Specialization
(From The People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, by M. Scott Peck)
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Preface to group evil
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For many years it has seemed to me that human groups tend to behave in much the same ways as human individuals—except at a level that is more primitive and immature than one might expect. Why this is so—why the behaviour of groups is strikingly immature—why they are, from a psychological standpoint, less than the sum of their parts—is a question beyond my capacity to answer. Of one thing I am certain, however: that there is more than one right answer. The phenomenon of group immaturity is—to use a psychiatric term—>overdetermined. This is to say that it is the result of multiple causes. One of those causes is the problem of specialization.
Specialization is one of the greatest advantages of groups. There are ways groups can function with far greater efficiency than individuals. Because its employees are specialized into executives and designers and tool- and diemakers and assembly-line workers (who are in turn specialized), General Motors can produce an enormous number of cars. Our extraordinarily high standard of living is entirely based on the specialization of our society. The fact that I have the knowledge and the time to write this book is a direct result of the fact that I am a specialist within our community, utterly dependent on farmers, mechanics, publishers, and booksellers for my welfare. I can hardly consider specialization in itself evil. On the other hand, I am thoroughly convinced that much of the evil of our times is related to specialization and that we desperately need to develop an attitude of suspicious caution toward it. I think we need to treat specialization with the same degree of distrust and safeguards that we bring to nuclear reactors.
Specialization contributes to the immaturity of groups and their potential for evil through several different mechanisms. For the moment I will restrict myself to the consideration of only one such mechanism: the fragmentation of conscience. If at the time of MyLai, wandering through the halls of the Pentagon, I stopped to talk with the men responsible for directing the manufacture of napalm and its transportation to Vietnam in the form of bombs, and if I questioned these men about the morality of the war and hence the morality of what they were engaged in, this is the kind of reply I invariably received:
Oh, we appreciate your concerns, yes, we do, but I'm afraid you've come to the wrong people. We're not the department you want. This is the ordnance branch. We just supply the weapons—we don't determine how and where they're used. That's policy. What you want to do is talk to the policy people down the hall.And if I followed this suggestion and expressed the same concerns in the policy branch, this was the response:Oh, we understand that there are broad issues involved, but I'm afraid they're beyond our purview. We simply determine how the war will be conducted—not whether it will be conducted. You see, the military is only an agency of the executive branch. The military does only what it's told to do. These broad issues are decided at the White House level, not here. That's where you need to take your concerns.So it went.Whenever the roles of individuals within a group become specialized, it becomes both possible and easy for the individual to pass the moral buck to some other part of the group. In this way, not only does the individual forsake his conscience but the conscience of the group as a whole can become so fragmented and diluted as to be nonexistent. We will see this fragmentation again and again, one way or another, in the discussion that follows. The plain fact of the matter is that any group will remain inevitably potentially conscienceless and evil until such time as each and every individual holds himself or herself directly responsible for the behaviour of the whole group—the organism—of which he or she is a part. We have not yet begun to arrive at that point.
Bearing in mind the psychological immaturity of groups, we shall be examining aspects of both the MyLai crimes: the atrocities themselves and their cover-up. The two crimes are quite interwoven. Although the cover-up may seem less atrocious than the atrocities, they are part of the same ball of wax. How is it that so many individuals could have participated in such a monstrous evil without any of them being so conscience-stricken as to be compelled to confess?
The cover-up was a gigantic group lie. Lying is simultaneously one of the symptons and one of the causes of evil, one of the blossoms and one of the roots. It is why this book is entitled People of the Lie. Until now we have been considering individual people of the lie. Now we will also be considering a whole people. Certainly, by virtue of their extraordinarily common—that is, communual—participation in the cover-up, the men of Task Force Barker were a
people of the lie. By the time we are finished we may even conclude that the American people, at least during those war years, were also a people of the lie.As with any lie, the primary motive of the cover-up was fear. The individuals who had committed the crimes—who had pulled the triggers or given the orders—obviously had reason to fear reporting what they had done. Court-martial awaited them. But what of the much larger number who only witnessed the atrocities yet also said nothing of that
something rather dark and bloody? What did they have to fear?Anyone who thinks for a while about the nature of group pressure will realize that for a member of Task Force Barker to report the crime outside of that group would require great courage. Whoever did so would be labelled a
squealerorstool pigeon. There is no more dreadful label that can be applied to a person than that. Stool pigeons often get murdered. At the very least they are ostracized. To the ordinary American civilian, ostracism may not seem such a horrible fate.So, if you get kicked out of one group, you can just join another,may be the reaction. But remember that a member of the military is not free to just join another group. He can't leave the military at all until his enlistment is up. Desertion itself is an enormous crime. So he is stuck in the military and, indeed, in his particular military group, except at the discretion of the authorities. Beyond this the military does other things quite deliberately to intensify the power of group pressure within its ranks. From the standpoint of group dynamics and from military group dynamics in particular, it is not bizarre that the members of Task Force Barker failed to report the group's crimes. Nor is it surprising that the man who finally did report the crimes was neither a member of the Task Force group nor even a member of the military at the time he did the reporting.Yet I suspect there is another extremely significant reason that the crimes of MyLai went unreported for so long. Not having spoken with the individuals involved, I offer it purely as conjecture. But I did speak with many, many soldiers who were in Vietnam during those years, and I am deeply familiar with the attitudes prevailing in the military at that time. My profound suspicion, therefore, is that to a considerable extent the members of Task Force Barker did not confess their crimes simply because they were not aware that they had committed them. They knew, of course, what they had done, but whether they appreciated the meaning and nature of what they had done is another matter entirely. I suspect that many of them did not even consider what they had done a crime. They did not confess because they did not realize they had anything to confess. Some undoubtedly hid their guilt. But others, I suspect, had no guilt to hide.
How can this be? How can a sane man commit murder and not know he has murdered? How is it that a person who is not basically evil may participate in monstrous evil without the awareness of what he has done? It is this question that will serve as a focal point for the discussion that follows on the relationship between individual and group evil. In attempting to answer this question, I will proceed in the consideration of evil up the ladder from the level of the individual to the level of the small group (Task Force Barker) to the levels of ever larger groups.
The individual under stress
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Group dynamics: dependency and narcissism
Individuals not only routinely regress in times of stress, they also regress in group settings. If you do not believe this, watch a Lions Club meeting or a college reunion. One aspect of this regression is the phenomenon of dependency on the leader. It is quite remarkable. Assemble any small group of strangers—say a dozen or so—and almost the very first thing that happens is that one or two of them rapidly assume the role of group leader. It does not happen by a rational process of conscious election; it just happens naturally—spontaneously and unconsciously. Why does it happen so quickly and easily? One reason, of course, is that some individuals are either more fit to lead than others or else desire to lead more than the rest. But the more basic reason is the converse: most people would rather be followers. More than anything else, it is probably a matter of laziness. It is simply easy to follow, and much easier to be a follower than a leader. There is no need to agonize over complex decisions, plan ahead, exercise initiative, risk unpopularity, or exert much courage.
The problem is that the role of follower is the role of child. The individual adult as individual is master of his own ship, director of his destiny. But when he assumes the role of follower he hands over to the leader his power: his authority over himself and his maturity as decision-maker. He becomes psychologically dependent on the leader as a child is dependent on its parents. In this way there is a profound tendency for the average individual to emotionally regress as soon as he becomes a group member.
From the standpoint of a therapist who leads a therapy group, this regression is not welcomed. It is, after all, the therapist's task to encourage, foster, and develop the maturity of his or her patients. Hence much of the work of a group therapist will be to confront and challenge the patients' dependency within the group, then to step aside so that the patient may risk assuming a leadership position and thereby learn how to exercise mature power in a group setting. A therapy group that has been successfully led will be one in which all the members have come to share equally in the leadership of the group according to their unique individual capacities. The ideal mature therapy group is a group composed entirely of leaders.
Most groups, however, do not exist for the purpose of psychotherapy or personal growth. The purpose of the First Platoon, Charlie Company of Task Force Barker was not to train leaders but to kill Viet Cong. Indeed, for its purpose the military has developed and fostered a style of group leadership that is essentially the opposite of a therapy group. It is an old maxim that soldiers are not supposed to think. Leaders are not elected from within the group but are designated from above and deliberately cloaked in the symbols of authority. Obedience is the number-one military discipline. The dependency of the soldier on his leader is not simply encouraged, it is mandated. By nature of its mission the military designedly and probably realistically fosters the naturally occurring regressive dependency of individuals within its groups.
In situations such as MyLai the individual soldier is in an almost impossible situation. On one hand, he may vaguely remember being told in some classroom that he is not required to forsake his conscience and should have the mature independence of judgment—even the duty—to refuse to obey an illegal order. On the other hand, the military organization and its group dynamics do everything to make it just about as painful and difficult and unnatural as possible for the soldier to exercise independence of judgment or practice disobedience. It is unclear whether Charlie Company's orders were to
kill anything that moved,or towaste the village.But if they were, is it surprising that the troops followed those orders of their leaders? Would we have expected them to mutiny en masse instead?If mutiny en masse seems farfetched, could we not at least have anticipated that a few individuals would have been brave enough to rebel against their leadership? Not necessarily. I have already made note of the fact that patterns of group behaviour are remarkably similar to the behaviour of an individual. This is because a group is an organism. It tends to function as a single entity. A group of individuals behave as a unit because of what is called group cohesiveness. There are profound forces at work within a group to keep its individual members together and in line. When these forces to cohesiveness fail, the group begins to disintegrate and ceases to be a group.
Probably the most powerful of these group cohesive forces is narcissism. In its simplest and most benign form, this is manifested in group pride. As the members feel proud of their group, so the group feels proud of itself. Once again, the military deliberately does more than most organizations to foster pride within its groups. It does so through a variety of means, such as developing group insignia—unit standard flags, shoulder patches, even special uniform deviations such as the green berets—and encouraging group competition, ranging from intramural sports to the comparison of unit body counts. It is no accident that the common term for group pride is a military one: esprit de corps.
A less benign but practically universal form of group narcissism is what might be called
enemy creation, or hatred of theout-group. We can see this naturally occurring in children as they first learn to develop groups. The groups become cliques. Those who do not belong to the group (the club or clique) are despised as being inferior or evil or both. If a group does not already have an enemy, it will most likely create one in short order. Task Force Barker, of course, had a predesignated enemy: the Viet Cong. But the Viet Cong were largely indigenous to the South Vietnamese people, from whom they were often impossible to distinguish. Almost inevitably the specified enemy was generalized to include all Vietnamese, so that the average American soldier did not just hate the Viet Cong, he hatedGooksin general.It is almost common knowledge that the best way to cement group cohesiveness is to ferment the group's hatred of an external enemy. Deficiencies within the group can be easily and painlessly overlooked by focusing attention on the deficiencies or
sinsof the out-group. Thus the Germans under Hittler could ignore their domestic problems by scapegoating the Jews. And when American troops were failing to fight effectively in New Guinea in World War II, the command improved their esprit de corps by showing them movies of Japanese committing atrocious acts. But this use of narcissism—whether unconscious or deliberate—is potentially evil. We have extensively examined the ways in which evil individuals will flee self-examination and guilt by blaming and attempting to destroy whatever or whoever highlights their deficiencies. Now we see that the same malignant narcissistic behaviour comes naturally to groups.From this it should be obvious that the failing group is the one likely to behave most evilly. Failure wounds our pride, and it is the wounded animal who is vicious. In the healthy organism failure will be a stimulus to self-examination and criticism. But since the evil individual cannot tolerate self-criticism, it is in time of failure that he or she will inevitably lash out one way or another. And so it is with groups. Group failure and the stimulation of group self-criticism act to damage group pride and cohesiveness. Group leaders in all places and ages have therefore routinely bolstered group cohesiveness in times of failure by whipping the group's hatred for foreigners or the
enemy.
Returning to the specific subject of our examination, we will remember that at the time of MyLai the operation of Task Force Barker had been a failure. After more than a month in the field the enemy had still not been engaged. Yet the Americans had slowly and regularly sustained casualties. The enemy body count, however, was zero. Failing in its mission—which was to kill in the first place—the group leadership was all the more hungry for blood. Given the circumstances, the hunger had become indiscriminate, and the troops would mindlessly satisfy it.