Why are so many Americans in love with causing pain?

[phantom power]

I've always said, it's to do with Puritan / Calvinist influence, but it can't be the whole answer. The Puritans and Calvinists were a rather long time ago now, and they weren't ever the only cultural influence in early America.

Why do so many Americans feel so strongly that pain is morally good?

Assisted suicide is in the news again after Stephen Hawking came out in support of it. For some reason it remains a controversial question whether people wracked with terminal illnesses should be able to bring an end to their own suffering. Apparently many Americans feel it's the the greater moral good for dying people to spend an extra few months excruciatingly experiencing every organ failure until a painful, convulsing release finally sets them free. Why is that?

Then there are the Americans who believe that unless food stamps are eliminated, poor people won't be suffering enough to take horrible jobs. Never mind that even horrible jobs are often unavailable, or that society shouldn't be encouraging the existence of awful jobs with terrible pay. There are many Americans who believe that the suffering itself is an intrinsic value, part of some cosmic justice that applies to people who didn't have rich parents, or didn't happen to make that one lucky friendship, or had to take care of a sick family member as a teenager at the expense of their studies. Why do so many Americans feel that their fellow Americans should be starved into waving signs on street corners at $5/hour rather than receive help to get back on their feet? What psychosis leads to that belief?

Then there are the Americans who seem to be just fine with a police culture that treats even minor incidents as an opportunity to deal out incredibly painful doses of electric shock via taser. What cruel perversion is that?

And then, of course, there is the new acceptance of outright torture as a method of preventing terrorism. Don't we need to question how exactly that happened?

What is it in the American psyche that seems to be in love with the idea of forced pain as an instrument of terrestrial and divine justice?

Whatever it is, the country could use a collective therapist. Our obsession with causing and enduring pain isn't a healthy one.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/09/forcing-people-to-experience-pain-isnt.html

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. Part of the answer is here I think

http://www.amazon.com/American-Nations-History-Regional-Cultures/dp/0143122029

[phantom power]

3. that looks pretty interesting

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. Next on my reading list

[enough]

2. I don't think it's just Americans. Looking at history, I think it's

humans. We see it in Americans because we are Americans and we see what we are.

[pipi_k]

5. Why are humans

(so many of them) OK with causing/allowing pain?


Because it's OK when it's not them.


That is my (perhaps somewhat cynical) opinion...

[Mojorabbit]

7. Lack of empathy? nt

[procon]

6. Maybe it reinforces a false sense of moral superiority

to view "others" as unworthy and inferior when they fail to live up to all these mythical standards and improbable benchmarks that have become the de rigueur punishment and humiliation heaped upon folks less fortunate. Of course, in my observation, those who fancy a role as some sort of Grand Inquisitor-General, are exempt from the same criterion they try to foist off on everyone else, so I think it's just the basic self-congratulatory 'Power Trip' fancied by those in search of a little ego-stoking.

[GeorgeGist]

8. The Civil War failed.