Joseph Dimow
In the infamous Milgram experiments people were asked to give progressively stronger electrical shocks to partners who answered questions incorrectly. The recruits were told they were in a study about learning and memory; in fact, their resistance to obeying authority was being observed
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I agree that people need to live authentic meaningful lives -- that meaning is probably not optional.
Philip Zimbardo gave a nice TED talk that considers the idea that our environment or the system we live in profoundly influences our behavior. Zimbardo was the guy who did the Stanford Prison experiment where some students were guards and others were prisoners. The experiment had to be shut down because it went out of control -- the guards quickly became sadistic and the prisoners began breaking down after only 36 hours.
He was also an expert witness to defend one of torturers at Abu Ghraib. His point was that 'bad barrels' allow 'bad apples.' That the system is as much to blame as the individuals.
That idea seems really obvious to me but I have come to understand that it is not obvious to others. When I was involved with my school's positive behavioral interventions and support project I started to realize the extent of the system's inertia. Teachers on the surface wanted change but they had a hard time realizing that real change meant THEY would have to change their ways, too. They had this terrible need to pathologize students and to blame issues of violence on the psychology of individuals: i.e. terrible parenting and screwed-up kids. They simply could not see their own culpability. Freud was right: denial is a powerful defence mechanism.
I think it is very difficult 'to use a system to human purposes' if the system doesn't care about the individual. I think Gandhi was able to exploit the traditions of English rule of law and Indian culture to create change but it ertainly wasn't easy. It was a great act of imagination and he had to devote his life to the cause.
It is harder to imagine someone making that kind of sweeping change today because I think that our free market system has built in safeguards against that kind of thing happening again. The third world is deliberately kept unstable; China uses terrible repression against its own people; and Americans are by and large oblivious to issues of oppression. These are really effective strategies for derailing change.
http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html
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