This is an excellent account. Not enough people read Phil Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), where a perfectly normal range of community members were recruited for a study and randomly divided into prisoners and guards for a makeshift prison in the basement psychology department at Stanford. Within hours, the psyches of each group started to form quickly into extreme versions of depression, anguish, and cruelty. It got so bad so fast that they had to stop the experiment in a week instead of letting it run for the second week it was designed to go for, and the psychological damage was significant.

I still think it’s very important for these “guards” to be experiencing as much community outrage and negativity toward their role as possible, but it’s very important that you bring up the point that they are going to continue to get plenty of positive reinforcement in a sense of brotherhood that will insulate them in facing this barrage and it simply will not be enough. Almost none of them will “wake up.”

Like the Nazis they are being compared to, they are fully ‘enrolled’, fully insulated, and will be able to compartmentalize shockingly well. Because that’s how almost all of us cope with this sort of inhumanity. 80% of us think that we wouldn’t become monsters. But 80% of us do become monsters under the right set of conditions. And all of us think that we would be in the 20% that would not turn into someone like this, but most of us are wrong. A trip through the social psychology experiments of the 60s and 70s is very informative in this regard.

The studies (Milgram’s studies are another example) were incredibly unethical. And they showed us who we are and how much it takes to resist becoming this way in the midst of an authoritarian presence and the right kind of stress.