Guy Kawasaki has a transcript of an interview with Dr Philip Zimbardo about the Stanford Prison Experiment, where ordinary people became helpless prisoners and control-free guards. Reading this, and the comparisons to the treatment of people in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, gives a perfectly rational (and utterly chilling) explanation for the ordinary people performing horrible acts of mental and physical torture.
Granny Weatherwax said that evil was what came of treating people like things - and while I am not a Psychology graduate, I can see that this is true. We can pretend that this is not happening now - but it is, in both traditional settings such as prisons and “Guantanamo on the Gold Coast”… Big Brother’s White Room.
Speaking of which - I am going off the idea of watching people slowly lose their sanity - I think that anyone who watches Big Brother has to question their own conscience (and I did watch the first episode myself).
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