Are We Capable of so Much Evil?

Every day, we bombarded by acts of cruelty, we ask ourselves: how can men be capable of so much evil? The example stretches from Riode Janeiro, where a journalist was barbarously tortured to death, all the way to the Abu Graib prison in Iraq where young American men and women who always behaved in exemplary fashion in their own small provincial communities back home end up behaving like monsters.

In 1971, professors from Stanford University in the United States created a sort of simulated prison in the basement of the Psychology Department. Using no special criterion, they chose 12 students as guards and another 12 as prisoners, all from the same social background, middle class, strict upbringing, dignified moral values. For two weeks the “prison guards” would be given total power over the “prisoners”.

The experience had to be interrupted after a week: after a few days the “guards” began to reveal a form of behavior that became increasingly sadistic and abnormal, committing barbarities never before suspected. Today, over 30 years later, the two groups still need psychological counseling.

The idealizer of the Stanford experience, Philip Zimbardo, told the Herald Tribune: “I was not surprised at the photos of the Abu Graib prison in Iraq. This is not a group of rotten apples placed in a basket of fresh fruit, but exactly the opposite: when faced with the possibility of absolute power, people of good sentiments lose all notion of limits and let the most primitive instincts be released.

So till my next post ya, its bye from Ganz.

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