Only on page 24 of this 470+ page book (small type) so it's going to take awhile. Already he's summarized the Abu Gharib prison, the Inquisition and Witch trials and psychological reasons for using rape as a weapon during the Hutu's machete massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda. My favourite quote so far comes from the 'Notes' from Chapter 1:
The psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, author of The Nazi Doctors, argues that rape is often a deliberate tool of war to set into motion continuous suffering and extreme humiliation that will affect not just the individual victim but also everyone around her. "A woman is seen as a symbol of purity. The family revolves around that symbol. Then there is the brutal attack on that, stigmatizing them all. All this perpetuates the humiliation, reverberating among survivors and their whole families. In this way, rape is worse than death."
My other favourite quote, so far, concerns the Witch Trials:
The terrible paradox of the Inquisition is that the ardent and often sincere desire to combat evil generated evil on a grander scale than the world had ever seen before.
Zimbardo was responsible for the famous (or infamous?) Stanford Prison Experiment that randomly assigned college students to be either a guard or prisoner. The guards became capable of inflicting extreme humiliation on the prisoners so quickly that the experiment was halted prematurely. Zimbardo discovered just how easily evil can oversome us. I'm just starting the chapters which details this experiment.
Here's the link to his presentation at TED that prompted me to read his book:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html
3 comments:
Yeah, it was an amazing book. There's talk of making a movie out of it (rumoured to film part of it where I went to university). Amazing how quick the boys involved got involved, eh? Less than a week and they all forgot they could walk away from the experiment at any time. Even Zimbardo got caught up. It was brutal. Three or four days was all it ran, right?
Have you watched the YouTube stuff? There's an interview in one of the parts by one of the guys who played a guard who said that he ramped up his behaviour just to see if anyone would get alarmed and tell him to chill. Nobody stopped him.
There was also that class project done around the time Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. A school teacher sorted her grade into brown eyes and blue eyes for a racism lesson and was amazed and worried about how quick the kids believed her when she said brown eyed kids were dumber, etc. And the second day, she reversed the situation so the brown eye kids thought they were elite. She thought maybe they'd remember how they were treated and behave nicer towards the blue-eyes but in some ways they were worse. It was really interesting. Peter Williams wrote the book about that - A Class Divided.
I gave our giant German friend, initials RW, a copy of this book - I could easily see him attempting a Fenbrook Prison Experiment in which the actual inmates could not escape - keep an eye on the news there for me, would you?
Yes, I can imagine RW plotting something right now! I'll put my policeman-friend on alert...
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