I think
that most people are aware of torture in the post-9/11 period, but are
so detached from life that they don't understand it nor understand how
they can change it.
Torture
for me is a lack of empathy, which stems from a lack of empathic neural
constructs: spindle and mirror cells. It is mental degradation in the
sense that "evil" is sometimes though of as missing "good." (John the
Scot)
I write
about it in my wiki document Empathy
Model. A key part of the model is a layered approach adopted from
the Internet Protocol stack, that shows complex communication as an
abstraction of completely independent events.
If the
good stuff is missing in the neural layers, the upper layers, which
include interrelations and society, will be sick -- exactly how I would
describe torture. Torturers are just really bad people who are missing
what is good in their basic psychology, and they are not going to
change because they do not have the basic components to be normal.
There
may be therapeutic relief, which I discuss from a recent experience in the supporting
empathy discussion group on Care2, but relief is not a cure. The
cure is to enlighten and enable the vast majority of normal people to
resist the minority that operates in a continual state of exploitation
and abuse on a person by person basis. Revolutionary resistance at
every step, sort of like Christianity initially was, but with a
Scientific basis.
At
present, suspicion is pointed towards the concept of the fascistic
nature of oligarchy as designed by Plato, telling us that our problem
may be very ancient, but not so ancient as to be evolutionary. The
problem is actually a decay of evolution; which brought us the necessary
neurology for our high-level empathy.
Another
area for blame seems to be a Libertarian drive to attempt to give
anarchistic freedom to capital exploitation to remove capital from any
responsibility for its actions.
The APA
is oligarchic in that it descends directly from Plato's school, and it
carefully preserves the basic beliefs of Plato and his followers. If
so, the APA cannot be fixed; its sickness is far to ancient to be
updated.
This may
be true about the entire institutional structure of what we think of as
society and civilization. What we have been taught to think of as good
and stabilizing is in reality a departure from the natural path that
has been meant for humanity, and the World as a whole.
