Here is the statement of the new Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior:
If you see a behavior that seems to you to be counterproductive, perhaps you have misunderstood what the actor was trying to produce.
Corollary 1:
If you try to use logic to argue against the seemingly obvious motive for the behavior, you will fail. You need to find an argument against the actor’s actual motive.
The use of torture to gain information has been the subject of several recent posts. Experts agree that torture does not garner reliable information. Despite George W. Bush’s repeated claims, the people conducting the interrogations that did garner the useful information Bush talks about, claim that they did not use torture to get the information. They claimed the information flow stopped when torture began.
The torture regresses the subjects to an infantile state and has a tendency to erase memories from their minds. If you want to get information from somebody, you’d think that mind erasure would be the last thing you would want.
Here is where Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior comes in. We who argue against torture have fallen into the trap of believing the motive for torture is to gain information.
As described in the book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, the purpose of the torture is more to induce terror in the compatriots of the victims than it has to do with gaining information.
Another use of these torture techniques, according to the book, was specifically for erasing the memories of the victims. Sometimes the hope is to rebuild the victim into a person whose ideas meet the approval of the torturer. You can see this motive at work in claims by George Bush. The former president writes, “His understanding of Islam was that he had to resist interrogation only up to a certain point. Waterboarding was the technique that allowed him to reach that threshold, fulfill his religious duty, and then cooperate.” Bush goes on to claim succcess for waterboarding in that Zubaydah, his torture victim, gave him (Bush) a direct instruction, “You must do this (torture) for all the brothers.”
In South America during the period when many countries were being ruled by military juntas, torture was used to try to change the minds of citizens who objected to the extreme free market economics that the dictators were imposing on their countries. The people who objected to these economic policies were considered to be a cancer on the society, They had to be either cured or removed.
Up until the time of the military takeovers, the University of Chicago economics department under Milton Friedman had been training South American economists to foster pure free market economics in South America. When years of these attempts had failed, they had to resort to military takeover and then brute force and torture. This is how the students of Milton Friedman finally gained the power over economic policy that they had been seeking.
When you hear today’s Republicans touting the virtues of unfettered free market capitalism, you should bear in mind what could happen if you don’t go along with the idea.
