Savages

I had created a post about the Abu Ghraib torturers and then decided to skip it. Enough. But then I came across another story at Jonathan Turley’s blog, and I’m just constantly left wondering what the hell? Will we never evolve?

So, I’ve resurrected the original post and added the Turley article after.

[Ted] Zimbardo conducted a now-famous experiment at Stanford University in 1971, involving students who posed as prisoners and guards. Five days into the experiment, Zimbardo halted the study when the student guards began abusing the prisoners, forcing them to strip naked and simulate sex acts.

His book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, explores how a "perfect storm" of conditions can make ordinary people commit horrendous acts.

  Wired

What pressures were brought to bear on otherwise good people in the Stanford experiment that could excuse their forcing their “prisoners” to strip and simulate sex acts? These may well have been ordinary people, but they were not “good people”.

He spoke with Wired.com about what Abu Ghraib and his prison study can teach us about evil and why heroes are, by nature, social deviants.

[...]

”Understanding the reason for someone's behavior is not the same as excusing it. Understanding why somebody did something -- where that why has to do with situational influences -- leads to a totally different way of dealing with evil. It leads to developing prevention strategies to change those evil-generating situations, rather than the current strategy, which is to change the person.”

I’m skeptical. Forcing someone to do something bad, for instance in situations where individuals are made to choose between doing something horrible or having something horrible done to them or their loved ones, is a situation where behavior can be excused. But it’s hard to understand how the prison guards at Abu Ghraib, with either implicit or explicit instruction from superiors, even given the heavy mental stress they were undoubtedly under, could abuse and torture prisoners unless they wanted to. And that’s not my definition of a good person. I hate to think it's an ordinary one.

So it's a case of people who feel powerless in their lives seizing power over someone else.

Now that, I’ll buy.

Animal rights advocates (and virtually every other human being) are in shock over this video showing U.S. soldiers [thr]owing a puppy off a cliff for fun.

[...]

This video has been racing around the Internet and shows two U.S. soldiers cooing over a cute puppy and then throwing him a great distance as the puppy is heard whining. This type of cruelty to animals would violate a host of military rules and could (and should if true) lead to a court martial.

[...]

Unless this is somehow doctored, these are obviously two soldiers who have no place in the service — particularly if they are (as it seems) stationed in the Middle East where we are trying to reduce any unnecessary use of force.

  Jonathan Turley

I didn’t look at the video. There’s question whether it’s a hoax. But even that would indicate a depraved mental and moral condition.

"There are many humorous things in the world: among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages. --Mark Twain"