Maybe Stephen King is on to Something

            We see it all the time.  It’s on the news, in the newspaper, and in magazines.  We read about it and just shake our heads at the brutal nature of these murders and acts of violence occurring all around us.  We judge the perpetrator; perhaps we wonder how he got around to hitting rock bottom and what drove him to commit such an abhorred crime.  For example, I was watching a hockey game the other night and a saw an old acquaintance of mine hit another player with unnecessary force.  In the moment, I was disgusted by his short temper and couldn’t believe what he had done.  Now, with some hindsight, I realize that maybe he wasn’t justified in drilling that player into the boards, but I have no right to judge him.  A few years back he went through a traumatic experience involving a family member and it’s more than likely that this has had a lasting effect on his personality.  However, it’s very rare would I would give a criminal the benefit of the doubt, especially if I don’t know them, because identifying with him or her would be like committing the assault ourselves and surely I could never be capable of such violence, no matter what the situation is… right?



Stanley Milgram



            Results of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment in 1963 ripped thousands of people out of this naïve mindset.  He proved that ordinary people, like you and I are without a doubt morally capable of putting another person in pain and even torturing them, for doing nearly nothing wrong.  In his experiment, regular people were willing to torture other innocent people to the point of knocking them unconscious.  The natural first reaction to this data is to once again ask what drove these people to such violent behaviour.  The only driving force behind their actions was a man in a white lab coat saying, “Just do it."

            These people didn’t need any more motivation than the encouragement of an authority figure to inflict pain on an innocent human.  63% of them followed through with the experiment until their subject had been exposed to the maximum amount of voltage that the experiment would allow, leaving the subjects unconscious.  Before going unconscious, the subjects begged the people administering the shock to stop and they screamed in pain (it was all just acting, of course – but the people administering shocks didn’t know that).  We would all like to believe that we would be in that 27% of people that didn’t knock our subjects unconscious, but in reality most of us would have been included in that larger percentage of people that tortured innocent people out of obedience.  The part that scares me the most is that the leader of the experiment didn’t have a gun and didn’t force the participants into doing anything, he simply urged them to continue.  If the need to obey could take over my morals so easily, it makes me shiver to imagine the things I would do at gun point or even with another form of motivation, like revenge.   
            Most participants of the experiment carried on with the shocking because they thought that they wouldn’t be held accountable for their actions, but the experimenter would.  If we had no judicial system, would today’s society actually break out in chaos and murder, rape or torture with as much ease as we have when we pick up the mail in the morning?  Would our morals not hold us back?  I suppose it comes down to the old question, “if this man jumped off a bridge, would you?”  Except the question has been changed to, “if this man told you to push someone off a bridge, would you?” Apparently most of us would if the man looked like he was an authority figure and would take responsibility for our actions.

Nazis were all tried after WWII for the brutality that they brought upon innocent people in concentration camps.  Most of them said, “I was just following orders.”  I think it’s safe to say that if they didn’t follow orders, Hitler would have killed them and probably their families as well.  Once again, we’d like to think that if placed in the same situation as the Nazis, we would have taken mercy on the innocent people.   After Milgram’s experiment, I find it unlikely that anyone in today’s society would have sacrificed their lives for those around them.

My intentions in bringing up this experiment are certainly not to excuse murderers, rapists or any criminals for their crimes.  My intentions are just to indicate that we probably don’t deserve this self-righteous pedestal that we fabricate for ourselves.  We seem to have this preconceived notion that criminals are a different breed altogether.  Our society would like to think that comparing themselves to criminals is like comparing night and day, but perhaps we all have a darker side waiting to be provoked.  Maybe Stephen King is on to something.