The hiring filters for most of the security services seem to select for people who consider following orders to be the most American thing they could possibly do.
The FBI and CIA dont seem to weed out poor quality candidates maybe they are placing to much reliance on patriotic hooha and polygraphs and not doing proper vetting checks.
The uk found out the hard way that he seems a good sort of chap belongs to all the right sort of clubs isn't agood selection criteria for the SS and SIS the hard way with the Famous 5 (Philby Maclean Burgess Blunt and Caincross)
Ok sure, plenty of cogs in the wheel following orders. But what about the judges? What about the leaders? The people we elect into office? Where is the accountability?
> judges? What about the leaders? The people we elect into office?
Judges are appointed by the president, and confirmed by the senate[1] (I guess that means voted on by the senate after a high ranking civil servant decides they would make a good judge) so if this person disagrees with the policy of the senators, there's a good chance he's not going to get into power. The people who are in office are normally so caught up in this sort of thing that they would end their own careers by speaking out about it, or worse, be called traitors of their own country and hunted by the NSA/FBI (see Snowden). The problem is once you know about it, you're already in deep, and your head will roll if it rolls. For many people, that sacrifice is too much to make. If you have a family, you ruin their lives too remember. All your friends, parents, relatives lives will be turned upside down at the same time... Is that something you would risk and give up if you were in this position?
The standard argument I've heard against "accountability" is that "leaders" won't "lead" properly if they know they could be held accountable for the consequences after leaving "office". It's utter bullshit, and there is absolutely no way for any of us to change it, or do anything about it.
I'd call for us to 'scientificize' the shit out of politics, but it would do no good. We all know what an utter failure the social sciences are when it comes to the scientific method. Mainly due to unpredictable human nature and the vagueness of social and political policy.
That said, if the people hired already have a righteous belief in a cause they think they are serving then they are much more likely to go along with things that, from the outside, seem quite wrong.
I love these sorts of articles. They criticize Milgram for a lack of scientific integrity, but nobody seems to point out that prisons aren't a bastion of scientific integrity, either. If anything, Milgram's sloppiness made his study a better model of the institutions in question. He allowed his human biases to overcome his duty -- which, as his own results show, is exactly how these things happen.
Milgram's experiment wasn't about prisons (at least not directly), and it didn't really seek to model any particular situation. It just sought to examine people's response to authority, and the setting chosen was merely a convenient way to do that.
If you're referring to the Stanford Prison Experiment, there's no point making something a "better" model if you lose your controlled environment in the process. The fact that Zimbardo interfered might be an interesting observation, but since it's not a repeatable experiment, it becomes merely a well documented anecdote.
Also, this isn't what the articles were about. They're mostly just presenting alternative explanations for the results, and the experimental evidence which supports them.
