I shudder a bit at the results of the study discussed in Breaking Rules Makes You Seem Powerful. We learn:
What happens when people interact with a rule breaker? Van Kleef and colleagues had people come to the lab, and interact with a rule follower and a rule breaker. The rule follower was polite and acted normally, while the rule breaker arrived late, threw down his bag on a table and put up his feet. After the interaction, people thought the rule breaker had more power and was more likely to “get others to do what he wants.”
“Norm violators are perceived as having the capacity to act as they please” write the researchers. Power may be corrupting, but showing the outward signs of corruption makes people think you’re powerful.
The ever insightful Tocqueville was shocked when he came to the United States in 1830 or so. Having heard stories from his father’s good friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, about the high caliber of American leaders, he found the Americans holding leadership positions in 1830 were no better than self-serving scoundrels. Why do we prefer self-serving scoundrels and “norm violators”? Why do we think sociopaths make good leaders? Is it a simple matter of thinking bad behavior to be a sign that a man or woman already has power? If that were true shouldn’t morally responsible human beings refuse to submit to that sort of power? Don’t we have the moral responsibility to recognize our tendency to follow sociopaths and to do something about it? If we can’t recognize such morally disabling conditions and do something about them, we can’t be morally responsible voters, we can’t be self-governing in a morally allowable manner.
In any case, we are particular sorts of physical animals. We become true persons, human persons of higher moral standards, by shaping ourselves to be such, by proper responses to our own given natures and to what lies outside of us. This requires some effort. In slacking off, heading for the television rather than — for example — reading Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence or similar sorts of intelligent narrative histories, we’ve chosen to be self-governing creatures of a willfully ignorant sort. We certainly aren’t taking on the roles of morally responsible human persons. At the risk of seeming an elitist, I’ll state without qualification that anyone who can’t intelligently and critically read historical narratives or biographies (of Abigail Adams and not some movie star) shouldn’t be voting in this complex world. Anyone who knows we’re waging a variety of wars, large and small, in Asia and North Africa, and threatening more wars in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, and doesn’t even take the time to browse some geographical works at their local library or to browse various Internet sites (such as that of National Geographic), shouldn’t be voting and shouldn’t be opening their mouths in support of the rule-breakers in Washington or London or Paris.
If such efforts are beyond the capabilities or time-constraints of most American citizens, we should consider whether we, as a nation or nation-state, have any business interacting with, let alone devastating regions of the world when we haven’t a clue where Iraq or Afghanistan are, what ethnic groups inhabit those countries, what the histories of those countries are, or how they make their livings. We, the American citizenry, are generally incapable of stating even the simplest of coherent understandings of what Clinton or Gore or Bush or Cheney or Obama or Biden were trying to accomplish by killing so many innocent human beings in other countries. But, so far as I can tell, these leaders also have not a clue what’s really going on in those foreign lands and they fight those wars partly to provide jobs in the war-industry and partly as a result of Washington politics. Many Vietnamese children were maimed or killed so LBJ could show he was tough enough to be a manly President and, apparently. many were maimed or killed in Iraq so George W. Bush could push his legislation through Congress. Rather expensive political games from the viewpoints of those on the ground.
Even the low American government estimates of “collateral damage” in Iraq and Afghanistan indicate we’ve now killed more than 100 innocent human beings for every innocent human being who died on 9/11, a rather horrible and damning — literally damning — situation for American Christians who line up behind Pilate and Caesar as they try to make peace by creating deserts about the world. It’s not just the proportion of 100 to 1, but the very fact that we Americans were willing to unleash murderous firepower upon innocent men, women, and children because of crimes committed by Saddam Hussein even if we should have known those crimes existed only in the lying imaginations of Bush and Cheney.
We kill a lot of innocent human beings and destroy a lot of infrastructure when we invade and occupy. We leave behind poisoned ground and very high birth-defect rates when we depart. Robert McNamara has confessed we were systematically killing or seriously injuring thousands of Vietnamese civilians a month — each month we created a 9/11 pile of civilian casualties. Vietnam and some regions of Iraq, such as Fallujah, have extremely high rates of birth defects because of the poisons we shot into their land. And how big a cost have American soldiers paid in the power-games played, from comfie Washington offices, by these thugs and mass-murderers we elect to the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives? Rather than terms like “rule-breakers” and “norm-violators,” we should just go right to “war-criminals” and “mass-murderers.”
We certainly prefer “rule-breakers.” Heck, we even seem to adore a serious amount of ignorance and stupidity and incompetence on the part of these gangsters and mass-murderers who are threatening the health and even the very existence of Western Civilization.
But who put those rule-breakers into power? The American voters. Are there some who bear a greater share of responsibility? Paraphrasing St. John Chrysostom, the road to Hell is lined with the skulls of those priests and minsters and rabbis and teachers and scholars and publishers and others who had the responsibility of applying serious moral critiques to society and government and the responsibility of guiding the development and education of the mass of citizens of the West. Those non-political leaders bear a great share of the guilt if not quite so great a share as the political leaders, but there’s enough damnation to go around and a goodly amount remains with the willfully ignorant creatures who proudly vote for their favorite well-groomed thug after spending months watching the occasional debate with no content and not even coherently expressed sentiments, but mostly those proud voters are busy channel-surfing that they might catch some good rock-and-roll videos and exciting parts of that show about efforts to survive on an exotic island at the expense of other human beings.
Maybe we American adults think the disordered children of Lord of the Flies are to be admired and emulated rather than to be feared and to be steered onto better paths?