TwistingWhumps

On a Surface Level

The ticking time bomb scenario, as Alex Adams points out in their 2016 book How To Justify Torture, might be posed as an open-ended question, but the conclusion which respondents are expected to reach is never really up for debate. To boil it down to its roots: if you can stop something very bad from happening by doing something that is less bad, you should do it. This thought experiment is designed, through the use of various forms of appeal, to guide participants to a predetermined conclusion, being that while torture is normally reprehensible, it can in certain special emergencies be morally justified. In effect, this makes the ticking time bomb less of a genuine thought experiment in ethics, and more of a rhetorical argument.

Because the average person typically views torture as morally repugnant, proponents of the ticking time bomb scenario need to quickly establish torture as a rational and reliable option within this pre-supposed emergency. Analyzing the ticking time bomb at a superficial, pragmatic level will quickly reveal a set of presumptions which are made to solidify this rational framing of torture.

The investigation preceding the scenario has been reliable: We definitely do have the right guy, the bomb threat is real, not acting will lead to dire consequences, etc.

No other forms of interrogation or negotiation will be effective, and neither will other forms of non-physical coercion, such as blackmail, threats, or intimidation.

Torture will not only be effective at reliably extracting the right information, but it will also achieve this in a way that is swift. Torture will save the day here.

The act of torture is assumed to have negative consequences only for the person being tortured.

None of these presumptions are particularly realistic, and in real life, scenarios like this are pretty much unheard of. Contentions about realism would significantly muddy the water as to what rational utilitarian value you can derive from the use of torture, but because you’re not actually supposed to engage critically with the ethics here, realism can be ignored. The framer might also comment that you must be fun at parties, just to drive that point home.

Let’s talk appeal

You can glean quite a bit about where an argument comes from by dissecting what it’s trying to appeal to. This essay, for example, largely appeals to reason (logos) through the use of logical arguments. It also implicitly appeals tothe character and credibility (ethos) of me as the mediator of these arguments, through the use of tone, structure, the fact that I tell you about theory, etc. Later on, I will tell you loosely about certain real-life uses of torture, which, along with tone and word choice, are both an appeal to emotion and imagination (pathos). Using appeal isn’t inherently a sign of dishonesty – in fact, it’s impossible not to use any form of appeal – but analyzing it will give you a good idea of what a the author of a text wants you to take away from it.

Which types of appeal are present within the ticking time bomb scenario? Well, let’s break it down.

The appeal to common sense and intuition, made evident in that the answer to this thought experiment seems clear-cut and obvious to participants, is one of those appeals that doesn’t take long to disentangle. A feminist finds it intuitively obvious that men and women are equal. A homophobe finds it intuitively obvious that gay people are degenerates. That should show you the inherent meaninglessness of this type of appeal.

Appeal to rationality, in that torture itself is portrayed as the rational tool for purpose. The implicit premise behind this thought experiment is that when torture is used, the result is swift, predictable, and reliable. (It is none of those things.)

There’s an appeal to fear in that this particular thought experiment deals with the threat of terrorism. Furthermore, the fear of terrorism specifically is common in right-wing political thought. Although it is never explicitly mentioned, it’s not hard to imagine that your average conservative probably pictures the terrorist in this scenario as brown-skinned. For a good chunk of participants, therefore, this thought experiment will specifically be an implicit appeal to tribalism and out-group bias.

Appeal to consequences, as inaction in this scenario will lead to the loss of innocent lives.

Appeal to urgency though the use of the “time bomb” itself – it’s ticking, remember? You have to make a quick decision. The appeal to urgency is notably quite common within reactionary thinking.

Appeal to heroism, or a savior complex in that your ultimate goal is to save the day. Torturers are made tough through this thought experiment. It is argued implicitly that they are willing to make a difficult decision for the sake of the greater good. You can go so far as to imply an appeal to the hypermasculine ideal of protecting the weak from harm.

The appeal to authority, in the ticking time bomb’s use of police/military organizations. As mentioned, the investigation preceding the thought experiment is presumed to have led to the right suspect, something that realistically wouldn’t be as clear-cut.

There is an implicit appeal to righteousness in that the person you are torturing planted a bomb with the intent to kill civilians. You might even go as far as to call it justice. This can also be interpreted as an appeal to the hypermasculine ideal of establishing dominance over others, in this case, specifically a bad guy. This is a rabbit hole of its own within torture justifications.

In fictional derivatives of the ticking time bomb scenario, the emotional appeal is often made even more personal. Now, the terrorist has specifically planted the bomb in the school of your child, or in the shopping mall where your wife works. This is another powerful appeal to emotion and urgency; the question is no longer Is torture sometimes justified?, but instead, Do you love your family?

You might notice that these appeals seem to snugly align with certain spheres of political thought. And make no mistake – this is more often than not by design. The purpose here is not to get you to think seriously about the ethics of torture; it is to lead you to a specific conclusion about torture through reactionary aesthetics.

As a participant, you are being asked to accept the use of torture in certain cases. If you’ve done some research on the topic, you’ll notice that the CIA seems to be convinced that torture works for interrogation (it doesn’t). So, regardless of the reactionary aesthetic, what if the CIA is correct? Shouldn’t we at least take this thought experiment seriously?

Well…

Utilitarianism 101

As previously mentioned, we can boil the ticking time bomb argument down to its ethical root, which is: if you can stop something very bad from happening to lots of people, by doing something that is less bad to one person, you should do it.

This in and of itself appears straightforward, but as people much smarter than me have pointed out, ‘the lesser of two evils’-type arguments invariably lead to the acceptance of some capacity of evil, which is why they should be approached very carefully. The ticking time bomb specifically makes use of utilitarian ethics – torture is given utility – and for that reason, I think it’s important to consider some basics of utilitarian ethics that the scenario and its proponents are suspiciously quiet about.

Utilitarianism is an other-focused ethical framework that states that our behavior should be aligned with the facilitation of the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.Here, the word good refers to predetermined axiomatic values, which are obviously highly subjective, and that’s a deep dive in and of itself. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to shorten the debate down to its most agreed-upon conclusion: it is bad when humans suffer: therefore, it is good to minimize human suffering.

Let’s have another classic thought experiment, the basic premise of which should sound familiar. You have a neighbor who kind of sucks. He sits around on his couch all day playing video games and drinking, he doesn’t produce anything of value to other people, he’s just kind of a bum. Coincidentally, down at the local hospital, five people are waiting for an organ transplant. If these five people don’t receive an organ transplant, they will die. Is it justifiable, in this scenario, for you to murder your neighbor so his organs can be harvested and used to save the life of the five transplant patients?  

Act utilitarianism posits that any act is moral if the end result leads to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Here, it would conclude that murdering one person to save the lives of five others would be morally good, because one person dying is less badthan five people dying. Overall bad, it would argue, has been reduced in this scenario.

Rule utilitarianism is a direct response to act utilitarianism, and posits that you can justify most acts through edge-case exceptions, precisely like the organ murder thought experiment does (or indeed like the ticking bomb does). It posits that instead of judging each act independently, we ought to live by rules that overall lead to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. This version of the theory is much more focused on long-term consequences of our rule of behavior, as opposed to the here-and-now short-term utility of any particular act itself. Rule utilitarianism, in this regard, is capable of acknowledging that while certain acts can have a positive outcome in the short-term, they might also have a negative outcomes in the long-term, and vice-versa. (There is an argument to be made here that rule utilitarianism eventually loops back around to just becoming act utilitarianism, but because I’m appealing to people who aren’t in the deep end, I won’t get into that in this essay.) In the case of killing your neighbor, rule utilitarianism would acknowledge that while it is true that the immediate consequence of one death for the sake of preventing five other deaths is good, the act of murder as a rule leads to much more bad than good, and should therefore not be something we accept or facilitate within our moral framework. Rule utilitarianism would argue that even if murder has utilitarian value in exceptional cases, facilitating a rule of behavior in which murder is “sometimes permissible” is in and of itself counter to our axiomatic values.

This might all sound abstract and inconsequential to you, but in praxis, it’s the difference between a government committing a war crime and not committing a war crime. It’s why I think it’s so important for people to be familiar with the basics of ethics.

According to rule utilitarianism, the ticking time bomb scenario deals with the short-term and implies that torture in this scenario is good, but it fails to consider the possible long-term consequences of permitting the use of torture into our prescriptive framework of ethics – the rules we ought to live by.

How might the use of torture on this terrorist be viewed by other like-minded people? Is it possible it might lead to further radicalization – potentially leading to even more terrorists planting even more ticking time bombs in the future?

Torture polarizes people. How will the use of torture be perceived within the state that allows it? Is it worth the further polarization of our internal political climate? This polarization has the potential in and of itself to lead to politically motivated violence, after all.  

Straight tribalism appeal: if we use torture against them – wouldn’t it also be acceptable, then, for them to use torture against us? Are we willing to accept that?

Is it possible that allowing police or other government bodies to engage in torture might have a negative impact on these organizations’ interrogative efficacy down the line? Might knowledge of an organization’s use of torture discourage people from volunteering information, or make suspects less likely to cooperate in the first place? Joe Navarro, who is an expert within the FBI in regards to questioning techniques, has stated: “Only a psychopath can torture and be unaffected. You don't want people like that in your organization. They are untrustworthy, and tend to have grotesque other problems.” Following this line of reasoning, is the use of torture in exception cases worth the possible risks of employing torturers?

Allowing for a government-sanctioned use of torture in and of itself has massive connotations. Is the use of torture compatible with a society that strives to uphold human dignity? Is our willingness to disregard this human dignity in “edge cases” worth the utility we could get from torture?

Even presupposing that torture works as an interrogation method (which it doesn’t), proponents the ticking time bomb scenario need to actually demonstrate that the potential short-term positive outcome of using torture outweighs the long-term negative outcomes of accepting torture into our prescriptive ethical framework. This thought experiment and its derivatives within fiction, through the use of emotional, reactionary appeal, actively seeks to discourage participants from engaging with this aspect of the discourse. The rule that might reduce overall long-term suffering is disregarded in favor of the short-term good of the act.

If you take a look at ethical committees across the world, you’ll notice they don’t engage a whole lot with the ticking time bomb thought experiment. This is because at best, it’s incredibly vapid in terms of base-level ethics – and at worst, it’s a deliberate ethical fallacy.

Hang on… if it’s an ethical fallacy, then why are we still talking about it?

Running a pedo sex trafficking island in the Caribbean is usually considered morally wrong, yes. But let’s say aliens came to earth and told you they were gonna vaporize the whole planet, unless you ran a pedo sex trafficking island in the Caribbean and then invited all your buddies, allegedly including Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, and Bill Clinton? In this hypothetical scenario, would it not be morally justifiable to do so? Well, maybe the best response to a thought experiment like this isn’t an immediate acceptance of the “lesser evil”, but instead posing a question back to the framer: why the fuck, exactly, are you asking me to accept a moral justification for pedo sex trafficking?

It's about politics. Duh.

And now that we’ve finally established that, we can criticize this “thought experiment” within its historical, material context. Because here’s the thing: governments and state leaders regularly frame the use of torture, following the ticking time bomb philosophy, as a necessary, justifiable evil in certain edge-case exceptions, which implicitly denies atrocity as a way to avoid accountability. Torture, you know – that thing that is internationally recognized as a war crime. In this way, the ticking time bomb scenario isn’t just a political argument – it is a legal argument.

Researchers will tell you that the public discourse around torture seemed to shift after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and that this shift was spearheaded by the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror.” The war on terror notably included actual on-the-ground military invasions throughout the middle east, like the invasion of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, the effectiveness of which are highly disputed by experts, to say the least. And a notable project to go along with these actual, literal wars, were the systematic propaganda campaigns that the United States government propagated alongside. You’ve probably already read about the US military’s funding of action movies, books, and video games, and probably (rightly) assume that these in part served to influence the public perception of the US’ participation in foreign invasions. And given what was brought into public awareness by the leak of a classified Red Cross inspection report from the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in November 2004, it’s not so surprising that the US government would want its citizens to be more, ahem, openminded about the use of torture on enemy combatants. They did this by appealing to reactionary thinking. They turned torture into a terrible, but under certain exceptions, intuitively righteous act. And through the use of euphemisms – “enhanced interrogation methods” – the United States’ use of torture was even distinguished from the torture used by other (browner) nations, as a rational, even civilized act.

And this framing can still be seen in US politics to this day, most commonly along the republican party line. I don’t want to talk about Donald Trump for longer than I need to here. Let’s just say he’s been very outspoken about his support for the use of waterboarding – “or worse” – as an interrogation method, both before, during and after his presidency. This is one of the most powerful men in the world, who has a real chance of being re-elected this year, telling you explicitly that he intends to commit war crimes.

In reality though, justifications for the use of torture as morally permissible in edge-cases aren’t a new phenomenon, and it wasn’t invented by the United States. The reason the 9/11 shift comes up so often in research is that the US, as much as I hate to admit it, is the cultural epicenter of the world, and these ideas have gained global mainstream traction through Hollywood specifically. But you don’t need to look hard to find examples that predate the war on terror.

The ticking time bomb – not just the argument behind it, but that specific thought experiment – was actually popularized by French writer and former soldier Jean Lartéguy in his 1960 novel Les Centurions, which was set during the 1954-1962 French-Algerian war. Later on, General Marcel Bigeard claimed that the use of torture by the French military was a “necessary evil.” Another French general, Paul Aussaresses, wrote in 2001: “torture became necessary when emergency imposed itself.” The French army used a wide variety of torture against Algerians, including beatings, burning, electroshock, waterboarding, mutilation, and rape. Funny how bad ideas always trace back to colonialism.

Who else? The Nazis, the British in Kenya (at least they’ve finally officially admitted it was torture, I guess), South African Apartheid forces, Russian military in Ukraine… I feel like I’m missing someone relevant…

Oh.

The use of coercive interrogation, another euphemism for torture, was reviewed by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1999 and deemed “unlawful, though permissible in certain cases.” Sound familiar? Torture is practiced by Israeli forces both in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the use isn’t always limited to adult detainees. Torture techniques include beatings, sleep deprivation, stress positions, breaking limbs with clubs, and non-physical torture, such as endless lectures along the lines of, quote: “All Arabs are Bedouin, and Bedouin are Saudis, so Palestinians should go back to Saudi Arabia where they came from. You don’t belong here.” The fog of war sure make things foggy, but I’d imagine torture isn’t above the IDF’s paygrade in the current Israeli attempt at a Palestinian genocide. Considering that allegations of torture have been coming out steadily for months now, I feel like I’m not off base here.

Do you see how the “clear-cut” argument presented within this innocent hypothetical is used by governments to shrug off accountability? Torture is described as necessary in the case of emergency – the words necessary and emergency sure do shift quite a lot depending on who’s talking, but the basic arguments are all based on the same ethical fallacy, one that conflates useful with sometimes justified. I would argue, based on actual utilitarian ethics, that when you accept torture as sometimes justified into your ethical framework, bad shit tends to happen.

Ah, and then there’s Hollywood. Popular culture is a part of public discourse, and all art, as you might know, is inherently political. Fictional portrayals of torture in western movies and literature before 9/11 tend to come away with the conclusion that torture is unjustifiable under any circumstances, and torturers are almost always portrayed as being in the wrong. Since then, portrayals have shifted to favor various derivatives of the ticking time bomb scenario. One of the most famous examples of this is Jack Bauer from the TV-series 24, who frequently makes use of torture as an interrogation method – in fact, he uses the same techniques that the United States used during the war on terror – and the show, in turn, treats him as heroic for being willing to do this. Other examples of ticking time bomb derivatives can be found in The Dark Night trilogy, Supernatural, Stranger Things, Daredevil, Taken, Fast and the Furious, Dirty Harry… Zootopia? Yeah, um, sorry, mr. Pixar, was the torture apologia scene perhaps really necessary to include in this children’s movie?

Along with the discourse seen by lawmakers and political figures, fiction influences the opinions of regular people all the time – it all adds up, you know? And I haven’t been able to find more contemporary sources on this, but according to a poll from the Pew Research Institute from 2016, 48% of Americans believed that torture is acceptable “in some cases.” According to a 2019 poll from the nonprofit Freedom From Torture, 43% of Britons are “unsure” if torture is always wrong – 29% believe that there are “some circumstances” in which torture is acceptable. In a global survey from 2014 by Amnesty International, 74% of Chinese respondents said that torture is a “necessary and acceptable” way of gaining information. Conversely, Brazilian respondents, who scored highest in regards to the fear of being tortured, scored among the lowest favorability in the world, with only 19% saying that torture can be justified “in some cases.”

Globally, over a third (36%) of respondents said that torture can be justified “in some cases.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the debate around torture isn’t whether or not it’s good or bad - the vast majority of people will agree it’s bad, we’re all on the same page there. The really insidious idea is that torture is useful (which it isn’t), mixed with the fact that your average person doesn’t know the first thing about basic utilitarian ethics. Useful, to them, is tantamount to justifiable in some cases. As I hope to have shown you, this in and of itself is an ethical fallacy, and it is inherently reactionary.

Conclusion

I guess I wouldn’t mind if you were a bit concerned.

But my greater point, perhaps, is that you should take “thought experiments” like the ticking time bomb with a tub of salt, especially if you know your grasp of ethics isn’t particularly strong. If I want you to learn anything from this essay, it’s that reactionaries will sometimes make use of arguments that seem very convincing at first glance. They mostly do this purely on accident, to be sure, but appeals to intuition often require 4100 words at least to fully break down, and since nobody likes to read, a good chunk of people are going to take the ticking time bomb scenario at face value, and then go on to believe their opinions on torture stem from actual critical thought. Maybe don’t be like them, is my point.

And if you’re a writer, I guess I’d also like to ask you to be extremely careful of using ticking bomb derivatives in your stories. Ask yourself if your story might accidentally justify the use of torture, explicitly or implicitly. Ask yourself how the torturer and victim are portrayed – how the act itself is portrayed. Ask yourself what the scene is supposed to convey, and who you might be appealing to. Think about it, actually.

I want to start out by briefly reitorating some basics of how torture apologia typically works within political discussions, because this very much is relevant to how you can avoid accidentally sending the wrong message.

The first thing you need to understand is that the real-life debate surrounding torture isn’t framed in terms of whether or not torture is good or bad – everybody, including torturers themselves, will concede that it is bad. The more insidious argument is that torture is useful for achieving certain goals, and that it is therefore justified in extreme emergencies. Not only does this argument try to soften the usually rigid negative framing of torture in moral discussions, but it also seeks to poke holes in the international laws which ban the use of torture outright. It’s a moral, political and legal argument all wrapped up in one reactionary package. For this reason, having the theme of “torture is bad” doesn’t always mean a piece of writing isn’t making use of torture apologia. “Torture is useful” serves that goal just fine.

Torture is also often discussed in terms of civility – not the civility of the torturers, but the civility of the victims. It’s the argument that the people who are being tortured are bad people, and therefore don’t warrant the respect and dignity we usually offer to other human beings; they are so bad, essentially, that it’s fine for us civilized people to war crime them. Whenever I’ve encountered this argument, it has usually been presented in a way that was, shall we say, sussy as fuck – some even give up the pretense and straight up call their victims “savages” or “degenerates”. I hope I don’t need to explain why this line of thinking is insane, but in any case, it’s just my way of getting you to consider that a lot of the myths surrounding torture are rooted in broader sociopolitical issues, often racism and religious discrimination, and historically, most often within the context of colonialism.

With that in mind, let’s get into the myths, starting with the most obvious one.

"Torture for information works."

Every study I’ve read has concluded that torture is counterproductive when it comes to gathering intel from reluctant sources. Under severe pain or distress, victims are more focused on saying whatever they think the torturer wants to hear to make the torture stop, as opposed to providing accurate information. On a neurophysiological level, severe pain or distress actually interferes with the pathways of the brain relating to long- and short-term memory; this means that torture in and of itself is likely to destroy the very evidence it sets out to gather. Furthermore, victims are less likely to cooperate if subjected to physical abuse, including torture, and nothing in the infliction of pain itself works as some kind of truth serum. Lying and defiance are more likely under torture.

To a large minority of people, portraying torture as a reliable tool for gathering accurate information will make the implicit argument that torture, although usually bad, can hold utilitarian value in certain exceptional cases. I’ve written about this more in depth here.

"Under torture, everyone cooperates sooner or later."

French prosecutors used torture in the events leading up to the French revolution, as a way to gain forced confessions from suspects. Their failures and successes were jotted down, leading us with a pretty revealing insight – the highest success rate for gathering forced confessions was in Toulouse, an exceptionally high 14%. In Paris, only 3% of suspects cooperated long enough to sign their name – the rest did not. This is one of the primary reasons that the French criminal justice system eventually dropped using torture for intelligentsia. To quote Darius Rejali, who wrote The Book on torture: “Torture the clumsiest method available to organizations.”

So no, not everybody talks – in fact, rough estimate, 90% of torture victims never do. Defiance is by far the norm with torture.

"When the bad guy does it, it’s torture – when the good guy does it, it’s a tough, but morally justifiable decision."

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Heroes of stories, especially in the action genre, often engage in the use of torture for information, usually following the framework of the ticking bomb scenario, a thought experiment based on the false notion that torture works as an interrogation method. Here, torture is turned into a heroicact, one that speaks to the toughness of the person who uses it. Ask yourself if you want to frame torturers though this lens – because if you do, you are literally justifying the act torture, and, y’know, you do you, but I am gonna call you stupid and reactionary. Torture done by a “good” person is just as abhorrent as torture done by anybody else.

"Some methods of torture are less severe than others."

This myth stems from governments trying to downplay the use of certain methods of torture, and usually goes hand in hand with euphemistic redefinitions of the concept, such as the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation methods,” also known as “torture lite,” or the Israeli “coercive interrogation.” The methods that have been proposed in this supposed less severe category of torture includes stimulated drowning, also known as waterboarding, as well as caning, beatings, limbs being broken with clubs, sleep deprivation, stress positions (ex. forcing a person to crouch against a wall for extended periods of time,) mock executions, sexual assault, and more. If these things all just sound like torture to you, it’s because they are. There is zero evidence to suggest that any torture methods, including those that leave no physical mark on the body, have less severe outcomes than those that do not – on the contrary, non-physical torture methods, including mock executions, or witnessing the torture of a loved one, have been ranked by victims as causing equal amounts of psychological distress as physical torture.

"Torture only causes harm to the person who is being tortured."

This is incredibly unrealistic. Torture is an act that is destructive in all directions, causing trauma to victims, their family, witnesses, and even torturers themselves. It disintegrates the structure of the organizations that use it, it breeds resentment and hatred in the communities around it, and it radicalizes people into extremism. Pretending that consequences like this don’t exist isn’t torture apologia per se, but if your aim is to show the realistic outcomes of torture, these are some of the things you need to consider.

Torture is portrayed as “scientific”; torturers are “skilled” in the “art” of torture.

The most common methods of torture in use today are: hitting people, sleep deprivation, and starvation. These don’t require a whole lot of brain power to conjure up, in fact the infliction of intense suffering is very straightforward. Human beings are full of nerves. Stick a knife anywhere, and I’d be more impressed if it didn’t cause pain.

Not to mention, portraying torture as “scientific” or something that “requires technical skill” makes the implicit argument that torture works for its intended use, here under the condition that you should at least do it right – which brings us right back to that utilitarian fallacy.

"Torturers are expert interrogators, and possess an extraordinary ability to detect lies in their victims."

Studies have been done on the ability of police officers to detect lies for about four decades now. The average person will have a 57% accuracy rate, meaning they’re barely better at spotting deception than a coin toss. For police officers, the highest estimate is around 65% - but it might also be as low as 45%, meaning they might be less accurate than a coin toss – even though police officers tend to think of themselves as exceptional at spotting deception. The same trend is seen in torturers.

In fact, this myth in particular originated from torturers’ accounts of how they conceptualize themselves, which is not only false, but also cringe. When an interrogator starts making use of torture, their focus tends to shift away from gathering reliable information, and more towards “perfecting” the infliction of pain, which means that over time, those interrogative skills are substantially degraded – they are terrible interrogators. So torturers are no better at spotting lies than your average person; they might actually be worse. They can’t read minds, and they don’t possess some secret mystical knowledge about the psychology of their victims.

"You can train someone to resist torture."

Loads of intelligence agencies and revolutionary groups around the world have published material that supposedly serves as manuals for resisting torture, but the truth is, torture is so extreme, there really is no way to prepare or train someone to “resist” it; this is something that even the CIA has acknowledged. Everybody’s reaction to pain will be different. There is no way to predict how torture will affect anyone, much less give them instructions beforehand that will somehow magically negate those effects.

"Brainwashing through torture works."

Torturers can’t change the emotional framework of a person through the infliction of pain. They cannot change the strongly held beliefs and opinions held by their victims through the infliction of pain. They can’t erase someone’s entire personality or make them a ‘blank slate’ through the infliction of pain. They can’t predict how a victim responds to torture, much less direct that response to their own benefit. This is not how pain works.

This is not only an implicit argument for the usefulness of torture to change someone’s behavior or force religious conversions, but the myth that torturers have some form of control of their victims even after the torture has ended is also used in real life to paint survivors as dangerous or unstable, and thereby bar them from treatment and aid, and even to allow access into countries to escape the circumstances that facilitated their torture in the first place. That last point is why you often see the advocacy of refugee rights in organizations that work to prevent torture; these two branches of activism have a huge overlap.

Torture victims cannot be controlled by their torturers. Brainwashing isn’t real.

"Stockholm syndrome is real."

This is a derivative of the brainwashing myth, which means all the connotations previously mentioned remain, but as a cherry on top, Stockholm syndrome as a trope can also serve as an implicit argument for the utility of domestic abuse. So that’s cool.

If you deliberately inflict suffering on someone, that is guaranteed to make that person dislike you. In real life, torture survivors not only tend to be extremely resentful of their torturers, but they also tend to be resentful of anyone belonging to the same demographic as their torturers, whether that be ethnicity, nationality, or even gender or general appearance. Like I said, torture radicalizes people.

"Torture makes people obedient."

Any physical abuse or neglect, including bad cell conditions, access to medical aid, decent food and clean water, is likely to breed resentment in victims and makes them far more reluctant to cooperate with their aggressors. With torture, defiance is the norm, by far. You saw this on a larger scale in the war on terror, for example – turns out that carpet bombing a country to deter terrorism only radicalizes the civilian population, producing more terrorists. No form of violence exists that will make a person particularly eager to shut up and do what you want them to do. It will just make them hate you.

The notion that torture makes people obedient is also an implicit argument for the use of corporal punishment or as crime deterrence, something that along with capital punishment has repeatedly been proven false by sociological studies. People just do not function like this. If you want to create obedience in your story – violence is the last thing you should use.

"People “break” under torture."

Victims of torture sometimes make the conscious decision to do what their torturer wants them to do, and this often serves as a means to buy enough time to plan an escape, or mount up whatever act of defiance they can manage. Sometimes they simply do it to get the torture to stop – this, too, is a tough, conscious decision. If you want to consider this a form of “breaking”, by all means go ahead, but implying personal weakness or lack of willpower in torture victims rubs me the wrong way. I personally see it as a rational choice made by a person who is in an otherwise impossible situation.

"Torture survivors are “broken”."

Torture certainly can lead to extreme psychological distress, but again, the term “broken” here implicitly makes the argument that torture victims simply lacked the mental fortitude to withstand their trauma. In my opinion, there’s a certain degree of victim blaming involved with framing torture survivors in this way, and certainly, it’s a framing that inherently strips away their agency.

Another thing that rubs me the wrong way is the fact “brokenness” implies a degree of permanence and rigidity to human beings that simply isn’t there, as if we are solid objects that, once shattered, can never regain the function we once had. It’s a nitpick, but I view people as organic things, capable of healing and growth – not as glassware.

Conclusion

I’d wager that while reading this, a good portion of you recognized some of these myths from depictions of torture in fiction; that’s not particularly surprising to me. These myths aren’t just widespread, they’ve been engrained in the global public perception of torture by decades of political debate and government propaganda, and as a result, have seeped into popular culture.

Torture isn’t rare, and neither is torture apologia. According to Amnesty International, 31% of the global population believes that torture is justified “in some cases”; as of 2014, AI had also reported on torture or other ill treatment in 141 different countries, despite the fact that torture is internationally recognized as a war crime.