In his book Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons (which, incidentally, seems not to be available to American readers through Amazon), Clive Stafford Smith describes the way in which the military personnel guarding the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay absorb and adopt a persona that exemplifies the role they perceive themselves to be playing. They listen to a partial and lopsided broadcasting of events on their Forces radio in their secluded, protected section of their isolated island. They mix in a social stasis of black and white, good and bad, criminals and saviours.
They are willingly seduced by the glamour of one version of events and succumb to the heroic way in which they are portrayed: as holding the line between order and civilization on one hand, chaos and the terrorist hordes on the other. Hardly surprising, then, that when one of their own military personnel is put into an orange jumpsuit and told to disobey orders (but, critically, with nobody else informed that this is an exercise), they beat him so severely that he ends up with permanent brain damage. He was, after all, clearly the enemy and no mistake.
Perhaps we all pretend to be who we would wish to be and therein may lie our problem. Are we actually pursuing our own wish fulfillment or do we just become whatever we are persuaded to be by others? These 'others,' of course, may be siblings and loved ones, parents and employers, companies, advertisers, and governments.
The concept that we tend to fall into groups or hierarchies within a power structure is hardly new. Nor is the idea that the groups we occupy, and from which we look out upon the rest of the world which is not ours, tends to be corrupting and simultaneously provides social cohesion and the catalyst for social collapse. In Lord of the Flies, William Golding shows the tenuous grasp of civilization over the lurking savage within us all.
Philip Zimbardo showed much the same outcome with his Stanford Prison Experiment. He sat up an experiment in which a group of mainly white, middle-class, and intelligent people were divided into prisoners and guards. He told the guards: "You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy… We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none."
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