This happened a day or so ago, in New Jersey. A woman was brutally beaten in public by a MacDonald's coworker, her 2-year old son tries to stop it, and the adults stand around taking video. Welcome to America.
And then, on CNN's New Day (Saturday) the hosts interviewed a "licensed psychologist" about this, and he actually came scarily close to explaining it, but without the anthropological insight (shouldn't psychologists, almost by definition, have to know some anthropology?). Anyway, the CNN guys asked how this could happen, and the psychologist pointed out that the adults had been socialized (we would say enculturated) into being witnesses, bystanders, not participants; the 2-year old, on the other hand, was not "socialized" and thus didn't know he was supposed to just watch or try to film it.
If only this psychologist had known about psychological anthropologist Francis Hsu, who wrote about a thing called Independence Training way back in the 50s. Independence Training, in the extreme form we see in America, turns us into unempathetic, socially irresponsible psychopaths: she's not beating me, what's the problem? I'll be writing an email as soon as I get his name...
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