The Chris Hedges Report: Breaking the cycle of American violence

now you talk about terror [Music] what about for me [Music] i've been terrorized [Music] all my days american society is the most violent of any nation in the industrialized world nothing we do from administering the world's largest prison system to militarizing our police seems to help dr james gilligan the former director of the study of violence at harvard medical school and the former director of the bridgewater state hospital for the criminally insane argues that childhood abuse and the shame it engenders is the engine that fuels america's deadliest epidemic this abuse and shame he argues fosters a dangerous numbness that breeds a deep self-loathing and incohate rage it is only by understanding the causes of our national epidemic and addressing those causes that we will have any hope of stemming the nihilistic violence that grips american society dr gilligan grounds his writing not only in case studies of the violent patients he has worked with but greek myth and shakespeare joining me to discuss his book violence our deadly epidemic and its causes as well as his book holding a mirror up to nature shame guilt and violence in shakespeare which he co-authored with david richards is dr james gilligan professor of clinical psychiatry at new york university you argue that the usual dichotomies between life and death this world and the other world rationality and irrationality pleasure and pain reward and punishment the body and the soul self-preservation and self-destruction have broken down for those who commit violence can you explain this dichotomy one of the first things i started hearing from the really the most violent of the prison inmates i was working with was that they would tell me that they had died even before they started killing other people and what they meant by that was they felt dead inside they felt empty they felt numb they lacked the capacity for emotions or even physical sensations they they would refer to themselves with terms that referred to the living bed like zombie or vampire or robot um they would mutilate themselves to see if they have feelings they weren't doing this as an act of penance they didn't feel guilty about their crimes what they found was that their state of their feeling of numbness and deadness inside was more tormenting than even physical pain would be so they were trying to see if could they feel alive could they see blood flow and they cut themselves to prove that they were feel they had blood rather than being filled with straw or other lifeless matter now what struck me was these people were willing to go to their physical death in order to try to resurrect their soul death their psychological death um there's a very good book that psychoanalyst yale wrote called soul murder the most violent people i saw in the prisons had were victims of soul murder now what i discovered with them was you know when most of us talk about self-preservation we take it for granted that we mean both the the body and the soul you know you don't survive if your body does uh i mean your soul goes with it so in the business the most violent inmates had dissociated the body from the soul they were willing to sacrifice their bodies in order to try to save their souls or to resurrect their dead souls um i heard from the most violence that their their their goal in life was to go to their own death physical death but in a blaze of glory a hail of gunfire in which they would kill as many other people as possible before they themselves got killed by the police or in in in many actual cases uh in the in the community you see mass murderers who kill themselves after they have killed as many people as they could the columbine high school boys the mass shooting there the uh the guy in the uh hotel room in las vegas i mean you you can't read the newspapers for that scene and of course we see this with the suicide bombers in the middle east but people feel so desperately overwhelmingly humiliated it causes the death of the self and they are willing to sacrifice their bodies in order to try to reclaim some sense of of agency of power of revenge these things that they feel will undo the shame and humiliation that they have suffered all their lives this is the point emil durkheim makes that people who seek the annihilation of others are driven by a desire for self-annihilation uh i i'm just gonna stop and ask you about the word soul that's a religious term you're a medical doctor i went to harvard divinity school i'm curious how you define a soul well to me i mean it's it's the english translation for the greek word psyche which really is the root of the words psychology and psychiatry and psychoanalysis but i think it uh i i think it makes sense to to to use the word soul uh the human human person has a at something i think you can only describe as a soul it's more than just a mind it's what it means to be human um i mean other animals have minds to one degree or another but only humans have a soul uh and to me but i i would actually go further i would say this um to me i i mean i was approaching trying to understand the causes and prevention of violence as a psychiatrist but actually this for me this was really a religious vocation um i i felt every every major world religion has put the problem of violence very much at the center and that you think in the in the old testament one of the first of the ten commandments is thou shalt not kill and then you think that the iconic symbol of christianity is the most cruel form of murder ever invented the cross the crucifix so i mean the problem of violence is absolutely central to religion itself and uh my approach to the prisons was to uh i quote something i used as an epigraph in my first book on violence a statement that from a religious point of view none of us humans are good but all are sacred when i say none are good i mean that we have all committed harm to people we love and who loved us i mean there's nobody who there are none of us who do not stand in need of forgiveness but on the other hand every human being even the worst has what i would say is a soul that is sacred and i took that attitude with the worst murderers that our society produces they were still human beings they had a soul and it was our obligation my obligation and my colleagues to reach that soul to try to bring it to life after it had you know had died on them we were trying to resurrect their dead souls or help them to resurrect them so i to me the word soul is the only word that has a large enough meaning a large enough capacity to describe what uh what i thought we were really working with when we worked with the most the most violent people that our society produces so one of the consequences of ptsd is numbness is that the numbness that these people endure or is it different from the numbness one gets from ptsd well i mean i'd say both uh when i would ask people about their feeling of being bad they could often tell me what had happened and they could describe an event in their lives in which they felt totally unload treated like dirt um you know our word humiliation comes from the latin word humans which means earth to be humiliated is to feel like you're treated like dirt that you can just be stepped on and that is how these the men that i saw in the prisons felt so they they were i'd say this feeling of deadness had been caused by experiences of of just total rejection and and and humiliation and and having it made clear to them how unlocked they were beginning at home beginning in the family so you talk about uh murder as an attempt by these people to bring back one's dead self bring it back to life you say of course that fails but can you speak about that process well actually their method of trying to resurrect their dead soul does fail i i compare it to uh it's like they're drinking salt water to try to quench their thirst it's really counterproductive they only provoke more loss of love they provoke uh hatred from other people but i'll tell you what would happen when when i would work with these guys in the prison when they first came in they felt the first came into the prison after someone's having committed terrible crimes murders and rapes and so on they would feel absolutely innocent they would feel they were the victims uh when i would ask them why they had assaulted somebody in this way they'd say because they they had the person had disrespected them so they were trying to gain respect by being violent but it was like as i said like drinking salt water but when they've been in the prison for a couple of years working with the prison mental health service that and my colleagues in iran where we treated them with respect we didn't put them down we showed an interest in them and in their life history their life story we engage them in psychotherapy we offer them opportunities for education you know after a couple of years or so these impossible people often became capable of empathy toward other people that began to realize how much pain and suffering they had caused others and they developed the capacity to feel guilty about that up to that point they were noticeably unincapable of feelings of guilt for example um you know freud said once that nobody feels guiltier than the saints i mean guilt feelings inhibit people from hurting other people i mean saints feel too guilty to heard a butterfly but i would add something that freud did not know because he never worked with violent people and that is that no one feels more innocent than the criminals that's why they're capable of committing crimes because they lack the capacity to feel guilt or remorse about hurting other people but you know after they'd had an experience of being treated like a human being and responded to as a human being with dignity they developed the capacity to empathize with other people and realize that they had that they actually were guilty of really having committed horrible pain and suffering on other people then they would be feel so guilty they would become suicidal and they would make serious suicide attempts and our struggle then would be not so much to prevent them from getting homicides but to prevent their suicides and that might take another couple of years however then something happened that i had not anticipated i hadn't read about it anywhere it took me by surprise they discovered something that enabled them to transcend both the shame and guilt and that is they discovered that they could be useful and helpful to other people they they could they could they could teach the illiterate prisoners and many prisoners are illiterate they could teach them to read and write um they could help them to write letters home they could help them navigate the law library in the prisons and so on once they had discovered that they had something that enhanced their own self-esteem but also enabled them actually to care about other people and to care for them to me that was that was the resurrection of maybe resurrection is the wrong word maybe it was the coming to life for the first time of a soul and people who had just you know had really just been treated in a way that was inhuman and had become what we used the word inhuman to describe they became human yeah i think that point is correct and matches my own experience teaching in the prison uh you write about capital punishment you say correctly that more prisoners are killed by other prisoners than are killed by the state you can say that for this reason perhaps no group is more strongly and widely in favor of uh capital punishment and then you say you just find it risible uh these people who argue uh that capital punishment deters murder and other violent crimes can can you just explain that well one thing i'd mention is that more criminals more murderers kill themselves than were ever killed by the state even when capital punishment was the default punishment for murder um the i think the biggest mistake that our criminal justice system makes is to make the assumption that punishment will deter violence or crime on the contrary punishment is the most powerful stimulant of violence that we have yet discovered if you'll remember what i just said about the childhood history of the violent criminals i worked with they had been punished by their parents as severely as it is possible to punish somebody without actually killing them as i said they were often the victims of attempted murder i saw one multiple murderer whose mother had thrown him out the window on another occasion set him on fire on another occasion attacked him with an axe and he said to me more with one of the in a state of confusion than bitterness i guess she wanted to kill me but i just didn't die and these so but then the thing is that so many of them do kill themselves after they have killed other people or as i mentioned earlier many of them want to kill as many as they can even though that will mean going to their own death so they the um the notion that the death penalty will would deter them it's just based on total ignorance of the psychology of people who commit serious violence and precisely the people that we need to be most concerned about i mean the most violent so uh the but you know we know this from developmental psychology psychologists who studied child development have found that the more severely children are punished the more violent they become both as children and as adults and as i said if if punishment would prevent violence then the people i saw in the presence would never have become violent in the first place because they had already been punished so severely i would see this also on a day-to-day basis in the prisons the more a prisoner was punished by prison guards the more violent they'd become until there would be an endless vicious cycle between the prisoners and the guards they would punish the prisoner would become more violent they'd punish more the president would become more violent and on and on until finally the officers would ask me to seek people like this to help them figure out how to get out of this vicious cycle of punishment stimulating violence um i remember talking to one man who had been planning on up in solitary confinement with the door closed so he was in darkness the light was turned off he was deprived of a mattress he would uh the the toilet the toilet was a hole in the floor and so on i asked him what is it you want so badly that you're willing to give up everything in order to get it because that's what he was doing and he's this guy who was usually so inarticulate he usually just talked to his fists he stood up tall and looked at me and said pride dignity self-esteem and and then he went on more in his usual way said i'll kill everybody in this cell block if i have to in order to get it um but this again my point is the idea that punishment deters violence is totally the opposite of the truth and i think it's very important particularly for americans but really for all human beings to know this but america has the most punitive uh criminal justice system in the developed world as you mentioned we have the highest imprisonment rate in the world of even of the non-developed countries uh we have more prisoners in our prisons on a per capita basis than the countries we call police states um and yet despite that or i'd say because of it in part we have the highest murder rates in in the developed world our murder rate is seven times as high as the murder rates in the uh political democracies and social democracies of western europe and roughly five times higher than the other english-speaking democracies like canada and australia and you know our our violent criminal justice system including the death penalty it only stimulates violence to the extent it has any effects at all there is no western european country or english-speaking democracy that still has the death penalty the u.s you know stands alone on that and uh it's not surprising since punishment only stimulates violence that uh that we would be there would be this correlation between our violence and and the violence of those that we that we punish i want to before we get into shakespeare in the last five minutes you write actions or symbolic representations of thought what do you mean by that i mean that violence doesn't occur at random one reason i wrote about shakespeare and i refer to them often and describing the prisoners i see is he described what i saw in the prisons in in king there he describes how uh edmund the the bastard son of the duke of gloucester earl of cluster um uh has his father's eyes gouged out after having been humiliated repeatedly by his father that helped me to understand a criminal that came into the prison who had killed and gouged out the eyes of his victim he made it clear he had the same motive that shakespeare's character did he said he didn't like the way she was looking at me and uh he had felt he had also been bullied been called humiliating uh words of wimp upon [ __ ] and uh people overwhelmingly humiliated the way to undo his humiliation was destroyed the eyes of a person because as as aristotle put it people experience shame in the eyes of others we experience shame as we're being in front of an audience that is witnessing our shame and seeing how how how weak and and shameful we are and uh so that attacking the eyes is not an accident uh i could give you many of many other examples of me that the part of the body that inmates attack or the violent criminal attack it is not chosen at random uh it has a real emotional meaning um and i i just saw this over and over i want to ask you about anthony and cleopatra anthony says to the soothsayer say to me whose fortunes shall rise higher caesars are mine and the soothsayer says caesar's therefore anthony stay not by his side thy demon that's thy spirit which keeps thee as noble courageous high unmatchable where caesar's is not but near him thy angel becomes a fear as being overpowered therefore makes space enough between you and i i'm asking whether love is a helpless force against those who have been rendered numb you mean giving them love is is that helpful that be anthony in a way his strength and his weakness is that unlike caesar he can feel love he he he loves cleopatra and that of course leads to his downfall at least in the play while caesar who feels nothing but a coal lust for power rises and there's that moment in the play that said you're in and away your greatest strength is your greatest weakness i was always other students in the class and the prison would caution me about trying to care for people who couldn't care for themselves well when i think of anthony and cleopatra i think of anthony as having his love for cleopatra was so deep that it made what caesar did to him you know relatively irrelevant um remember he said let rome into tiber melt you know my world is here with cleopatra and there's a sense why she didn't even care what what she did he had achieved i think a sense of personal immortality in his love his love for cleopatra was so deep uh uh whether i'd say he had transcended the difference between life and death not dissociated himself from it and i think that if people can develop the capacity for love well first of all that as i mentioned earlier when prisoners learned they could be helpful to other people that was a form of loving other people it was not you know personal intimacy but it was transpersonal it was just helping people because they needed help responding to other people's need and i think that once people develop that capacity for love um that they lose the incentive uh for us now what i do think shakespeare showed in the in the play ending cleopatra is that there was no room in that world of ancient rome and the roman empire that was a world based on violence and on the denial of love so in that sense i think shakespeare correctly was showing that there was no room for love between people in in that kind of world and i thought it was a powerful indictment of the world that he lived in that shakespeare lived in and and that anthony lived in yes i think that's right um but it's it's an understanding i think of the attributes that uh in many ways are required for power certainly autocratic power it's it's really uh those who uh objectify and dehumanize others many of the characteristics the numbness that you write about absolutely and i think that uh octavian who later became emperor augustus exemplified the kind of person who does not have the capacity for love and whose life is really frankly dull and empty and and not fully human compared to anthony's yes anthony becomes the the victim who you know uh who dies in the play uh i mean he he kills himself but in order to stay with cleopatra and be loyal to her um but uh he's much more human and i think had a much fuller life uh even though he died young relatively younger than necessary i had a much fuller life than than i think augustus could ever even imagine or ever realize existed great uh that was dr james gilligan speaking about his book violence i want to thank the real news network and its production team cameron grenadino adam coley dwayne gladden and kayla rivera you can find me at chris edges.sumstack [Music] you

Channel: The Real News Network

Views: 81,190

Keywords: violence, nihilism, james gilligan, chris hedges, the chris hedges report, the real news network, trnn

Id: fqJVhZGy4Jo

Length: 28min 48sec (1728 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 22 2022