Why is it a firing "squad"?

Why is it not a firing guard?

You must have seen in old war movies that once quick-serve justice is dispensed by kangaroo courts, the convict (victim?) is handed over to a firing squad to be dispensed with.

Thankfully (hopefully) this doesn’t happen anymore. However, it does raise an interesting question. If the decision has been made to dispense with, and a gun and a trained soldier are at hand, why not do the deed at point-blank? Why the drama of five shooters at range?

Interestingly, not only are there several shooters in the firing squad, but one or more shooters are randomly given a blank instead of a real bullet. Why?

To understand this we need to understand diffusion of guilt.

It is unacceptable to kill someone. No moral doctrine allows this. How does someone overcome internal resistance and do such a terrible thing? It is done through an internal rationalizing dialogue.

The following internal dialogue takes place:

1. I must obey the order otherwise I will be punished (threat of punishment).
2. I did it because I was ordered to do so (Obedience to authority. Even duty)
3. It has been decided and it will be done. Whether I do it or someone else does makes no difference to the outcome. (Inevitability of outcome)
4. I didn’t do it alone, there were others (Diffusion of responsibility). The more the shooters the larger the diffusion. Mob violence is of this nature.
5. The icing on the cake: For all I know, I could be the blank. It may not even be me!

And, like that, boom — the trigger was pulled.

Interestingly, when the death penalty is administered by lethal injections, a similar ritual followed.

Lethal injection machine s come with two syringes, two control systems, two separate delivery systems, and two buttons pressed by two different people!

When the buttons are pressed, the system randomly sends the contents of one injection into the convict and another into a waste bucket allowing each executioner to think “It may not be my injection.”

I found it intriguing how many hurdles we must overcome to go against our internal constraints and the multitude of creative tactics used to get us to do what we abhor.

Key takeaways:

> Know thyself! Understand your internal dialogue, its inclinations, and susceptibilities. It’s hard to do it through self-observation (you should try anyway), but you get to learn a lot about it from psychological studies. (Keep reading my blog :-))

> Beware of the internal rationalizing dialogue: There is a constant internal rationalizing dialogue within us justifying something as benign as an extra scoop of ice cream to …. The rationalizing brain has the capacity to rationalize most things if you let it.

My best reminder about internal rationalizing is a quote by Benjamin Franklin

“So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”

― Benjamin Franklin

> Terrible things happen in our world that shouldn’t happen. They don’t feel so terrible because they have been diffused and rationalized.

Finally, We harm even when doing nothing. Doing nothing is a form of diffusion of responsibility. “There are so many, someone else will do it”

“The world suffers a lot. Not because the violence of bad people. But because of the silence of the good people.”

― Napoleon