Seligman’s concept of “learned helplessness” would be quite purposely baked into the interrogation and torture program created and implemented for war on terror detainees by American officials during the administration of President George W. Bush.

Having studied and written about the nightmare of those prisoners and Guantánamo for so many years now, it’s been supremely jarring to see the term “learned helplessness” re-emerge in connection to the current unnerving state of American politics and the 2024 presidential election.

Karen Greenberg first wrote for TomDispatch in January 2005. In that piece, she and a co-author had 37 grim questions (“Why was one of the first tasks of your administration finding a place — Guantánamo Bay — that was meant to be beyond the reach of the courts?”) for Donald Rumsfeld. In case you’ve forgotten, he was then secretary of defense for President George W. Bush. Their focus was on what had already come to be known as “the torture memos” produced by that administration to deal with prisoners taken in the post-9/11 Global War on Terror. And all too sadly, that term “torture” was anything but an exaggeration. For endless years, Greenberg and other scholars did their best to uncover the full horror story of American torture at the CIA’s global “black sites” and elsewhere, and she’s written rivetingly about that nightmare ever since.

Given the degree to which this country created a full-scale offshore system of injustice and the horror of the kinds of torture it employed on prisoners in that never-ending war, it’s surprising how little any American official ever truly paid for planning such acts. Still, no one should be surprised to learn that, however hidden those torture sites were, torture itself somehow managed to enter our all-American world. In fact, today, TomDispatch regular Greenberg, whose new book with Julian Zelizer, Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue, has just been published, offers a vivid look at how one aspect of the planning and committing of torture has — without anyone (other than her) noticing — spilled over into our everyday world. Of course, Donald Trump, like every president before and after him, kept that horror of an offshore prison at Guantánamo Bay open. If reelected in 2024, given the grim planning for a future Trump administration already underway, I wouldn’t be faintly surprised were we to end up with a whole new set of “torture memos” of an unpredictable kind. Tom

“Learned Helplessness” and the 2024 Election

Or Is “Learned Optimism” Finally on the Horizon?

By Karen J. Greenberg

Imagine my surprise when, nearly eight months ago, commenting on the state of the country as it approached the 2024 presidential election, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg noted that “Biden has set himself the task of trying to jolt the country out of its learned helplessness in the face of Trump’s exhausting provocations.” Unbeknownst to most Americans, that term, “learned helplessness,” was profoundly and inextricably tied to this country’s disastrous post-9/11 Global War on Terror and, in particular, its horrifying torture program. Yet there it was, being used in a new context — one that, while perhaps altered by the president’s recent decision not to run for a second term, has been employed with remarkable frequency in the intervening months, especially recently, when it comes to this country’s presidential future.

As the pundits weighed in on Joe Biden’s abysmal performance at that June 27th debate with Donald Trump and cast doubt on his prospects for reelection, “learned helplessness“ was used over and over again in the days leading up to his withdrawal from the presidential race in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris. Two days after the debate, for instance, The Economist, focusing on Biden’s refusal to declare himself a non-candidate for the presidency, concluded that “many [Democrats] have fallen into learned helplessness,” as evidenced by the gap between their private doubts and their public assertions.

Writing for the San Francisco-based progressive daily, 48hills, Bruce Mirkin chastised the Democrats for choosing hopelessness over hope. “Instead of ‘yes, we can,’” he wrote, “the instinctive response from a good portion of the folks who should be helping to defend democracy seems to be ‘no, we can’t.’” He then labeled the party’s inaction “learned helplessness.” Jordan Zakarin, writing for the Center for American Progress Action’s Progress Report, extended that diagnosis from “the worst debate performance in modern history” to the larger moment in Washington. He pointed, for instance, to Attorney General Merrick Garland having “slow-walked prosecuting Donald Trump.” “It is,” he concluded, “a learned helplessness,” a “preemptive surrender.”

The question is: What should we make of the concept of “learned helplessness”? Where did it come from and what are the remedies writ large? In this distinctly disturbing moment in our history, is it possible that an all-American version of despair and hopelessness has changed in light of Joe Biden’s backing out of the presidential race?

The Psychological Concept

To better understand the sudden shower of references to “learned helplessness,” a little history is in order. In the late 1960s, psychologist Martin Seligman coined the term while conducting experiments with dogs. He had accidentally stumbled on the fact that dogs that experienced electrical shocks without having any control over starting or stopping them were ultimately rendered strangely passive. They proved unwilling to move, even to escape further mistreatment.

After more experiments demonstrated that being subjected to severe pain or stress did indeed induce a state of inaction in dogs, Seligman then turned to humans and discovered that individuals who had suffered an act or acts of trauma and abuse continued, well after the painful incident, to show signs of depression and anxiety that rendered them completely unable to act. They continued to exist, he discovered, in a state of profound resignation and inaction, long after the traumatic moment in which they found themselves powerless. Afterward, they were convinced that nothing was under their control, that any action they might take would be futile, and that failure was inevitable, should they even try to act. (Later studies suggested that some elderly individuals might also experience such a state of profound resignation and inaction in response to “stressful life events,” at times in association with dementia.)

But here’s the truly strange thing: more than three decades later in the years after the 9/11 attacks, Seligman’s concept of “learned helplessness” would be quite purposely baked into the interrogation and torture program created and implemented for war on terror detainees by American officials during the administration of President George W. Bush.

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