Disturbing Article...
I read a disturbing article today about Philip Zimbardo, the man in charge of the 'Stanford Prison Experiment' years ago, where he randomly selected certain subjects to be prisoners and others to be guards, and then just sat and watched them interact. The result was chaos: "'Evil is a slippery slope,' he says. 'Each day is a platform for the abuses of the next day. Each day is only slightly worse than the previous day. Once you don't object to those first steps it is easy to say, 'Well, it's only a little worse then yesterday.' And you become morally acclimatised to this kind of evil.'" The interesting thing to me, though, was that this inspired him, since, to defend the guards from teh Abu Ghraib prison scandal. That turned my thoughts around about those folks pretty quickly... (Via Bruce Schneier.)
2 comments:
It reminds me of one of the philosophers we read in Human Sit in college. I can't remember if it was Machiavelli or someone else, but he used discussion of civilization during the plagues to show how humans are nothing but selfish animals when the surface is scraped away. Experiments (and real life experiences) like these terrify me. Particularly because I think each of us, myself included, can see exactly where we'd fit in that scheme of things, and could see how disgusting we'd be with our skin stripped back. What an awful way to view humanity.
I tagged you in my blog...have fun.
Post a Comment