Torturing Someone Needn't Hurt Your Self-Esteem

As you probably know, the Wall Street Journal says that Bush administration lawyers drafted a report on what interrogation techniques could be used on prisoners. The report explained that regular pain doesn't count as torture. For it to be torture, you see, it "must be of such a high level of intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure."

There seems to be a problem here. Do you see what it is?

The problem is: if the pain and suffering inflicted aren't "difficult for the subject to endure," then WHAT'S THE POINT? If the pain and suffering are easy to endure, then the prisoners will just easily endure them and not tell you anything.

This seems confusing -- because, of course, the techniques the report was sanctioning were "difficult for the subject to endure." The US government wouldn't bother with them otherwise. Yet the authors of this report claimed they weren't.

The explanation for this weirdness is found in human psychology. Human beings must maintain a positive self-image, no matter what. No one, no matter how evil he is, conceives of himself as evil. Hitler was sure he was doing the right thing. I mean, what would you do if subhumans were trying to destroy the Master Race? You'd build gigantic death camps, that's what.

So, the reports' authors had to reconcile two competing drives:

1. Their desire to torture others.
2. Their desire to think of themselves as good people.

They ran these two desires through their little monkey brains and let them fight it out. At the end, their competing desires agreed on a rationalization that made no sense whatsoever. But the important thing for people like this isn't making sense. The important thing is torturing, bombing, killing, etc., while still believing yourself to be extremely nice.

The authors of this report don't know it, but their mentality is exactly the same as many slave owners in the American South. Sometimes the children of slave owners would witness slaves being whipped, and become upset. It just seemed so mean. Their parents would tell them: Sure, this looks bad, what with the bleeding and shrieking and begging for mercy and all. But you see, Africans have a different kind of nervous system than we white people do. They're less sensitive. So being whipped doesn't hurt slaves like it would hurt you or me.

Which must have made some of the children wonder: if it doesn't hurt, then WHAT'S THE POINT? Do you just need to exercise your whipping arm?