Issue nº 124

Human nature

     Every day, bombarded by acts of cruelty, we ask ourselves: how can men be capable of so much evil? The example stretches from Riode Janeiro, where a journalist friend (Tim Lopes) was barbarously tortured to death, all the way to the Abu Graib prison in Iraq where young American men and women who always behaved in exemplary fashion in their own small provincial communities back home end up behaving like monsters.
      In 1971, professors from Stanford University in the United States created a sort of simulated prison in the basement of the Psychology Department. Using no special criterion, they chose 12 students as guards and another 12 as prisoners, all from the same social background, middle class, strict upbringing, dignified moral values. For two weeks the “prison guards” would be given total power over the “prisoners”.
      The experience had to be interrupted after a week: after a few days the “guards” began to reveal a form of behavior that became increasingly sadistic and abnormal, committing barbarities never before suspected. Today, over 30 years later, the two groups still need psychological counseling.
      The idealizer of the Stanford experience, Philip Zimbardo, told the Herald Tribune: “I was not surprised at the photos of the Abu Graib prison in Iraq. This is not a group of rotten apples placed in a basket of fresh fruit, but exactly the opposite: when faced with the possibility of absolute power, people of good sentiments lose all notion of limits and let the most primitive instincts be released.
      Another interesting study was carried out by Stanley Milgram for Yale University. A group of students was chosen to study “punishment techniques”. They stayed on one side of a glass with a machine for electrical shocks, while on the other side of the glass a student had to give the right answers to certain questions. Every time he made a mistake, the students were to apply a shock, progressively increasing the voltage, even knowing that after a certain point they could kill their fellow student.
      The machine for shocks was false and the “student” was an actor, but the students in the experience did not know that. To everyone’s surprise, 65% of the “interrogators” reached what would have been the mortal dose.
      In short, when we are faced with situations that allow us total and absolute control over someone else, none of us can be certain that we will not overstep the limits. But only those who have undergone this type of experience (and, unfortunately, I remember certain attitudes during my youth that would include me in this group) know that at a certain moment we completely lose control and move beyond reason.
      If this is human nature, what are we to do? An old story that takes place in the Pyrenees – possibly a legend – tells how a certain monk called Savin, who came to collect donations in gold for the chapel he wanted to build, passed by the house of one of the most feared bandits in the region. Since he had nowhere to spend the night, he asked if he could stay there.
      The bandit, surprised at the monk’s courage, decided to test him, and asked:
     “You have come here to provoke me. You want me to kill you and steal your money and make you a martyr. If the most beautiful prostitute in town came through that door right now, would you be able to think she wasn’t beautiful and seductive?”
     “No. But I would be able to control myself.”
     “And if a monk came in with gold to build a chapel, would you be able to look at that gold as if it were stones?”
     “No. But I would be able to control myself.”
     Savin and the assassin had the same instincts — good and evil fought for them, just as they fight for every soul on the face of the Earth. When the evildoer saw that the monk was just like him, he also understood that he was just like Savin, and became converted.
      We have good and evil before us, and it is all a matter of control.
      Nothing more than that.