Conformity to survive
Taken from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgwNEDlB84E
Anna Vasilenka / March 13 2021
(8 mim. read)
People are wired for empathy and collaboration, but not for long under pressure. Personal socialization and special circumstances may turn a well-behaved person respecting human lives into a wild tyrant. I want to understand the brutal violence of riot police during the first days of protests. The easy answer to brutality can be “it is just an authoritarian regime”, but what stands behind people’s actions? Why did riot police torture and dehumanize civilians without being ordered to do so? Why did judges sentence people for years for no reason?
This picture shows the memorial in the yard, a memorial of a man beaten to death by unnamed people in masks. Here people surrounded the memorial to protect it from the riot police but an hour after everyone was detained and the memorial destroyed
Image source: https://abcnews.go.com/International/belarus-bans-foreign-media-working-pressure-grows-protesters/story?id=72702598
Tomasello (2009) stated that every human being is born cooperative, with empathy and a desire to collaborate. Nevertheless, there are several factors that can change a person's behaviour in a worse way, individualistic and competitive. It can be specific socialization, the environment they were raised in, the values they were given. Human culture is much more cooperative than any other animal species. That cooperation comes from the inheritance of cultural norms and behavioural practices of the ancestors. Later on in the book, Tomasello will explain that people were put under the circumstances to be forced to cooperate with each other in order to survive. Altruism plays a role in this process, helping others is a normal practice for people but what is more important here is the mutualism. Tomasello explains that the process primarily responsible for human cooperation is mutualism where we benefit ourselves by working together with the group.
In Belarus, judges are trying to conform stability in their life, unfortunately, the only guarantee of safety and stability in an authoritarian country is the president, who accumulated every branch of power. It is normal and natural for people to join the majority for their own survival. If there was any political change in the country or at least the change of government, election, then judges would only orienteer for the law as the guarantee. Now, they go with the crowd and do what the governmental machine is saying, otherwise they won’t survive. Those who were opposing are not alive anymore or had to flee the country
“They sometimes even invoke cooperatively agreed-upon social norms of conformity on others in the group and their appeals to conformity are backed by various potential punishments or sanctions for those who resist” (Tomasello). There are no people who will show their integrity in authoritarian regimes with no consequences. Judges and police will eventually adjust to new rules and norms in order to survive. Asch (1951) conformity experiment examined the behaviour of people under the pressure of the group. After a few attempts to resist the group, the subject was being ‘excluded’ and eventually gave up his own view and went along with the group identity.
The same process was happening to many judges and police officers in Belarus - after several attempts to resist and show off, they went along with governmental orders to detain, arrest and create fake criminal trials for those, who expressed unhappiness with the regime. Usually, when the trial is between two private individuals, both the judge and prosecutor were doing their job fairly and according to the laws. Though, when it comes to the government versus private business or individual, the preference is given to the former. Therefore, the individuals are ‘good’ by nature, they are collaborative and have a sense of right and wrong, but circumstances and a hostile environment make them adjust to this in order to survive.
If it is a genocide or no, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), Article 2 states: “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The political group who oppose the regime does not follow under this convention of genocide, nevertheless caries all its features - killing members of the group and causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. Legally, what Belarusian people experienced in the police stations and detention centres is not genocide, but morally – yes.
Police and especially riot police were a very closed and untouchable group of society. The only way for them to communicate with the outside world is through the president, who filtered all the information. This excluded a group of the society that was raised in a very different and specific environment, they were taught to beat stronger those, who opposed the regime of Lukashenko, who protested and used white-red-white symbolic. Exactly for this reason - to arouse hatred among police forces, the opposition with white-red-white flags is now viewed as traitors, occupants and those, whose only mission is to destroy the governmental order of Belarus. “Common Criteria for exclusion include ideology, skin colour, and cognitive capacity. We typically dehumanize those whom we perceive as a threat to our well-being or values” (Maese, 2003).
Image source: https://regnum.ru/news/polit/3147913.html
Meaningful communication is unlikely and it became difficult to understand where one’s opponent is coming from (Maese, 2003), that's why every attempt to talk and showed the police, that citizens are not western soldiers and the only purpose of the actions is to make the country better were not working on them. In the eyes of the riot police, those people always were and still are the threat who does not share the same authoritarian ideology. “Once certain groups are stigmatized as evil, morally inferior, and not fully human, the persecution of those groups becomes more psychologically acceptable. Restraints against aggression and violence begin to disappear. Not surprisingly, dehumanization increases the likelihood of violence and may cause a conflict to escalate out of control” (Maese, 2003).
Deindividuation is often unconscious and more likely to contribute to mischief, unlike conformity, in which you adopt the values and attitudes of others for approval and inclusion. It's "doing together what you wouldn't do alone," as Myers said. Moreover, apart from being violent towards the protestors with the wrong ideology, a very important factor made it even more possible to massively torture them in the detention centres for several days in a row. Here I am talking about the anonymity of police officers by wearing masks, special costumes with no identification numbers. “The deindividuation, the anonymity afforded by the hoods, allowed a terrible behaviour usually held back by social norms to run free without any regard for fairness or justice. Without consequences, the excitement of having control over another person fed on itself” (McRaney, 2011).
Image source: https://www.svoboda.org/a/30804185.html
Overall, the specific socialization of riot police enabled the process of dehumanization of citizens, who shared different ideology from the government. I believe that we all are born cooperative and with empathy, but when it comes to personal survival the cards are played differently. By nature, we adjust to the changing environment, like every other animal, otherwise we go instinct. Furthermore, humans tend to conform to be like others not for personal reasons only, but in order not to receive punishments. Both in cases of judge and riot police officer they had to follow others to not be fired, fined, or even worse.
References
McRaney, D. (2011). Deindividuation.
Maese, M. (2003). Dehumanization.
Tomasello, M. (2009). Why we cooperate?
McLeod, S. (2018, December 28). Solomon Asch – Conformity experiment. SimplyPhycology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
