Robert W. Rieber - Manufacturing social distress: psychopathy in everyday life

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ISSN 1574-048X

ISBN 978-1-4899-0055-5 ISBN 978-1-4899-0053-1 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-1-4899-0053-1

Springer Science+Business Media New York 1997

Originally published by Plenum Press, New York in 1997

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1997

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher

www.springer.com

This book is dedicated to my family and to all those who have dedicated their life to the principle let right be done

FOREWORD
Toward the Psychology of Malefaction

This is a book about human wickedness.

I would like to identify two obstacles in the path that this book seeks to traverse. One obstacle is an inappropriate scientism; the other is an inappropriate moralism.

There is a kind of scientism that prevents us from seeing that human beings are responsible for what happens on the planet. It is a view that, in the name of science, downplays the role of human beings as agents in what takes place.

This view is often expressed in a paradigm that regards human conduct as the dependent variable, while anything that impinges on the human being is considered the independent variable. The paradigm further takes the relationship between the dependent and independent variable to be the result of natural law. It characteristically ignores the possibility that individual or collective decision or policy, generated by human beings and not by natural law, is and can be regulatory of conduct.

I can best indicate the second obstacle by an anecdote. Some years ago I was invited to participate in a symposium to consider the Holocaust. I was asked to consider the Holocaust from the point of view of a psychologist. At the time, I was very interested in the history of psychology and was concerned with the radically different canon of method that the latter required. Psychologists at the time had come to the point of conceiving of the experimental method as the acme of achievement of the scientific method. History, of course, did not lend itself to study by the experimental method.

What I thought would be interesting would be to make a study of Hitlers Mein Kampf as a psychological document. This meant to take the writing of the document itself as a form of conduct, and attempt to make inferences back to the mind that was behind this conductor. My effort, much as that of many of the observations and speculations that Rieber cites, was to come somehow to a better understanding of the mind that was behind the wickedness we refer to as the Holocaust. Note that I have used the terms wickedness and understanding in the same sentence. My intention was that an increase in the understanding of wickedness might be a step toward preventing wickedness.

I did not fully realize that for many those two words could not go together. I certainly did not realize the extent to which my effort would offend. The very idea that anyone should try to understand Hitler in any way, understanding taken to be antithetical to condemnation, seemed to some to be an insult to the memory of those who suffered and died in the Holocaust. Hitler did not, as it were, deserve understanding. For many, understanding seemed to imply something like sympathy, apology, forgiveness, condoning, redemption, and so on. The reaction was so strong that I decided to withdraw my presentation from a printed version of the proceedings of the symposium. I was not sure that I had actually advanced our understanding that much. And I had no wish to add to the pain and suffering that had followed from Hitlers actions. I still wonder whether I did not err at that time with respect to the publication decision.

Riebers efforts might meet these obstacles. The following observation might be made with respect to both of them.

Consider where we are in history. Our civilization began some 6,000 years ago. The great agonies of this long history, and much of the time before that, have beenperhaps oversimplifying, but not greatlyoverwork and material want. Somehow, now for the first time in human history, we have come to the point where, in principle, no one need ever again suffer from overwork or material want.

The in principle, of course, refers only to our technical capacity. For there is a vast gulf between in principle and in fact. Wickedness is one of the factors that keeps the gulf open. The closing of that gulf should be our major world project.

Wickedness is a term mostly to be found in childrens books these days. Let me use another term. Let us say malefaction, meaning the making of bad things happen, of the doing of wrong. It is a parallel term in some respects to the term that Rieber uses in the title of this book, manufacture. Manufacture is the making of things by hand. Rieber, however, uses the term metaphorically.

Riebers book takes malefaction as a reality to be investigated. He opens the doorway to a new systematic scientific discipline, which might rightly be called the psychology of malefaction. I cannot imagine a discipline more needed for the coming age.

D avid B akan

Professor Emeritus, York University

PREFACE

This book is about the trials and tribulations of postmodern society. The postmodern lifestyle, with its current tendency to periodically reinvent itself, suffers from an unfortunate institutionalized ailmenttrained disability. Within this context, the story of the life of the mind emerges as a dialectic between in nomine Domini and in nomine diaboli.

Given the free-willing nature of the life of the mind, the great book tells us that there are serpents even in the Garden of Eden. Pop culture as well as the intelligentsia seem to be telling us that today these serpents are developing an immunity to guilt and conscience, and that this immunity is spreading within world culture like a social virus. The anxiety and desperation brought about by these circumstances give rise to magical solutions, high technology, escape mechanisms, virtual reality, and (most recently) just listening to Prozac.

All around us people appear to be in dubious conflict. That is, they fear that they are being or may be victimized, while at the same time, they seek the secondary gains of victim status. In the meantime, all this is taking place in the context where social institutions that should regulate and stabilize the social order instead irresponsibly deregulate and disintegrate under the flag of freedom. An atmosphere of circus mania litigation permeates the social climate, while persons in high places attempt to assure us that they can be trusted.

In broad brush strokes, this is the essence of the subject matter of this book on psychosocial distress. A slow and satisfying insight about how we institutionalize stress began to generate in my mind in 1980. This vision was clearly the outcome of many interests that had to be clarified and connected. The dominant theme of my thinking and writing for many years has been the identification of important broken connections (i.e., body-mind, nurture-nature, cognition, emotion, and activity, etc.) that may be found in the literature of psychology in particular and the social sciences in general. The unraveling of ideas that attempt to construct a critical analysis of society at large is in any case a self-searching endeavor with many influences.

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