically but psychologically isolated because neither system can protect the individual, both run the individual over for the system to stand. The individual is not protected no matter how many individuals “make it”. What they “make” is the maintenance of the status quo. Neither system can work at the cost of the individual, no matter how much individualism succeeds. Do “civil rights” have any actual power in America today? They’ve never had any power in many third world countries but do they still have any in the developed nations?
Are workers any less captivated by the status quo than people in prison? Can people survive without the job? Don’t they submit physically and psychologically, program themselves to accept every code of behavior so that they are not sacked? People in general have already accepted the status quo, are conditioned by it and are willing to play by its rules because the possibility of perceiving another form of social development is alien to them. Individualism cannot understand the process of “sharing”. To be “civilized” not only with those of one’s clan means to be human and we are still far from living up to our selves.
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