The U.S. foreign policy establishment and its mainstream media operate with a pervasive set of hypocritical standards that justify war crimes — or what might be called a "normalization of deviance," writes Nicolas J S Davies.Sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the term
"normalization of deviance" as she was investigating the explosion of the
Challenger space shuttle in 1986. She used it to describe how the social culture at NASA fostered a disregard for rigorous, physics-based safety standards, effectively creating new, lower
de facto standards that came to govern actual NASA operations and led to catastrophic and deadly failures.
Vaughan published her findings in her
prize-winning book,
The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture and Deviance at NASA, which, in her words, "shows how mistake, mishap, and disaster are socially organized and systematically produced by social structures" and "shifts our attention from individual causal explanations to the structure of power and the power of structure and culture - factors that are difficult to identify and untangle yet have great impact on decision making in organizations."
When the same pattern of organizational culture and behavior at NASA persisted until the loss of a second shuttle in 2003, Diane Vaughan was appointed to NASA's accident investigation board, which belatedly embraced her conclusion that
the "normalization of deviance" was a critical factor in these catastrophic failures.The normalization of deviance has since been cited in a wide range of corporate crimes and institutional failures, from
Volkswagen's rigging of emissions tests to deadly medical mistakes in hospitals. In fact, the normalization of deviance is an
ever-present danger in most of the complex institutions that govern the world we live in today, not least in the bureaucracy that formulates and conducts U.S. foreign policy.
Comment: See also: Soros leak shows his foundation viewed refugee crisis as opportunity to be exploited