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By Root 2351 0

while forcing them to simulate sex, sensory deprivation, water deprivation, forcing them to kneel or stand for hours, attaching electrical wires to their genitals, forcing them to stand on boxes holding electrical wires and telling them that if they step off the box they will die, putting a saddle on at least one woman in her seventies and riding her around while telling her that she is a donkey, and of course good old-fashioned smackyface leading to their deaths. His justification? “You got to understand, although it seems harsh, the Iraqis they only understand force. If you try to talk to them one on one as a normal person, they won’t respect you, they won’t do what you want, prisoner or just normal person on the street. So you’ve got to be forceful with them in some ways.”425 If you don’t beat them, they won’t do what you want: the key to understanding our culture’s relationship ethos in one phrase.

Slotkin could have predicted his justification. By now we should be able to as well.

But that’s not really why I bring it up now. I bring it up now because I don’t want to fall into the same trap Slotkin describes. In some ways this is similar to my concern over claims to virtue: a daily round of self-examination. I don’t want to say, “Just this once I need to deviate from my peaceful ways to enter into defensive warfare” unless I’m sure that a) my ways really are peaceful; b) the warfare really is defensive, and c) this deviation really is a need. At the same time I don’t want to be narcissistic and short-sighted enough to presume that my own sense of self-righteousness—After all, says the pacifist™, I choose the moral high ground—is more important than the survival of salmon, murrelets, migratory songbirds, my nonhuman neighbors whose land this was long before I was born. Nor do I want to choose my own self-righteousness over the survival, ultimately, of human beings. Because if we continue on this same path, it is not only murrelets who will be exterminated. Human beings will not survive.

Sometimes I think we think too much. Sometimes I think we don’t think very clearly. Usually I think it’s both at the same time. Our thinking, which so often isn’t thinking, makes us crazy, ties us in knots. This is not accidental. It is common to abusive situations. As Lundy Bancroft, former codirector of Emerge, the nation’s first therapeutic program for abusive men, writes in his book Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men, “In one important way, an abusive man works like a magician. His tricks largely rely on getting you to look off in the wrong direction, distracting your attention so that you won’t notice where the real action is. . . . He leads you into a convoluted maze, making your relationship with him a labyrinth of twists and turns. He wants you to puzzle over him, to try to figure him out, as though he were a wonderful but broken machine for which you need only to find and fix the malfunctioning parts to bring it roaring to its full potential. His desire, though he may not admit it even to himself, is that you wrack your brain in this way so that you won’t notice the patterns and logic of his behavior, the consciousness behind the craziness.” 426

As I tried to make clear in Language and Culture, nearly everything in civilization leads us away from being able to think clearly and from being able to feel. If we were able to do either, we would not allow those in power to kill the world, to kill our nonhuman neighbors, to kill humans we love, to kill us. And once we have been inculcated into this thinking that is not thinking, this feeling that is not feeling, the culture does not need to do much to continue to confuse us. We will continue to confuse ourselves with all of our not-thinking and not-feeling. We will do this gladly, because if we did not confuse ourselves, if we allowed ourselves to think in a way that really was thinking and to feel in a way that really was feeling, we would suddenly understand that we need to stop the horrors that surround us, and we would suddenly understand that