"I am deeply moved if I see a man suffering and risking my life for him, then I speak impersonally about the possible spraying of our big cities, with a hundred or so Millions of dead, I am unable to multiply the suffering of a man by one hundred million. "- Albert Szent-Györgyi
The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations has just wrapped up today a historic hearing on the authority of the executive to use nuclear weapons. This highlights Pres. The recent threat of Donald Trump to "totally destroy North Korea" and draws attention to the fact that we have created weapons whose vast destructive power exceeds our easy understanding. Due to a cognitive trend called "psychic numbness", Mr. Trump does not recognize, much less appreciate, the consequences of the extermination of 25 million people.
Watching the survivors of the atomic bomb detonation in Hiroshima, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton discovered that they shared an ability or a tendency to feel diminished. Survivors described how they became "insensitive to human death" and "temporarily without feeling". Dr. Lifton described this state of psychic numbness and described it as "a useful defense mechanism" that "prevents the mind from being overwhelmed and perhaps destroyed by the images. terrible and unmanageable who confront him. "But psychic numbness is not exclusive to atomic bomb survivors, and it's not always helpful.Recent research shows that it is widespread and often destructive."
]It is well recognized that two ways of thinking guide our behavior, fast and slow, and the threat of President Trump reflects the first. Fast thinking, relying on intense feelings sharpened by direct experience, has been effective enough to allow our species to survive a long and dangerous journey from the cave to the modern world. The slowness of thought is more recent at the origin. Our brains have developed the ability to think symbolically and apply logic and reason to guide our decision making. The slowness of thought allows us to imagine and critically evaluate the consequences beyond those before our eyes. But the human mind is lazy, and intuitive and fast thinking is easier to use as the default mode. When the potential consequences of our decisions are extreme and beyond the realm of our direct experience, we must recognize the need to think more carefully and make the effort to do so.
Quick thinking allows us to feel strong emotions and act vigorously to protect an identified person. But this sensitivity to the value of a life is limited. The system of feelings is unable to escalate in proportion to the death and misery of many victims. He can not multiply, as Albert Szent-Györgyi has observed with insight. The unique life that seems so important to protect loses its value in the context of a larger tragedy. The quick contemplation of the suffering of countless unidentified people leaves us numb and indifferent and thus lacks an adequate understanding of their fate. It is not surprising that genocides and other mass atrocities occur again and again, in addition to other human and environmental crises such as mass incarcerations, chronic but curable diseases and the Extinction of endangered species.
That makes the statement of President Trump at the UN General Assembly that, if threatened, the United States would totally destroy North Korea, odious. The idea of 25 million individuals who die on the other side of the world is an abstraction that neither he nor any of us can understand without thinking. But a head of state openly threatening the total destruction of another company is not abstract; it is an impulsive and unthinking expression, not controlled by the rational faculties of slow thinking.
Thinker and intuitive communicator, the president probably knows that people are affected by the suffering of individuals. He criticizes North Korea for the crimes committed against "an innocent American student" and "a sweet 13-year-old Japanese", sympathetic victims and, for the sake of persuasion, identified individuals. But the president seems blind to his own prejudice to care more about the lives of a few than the lives of millions of people. In his UN speech in September, he also lamented the use of chemical weapons by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad on "innocent children". He said he was deeply moved by the sufferings of innocent Syrians during the sarin attack in April 2017. Two images: apathetic young children splashed with water in a frantic attempt to rid them of the l? neurotoxic agent; and an anxious father holding his dead twin babies, wrapped in soft white cloth. But now it threatens to annihilate millions of North Koreans.
One way to counter numbness by contemplating the death of a large number of people might be to remember that each individual has a life, a story and a family. As the survivor of the Holocaust, Abel Herzberg, said, "six million Jews were not murdered; By humanizing the numbers and imagining some of the individuals they represent, we can less easily succumb to the numbness that usually accompanies great loss of life, and we could understand that the threat of President Trump destroy a country, but rather to kill a child, a mother or a North Korean father 25 million times. An even better way to counteract psychic numbness would be to employ analytical and deliberative procedures that give meaning to the dreadful reality beneath the surface of the numbers and carefully weigh the pros and cons of a menu of possible actions.
Former Secretary of State George Schultz recently commented on the authority of the President to use nuclear weapons: "The important moment is when you get your hands on the nuclear trigger. You n & # 39; Are not you president then, you are God.Where is it written that a man should be able to press a button and kill a million people? "To prevent the quick-thinking outcome to a disaster, Congress should prevent the president from impulsively launching a first nuclear strike, for example, requiring any order to trigger a nuclear strike to go through multiple decision makers such as secretaries of defense and state.
Fortunately, nuclear bombs have not been launched on civilian populations since 1945. But it is naive to believe that this restraint will continue indefinitely as these weapons proliferate and that diplomatic negotiations between hostile countries unintentionally, and perhaps destined to deceive or trigger anger and aggression.
We must use the best quality of our slow thinking to create policies and procedures that ensure that nuclear weapons will never be used again.
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