On killing

by Unknown

  mander Narut had ordered violent films from him, and Narut's tale was subsequently published in the London Times.

  Remember that desensitization is a vital aspect of killing-empowerment techniques used in modern combat-training programs.

  The experience related by Jack at the beginning of this section is a sample of the desensitization and glorification of killing that has increasingly been a part of combat orientation. In 1974, when I was in basic training, we sang many such chants. O n e that was only a little bit more extreme than the majority was a running chant (with the emphasis shouted each time the left foot hit the ground): I wanna

  RAPE,

  KILL,

  PILLAGE'n'

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  BURN, a n n n n n '

  EAT dead

  BAAA-bies,

  Iwanna

  RAPE,

  KILL . . .

  Our military no longer tolerates this kind of desensitization, but for decades it was a key mechanism for desensitizing and indoctrinating adolescent males into a cult of violence in basic training.

  Classical Conditioning at the Movies

  If we believe that Commander Narut's techniques might work, and if we are horrified that the U.S. government might even consider doing such a thing to our soldiers, then why do we permit the same process to occur to millions of children across the nation?

  For that is what we are doing when we allow increasingly more vivid depictions of suffering and violence to be shown as entertainment to our children.

  It begins innocently with cartoons and then goes on to the countless thousands of acts of violence depicted on TV as the child grows up and the scramble for ratings steadily raises the threshold

  ,of violence on TV. As children reach a certain age, they then begin to watch movies with a degree of violence sufficient to receive a PG-13 rating due to brief glimpses of spurting blood, a hacked-off limb, or bullet wounds. Then the parents, through neglect or conscious decision, begin to permit the child to watch movies rated R due to vivid depictions of knives penetrating and protruding from bodies, long shots of blood spurting from severed limbs, and bullets ripping into bodies and exploding out the back in showers of blood and brains.

  Finally, our society says that young adolescents, at the age of seventeen, can legally watch these R-rated movies (although most are well experienced with them by then), and at eighteen they can watch the movies rated even higher than R. These are films in which eye gouging is often the least of the offenses that are vividly depicted. And thus, at that malleable age of seventeen D E S E N S I T I Z A T I O N AND PAVLOV'S D O G

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  and eighteen, the age at which armies have traditionally begun to indoctrinate the soldier into the business of killing, American youth, systematically desensitized from childhood, takes another step in the indoctrination into the cult of violence.

  Adolescents and adults saturate themselves in such gruesome and progressively more horrific "entertainment," whose antiheroes — like Hannibal the Cannibal, Jason, and Freddy — are sick, unkillable, unquestionably evil, and criminally sociopathic. They have nothing in common with the exotic, esoteric, and misunderstood Frankenstein and Wolf Man villains of an earlier generation of horror films. In the old horror stories and movies, very real but subconscious fears were symbolized by mythic but unreal monsters, such as Dracula, and then exorcised exotically, such as by a stake through the heart. In contemporary horror, terror is personified by characters who resemble our next-door neighbor, even our doctor. Importantly, Hannibal the Cannibal, Jason, and Freddy are not killed, much less exorcised; they return over and over again.

  Even in movies where the killer is not an obvious sociopath, the common formula is to validate violent acts of vengeance by beginning the movie with a vivid depiction of the villain performing horrible acts on some innocents. These victims are usually related in some way to the hero, thereby justifying the hero's subsequent (and vividly depicted) vigilante acts.

  Our society has found a powerful recipe for providing killing empowerment to an entire generation of Americans. Producers, directors, and actors are handsomely rewarded for creating the most violent, gruesome, and horrifying films imaginable, films in which the stabbing, shooting, abuse, and torture of innocent men, women, and children are depicted in intimate detail. Make these films entertaining as well as violent, and then simultaneously provide the (usually) adolescent viewers with candy, soft drinks, group companionship, and the intimate physical contact of a boyfriend or girlfriend. Then understand that these adolescent viewers are learning to associate these rewards with what they are watching.

  Powerful group processes often work to humiliate and belittle viewers who close their eyes or avert their gaze during these gruesome scenes. Adolescent peer groups reward with respect and 310 KILLING IN AMERICA

  admiration those who reflect Hollywood's standard of remaining hardened and undisturbed in the face of such violence. In effect many viewers have their heads bolted in a psychological clamp so they cannot turn away, and social pressure keeps their eyelids open.

  Discussing these movies and this process in psychology classes at West Point, I have repeatedly asked my students how the audience responds when the villain murders some innocent young victim in a particularly horrible way. And over and over again their answer was "The audience cheers." Society is in a state of denial as to the harmful nature of this, but in efficiency, quality, and scope, it makes the puny efforts of Clockwork Orange and the U.S. government pale by comparison. We are doing a better job of desensitizing and conditioning our citizens to kill than anything Commander Narut ever dreamed of. If we had a clear-cut objective of raising a generation of assassins and killers who are unrestrained by either authority or the nature of the victim, it is difficult to imagine how we could do a better job.

  In video stores the horror section repeatedly displays bare breasts (often with blood running down them), gaping eye sockets, and mutilated bodies. Movies rated X with tamer covers are generally not available in many video stores and, if they are, are in separate, adults-only rooms. But the horror videos are displayed for every child to see. Here breasts are taboo if they are on a live woman, but permissible on a mutilated corpse?

  When Mussolini and his mistress were publicly executed and hung upside down, the mistress's dress flopped over her head to display her legs and underwear. One woman in the crowd subsequently had the decency to walk up and tuck the corpse's dress between its legs in a show of respect for the dead woman: she may have deserved to die, but she did not deserve to be so degraded after death.

  Where did we lose this sense of propriety toward the dignity of death? How did we become so hardened?

  The answer to that question is that we, as a society, have become systematically desensitized to the pain and suffering of others. We may believe that tabloids and tabloid TV make us exceedingly conscious of the suffering of others as they spread the stories of D E S E N S I T I Z A T I O N AND PAVLOV'S D O G

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  victims. But the reality is that they are desensitizing us and trivializ-ing these issues as each year they have to find increasingly more bizarre stories to satisfy their increasingly jaded audiences.

  We are reaching that stage of desensitization at which the inflicting of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment: vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it.

  Chapter Three

  B. F. Skinner's Rats and

  Operant Conditioning at the Video Arcade

  When I went to boot camp and did individual combat training they said if you walk into an ambush what you want to do is just do a right face — you just turn right or left, whichever way the fire is coming from, and assault. I said, "Man, that's crazy. I'd never do anything like that. It's stupid."

  The first time we came under fire, on Hill 1044 in Operation Beauty Canyon in Laos, we did it automatically. Just like you l
ook at your watch to see what time it is. We done a right face, assaulted the hill — a fortified position with concrete bunkers emplaced, machine guns, automatic weapons — and we took it. And we killed — I'd estimate probably thirty-five North Vietnamese soldiers in the assault, and we only lost three killed. . . .

  But you know, what they teach you, it doesn't faze you until it comes down to the time to use it, but it's in the back of your head, like, What do you do when you come to a stop sign? It's in the back of your head, and you react automatically.

  — Vietnam veteran

  quoted in Gwynne Dyer, War

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  Conditioning Killers in the Military

  On the training bases of the major armies of the world, nations struggle to turn teenagers into killers. T h e "struggle" for the mind of the soldier is a lopsided one: armies have had thousands of years to develop their craft, and their subjects have had fewer than two decades of life experience. It is a basically honest, age-old, reciprocal process, especially in today's all-volunteer U.S. Army. T h e soldier intuitively understands what he or she is getting into and generally tries to cooperate by "playing the game" and constraining his or her own individuality and adolescent enthusiasm, and the army systematically wields the resources and technology of a nation to empower and equip the soldier to kill and survive on the battlefield.

  In the armed forces of most modern armies this application of technology has reached new levels by integrating the innovations of operant conditioning into traditional training methods.

  Operant conditioning is a higher form of learning than classical conditioning. It was pioneered by B. F. Skinner and is usually associated with learning experiments on pigeons and rats. The traditional image of a rat in a Skinner box, learning to press a bar in order to get food pellets, comes from Skinner's research in this field. Skinner rejected the Freudian and humanist theories of personality development and held that all behavior is a result of past rewards and punishments. To B. F. Skinner the child is a tabula rasa, a "blank slate," who can be turned into anything provided sufficient control of the child's environment is instituted at an early enough age.

  Instead of firing at a bull's-eye target, the modern soldier fires at man-shaped silhouettes that pop up for brief periods of time inside a designated firing lane. The soldiers learn that they have only a brief second to engage the target, and if they do it properly their behavior is immediately reinforced when the target falls down.

  If he knocks down enough targets, the soldier gets a marksmanship badge and usually a three-day pass. After training on rifle ranges in this manner, an automatic, conditioned response called automaticity sets in, and the soldier then becomes conditioned to respond to the appropriate stimulus in the desired manner. This process 314

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  may seem simple, basic, and obvious, but there is evidence to indicate that it is one of the key ingredients in a methodology that has raised the firing rate from 15 to 20 percent in World War II to 90 to 95 percent in Vietnam.

  Conditioning at the Video Arcade

  In video arcades children stand slack jawed but intent behind machine guns and shoot at electronic targets that pop up on the video screen. W h e n they pull the trigger the weapon rattles in their hand, shots ring out, and if they hit the " e n e m y " they are firing at, it drops to the ground, often with chunks of flesh flying in the air.

  The important distinction between the killing-enabling process that occurs in video arcades and that of the military is that the military's is focused on the enemy soldier, with particular emphasis on ensuring that the U.S. soldier acts only under authority. Yet even with these safeguards, the danger of future My Lai massacres among soldiers drawn from such a violent population must not be ignored, and, as we saw in the section "Killing and Atrocity,"

  the U.S. armed forces are taking extensive measures to control, constrain, and channel the violence of their troops in future conflicts. T h e video games that our children conduct their combat training on have no real sanction for firing at the wrong target.

  This is not an attack on all video games. Video games are an interactive medium. They demand and develop trial-and-error and systematic problem-solving skills, and they teach planning, mapping, and deferment of gratification. Watch children as they play video games and interact with other children in their neighbor-hood. To parents raised on a steady diet of movies and sitcoms, watching a child play Mario Brothers for hours on end may not be particularly gratifying, but that is just the point. As they play they solve problems and overcome instructions that are intentionally inadequate and vague. They exchange playing strategies, memorize routes, and make maps. They work long and hard to attain the gratification of finally winning a game. And there are no commer-cials: no enticements for sugar, no solicitation of violent toys, and B . F . SKINNER'S RATS 315

  no messages of social failure if they do not wear the right shoes or clothes.

  We might prefer to see children reading or getting exercise and interacting with the real real world by playing outside, but video games are definitely preferable to most television. But video games can also be superb at teaching violence — violence packaged in the same format that has more than quadrupled the firing rate of modern soldiers.

  When I speak of violence enabling I am not talking about video games in which the player defeats creatures by bopping them on the head. Nor am I talking about games where you maneuver swordsmen and archers to defeat monsters. On the borderline in violence enabling are games where you use a joystick to maneuver a gunsight around the screen to kill gangsters who pop up and fire at you. The kind of games that are very definitely enabling violence are the ones in which you actually hold a weapon in your hand and fire it at human-shaped targets on the screen. These kinds of games can be played on home video, but you usually see them in video arcades.

  There is a direct relationship between realism and degree of violence enabling, and the most realistic of these are games in which great bloody chunks fly off as you fire at the enemy.

  Another, very different type of game has a western motif, in which you stand before a huge video screen and fire a pistol at actual film footage of "outlaws" as they appear on the screen. This is identical to the shoot-no shoot training program designed by the FBI and used by police agencies around the nation to train and enable police officers in firing their weapons.

  The shoot-no shoot program was introduced nearly twenty years ago in response to the escalating violence in our society that was resulting in an increase in deaths among police officers who hesitated to shoot in an actual combat situation. And, of course, we recognize it as another form of operant conditioning that has been successful in saving the lives of both law-enforcement officers and innocent bystanders, since the officer faces severe sanctions if he fires in an inappropriate circumstance. Thus the shoot-no shoot 316

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  program has served successfully to both enable and constrain violence among police officers. Its video arcade equivalent has no such sanctions to constrain violence. It only enables.

  The worst is yet to come. Just as movies have become successively more realistic in their depiction of violence and death, so too have video games. We are now entering an era of virtual reality, in which you wear a helmet that has a video screen before your eyes. As you turn your head the screen changes just as though you were within the video world. You hold a gun in your hand and fire it at the enemies who pop up around you, or you hold a sword and hack and stab at the enemies around you.

  Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, says, "This manipulation of reality may provide us with exciting games, entertainment, but it will substitute not a virtual reality, but a pseudo reality, so subtly deceptive as to raise the levels of public suspicion and disbelief beyond what any society can tolerate." This new "pseudo reality"

  will make it possible to replicate all the gore and violence of popu
lar violent movies, except now you are the one who is the star, the killer, the slayer of thousands.

  Through operant conditioning B. F. Skinner held that he could turn any child into anything he wanted to. In Vietnam the U.S.

  armed forces demonstrated that Skinner was at least partially correct by successfully using operant conditioning to turn adolescents into the most effective fighting force the world has ever seen. And America seems intent on using Skinner's methodology to turn us into an extraordinarily violent society.

  Chapter Four

  Social Learning and Role Models in the Media The basic training camp was designed to undermine all the past concepts and beliefs of the new recruit, to undermine his civilian values, to change his self-concept — subjugating him entirely to the military system.

  — Ben Shalit

  The Psychology of Conflict and Combat

  Classical (Pavlovian) conditioning can be done with earthworms, and operant (Skinnerian) conditioning can be conducted on rats and pigeons. But there is a third level of learning that pretty much only primates and humans are capable of, and that is what is called social learning.

  This third level of learning, in its most powerful form, revolves primarily around the observation and imitation of a role model.

  Unlike operant conditioning, in social learning it is not essential that the learner be directly reinforced in order for learning to take place. What is important in social learning is to understand the characteristics that can lead to the selection of a specific individual as a role model.

  The processes that make someone a desirable role model include:

  • Vicarious reinforcement. You see the role model being reinforced in a manner that you can experience vicariously.

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