http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/03/DDGIFOV4M71.DTL wrote:
No one can forget those images from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Now, three years later, San Francisco psychologist Philip Zimbardo has written a book arguing that the men and women who participated in the torture were not just "rotten apples," as the Bush administration has argued, but the unfortunate products of a "rotten barrel" mind-set that left them unsupervised, poorly trained and ignorant of Iraqi culture.
Any of us is capable of doing things our rational, everyday selves would find repugnant and even unforgivable. It's an obvious truism that bears repeating every single day.
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Trying to understand the Abu Ghraib disgrace, he says, isn't the same as excusing it. "If you don't understand the dynamics -- and if you don't change the situation -- then it's going to happen over and over again."
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He cites examples of men who, at the same time they inflicted evil in the context of work, maintained parallel lives as family men and loving fathers. "What I'm saying is that the human mind is so complex that any of us have templates to do anything. I mean, we could be Mother Teresa, we could be Idi Amin. We could be Nelson Mandela, we could be Saddam Hussein. But for most of us, we go in and out. It's not even a choice."
He goes on to talk about his own infamous 1971 Stanford prison experiment. That study, and the fallout from that study, have had a major influence on my own thinking.
Every once in a while something happens that reminds me of Zimbardo, and I'm made happy, again, that he's been around to tell us some of the hard lessons we've needed to hear. It'd be nice if more people were willing to hear them, of course; but he's done his job.
Cheers, old man.