conditioning
As this administration violates norms nearly every day, what matters most is its consistency. Each new transgression adds to a body of anti-democratic moves that condition us to accept aberrance and become inured to it. What was once unthinkable has become predictable, even expected. On any given day, the cruelty and crudeness that this president exhibits have had a numbing effect. We are no longer surprised, and some of us have chosen to glory in it.
Conditioning is a psychological tool that helps change and then mold behavior. Ivan Pavlov and B.F. Skinner are generally considered the founders of the Behaviorist school of psychology. Their work studied how to modify and change human behavior using a series of stimuli repeatedly to effect change. Children are especially susceptible to the theory, as schools often use the Behaviorist toolkit to reinforce good behavior and punish bad.
Sometimes our history provides convenient myths to shape the way we view past events, to embellish for the sake of telling a more compelling rather than complete story about our past. Thanksgiving, for example, is a great American story embellished by myth. We have been taught that indigenous Americans celebrated the first harvest with the Pilgrims who had arrived in 1620, about how they endured a harsh and deadly first winter. Sickness and starvation left only about 52 Pilgrims to celebrate the next fall’s harvest, aided by friendly indigenous Americans. As the story goes, the Native Americans had helped save the small colony. The alliance was based on mutual need and an abiding respect for one another. The story taught in schools with vignettes drawn and colored in, taped on school walls and windows of turkeys and maize, of friendship and cooperation, is mostly myth:
The myth is that friendly Indians, unidentified by tribe, welcome the Pilgrims to America, teach them how to live in this new place, sit down to dinner with them and then disappear. They hand off America to white people so they can create a great nation dedicated to liberty, opportunity and Christianity for the rest of the world to profit. That’s the story—it’s about Native people conceding to colonialism. It’s bloodless and in many ways an extension of the ideology of Manifest Destiny...
(The) Wampanoags had a century of contact with Europeans–it was bloody and it involved slave raiding by Europeans. At least two and maybe more Wampanoags, when the Pilgrims arrived, spoke English, had already been to Europe and back and knew the very organizers of the Pilgrims’ venture.
— Smithsonian Magzine, “The Myths of the Thanksgiving Story and the Lasting Damage They Imbue,” by Claire Bugos
Depending on who writes it and how well we have been conditioned to accept it, history is largely what we choose to write for ourselves and others to believe in the best of times, and at other times, what we wish to forget about our past.
the Hitler predicate
From the moment Donald Trump descended into our politics, he began conditioning us into believing that there are competing truths. Lies that would have made us blush now make half of us think again— the rest scratching our heads. Cruelty we would have found unconscionable in the past is now tolerated as legitimate policy solutions. Crises are manufactured precisely to inflict pain and hardships on the most vulnerable among us. The poor, immigrants, and children have become fodder for his ego— no need to list the examples here. We are inundated daily with the deterioration of our good sense and better judgment.
Writers are warned to avoid overstatement and hyperbole, especially when evaluating this president’s motives and behavior. The most common comparisons we are asked to avoid have been those likening our current president to fascist dictator Adolph Hitler. The German Führer conditioned his stormtroopers to believe Jews, along with Poles, Slavs, and Romani populations, were subhuman— beneath the Aryan race he deemed superior. The result was to condition the German nation to accept inhumanity as a legitimate political reality.
In a New York Times article this week, Aleander Nazaryan relates the story behind the 1941 photo known as “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa” and the attempt to identify the Nazi soldier who is about to murder an unarmed, innocent man on behalf of his country. The indifference of the shooter is further accentuated by the audience of seemingly unfazed onlookers who watch with disinterest as if the death of innocents is so commonplace as to be routine. Their blank stares and body language suggest the demise of their own humanity. The article cites another author’s insight into the mindset of those who watched but did nothing to stop the evil:
Dr. Browning’s 1992 book “Ordinary Men” upended how scholars understand the Nazi henchmen who murdered six million Jews and millions of other people they considered opponents, including homosexuals, communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Imbued with years of propaganda and discouraged from independent thought, many of them committed genocide out of what they perversely believed to be professional obligation.
— NYTimes, “At Last, a Name for the Murderous Face in a Holocaust Photo,” by Alxander Nazaryan
The article notes that the Nazi soldier was finally identified as Jakobus Onnen, 34, a former teacher from the town of Tichelwarf. Nazaryan adds that the victim and photographer remain a mystery. I am reminded this week of Trump’s response to the ad by Democratic legislators, warning the military of their duty to refuse to obey illegal orders. Trump labeled the warning seditious and called for an immediate investigation of the Democrats, suggesting that their act was worthy of hanging. I wonder at what point a young German soldier would have been affected by similar threats passed through a chain of command conditioned to follow orders or else.
trump unhinged
Meanwhile, this president has been seen in increasingly unhinged moments, calling for mass deportations, asking for National Guardsmen to shoot at peaceful protesters, and insulting reporters, calling them stupid and pigs because they dare question his actions. His disregard for human rights in Ukraine, Gaza, and Venezuela is matched by his similar disregard for those who oppose him at home.
His pardon this week of Honduran ex-president Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted of taking bribes from Mexican druglord “El Chapo,” underscores the insincerity of his purported war on drugs that has led to the murders of at least 83 people in opposition to international law, which by law should require interdiction and due process. As I think of Secretary Hegseth’s order this week to kill 3 men who survived the initial American assault on their fishing boat, I wonder about the American soldier who carried it out. Did he question the order’s legality, or was he conditioned to respond as a good soldier? If, as this appears to be a violation of international law, then who is to blame for a war crime committed to satisfy his leader’s lust for inflicting pain without mercy? No, this president is not Hitler; he just acts like him.
Indifference in the face of evil
All this brings us back to the photo, and the look on the faces of the German soldiers who have been conditioned to accept the extraordinary breach of humanity, the complete disregard for personal responsibility, as they watch the killing of an innocent man. Dr. Browning noted that Hitler’s followers were ordinary men inured to hatred by a leader with unusual powers of persuasion:
“These are not nuts,” Dr. Browning said. “They are committed true believers, but they basically are not dumb people, and they’re not crazy in the sense that they’re out of touch with reality.” Rather, years of antisemitic, nationalistic propaganda closed off whatever was left of their basic humanity.
America has been conditioned to believe many things about itself-- most of them true. The half-truths and the bad in our history are a matter for our national conscience to sort through. The Founders spoke of it as the process of developing a more perfect union using democratic institutions and the lawful processes of protest and debate.
Trump’s revised vision of America, inappropriately stated in his slogan to make it great again, begins with forgetting who we are to condition us to believe who he thinks we were. Only in a world without conscience can he be right.
