Objectification -- It's Much More than a Women's Issue!

PSA from Laurie Anderson - Women and Money

I can recall noticing through most of my life that most men react to the women's movement by taking it as a personal attack on their manhood. I don't see it that way. I can guess at why I don't, but I can't say for certain how that's come about for me. If I tried I think the effort would get quite lengthy.

One of the ways I tend to look at this issue of objectification is as a long revolutionary struggle, the liberal revolution, that began several hundred years ago. Whether it's a return to a human potential that evolved in the species before we began developing the authoritarian meme in our cultures, which hypothetically is the result of the complexities that followed the onset of agriculture 10-12,000 years ago, or not, is maybe an interesting question, but not one that makes much difference about the importance of the liberal revolution for individual rights or not. That revolution continues to evolve and each of us who embrace it, can embrace it with the very instructions built into our DNA. Fantasizing about how our ancient relatives did it 40,000 years ago won't really make much difference.

One of the narratives I run through my mind is that the Founders of this political system were a group of men who were philosophically tantalized by the ideas about liberal thinking at the time -- each in their own way, and hypothetically to different degrees. I take note of the fact they were a group of elites, many both monied and propertied, they were mostly from the European cultural traditions that were emerging at that time from feudalism -- and that very fact had a lot to do with their thinking framework, the context of their thoughts. This nation was structured out of that context in a specific period in what I see as an extended revolution of liberation from tyrannical, authoritarian structures of thought.

A question might be asked, revolution for who? And I'd answer, for the individual. I'm an individual, for instance.

What was born here in the US was, then, potentially not the final fruits of that struggle because of the very nature of what it was born into. I can see that the framework everyone genuflects over is still imperfect, and out of that imperfection has emerged the continued struggle for rights of the individual, the inhibit-ation of which I believe we can see in the very nature of feudalism, which itself is an extension of other forms of individual repression going back into history. Some of the dogma of the rights of property from that feudalistic era over our individual rights have been put down on this very thread, as the rights of a "property owner" known as an employer, and stated as, "this is the way it is." These, to me are the feudal fragments the Founding Fathers couldn't leave behind and they got built into the system, and because of that even corporations became "persons" with individual rights, it appears. And as long as we believe that this is the way it is, just as, as long as we believe we operate as a society under the rule of law, then it's so. But sometimes it seems to me those "this is the way it is" concepts come into play in ways that are seemingly contradictory. And it's then that I feel we are challenged with the problems of this liberal revolution that still need to be solved. One of the aspects of the liberal revolution is to recognize that very unique feature of ourselves, and to get out from under the self imposed belief in an authority that dominates how we think.

I feel that the revolution for individual rights was limping along on a single, somewhat crippled leg until women started to wake up and express themselves as individuals. Oddly enough, there's a group feature to individual freedom, and it's hypothetically very contradictory in nature. I believe we cannot free ourselves of authoritarianism while practicing it on any part of our humanity. Objectification, by the way, is to me an ingredient of the authoritarian mind frame. I discovered the very structure of feudal objectification when I was in the military. I was too young to know it already existed in society, so I was completely shocked when I discovered it. That really set my mind off. I had questions going in my head like: how do you take away someone's freedom to act and decide for themselves in a so-called democracy in this way to fight that which I was being told was a totalitarian system that does just that to its population? That was really a huge existential question for an eighteen year old mind I recognize now. I nearly went insane. But in the process I set up some ingredients for possibly working things out for myself.

When I got back into the "real" society, where the US constitutional Bill of Rights were the rules, not the Uniform Code of Military Justice, I decided it was time to get an education. In college I met members of the women's movement, and many of them were just about as confused as I was about all of this. But I managed to sort out through many of our talks, some highly emotional, that we were struggling for some of the same things, and against some of the same abstract institutional structures. Many or those structures are simply "authoritarian" and not oriented to promoting individuality of any kind, but because of the nature of our enculturation, the institutions themselves get associated with men, and so men often feel they are being personally attacked.

So what's happened as women are waking up? Are we dealing with the imperfections of our system itself, those features that create the objectification process? Or are we just incorporating the rest of the individuals who got left out about 220 years ago into a latently feudal system that has never been fully structured to allow us all our individual freedom? I'm still asking that question after forty years.

One of the thoughts I have: we have somewhat successfully codified this system of rule by law, combined with an individual Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights concept is being extended to the world, the United Nations has a nicely described version that even includes children. But it's like hand building a high tech Ferrari in a garage in the jungle. You start up that fine engine, open the garage door and there's no where to go, because there are no roads to drive it on. Most people spend most of their days in institutions that only vaguely and in fragments offer them individual rights to practice their daily tasks and to think in their own, individualized way. Their lives at home are planned and arranged around how they must relate to these institutions. Their children are carefully prepared so that they can successfully engage in them. And so we remain in a jungle of authoritarian institutions, and that jungle forms the context out of which we make up our minds, and that context is what we see as "the world" as it "must be."

The women's movement, the civil rights movements, those are about getting our good solid legs under us so we can go out into that jungle and claim our individuality consciously, and support each other in that process, instead of fight each other. Men are not being attacked as individuals by these ideas, in which the nature of objectification itself, for instance, is being questioned and examined. The institutions that men associate themselves with are not the individual men. And it's difficult to get that out where it can really be looked at and understood.

Maybe it would be easier, if only I were an expert...

Institutionalization, objectification, authority and hegemony

Hegemony

I have never liked the easthetic feel I get when I think or say the word "hegemony." The accompanying sensation is one of breathing through a dank, brown sponge filled with spores of mildew. There's probably some psychological subtext in that for me. However, I find myself able to use it more after hearing this wonderful explanation in an audio of a talk Stan Goff gave at a University in Maine last year, titled Iraq and Exterminism. Here's what he said:

It’s much easier to exercise control over a population whenever they consent to their own domination. They sort of accept the official story, accept the official ideology and then we all just sort of go around and cooperate. That kind of control, where we internalize the control, is hegemony. Where when I come up and hold a gun on you and you do it out of naked fear, that’s coercion. And the idea is you’ve got sort of hegemony on one pole, exercising ruling class power and coercion on the other pole and as hegemony fails then coercion becomes the more prominent instrument.

As we look around the world right now, Latin America in particular, we are seeing a sort of continental drift with a definite shift to the left, and it’s created all sorts of political instability… The immiseration of the people on the periphery in the world system right now has doubled over the past thirty years. Globally hegemony is not working any more.

As hegemony breaks down as a method of control, which is an indication of a larger sort of crisis of the system itself, then coercion becomes more and more the instrument. What we are seeing is just an acceleration of that process where the neocons sort of jumped on this “surprise from the sky” on 911, the acceleration of an agenda that was already inevitable, hegemony was always going to give way to coercion at some point.

In my first post in this Blog I introduced the Zimbardo prison experiment and his book he's just released titled The Lucifer Effect. I have his website linked on the side bar.



What I'm seeing Dr. Zimbardo talking about is the problem of the hegemonic element of control, where the actor takes on the structure of the system and internalizes it. What was remarkable to him, and others now I suppose, was how quickly the people in the experiment took on their roles and acted them out. From a recent interview on Democracy Now!:

The experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks. By Day Two, the guards were going far beyond just keeping the prisoners behind bars. In scenes eerily similar to Abu Ghraib, prisoners were stripped naked, bags put on their heads and sexually humiliated. The two-week experiment had to be canceled after just six days. Zimbardo tells the full story of the landmark study in his new book,

I want to link this article: The Stanford Prison Experiment: Still powerful after all these years?

I'm interested in why authority works both in a prison setting and in society. So is Zimbardo, especially it seems after the way his experiment went. I don't see "society" and a prison as necessarily distinct or seperate issues once the notion of "institutionalization" is added to the mix. Zimbardo's experiment raised some serious questions about the institutionalization of power and inherent features built into institutional power that appear to effect behavior, potentially in all of us, in ways that are not necessarily obvious. It can raise some very serious questions about our own sense of autonomy, our range of self actuation, and perhaps our own self conceived heroic efforts to be good persons in the world.

From that article I linked above:

Zimbardo's primary reason for conducting the experiment was to focus on the power of roles, rules, symbols, group identity and situational validation of behavior that generally would repulse ordinary individuals. "I had been conducting research for some years on deindividuation, vandalism and dehumanization that illustrated the ease with which ordinary people could be led to engage in anti-social acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or they could perceive of others in ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects," Zimbardo told the Toronto symposium in the summer of 1996.

From the perspective of the researchers, the experiment became exciting on day two when the ["]prisoners["] staged a revolt. Once the ["]guards["] had crushed the rebellion, "they steadily increased their coercive aggression tactics, humiliation and dehumanization of the prisoners," Zimbardo recalls. "The staff had to frequently remind the guards to refrain from such tactics," he said, and the worst instances of abuse occurred in the middle of the night when the guards thought the staff was not watching. The guards' treatment of the prisoners ­ such things as forcing them to clean out toilet bowls with their bare hands and act out degrading scenarios, or urging them to become snitches ­ "resulted in extreme stress reactions that forced us to release five prisoners, one a day, prematurely."

The experiment was brought to a close after only six days, because Zimbardo more or less "woke up" to the realization it had gotten out of hand. Here's an explanation of the process that helped him to "come to his senses" and the role Christina Maslach played:

Later that evening, Maslach said, she suddenly got sick to her stomach while watching guards taking the prisoners with paper bags over their heads to the bathroom before their bedtime. Her fellow researchers teased her about it.

After leaving the prison with Zimbardo, she said, he asked her what she thought of it. "I think he expected some sort of great intellectual discussion about what was going on. Instead, I started to have this incredible emotional outburst. I started to scream, I started to yell, 'I think it is terrible what you are doing to those boys!' I cried. We had a fight you wouldn't believe, and I was beginning to think, wait a minute, I don't know this guy. I really don't, and I'm getting involved with him?"

Zimbardo was shocked by her reaction and upset, she said, but eventually that night, "he acknowledged what I was saying and realized what had happened to him and to other people in the study. At that point he decided to call the experiment to a halt."

Says Zimbardo: "She challenged us to examine the madness she observed, that we had created and had to take responsibility for."

Some people think she's a hero, she doesn't. Interesting. I think she's a hero. I think her reaction and wilingness to express them is heroic in light of the dark implications of the situation with her own peers standing by, even imposing pressure by teasing her.

For me, reading about it brought back my first memories of going into boot camp. Very powerful, very surreal sensations that I've never forgotten. Strong feelings of not wanting to be there, not wanting to follow the orders I was being given, yet the knowledge at the same time of all that was known as that very young person, socially provided choices from my eighteen formative years, from the (minimal) level of sophistication of my parents and what they could share from that level about how to behave in such a situation for me, all of which seemed to leave me with no good choices I could imagine, and it felt like something I really had to do. I guess that's best described as something within the realms of conformity, because I remember looking at the high fence with the barbed wire on top and imagining how I would get over it and where I would go. And conformity is one of the issues being explored in this dark experiment for me.

There are lots of issues in this to explore. Especially since you've raised the issue, I would like to explore more in the direction of role-playing, because that was one of the points of criticism raised about the experiment, perhaps in hopes of finding something light in the darkness implied. How much of what we do in our life is about role playing, any? A lot? A rite of passage, like a marriage ceremony, boot camp, graduation, can be seen sometimes more, sometimes less formally as a change of one's personal role in society. One is no longer a single person, one is no longer a civilian, one is no longer a student, that sort of notion. What does that mean to an individual? How can and how do people deal with what that means? I think it may vary a lot. But what are the forces that keep that variance within some normative range, and how much societal tolerance is there for variation?

Two images for some thoughts, one from the 1971 Stanford Prison experiment, completely invented by the players in their roles, the other from recent atrocities at Abu Ghraib:

Getting started -- Introducing the Lucifer Effect

The above scene is from an early morning walk along a wetlands near my home here in the Willapa Watershed, not far from the Pacific Ocean in southwestern Washington State. It's a relatively benign yet richly vibrant ecosystem and a wonderful place to begin a contemplative mental journey. So that's why I've started this first post with it. Willapa is a local indigenous group's word that means "weeping forest."

I've begun this blog to consolidate a wide range of writings I've been doing over the past three years, much of it on the Thom Hartmann Message Board (linked in the right hand column). The writings have evolved into three major themes that I see integrally related in various ways. As I look at each of them seperately and together I discover connections that are the basis for explanatory narratives of what the U.S. has become today, and what it's about in the world, both domestically and internationally. I'm working on a main theme involving a U.S. geopolitical strategy of neoliberal globalization, focusing on the contemporary issues in the Middle East, with sub themes of authoritarianism, something called the unitary executive theory, and a form of governance that has elements of the loosely defined, general category we think of as democracy, but which involves a decisionmaking process by elected officials and their appointees, who together form an elite class in a society, and that governmental formula, as termed by some theorists now, I'll also call polyarchy. It's come to be associated with a more general policy making tool that began to be implemented in th 1980s called "democracy promotion." A similar frame for describing that tool can be found within a broad tradition labeled by many others more generally as liberal democracy, or liberalism, one form of which is neoliberalism. Polyarchy as I'll be using it is an identifiable subset of this more general category, so that's why it appeals to me at this point.

I'll be getting into all of it more in depth as I go along, but I wanted to introduce these basic parts of the thematic structure I'll be exploring to set a tone for myself here, as much as for anyone else who may stumble upon this. So that's what this blog will be about. It looks like it's going to function much like a written diary with a few bells and whistles. My goal is to weave a narrative of related themes through essays I will be publishing frequently -- to the extent circumstances permit, daily.

Here's my preliminary proposition for a discussion about the effects of institutions on human behavior; imbedded in this discussion are themes of authoritarianism, which bears directly on questions I raise about the extent and nature of the peculiar arrangement of democracy in the U.S. This lead issue involves the famous 1971 Stanford prison experiment and I'm spinning off the title of Zimbardo's recently published book on his experiment:

Topic: The Lucifer Affect

I've been interested in authoritarianism in one way or another since my experience in the military during the Vietnam War. At the time, the term itself was not familiar to me, but its nature in the institutions I'd experienced up until then was. My experience before entering the service was primarily in the institution of public education as a student. This was a situation I essentially tolerated with the knowledge that it would one day come to an end and I would then be "free" as my young imagination saw it, to finally live life. All the circumstances that came up around the fact of my finding myself entering military service, and then the features of the institution itself that I found myself adapting to, brought about a disturbing awareness in the form of what I'd have to call now, cognitive dissonance. My imagined sense of what was available to me as an adult, in what I was looking forward to as my release into an open and now accessible world, and what life really would entail for me in that world, suddenly did not seem to have a good matching overlay anymore with what I was experiencing. And as I think back on it now, it was the institutionalization of authority itself, in the military, that brought me to a very real psychological crisis. I'll leave that there, for now. I expect I'll pick it up later. I just wanted to raise the issue, since I suspect it's familiar to just about everyone in some way, to illustrate where I first became aware that I needed to come to an understanding about something I became vaguely aware was far more complex than anything I'd imagined, and that was what I am now referrng to as authoritarianism.

The topic I’m introducing relates to institutionalization of power and authority in society and its potential psychological affect on each of us. Integral with this is our permission both for our own acknowledgement and acceptance of this form and our adherence to it, and for others to play out their acknowledged roles in this form. When this no longer happens smoothly and without conscious questions, serious difficulties can arise in the processes of daily existence. I believe we all owe it to ourselves to explore what that means.

Surely many of us have heard in one way or another about the renowned Stanford Prison Experiment. That experiment raised some serious questions about the institutionalization of power and inherent features built into institutional power that appear to effect behavior, potentially in all of us, in ways that are not necessarily obvious. It can raise some very serious questions about our own sense of autonomy, our range of self actuation, and perhaps our own self conceived heroic efforts to be good persons in the world. It would certainly be a pertinent issue to raise in a discussion of values between the people with conservative and liberal perspectives. Especially with regards to troubling concerns about personal responsibility and the degree to which one can actually follow out and accomplish one's dreams of one's own initiative. Both general categories have values and ideals about how an individual is free to pursue their dreams. Perhaps in an exploration of institutionalized authority, an exploration of those differences will emerge as well.

Recently Philip Zimbardo, who created and conducted the 1971 experiment, published a book about it (three days ago?!) called The Lucifer Affect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. In an interview on Democracy Now!, Dr.Zimbardo discusses the book and what the experiment has come to mean to him over the past 36 years. During the interview, excerpts from the actual film made during the experiment are shown, and also, after the fact (several months after) interviews with those who took part in it, where the participants discussed with each other their roles and their perspectives on their experience, and of each other.

A prison is perhaps the most extreme version of institutionalization of power in our society, but with some contemplation we can find many elements of it in other systemic forms of our society. Nearly all of us undoubtedly experienced it during our primary and secondary schooling, it can be found in many private work environments, like corporations, and in the bureaucracies of government. Much of that people take for granted as the way it needs to be. Those of us who have been in the military and through boot camp, have experienced the closest form of institutionalized power that I am familiar with to a prison environment, and a prison environment was supposed to be the basis of the institutionalization acted out in that 1971 experiment. As noted, having been through the military myself, I know personally what some of the structural elements are like in such profound institutional settings, and what I had to do to personally move through all the challenges I found it presented, the roles I was expected to fill in the process, and what it was like for me, existentially, to fill those roles and at the same time manage to maintain what I considered to be values of personal integrity. Not surprisingly I discovered I was sometimes required to restrain my values under threat of what to me was coercion from a figure of authority; for others, maybe not so, because I discovered that a fair number of my fellow service members seemed to have internalized the legitimacy of the system in ways I had not. But those issues that seem to comprimise my established ethical framework, out of which I would normally have guided my behavior present the dilemmas out of which arise the kinds of perplexing questions this topic stimulates for me. These questions may also infer the philosophical debate that Jacques Ellul has raised with his concepts of integrative and sociological propaganda.

Most of us may be proud of our individuality and may believe that we are immune to the affect a systemic institutionalization of power can have on our behavior. This experiment raises questions that may challenge such beliefs about our personal freedom and dignity. The question I have asked about it, since I first heard of it years ago, is what psychological affect institutionalization of power has on each of us, subtly or overtly, since we are always engaged in various ways with these environments? And what, if anything, can we do about it? Is it possible that by knowing and understanding it better, we can in some way mitigate those affects? Or is it even possible that some people, for various reasons, would rather not?

Professor Zimbardo testified for the defense of the soldiers who were prosecuted for their role in the abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib. In light of that experience, as well as his thirty six years since his experiment, he asks the question, who is really to blame? Or maybe what is really to blame for the abuses that took place? He apparently does try to offer an answer to that in the book, and he gives a brief explanation at the end of the interview.



Watch an introduction to a documentary film of the experiment Quiet Rage: