Human Weakness

I've been reading a little bit lately on studies that have been done to show how weak we all are as humans. It's something I've been interested in since I went on the March of the Living in 1998. Over the last few days, I've stumbled upon some websites which have made me revisit this belief. First, some background....

Anyone who has ever studied about Nazi Germany inevitably comes to the question: "How could so many people let something like the Holocaust happen?" It is a very interesting and powerful question. Millions of people lived in Germany during and before the war. It is impossible to believe that regular people did not know what was going on in the camps. It has been reported that the smell coming from the camps could be detected for miles. So, assuming that people knew (because they must have), why did so many people go along with Hitler? There are definitely cases of Germans helping Jews escape or hide from the Nazis (Schindler's List, Anne Frank, etc.), but most of the German population went along or allowed these acts to occur. There are also acts that are less horrific but also very disturbing, like book burning, which the Nazi got people to do.

This brings me to two articles that I've recently read. One concerns a high school teacher who was asked the very question I posed above. To answer the question, he started an experiment with the class to demonstrate how easy is can be to become brainwashed. The experiment was called the Third Wave. The other article is about the Stanford Prison Project. This was an experiment in the 1970's to understand the dynamics of prisoners and guards. The website also tries to explain the correlation between those experiments and the Iraqi prison abuse scandal.

These two studies illustrate a very strong and scary point about the human mind. Most people... Almost all people... Would say that they would never go along with a group or be led like that, but it's easy to see from history how easily a person can be swayed. It is probably too harsh to say that people are inherently evil, but it does seem that we are all weaker than we think we are.

I'll probably add to this point later, but this is a good start...