by Joe Kandra, Kathie Malley-Morrison, & Pat Daniel
Tag: blaming the victim
Who’s been attacking your country? (Plutocrats, moral disengagers, & mind game perps)
by Kathie MM
Republican President Theodore Roosevelt , the “trust buster” president who successfully opposed powerful monopolies, said what the country needed was “a real democracy” and “of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.”
A plutocracy is a “society…ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income….“[T]hroughout history, political thinkers such as Winston Churchill…and Noam Chomsky have condemned plutocrats for ignoring their social responsibilities, using their power to serve their own purposes and thereby increasing poverty and nurturing class conflict, corrupting societies with greed and hedonism” (Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy ).
Plutocrats overlap with the group Eidelson calls one percenters, but not every multi-millionaire or billionaire is motivated solely by greed and lust for power.
Currently, the United States (and other countries) are being wrenched steadily back into the tyranny of plutocracy. Where is the Theodore Roosevelt to stop them?
What you need to understand about plutocrats:
- Many are morally disengaged, able to convince themselves that behaviors causing enormous damage to people and the planet are all for the good.
- Many want to get you morally disengaged too, and exploit groups already morally disengaged (more on fascists and chaos seekers later).
- Many are political extremists who feed racism, ethnocentrism, and sexism, and use mind games (manipulating feelings of fear, anger, resentment, distrust, pride, and despair) to spread moral disengagement to vulnerable audiences. For example, they create scapegoats and dehumanize them. They propagate increasingly severe levels of poverty, and blame the poor for their misery. They generate policies designed only to help themselves, but claim the policies will benefit all.
For a powerful insider portrayal of how plutocrats do these things, click here: https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocrats_the_pitchforks_are_coming
Whistleblower Nick Hanauer never uses the terms mind games or moral disengagement, but provides compelling examples of both; moreover, his effort in this video and elsewhere (e.g., here and here ) suggest that even a one percenter can become morally engaged.
As the next election year approaches, let’s all work together to sustain and promote moral engagement.
What makes them tick: Part 2.
In this post, we continue our comparison of types of morally disengaged reasoning with contrasting examples of morally engaged reasoning, using excerpts from speeches from well-known contemporary politicians.
Moral disengagement: Attribution of blame/Blaming the victim: “There may be somebody with tomatoes in the audience. If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.”
Moral engagement: Exonerating or pardoning the victim: “A kid gets caught with a few ounces of pot and goes to jail but a big bank launders drug money and no one gets arrested.”
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Moral disengagement: Displacement or diffusion of responsibility: “I certainly don’t incite violence.”
Moral engagement: Moral agency/accepting responsibility: “I’m willing to throw my body in front of the bus to stop bad ideas…. We believe that no one should work fulltime and still live in poverty… and we are willing to fight for it. We will fight for it. Let me add to that we believe that fast food workers deserve a livable wage and when they take to picket lines we are proud to fight alongside of them.”
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Moral disengagement: Advantageous comparisons: “I would support and endorse the use of enhanced interrogation techniques… The enemy is cutting off the heads of Christians and drowning them in cages, and yet we are too politically correct to respond in kind.”
Moral engagement: Identifying better alternatives: “”We should use our powers not to create conditions of oppression that lead to violence, but conditions of freedom that lead to peace.” (Speaker is quoting late Senator Edward Kennedy).
As you can see, many of the selected examples of morally disengaged reasoning illustrate more than one type of moral disengagement, and indeed they are tightly interrelated—as are the types of morally engaged reasoning. Think of the kinds of emotional and perhaps behavioral responses the two types of argument are likely to provoke in their listeners, particularly listeners dissatisfied with the status quo.
You probably have identified the sources of these examples of morally disengaged and morally engaged arguments—Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren. Each of them has millions of listeners whose reasoning about issues is consistent with their messages. What are your views as to which type of thinking is more likely to lead to peace and social justice? And if you are not concerned with peace and justice, why not?
Clever devils: getting good people to act bad
Moral disengagement involves a set of unconscious psychological processes allowing individuals to engage in or support or tolerate inhumane treatment of others while still thinking of themselves as good people. Common examples include using euphemistic language to make bad things sound less bad (“collateral damage”), pseudo-moral justifications (“the war to end all wars”), displacement or diffusion of responsibility (“I was just following orders”), advantageous comparison (“killing a couple of terrorists is a lot better than letting them kill thousands”), and attribution of blame/dehumanization (“axis of evil threatening the peace of the world”).
Unscrupulous power-hungry political leaders throughout history have often successfully promoted moral disengagement in those whom they want to dominate for their own purposes. Unfortunately, in regard to the burgeoning global refugee crisis, expressions of moral disengagement in the home of the “tired and the poor” are rife.
Consider the following comments. What forms of moral disengagement, as listed above, do you see?
- “When the Syrian refugees are going to start pouring into this country, we don’t know if they’re ISIS, we don’t know if it’s a Trojan horse….it could be the great Trojan horse of all time…”
- “some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule. And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy….things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago.”
- “One of the problems that we have and one of the reasons we’re so ineffective is they [terrorists] are using them (civilians, family members) as shields….It’s a horrible thing, but we’re fighting a very politically correct war.”
- “I think waterboarding is peanuts compared to what they do to us….They don’t use waterboarding over there….They use chopping off people’s heads.”
- “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems… they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology