Like Alice, we are running as fast as we can to stay where we are. America’s huge imprisonment rate and desperate application of medical progress are technological tourniquets to stop us from bleeding to death in an orgy of violence. But they do so by dealing with the symptoms of the problem rather than the root cause.
The Cause of the Problem: Taking the Safety Catch off of a Nation
We know, as surely as we know that we are alive, that the whole human race is dancing on the edge of the grave….
The easiest and worst mistake we could make would be to blame our present dilemma on the mere technology of war…. It is our attitudes toward war and our uses for it that really demand our attention.
What
The three major psychological processes at work in enabling violence are classical conditioning (a la Pavlov’s dog), operant conditioning (a la B. F. Skinner’s rats), and the observation and imitation of vicarious role models in social learning.
In a kind of reverse
Operant conditioning firing ranges with pop-up targets and immediate feedback, just like those used to train soldiers in modern armies, are found in the interactive video games that our children play today. But whereas the adolescent Vietnam vet had stimulus discriminators built in to ensure that he only fired under authority, the adolescents who play these video games have no such safeguard built into their conditioning.
And, finally, social learning is being used as children learn to observe and imitate a whole new realm of dynamic vicarious role models, such as Jason and Freddy of endless
There are more factors involved. This is a complex, interactive process that includes all the factors that enable killing in combat. Gang leaders and gang members demand violent, even killing, activity and create diffusion of individual responsibility; and gang affiliation, loosening family and religious ties, racism, class differences, and the availability of weapons provide forms of real and emotional distance between the killer and the victim. If we look again at our model for killing-enabling factors and apply it to civilian killing, we can see the way in which all of these factors interact to enable violence in America.
All of these factors are important. Drugs, gangs, poverty, racism, and guns are all vital ingredients in a process that has resulted in skyrocketing violence rates in our society. But drugs have always been a problem, just as drugs (alcohol, and so on) have always been present in combat. Gangs have always been present, just as combat has always taken place in organized units. Poverty and racism have always been a part of our society (often much more so than today), just as propaganda, class divisions, and racism have always been manipulated in combat. And guns have always been present in American society, just as they have always been present in American wars.
In the 1950s and 1960s students brought knives to high school, whereas today they bring .22s. But those .22s were pretty much always present at home. And while there is new weapons technology available, fifteen minutes with a hacksaw will make a pistol out of any double-barrel shotgun, a pistol every bit as effective in close combat as any weapon in the world today — this was true one hundred years ago, and it is true today.[49]
The thing we need to ask ourselves is not, Where did the guns come from? They came from home, where they have always been available, or they may have been bought in the street thanks to the drug culture — which deals in illegal weapons as readily as it deals in illegal drugs. But the question we need to ask is, What makes today’s children bring those guns to school when their parents did not? And the answer to
Between 1985 and 1991 the homicide rate for males fifteen to nineteen increased 154 percent. Despite the continued application of an ever-increasing quantity and quality of medical technology, homicide is the number-two cause of death among males ages fifteen to nineteen. Among black males it is number one. The AP wire article reporting this data had a headline announcing, “Homicide Rate Wiping Out Whole Generation of Teens.” For once the press was not exaggerating.
In Vietnam a systematic process of desensitization, conditioning, and training increased the individual firing rate from a World War II baseline of 15 to 20 percent to an all-time high of up to 95 percent. Today a similar process of systematic desensitization, conditioning, and vicarious learning is unleashing an epidemic, a virus of violence in America.
The same tools that more than quadrupled the firing rate in Vietnam are now in widespread use among our civilian population. Military personnel are just beginning to understand and accept what they have been doing to themselves and their men. If we have reservations about the military’s use of these mechanisms to ensure the survival and success of our soldiers in combat, then how much more so should we be concerned about the indiscriminate application of the same processes on our nation’s children?
CHAPTER TWO
I yelled “kill, kill” ’til I was hoarse. We yelled it as we engaged in bayonet and hand-to-hand combat drills. And then we sang about it as we marched. “I want to be an airborne ranger… I want to kill the Viet Cong.” I had stopped hunting when I was sixteen. I had wounded a squirrel. It looked up at me with its big, soft brown eyes as I put it out of its misery. I cleaned my gun and have never taken it out since. In 1969 I was drafted and very uncertain about the war. I had nothing against the Viet Cong. But by the end of Basic Training, I was ready to kill them.
Classical Conditioning in the Military
