Keeping up appearances

From The Picket Line, pessimists about human nature;

[C]ontrary to the vision that the military has of Charlie Company, that they were poorly disciplined, I think that what occurred at My Lai shows that they were highly disciplined, that they, in fact carried out orders that were against their grain, and that they, many of them, felt were wrong. They carried out those orders anyway, most of them. And that shows to me that they were disciplined rather than ill disciplined. The ill-disciplined theory comes about with part of the bogus notion that this was an aberration, something that just sort of occurred spontaneously. It didn’t occur spontaneously, it was part of a military operation, it was a plan. And they followed their orders. Should they have fought and not followed their orders? Well, there were probably ten or twelve there that refused to participate and, yeah, they shouldn’t have followed those orders.
...
The extraordinary few somehow did withstand it. But we shouldn’t — our society shouldn’t be structured, so that only the extraordinary few can conduct themselves in a moral fashion.

You surprised? What are you, twelve?

Via Scratchings.