The Lucifer Effect
I read Dr. Philip Zimbardo's lengthy tome, The Lucifer Effect some time ago. It's a very verbose and very detailed examination of the hows and whys of what makes a reasonable, good person do horrific, cruel things. In it, he cites some very prominent studies in the field of social psychology:
• The Stanford Prison Experiment (which he ran)
• The Milgrim Experimetns
The Reader's Digest version can be found in Dr. Zimbardo's TED talk:
In a nutshell, what makes a good person go bad and do horrible things to his fellow man boils down to several contributing factors:
- Deindividuation of the perpetrator, such as with a mask, persona, or group label.
- Dehumanization of the victims.
- Obedience and deference to an authority who condones the abuse.
- Conformity in action, with nobody who breaks ranks to give "permission" to the others to be "good."
We saw this with the German Gestapo in World War II (recommended reading: Ordinary Men), where the officers were at first sickened by what they were doing, then numb, then accepting, and eventually they were making games of their work. The Lucifer Effect devotes about a quarter of its pages to discussing the Stanford Prison Experiments, and another quarter to Abu Gharib. It's a familiar rhyme that repeats itself over and over whenever the same mix of circumstances arises.
Evil is banal; it is commonplace. This is not the sort of thing that happens only under the stresses of warfare. Look at the four-point checklist above and you can see common, pervasive activities where this takes place. Consider inner-city gangs or the Ku Klux Klan, and how they treat (and view) their enemies. Away from their work at reigning in terror, and as individuals without their robes or colors, you may converse with one and find them pleasant. Then they go to work and undertake horrific acts of inhumane butchery, torture, and murder.
But, as with the opening of Pandora's Box, there is an element of hope amid the horror. With the proper conditioning and cultural influences, heroism can also become just as commonplace. The end of Zimbardo's book is dedicated to what makes a hero, especially one who is placed in less-than-heroic circumstances. A hero, he defines, is someone who does good in spite of the cost of a risk - threat of injury or death, imprisonment, ostracism, or other loss. This is important because being the one member of the Gestapo, the Klan, the Bloods, or the Mafia who stands up and says, "Stop! This is wrong," is likely to get you killed. But such people do exist (and are often martyred). In greater numbers, if they were the majority, or at least the plurality, instead of the rare few, the social upheaval they would cause would have profound implications. If the banality of evil gives way to the banality of heroism, where standing up against the system that rewards demonization of this "other group" and worships their slaughter, the world will be a better place for it.
So choose your path: Do you go along with the crowd, step outside yourself and your morality, and surrender your will to become part of a pack of wolves that descends upon sheep? Or, do you take up your staff and become the shepard? Think very carefully before you answer. You may already be a wolf and not even know it.