{"id":1127,"date":"2002-08-07T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2002-08-07T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles-wp\/?p=1127"},"modified":"2002-08-07T18:00:00","modified_gmt":"2002-08-07T22:00:00","slug":"milgram-and-stanford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2002\/08\/07\/18\/00\/milgram-and-stanford\/","title":{"rendered":"Milgram And Stanford"},"content":{"rendered":"

href=”http:\/\/www.kuro5hin.org\/story\/2002\/8\/5\/225025\/4082″>nice article<\/a> about the Milgram Obedience<\/a> and Stanford Prison<\/a> experiments, and what they can tell us about society. I think what the Milgram study most clearly indicates about “society” is that there are psychopaths and followers everywhere and the idea of “deviance” vs “normative” individuals from the criminologists is at best a quaint notion. It’s possible for any society to lurch unwittingly into savagery as did German society in the inter-war periods. The death camp guards were not, on the whole, deviant sadists — they were a representative sample of German society. Many of them suffered profound psychological trauma and emotional distress from their jobs, as anyone largely sane would. Others revelled in their task and authority positions, but these psychopaths were not limited to Germans of the mid-20th Century period and it would be foolish to imagine otherwise. Likewise, the people in neighbouring towns who accepted the death camps with knowledge of their purpose were cowed by police brutality and indoctrinated into racialism and seterotyping through mass media and propaganda. They were not so different from you or I.<\/p>\n

Of course, the idea that certain sociological patterns predispose a greater proportion of the society to cruelty, lack of affect, and loss of empathy (ie, the Frankfurt School’s ideas of the anal retentive conservative personality disorder<\/a>) can explain why some societies tend to lurch through periods of militarism and destructive fascism more frequently than others.<\/p>\n

In a country where the rulers casually export prisoners for torture abroad<\/a> and the body politic politely discusses the reintroduction and refinement of torture mechanism<\/a>, that imprisons more of its population than any other Western nation<\/a>, that almost alone in Western nations sanctions a racially-weighted execution media circus<\/a>, the cautionary lessons of Erich Fromm in his magisterial The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness<\/a><\/b><\/i> are incredibly pertinent and need to be considered alongside Milgram and the Stanford Experiment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

href=”http:\/\/www.kuro5hin.org\/story\/2002\/8\/5\/225025\/4082″>nice article about the Milgram Obedience and Stanford Prison experiments, and what they can tell us about society. I think what the Milgram study most clearly indicates about “society” is that there are psychopaths...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t