Whipping Boy

We inflict pain and damage on fellow human beings, as if, violence creates "mystical cohesion" amidst us. "Indeed, hurt-induced mystical cohesion accounts in large part for why we humans are addicted to turning on each other with weapons. We find an infinite variety of victims, and their suffering serves a social purpose. African-American men subjected with wild disproportionality to the caged violence of prisons. Muslim "terrorists" in torture camps. Enslaved women. Death row. In case after case, threatened authority locates a victim on whom to unload.Whether the designated object of punishment is guilty (Saddam Hussein, say) or innocent (the American soldiers whose faces we see on the news each night) does not matter. This impulse to salve communal anxiety by inflicting hurt was the defining core", not only in America, but also increasingly so in rest of the world.

Read James Carroll's article on "Whipping Boy": Click here.