According to “60 Minutes”, the Chilean miners nearly mutinied against their erstwhile rescuers when they discovered that their messages to and from their loved ones were being censored by therapists who were determined to maintain an upbeat, positive atmosphere in the mine.
In an age in which psychobabble repeatedly seeks to assert itself as a new religious orthodoxy (and in which heretics are as roundly punished as medieval free-thinkers), I found this particularly disturbing. Who decided to claim this authority? Who took control? Why did anyone think that that person had the authority to do this? What kind of psychologist would cooperate with this kind of emotional putsch?
Some answers: The plan, according to the rescue effort’s lead psychiatrist, Alberto Iturra Benavides, is to leave them with “no possible alternative but to survive” until drillers finish rescue holes, which the government estimates will be done by early November.
“Surviving means discipline, and keeping to a routine,” Iturra said.
So when the miners do get moments to relax, they can watch television — 13 hours a day, mostly news programs and action movies or comedies, whatever is available that the support team decides won’t be depressing. They’ve seen “Troy” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” with Brad Pitt and Jim Carrey’s “The Mask.” But no intense dramas — “that would be mental cruelty,” said Iturra.
I cannot imagine mental cruelty more brutal than watching “The Mask” or “Troy”. However…
The news the miners see — which in Chile includes frequent reports about the miners themselves — also is reviewed first by the team above, said Luis Felipe Mujica, the general manager of Micomo, the telecommunications subsidiary of Chile’s state-owned mining company.
“Of course to do that you need to watch the news first and effectively limit access to certain types of information, or to put it vulgarly, censor it,” said Mujica. “This is a rescue operation, not a reality show.”
Though some miners have requested them, sending down personal music players with headphones and handheld video games have been ruled out, because those tend to isolate people from one another. “With earphones, if they’re listening to music and someone calls them, asking for help or to warn them about something, they’re not available,” Iturra said. “What they need is to be together.”
So it was the mining company that made these decisions. But didn’t the worker’s rights take priority over this dictatorial impulse? What was the rationale? That the mining company owned the mine, and that the workers were their employees? Let’s just pass over that little detail about the negligence of the mining company causing the imprisonment in the first place…
I saw a website that questioned the strategy of the company psychiatrist, but not the essential point: who appointed this asshole to tell the miners what they would or would not be allowed to think or do while waiting to be rescued?
It is a stunning achievement: a discipline that has the success rate of witch doctors and palm readers has succeeded in appointing itself as an authority over mental/emotional issues. They have succeeded in convincing timid, gutless managers everywhere that they have some kind of magical authority that entitles them to decide what adult men and women may or may not see and hear.
Authoritarianism lurks all around us, just below the skin, even in so-called free societies. Even Hollywood movies adore it, giving us, time and time again, some asshole who “takes charge” and is supposed to be our hero because he tells people what to do, breaks the rules, and because, in the fantastically rigged outcomes of Hollywood blockbusters, he’s the hero, the only one who can save us.
Mujica says “to put it vulgarly” as if it is only vulgar if you have to describe what it actually is, and as if his mind is not at least as vulgar as anything the miners could hear or see if someone was not trying to nanny them.
