Otherwise known as the Nuremberg Defense.

The idea that someone can claim various forms of “orders” as a moral defense has always troubled me. It seems to abdicate the individual responsibility that must accompany the rights and freedoms of an individualistic society. The thought that we have this category of individual action that does not fully partake of this individual responsibility goes against the grain of everything we believe.

Especially for me. Readers of this blog know that I have no inherent respect for authority. In a sense, authority qua authority does not exist for me. Doing what I am told simply because someone told me to do it is foreign to me.

Luckily, I also have no inherent problem with authority. For me, authority is always judged on a case by case basis, with room left for belief in one authority more than another because of either superior qualifications or a demonstrated pattern of worthiness of authority by being fair, decent, objective, compassionate, and wise.

But no matter how much I trust an authority, I am not going to do something objectively wrong simply because someone told me to do it. Not without them being able to justify the action to me, and it had better be good. For better and for worse, I retain autonomy no matter what, and so I can’t imagine doing something which deeply violates my (perhaps overweening) sense of what is right and what is wrong.

To me, it almost seems absurd.

“Shoot that man!”
“Um, no, I don’t think so. ”
“I gave you an order, mister!”
“Yes, I know. I was there. ”
“I SAID KILL THAT MAN!”
“I HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME. ”
“Then why aren’t you following orders?”
“Because I don’t want to. Also, because I don’t believe that certain words have the magic ability to make bad things good. Killing that unarmed man would be evil no matter how loud you shout. Look, you have a gun. Why don’t you shoot him yourself?”
“BECAUSE I’M ORDERING YOU TO DO IT!”
“What, you mean you are far too busy shouting and getting red in the face to do it yourself? The solution to that seems obvious. Calm yourself down. ”
“I’m going to say this ONE MORE TIME… ”
“Oh good, then I won’t have to hear it again. ”
“SHOOT THAT MAN. ”
“Would it surprise you to know that my opinion hasn’t changed? I bet it would, even though it shouldn’t. I don’t know what sort of voodoo powers you think you have,, but they don’t work on me. ”

And so forth and so on.

But that’s just me. I have an independence of mind and thought that is extremely rare in human beings, and while I view it as an asset, it comes from a place of pain and isolation that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

Most people have the authority circuit installed at least to some extent. I first noticed this when I entered school. Even at only six years old, I intuitively grasped that the other kids were afraid of the teacher and did what they were told automatically. I had no fear of the teachers and did what I was told after thinking about it.

So what I wrestle with in the case of the Nuremberg Defense is the fact that while I recognize that most people have at least some sense of authority, I can’t empathize. Not entirely. I can imagine doing what you are told out of self-interest, but I can’t imagine doing it just because you are told to do it.

I honestly don’t know what that feels like.

What brought this subject up was a scene in something I was watching where all the crime boss has to do is to nod at one of his thugs,and said thug very viciously murders someone. Stab, stab, stab. Just like that.

I don’t get it. Does that thug feel like he is not a murderer because he was just following orders? It wasn’t his idea to kill the guy so it’s not really his fault? And does the crime boss feel like he isn’t a murderer either because he didn’t actually do the killing himself? Is that how these things work?

My gut instinct would be to judge the thug with the knife exactly as if nobody has said anything to him and he had just decided, out of the blue, to kill a guy. I must admit, I would enjoy watching him try the Nuremberg defense and have it fall absolutely flat with me. There are no magic words, and so on.

As for the crime boss, I would judge him exactly the same. There, instead of splitting the guilt, you doubled it.

But I recognize that such a judgment would be unfair. A solid case can be made that some people might be literally incapable of defying their orders. Certainly military and paramilitary (like the cops) organizations spend a great deal of time teaching their soldiers to act without thinking and obey without questioning. Such brainwashing has to enter the moral equation somehow.

But more importantly, the fact that I can’t empathize with the order-following emotion does not mean it doesn’t exist or that it does not count. I would never go so far as to say that I am willing to accept the Nuremberg Defense without qualification, and I would still hold the actual perpetrator primarily responsible for the crime.

But were I a judge, I would be willing to take orders into account as mitigating circumstances, especially when it comes to sentencing. Not everyone has the wit, the will,and the total social maladjustment to be as autonomous as I am, and for some people, doing what they are told is about the best that they can do.

As usual, sanity lies somewhere in between.

What do you think, gentle reader? Do you accept the Nuremberg Defense? Or do you think it’s bullshit? Just how much does it matter whether someone was following orders?

Please answer in the comments.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just watched the last quarter of a special about the life of Walt Disney, and it stirred up all my feels.

As with a lot of people, Disney got me young and has never entirely let go. I might be happy with Uncle Walt’s legacy or I might be made with it, but I will always, always, always love it.

It’s like family that way. Uncle Walt was an honorary member of millions of families in his life. Mine was one of them, mostly through me. Long after his death, Disney owns a deep, warm spot in my soul, and has provided me with such an extraordinary source of spiritual nourishment and inner flourishing that I can’t imagine who I would be without it.

Before I ever saw a Disney movie, I listened to Disney albums and tried to imagine the whole movie from just the songs. I would look at those wonderfully rich and colorful scenes from the movies in the “storybook” part of the album, and listen to the songs, and on some deep level, I knew that they were “right”. That they represented how things should be.

I still carry those ideals within me. Not the superficial stuff that people attack Walt over. The deep values of courage, compassion, cohesion, and community that runs through every Disney movie.

Those albums represent my first era of Disney. I don’t think that I really understood that Disney was a person back then. My little mind could not connect all this wonder and magic with a person.

It would have been like pointing at a sunset and saying “Your uncle painted that. ”

My second era of Disney came in the 1980’s, when two things happened. One, the VCR and the video store came along, and suddenly I could watch a lot of Disney movies I had never seen before. My appreciation for Disney grew with each one.

And then The Lion King happened, and everything changed.

It is very hard to put into words how much that movie means to me. The person who left that movie was not the same person who had walked into it. To this day, so many years later, I grapple with its enormity. There is just something about The Lion King which speaks to me on such a deep level that to explain it almost seems obscene.

All I can say is, that movie is a part of me, and a very good part it is.

And that’s why I get all mushy when I think of Disney. I owe their animated features so much, especially The Lion King, Jungle Book, and Robin Hood.

I think that they mean so much to me, in part at least, because I was such a lonely child, and that sort of thing doesn’t go away with age. I was 21 when Lion King came out, and still, it spoke to me. There is such warmth and goodness in Disney’s movies that they are, in a sense, like the religion I never had.

In that world, people cared deeply about one another.

I find it unfortunate how the name of Disney became associated with all the false optimism and phony sentiment of the 50’s. It was probably a necessary step in the evolution of the American consciousness, but to me, Disney was never about being phony because he never claimed his works were anything but fantasy.

Disney filled his movies with optimism and wholesomeness. They were meant to be escapes from reality as well as a way to teach children important lessons about growing up and about dealing with things. To call them false because they don’t depict reality is asinine. I understand that the fantasy filled Fifties had to give way to reality eventually, and that Disney made a convenient scapegoat for people to blame for the Fifties’ inability to face reality, but Disney never lied to anyone.

He depicted how things should be, not how they were.

In a way, Disney movies were the most potent form of contact I had with what I think of as a normal family. I love my family, but we are not the warmest of people. And I have gone on and on about how I felt unwanted growing up, and how there just did not seem to be a lot of love around.

And so, without ever intending it, a notion of how family is supposed to be formed in my mind, made from one half Disney movies (and other animated features, most notably the Secret of NIMH) and one half all the sitcoms I watched growing up.

Sure, most of them were not the traditional family comedy, with Mom and Dad and kids, but they all depicted people who had their differences but who cared about each other anyhow.

My family was, for the most part, not very close. We all did our own thing. Even when we were together, my father’s volatile temper kept us from truly relaxing.

Maybe none of us ever stood a chance at “normal”. I don’t know.

One of the things that occurred to me while watching the bio was that if I had been a kid in the Fifties or possibly even in the Sixties, I would have probably become a sort of Disney conservative. The Disney product of the time would have given me some chance at feeling like I was a part of something bigger than myself and I might well have become the sort of person who thought that the system works for everybody if they are just willing to work hard and make sacrifices.

Because the thing is, in many ways, Disney was quite progressive for his era. He would be considered racist and intolerant by modern standards, of course, and extremely sexist, but his was more of a Ned Flanders than a Dick Cheney conservatism, and I truly believe that his heart was always in the right place, even when his politics were not.

Well, I could write for hours and still not cover it all. That will be more than sufficient for tonight.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today has been a little weird.

I am blogging this into a text file because for the moment, my website is down. A routine scan by my webhost found some files that it thought were kind of hinky and so it flagged them as “malicious” and I was supposed to delete them the first (or second) time they emailed me about it, but I am so used to getting spammed by them with ads trying to get me to buy more services from them that I ignored them out of habit.

Bad move, it turns out, because the third email was to tell me that they had suspended my account for 24 hours in order to protect the integrity of their systems and their reputation blah blah whatever.

I don’t know why they couldn’t just delete the files themselves. I would have been cool with that. But the whole thing smells like a scam to get me to pay for some security upgrade anyhow.

I mean, all the files flagged were from an archive of the site I made in 2015. That means that these were not active files and had not been accessed in five years. One of them was a test file I had created myself back when I was trying to learn a few things about webhosting.

It’s possible that some malicious code infected those files, but if so, it originated from someone else’s account, not mine. Why should I get the third degree? Unless, of course, they are trying to scare me out of my money.

Anyhow, the ebil bad files are all deleted now, and I asked the support staff very nicely if they could activate my account now. So hopefully, the security people will scan my account, find it clean,and reactivate it in time for this post to go up before midnight.

Otherwise today has been decent so far. I went to Ideology and Politics. It was so freaking slow and boring. It consisted mostly of us reading out our cutesy little “interviews” we had done the previous Wednesday. So we had to go to the front of the class and tell everyone our partner’s answers.

Lather, rinse, repeat twleve times. These kids are so young that they don’t exactly have sophisticated and well developed political ideologies, and we’re all still pretty shy and nervous around each other, so for me at least, it just dragged on and on with no actual education going on. Suck city.

I did notice one interesting trend, though. One of the questions was “Do you think democracy is alive and well in Canada?” and the answers fell into two distinctive categories based on two distinctive interpretations of the question.

Some people interpreted the question as “is Canada currently a democracy?” and the answers was, of course, “yes”. They said “We have votes, our rights are protected. Of course we have democracy here in Canada!”

And more often than not, these were the kids with the thick accents who looked a little out of place. It’s a subtle difference, granted, because in this area, lots of born and raised Canadian citizens have brown skin and an accent. But my theory is still that these are people who grew up somewhere where there was no democracy, and so to them, it must have seemed like a trick question.

The other camp I will call the cynics, and they are the ones like myself who think Canadian democracy is under attack from Stephen Harper and his billionaire cronies. We interpreted the question as, in a sense, “How democratic is Canada right now?”

It was a real eye-opener in terms of different perspectives. From the point of view of someone from (like one student) Saudi Arabia, quibbling about degress of freedom and democracy must seem insane, like we are arguing over how juicy the fruits of Paradise are compared to last year’s crop.

But for those of us thoroughly in sync with this culture and its politics, these are very important issues. I truly believe democracy is under attack by people who, until now, have believed that democracy was a way to fool the sheep into being sheared, something to keep the masses diverted while the billionaire class – the private jet set – the “real people” – did whatever the fuck they wanted.

Then their golden boy, the One of Them that was supposed to deliver the White House to them so they could finally skip all that bribing of of individual politicians, lost to Obama, and people started talking about things like how the rich people won’t stop until they have literally all the money and the entire economic system collapses, bringing them to the ground like the king in Yertle the Turtle.

And now they are scared, and they have suddenly remembered why they never liked democracy in the first place because it gives the peasants some vague notion that they matter, and they want to strangle democracy to death ASAP.

Did not expect to go on that long about my political opinions. But it’s hardly a surprise, is it?

The rest of today has been comfortably banal. Finally got around to seeing if I could turn a can of baked beans into something vaguely like bean dip via blenderization. The results were not great. I should have followed my first instinct and emptied the bean juice out before blendering.

Also, in retrospect, should probably have used a lower setting than “frappe”. What can I say, I have not blendered much in my life.I have to learn this sort of thing the hard way.

All is not lost, however. The main problem with the result is that it is far too soupy. But I have cleverly put the leftovers in the fridge in hopes of not merely keeping them fresh but drying them out some as well.

Who knows, maybe it will develop an actual texture.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t worry, that’s not as deep as it seems.

It just means that today was my first day in the other Intro to Psych course I am taking, Introduction to Psychology : Basic processes. It basically covers the first half of the mondo huge and expensive textbook while the other one, Introduction to Psychology : Areas and Applications, covers the second half.

So they are kind of one course split into two. I thought it was odd that the system let me take both at the same time, and at first I wondered if it was some sort of mistake, but nope.

The questionnaire at the end of the other one even asked if I was taking both. So I guess I’m allowed.

Anyhow, this is definitely my fave prof of the group because she’s a total nerd girl. (Nerd lady?) She loves science fiction, she geeks out about psychology, and she’s a big fan of podcasts, including one I like called Radiolab.

In other words, she really seems like my kind of people.

One thing I learned from her today was something I didn’t know about a fellow by the name of William James. I had heard his name connected with psychology before but I knew nothing about him.

My professor calls him the Great Pontificator, and said he would go around expressing theories about the mind and how it works, but never actually tested them himself. And yet, and this is the crucial part, people are still proving him right to this very day, and he died in 1910.

He was also a philosopher, and a heavy hitter in the annals of pragmatism.

To sum up, he went through life thinking, talking, and defending pragmatism.

In other words he is my brand new hero. I want that kind of life. If I could have any lifestyle I wanted, carte blanche, I would choose that one. I would be able to spend all my time doing the things I am best at and happiest doing without any need to do the other boring stuff, like research and experiments.

I’m with Freud. The truth of what I say is in my reasoning and my observations about myself and others. You either agree with it or think it faulty. It is not the sort of thing that lends itself to testing.

So yeah. I wanna be like THAT guy.

What else… I learned from my prof that there is a real shattering firestorm going on in clinical research psychology right now. A small but very vocal group of thinkers are casting doubt as to whether psychology can be considered a science at all. They point to how hard it is reproduce the results of any psychological study because there are so many other variables lurking out there that you can’t control for, so merely the fact that it’s a different group of subjects makes the results no longer comparable. And then there’s the problem I have known about for a while, which is that so much of psychological research is done entirely on us people from WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) cultures, and then applied to all of humanity, which is both Eurocentric and just plain ignorant.

And so the question is wide open as to whether psychology is, in any sense, a science.

This is not new. In fact, psychology has been attacked like this since it was born. The very idea that there were things going on in people’s heads that had no direct correlation to something of the body was mocked for being nothing but fairy tales until Freud started getting results. And since then, psychology has been very defensive about its legitimacy versus things like physics and chemistry. In many ways, I see Skinner and the atrocities of behaviourism as a direct result of this animosity.

In other words, basically, psychology has been desperate to prove itself since the day it was born and apparently this era is having its own paroxysm of self-doubt and conflict. I am neither surprised nor disappointed. This has to happen.

And as much as I love psychology and therefore feel the need to defend it against all comers, the truth is that I have never been entirely comfortable with it as a science. To me, it has always lain somewhere between hard science and applied philosophy. I consider a lot of psychological research to be akin to trying to nail Jello to the wall. It is an attempt to make quantifiable and predictable things which are far too complex and dense for the job.

The human brain is the most complex object in the universe as far as we know. Ergo, using the straightforward methods that work for things like gravitation or biochemistry is going to be am exercise in futility.

But possibly not any more, now that fMRI allows us to monitor brain activity in realtime. Granted, that does not solve the problem entirely, but at least we have direct observations to go on now. And there have been some astounding advances in recording and interpreting neural activity.

In a way, though, that doesn’t matter because whether or not psychology is a “real science” or not, we will continue to study it. We cannot stop. There is no way we will stop trying to figure out what the hell is going on in that blob of goo between our ears, and if science is not the right word for it according to some people’s narrow definition of it, then we will simply have to come up with a new word for it.

Because the thing is, amidst all the fuzziness of hard psychological research, there emerges useful information that can be beneficially applied to actual human beings. Reliably.

And if that is not science, then I am curious as to what the detractors call it. It is beyond improbable, to put it mildly, to suppose that all forms of applied psychology have succeeded purely by chance.

And if you think it’s all the Placebo Effect, then I have to ask : what kind of research lead to the discovery of that effect?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.