In 1971, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo created the Stanford Prison Experiment in which 24 college students were randomly assigned the roles of prison guards and prisoners at a makeshift jail on campus. The experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks. By Day Two, the guards were going far beyond just keeping the prisoners behind bars. In scenes eerily similar to Abu Ghraib, prisoners were stripped naked, bags put on their heads and sexually humiliated. The two-week experiment had to be canceled after just six days. Zimbardo tells the full story of the landmark study in his new book, "The Lucifer Effect."

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: The experiment is really a study in how ordinary people, even good people, can be seduced or corrupted by powerful, social situations.....So we created a very – simulated physical environment. And at one end of the hall we had a little window that we could look through watching what was happening with a TV camera......And what we wanted to do was create essential psychology of imprisonment, and that’s all about power. Every prison is about power. Guards have to assume more and more power and domination, and prisoners have to have their power stripped away. And so that is the ultimate evil of prison. It's all about power, dominance, and mastery. And that was the same thing we found in Abu Ghraib prison.

But also -- so the way that power evolves is, the prisoners have to be ultimately dehumanized. You have to think of them as not your kind, not your kin, as -- ultimately you end up thinking of them as animals. And the guards have to be impersonal, distant. Whatever humanity they have when they are home, when they are with their families, that has to be suspended, put on a hook. Because, what they have to do is treat other people in ways that they don't treat anyone else, those are the people being prisoners.....So, it's that set of social psychological variables. Oh, the key one is of course diffusion of responsibility. When a person feels, I am not personally responsible, I am not accountable, it's the role I’m playing or these are the orders I’ve gotten, then you allow yourself to do things you would never do under ordinary circumstances.

So, it’s that mix of the physical environment, psychological environment, which came to be overwhelming. By overwhelming, I mean that, each day the guards would escalate their level of abuse, so that initially it was doing push ups, waking prisoners up in the middle of the night, long counts. Then it got to be personal humiliation. Cursing the guards, and having them curse each other, then finally it devolved into sexually degrading games.

......He goes on to note the Europeans are "only too happy" to pay high taxes to get social services in return. What is more they "understand that their lower rates of child poverty, incarceration, illiteracy, homicide, suicide and the like" are a direct result of this.

Thus, the Europeans, with many hundreds of years more experience under their belt - made the wiser bet that ultimately individual effort cannot attain all the basic needs over time, and it is better to pay a cost each year (in taxes) rather than one humongous cost when one failed to achieve the millionaire goal.

Americans meanwhile, continue to push for lower taxes, hoping one day they will one day also be Trumps or at least miniature Trumps, drunk on the mother's milk of false optimism and Horatio Alger piffle. The bet they make, wrong in 99.999% of cases is they can make it one their own, and will have all basic needs met without the need to depend on the government "nanny".

And what about the treasury-bleeding wars or what are sold as wars? Berman has no more sympathy for the rank and file American here than in the economic sphere. He notes most are anti-intellectual and poorly read, nor do they bend the least effort to pursue facts or information outside of what the gov't propagandists tell them. Yes, eventually many do "wake up" - but by then it is often too late to accomplish much.

Berman notes how every politico is compelled to whisper "the American people" as if in some sacred mantra during campaign forays. But what IF "the people" (in the words of Nicholas von Hoffman) are a collection of “asses, dolts and blockheads.” A people that choose to live in a self-fabricated fantasyland, or a bubble cut off from all reality?

Yes, this massive and nasty serf-state has been pushed upon us, Berman observes, but not without the cooperation of a people who ceased to act as wary citizens. Preferring instead to aimlessly graze at Malls, and consume -consume like so much cattle.

Fattened up for the kill.
BajanMan | Mar 30 2007 - 3:23pm |