What is the impulse to torture? The thought that humans have since unrecorded history delighted in various brutalities visited upon their fellow humans offers a dark window into the soul of humanity. It seems to me that to understand the human psyche, one cannot only focus on the virtues but also the vices.
If you peer through that dark window, you see such levels of squalor and gaping nihilism that your body shudders with its inhumanity. Our closest and fast-closing grand tableau of torture is the spectacle of the Second World War, where man’s inhumanity to man was given free reign for half a decade. Aside from the ‘normal’ excesses of battlefield violence were the careful distillations of hatred and misinformation that led to the Nazi excesses of eugenics, the Holocaust, and industrial-scale political persecution and incarceration, such as in the Soviet gulags. It was high season for sadists and their enablers. But such is human nature that these willing executioners continue to circulate like cancer cells, even in healthy political bodies, waiting for a lapse or weakness in the immune system that suppresses them.
The only way to ensure that such times do not repeat themselves, certainly beyond the window of living history and its survivors, is to foster a culture of continuous open discussion about the darker impulses in human nature and, by so doing, bring them into the light. Thank God for cultures that continue to encourage critical thinking in political discourse and civic engagement at all levels of free society. Neither of these impulses are, however, givens in the modern world, and the drip-drip creep towards self-censorship in an increasingly paranoid information space is every bit as dangerous as the full-throated endorsement of authoritarians and their regimes.
Torture takes many forms, but implicit in all forms is the imbalance of power between the torturer and the tortured. In modern warfare, this can be seen in the violent targeting of non-combatants, i.e., civilians, by combatants, whether at close distance or long-range assault by missile, bomb, or increasingly, drone. Creating terror is the point, and paralysis is its objective.
There is, however, another form of torture, which is spreading perniciously around the world. It’s less obvious and thrives on the modern disease of inequality. It’s the acceleration of wealth transfer that drives scarcity and beggars ordinary people trying to live a life of dignity in a system that increasingly disavows it. There has always been a war upon the poor, which is most evident in what one sneering capitalist called'shithole countries’. Such corrupt states have ruling classes that enjoy fabulous exclusive wealth compared to their ordinary countrymen and maintain it through suppression of human rights and depriving people of access to the most basic requirements for life. These kleptocracies are remarkably durable, but they also can collapse, as has been witnessed recently in Syria.
The bigger question remains about the future of the Western alliance of democracies that, until now, has encompassed the UK, the Commonwealth, and most importantly, the United States acting as guarantor of the Pax Americana. America under its present administration is pushing hard to dismantle the regulatory state, side with authoritarian regimes in the East, and remove any safeguards that uphold the largest bastion of free speech and self-determination, the middle class. In their absence, complex democracies like the US can easily devolve into the kind of dystopias that Hollywood has been selling us for decades now.
In a place like Syria, torture and its brutal application were the motive force behind its regime. In America, the torture starts by deconstructing the guardrails, socially and financially disenfranchising and excluding ordinary people, and creating a new slave class to serve their plutocrat masters. States exist, among other things, to protect all their members, not just the powerful and influential.
Based on what I see happening now in America, it has become a country for sale to the highest bidder, someone whose financial influence tipped the balance in favor of a candidate better fitted for prison than the presidency. The fact that 100 million estimated American voters chose not to vote at all suggests that the main work has already been done for the door of democracy to be kicked down. In real terms, it’s hard to imagine any way back for America, in spite of the millions who still believe in it. What that means for the rest of the world is still open for debate, but the future looks darker and darker.
America is now submitting itself to the whims of the world’s richest man, who clearly has little empathy for the poorest. His pronatalist views, contempt for the country’s constitution, and right-wing sympathies all suggest a very dark future for that country and, by default, the civilized world. The Nazi regime were big proponents of science and applied the same thinking to the remodeling of society divided by slaves and Aryan masters.
We laud scientists in this era, but it’s good to remember that the scientific impulse also brought us such vile specimens as Dr. Josef Mengele performing torture on children and Ernst Von Braun, the rocket scientist who built rockets to terrorize the free world before he conveniently opened the door for US space exploration. Interestingly, there is another historic figure whose iconic name is the automotive brand backed by the same usurper of the US: Tesla.
Nikola Tesla died in poverty, but his technological vision laid the path for the AC electrification of the world, as well as wireless transmission, induction motors, and more. In another century, he might have become the richest man in the world and developed aspirations as a politician. Certain ideas, like malignant cells, continue to circulate. We can only hope that the following world visions laid out by Telsa in 1937 can never come to pass:
The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now, it will no longer occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.
Is this the future you envision? Torture takes many forms, but making it a waking reality for the majority of the world population can still be avoided by embracing our humanity and rejecting the cold, tortuous embrace of technologists and their twisted agendas.
