Did program staff climb on the barn in which you students were burned and douse its roof with gasoline?
I'm not interested in the severity of what happens. I know if it can happen, it will happen. What interests me is how it can happen. Hitler was a political cult leader who got a little too popular and a little too much power... natural consequences of that social situation ensue. When there are similar patterns of totalist control, regardless of scale, abuse will occur to the maximum possible extent power allows... and where there is absolute power and no consequences (which can only happen in a dictatorship, really... you get genocide... each and every time.) Think about that.
There is no inevitable slide from one-on-one discipline to the total extermination of human life, which only regulation can prevent.
Well. First off. I didn't say one on one discipline. I said a totalist enviornment.
Now ask youself two questions:
1. Why such an enviornment exists in the first place? Because somebody desires power over others. Whether it is to help them where then cannot help themselves, or out of some malicious motive, it doesn't matter (and many would argue power tends to corrupt anyway). In order to maintain the enviornment... that particular system, it necessitates certain practices:
2. What conditions must be met to maintain that environment? For example, In any totalist system, there will be dissidents. Since it is necessary to control communication to maintain the thought reform milieu / totalist environment, those dissidents must be dealt with. In a program, kids can be coerced to comply, isolated, or if all else fails, thrown out and sent to a worse program. A program
has an "out point" that does not necessitate murder, as well as consequences to such things (such as bad press for a dead kid). Even if nothign is accomplished... why should the program care, since a longer "treatment" means more money, ultimately? In communist Russia, in the beginning, people were exiled... When it became clear that nobody particularly minded being exiled, and they would later speak out in public about the internal workings of the broken system, it became necessary for the survival of the system and the "greater good" to exterminate dissidents/suspected dissidents or imprison them for life. Since there was no authority higher than the state, and the country's communication with the outside was controlled, nobody batted an eye until many years later when books such as the Gulag Archipelago were published. Think what kind of things are necessary for a program to survive and profit in a competitive market (where abusive programs can inherantly have an edge in marketing due to their, for example, glowing "sucess stories"... where fradulent program have an edge in admissions since they had out kickbacks to ed-cons) and come to your own conclusions. Perception is everything in this business.
There were many factors working toward the Holocaust in Europe. I don't see those factors as applying here.
You don't think teenagers are the new "nigger"? For chrissakes, you can drag em behind a Truck in texas and get away with it as long as you call it "therapeutic" and claim that the
ends justify such extreme
means. It's not just teenagers, either. It's any group demonized by the state or the press. Fear is used to control.
I don't see program staff and administration turning genocidal, given the freedom. Or you. Or me.
They you are blind. Look into the Stanford Prison Experiments, or some of Milgram's experiments. Anything is possible if you rationalize the ends as justifying any means, including the deprivation others' liberties.
Holocausts are possible. They're not inevitable.
What you're saying is what every kid resents hearing: if you start smoking cigarettes, you will end up dead of an overdose. That's rarely the case. The same holds good for a person's capacity to injure another.
I share your interest in what leads to human pathology. I disagree with your belief in the inevitability of that outcome.
I'll concede that it is theoretically possible that a benevolent dictator could exist, but look at history. In what totalist dictatorship/enviornment has abuse
not occurred, usually progressing in severity until a snapping point? As i've pointed out: dissidents must be dealt with, lest the dissent spread and threaten the "greater good".
