"What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?” Phillip Zimbardo once said. This same man is the man who conducted one of the most controversial experiments in history, the Stanford Prison Experiment.
During the summer of 1971, Phillip Zimbardo gathered a group of young college students and placed them in an environment that resembled a prison. He assigned each of the men to either be a guard or to be a prisoner. The experiment that was supposed to be conducted for two weeks, abruptedly ended after only six days due to the unethical violence the guards were inflicting on the prisoners. Phillip Zimbardo realized that the guards and prisoners became so psychology trapped in their roles, they forgot their true identities. This resembles a scene in the Zeitoun where the mentally disabled man was sprayed with pepper spray and verbally harassed because he was unable to control his actions.
How far is too far? Is screaming profanity okay? Spraying an innocent man with pepper spray because he cannot control his actions, is that all right? How about treating guiltless people like high profiled criminals? When asking these questions, anyone would agree that this is a violation of human rights. The guards were sent to New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina to protect the citizens not to torture innocent victims. Unfortunately, many of the guards took their roles to the next level and behaved in ways that were uncalled for and inappropriate. One may agree that this seems rather similar to the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Reading how the men acted during the time of distress almost mirrored the behavior of the guards during the Stanford Prison Experiment. It seems as if the men were so psychologically involved in their roles, that they were unaware of their actions. Again we ask ourselves, "What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?” Evil triumphs.
Evil doesn't always triumph, as for example, during the Holocaust, many people who were not Jewish risked their lives to save Jews. Mies Giep, who died in January 2010 at age 100, did not go along to get along. She risked her life when she and her husband hid Anne Frank and her family. But the example of the Nazis does support your post, since in order to gas the Jews, the Nazis had to see them as not human. This dehumanizing of the "enemy" is apparently a human trait that is hard for people to rise above, a problem for our own military in Viet Nam and Iraq.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Cec. Yes there is evil, but I do not think it always triumphs. For example, my parents are from Haiti. Haiti has a government that is extremely corrupted. At one point the government kept resources and money away from the natives of haiti. They even killed people that did not agree with their views. It was so easy for the officials to go on this power trip because there was no one to stop them. However, not everyone in the government did participated in these activities. My father told me once that his cousin was ordered to be killed. The guard that was suppose to carry out this order lied and never did it. For my father's cousin evil did not triumph that day.
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