The Lucifer Effect
It’s weird how synchronicity works. The whole ZTE scandal, and all the other strange things that happen in government had me thinking about evil. By chance, Jon Buloaong who is in Germany, found me online one day on ym (we have chats every few months). He told me he had been asking himself whether he was capable of being corrupted - of doing evil things.
Funny, that soon after the whole ZTN thing erupted, I was getting into discussions with my ateneo batch egroups. I was insisting that instead of humans being born inherently good, we were in fact, inherently bad. And that in fact, Genesis, if I would even fall into the fallacy of using the Bible as the end-all of arguments as some would do, proves my point. We are fallen, we have the smudge of original sin. Therefore, bad.
Of course my classmates beat up on me for this. No, they insisted. We are all good. Siyempre, cynical Karen was again taking the less trodden path of ideas.
Well the day after Jon raised the question, I came across a book at National (where I rarely buy books, as I have discount cards at Fully Booked and Powerbooks). But the book intrigued me and as soon as I got home, I started reading.
It’s a book EVERYONE should read. Ok, there are some tedious parts when he goes into much detail about his Stanford Prison experiment. But skim through it, he has to put it there as he is after all a researcher, and has to present his evidence.
But the points he makes are these:
– too long we have blamed evil on personality traits, on motives and the “nature” of a person
– we should instead look at things from the perspective of a social psychologist and look at dispositional factors in why anyone turns to evil
– too long have be said that there are a “few bad apples” when actually it is the “barrel” that is bad
– it is the system (the barrel) or the structure that allows ordinarily “normal”, “ordinary” “average” people to do evil
– when people are put into a situation such as Abu Ghraib, Nazi Germany, the situation makes them do evil deeds
– deindividuation is what pushes us to do evil
And most of all, and I go back to Jon Bulaong, the author says the question to ask is not whether or not we can be corrupted or become evil. Since, given his theses, we are ALL CAPABLE of turning evil, given the right (well, really the ‘wrong’ situation).
The more important question to ask is CAN WE BE A HERO? Can we rise above the situation and do the right thing and shun the evil we are being pushed to do?
He also has some interesting things to say about the legal system. Such as, it is time that the legal system stops blaming solely the person - he is evil, he is morally bereft — but instead take into account the system that made him do wrong.
For example, the man who steals because he cannot find work and cannot feed his family. Ok, we will say tamad, walang pinag-aralan. But why? Why is he poor, why has he no opportunity? Is jail the solution? Or is fixing the system the solution?
But the question is important - not can we be bad, but can we be good?
It’s an important book to read. Sometimes I just wish the world could be saved.
http://www.lucifereffect.org/about.htm
http://www.zimbardo.com/current.html
