How We Lost Our Souls By Butler Shaffer
(2010-04-18 at 18:07:52 )

How We Lost Our Souls By Butler Shaffer

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained
only by someone who is detached. ~ Simone Weil

Anyone who has not seen the videotape of the July 12, 2007, helicopter
attack by American soldiers that resulted in the deaths of unarmed Iraqi
civilians and two Reuters news employees, can view it on YouTube.

After months of requests, by Reuters, for this video - followed by
refusals from the military - WikiLeaks received a copy from an unknown
source. The revelation of this atrocity quickly raised criticisms not
just of the practice, but of the mindsets of soldiers who could so
eagerly and gleefully carry out this slaughter of innocents. Even the
shooting of children at the scene produced no apparent sense of
wrongdoing on the part of the soldiers. One of the best analyses of this
evil act was offered by Karen Kwiatkowski.
( http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski248.html )

How does such moral depravity not just occur, but become so pervasive in
our world? The occasional recordings of such behavior touch only the
surface of institutionalized viciousness.

Was Rodney King the first person to be brutalized by police officers?
Were civilians shielded from execution-style murder prior to the My Lai
massacre? Did the revelations at Abu Ghraib constitute the first acts of
torture practiced by American soldiers upon captive civilians? In each of
these occurrences - a precedent no doubt to be followed in the current
criminal machine-gunning of Iraqis - one or more scapegoats were selected
for punishment, so as to distance the brutality of their actions from the
more pervasive inhumanity that inheres in the institutions for whom they
acted.

The central theme of my writing has been to demonstrate that allowing
institutional purposes to pre-empt our own has been destructive of life,
liberty, peace and, ultimately, of civilizations. We have long walked a
line between our need for social organization - as a way of satisfying
various mutual needs - and becoming so attracted to the systems that
serve our interests that we want to make them permanent. We move
imperceptibly from associations that we control in pursuit of our ends,
to organizations that become ends in themselves, and that control us in
order to foster their interests. When this occurs, the informal
organization has metamorphosed into an institution. I have developed
this process more fully in my book, Calculated Chaos.

An institution is no longer a convenient tool for our mutual benefit, but
an end in itself; its own raison d etre. It has taken on a life of its
own, one that differs from, and usurps, our purposes. Because they can
only function and survive through using people, institutions require
humans to identify their sense of being with them.

To This End, Government Schools have been established, whose Primary
Purpose has always been to Condition young minds in the necessity and
desirability of the institutional scheme of things. In the words of Ivan
Illich, -School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that
you need the society as it is.- Schools also help us learn to seek
meaningful and well-paying careers within institutional hierarchies.

When we identify ourselves with, and attach ourselves to these
institutional entities, we absorb their values; their purposes; their
modus operandi. Such practices of attachment can be analogized to a
cancer that metastasizes our inner sense of being. In the process, we
become dehumanized, for institutions have no souls; no emotions; no
spiritual, moral, or intuitive sense. They neither cry, bleed, love, or
experience elation. They are machines and, like other machines, operate
solely on the basis of mechanics, linear processes, and material ends.

When we become institutionalized, we become little more than robots
-servo-mechanisms - functioning in response to how we have been
programmed to perform.

The emotional and spiritual dimensions that make us human are of no value
to institutions which, in times of political wrong-doing, urge us to
suppress such sentiments. Anything that is nonmaterial is immaterial to
members of the institutional order. In place of deeply-held philosophic
principles, institutions have policies; their sense of -Meaning- consists
only of perpetuating themselves by maximizing their power and material
wealth. To such entities, human beings have value only as fungible
resources to exploit on behalf of institutional ends.

It would be easy to condemn the soldiers who engaged in this slaughter as
Evil or Depraved or Insane- beings. Such is the manner in which we have
long accustomed ourselves to blanking out any awareness of the Dark Side
of our own unconscious. In such ways have we isolated ourselves from the
Hitlers, Stalins, Mao Tse-Tungs, Pol Pots, and other tyrants, leaving us
with the comforting feeling that we shared nothing in common with them.

But history informs us - if we will only look - that, once we have
identified ourselves with any purpose beyond ourselves, we can become
capable of the most vicious forms of wrongdoing. How do otherwise decent
men participate in a lynch-mob?

The state - an institution that is defined in terms of enjoying a
monopoly on the use of violence - is particularly attractive to men and
women whose -Dark Sides- are closer to the surface than those of more
tolerant and peaceful persons. When the state energizes this Dark Side
-which it does particularly in wartime, the quality that led Randolph
Bourne to identify war as -The Health Of The State - otherwise decent
men and women can turn themselves into agents of savage brutality. When
their murderous acts are conducted on behalf of the state - with which
most people identify themselves - their actions acquire an aura of
legitimacy that would not have obtained under other circumstances; a
distinction that would prevent them from becoming serial killers upon
their return home.

Identifying ourselves with the state, in other words, has a way of
turning us into sociopaths. It is not that the state does this to us, but
that our willingness to attach ourselves to external entities - and the
values upon which they are grounded - separates us from our focused inner
sense of being.

This applies not just to the pilots of helicopter gun-ships over Baghdad,
but to more visible political figures such as Madeleine Albright - who
defended her Clinton-era policies that led to the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi
children - and Janet Reno, who defended her massacre of Branch Davidian
men, women, and children at Waco. More recent application of these
dynamics are found in George W. Bushs fascination with starting
pre-emptive wars against the rest of the world, and Barack Obamas
apparent willingness to use nuclear weapons in future pre-emptive
attacks, as well as to assassinate Americans.

People who are willing to embrace - or even to tolerate - such
sociopathic conduct, have Lost All Touch with what it Means to be Human;
Have Lost Their Souls.

No federal bailouts; no increase in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, or
decrease in unemployment levels, will overcome this loss. Nor can any
Stimulus Package be enacted - with or without bipartisan support - to
restore the personal integrity long since lost.

There was a time, not so many decades ago, when brute force -
particularly when engaged in by Police and Military agents of the state -
was at least frowned upon, if not condemned, by decent men and women.

The threshold level for such practices continues to get progressively
lower. A major contribution to Barry Goldwaters defeat in the 1964
presidential campaign, was the unfounded fear that he might be willing
to use nuclear weapons in the war in Vietnam. Modernly, Bushs and Obamas
willingness to initiate a nuclear war have raised no major outcries from
most Americans, who seem to prefer Hope (i.e., wishful thinking) over
intelligent -Understanding as a way of making the world free, peaceful,
and productive.

When the 2008 GOP presidential candidate, John McCain, can garner nearly
60,000,000 votes with his sociopathic dance of Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran,
should we be shocked by the butcherous conduct of some American
helicopter pilots?

April 14, 2010

Butler Shaffer teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He
is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business
Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938 and of Calculated Chaos:
Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival. His latest book is
Boundaries of Order.

Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or
in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.