TIME, Time, Time…
…see what’s become of us.
TIME Magazine</a> has a special report on Abu Ghraib in their May 17th issue. Many of the articles are well worth reading, but I was especially struck by this one, which asks the question: Why Did They Do It? How did a bunch of people who look like guys I used to kid with at the Rocky Horror Picture Show or girls I knew in high school turn into torturers?
One disquieting possible answer is offered.
“Psychologists who have studied torture and prisoner abuse say it is remarkably easy for people to lapse into sadistic behavior when they have complete power over other human beings, especially if they feel the behavior has been sanctioned by an authority figure. In a classic series of studies conducted at Yale in the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram showed that psychologically healthy volunteers did not hesitate to administer what they thought were electric shocks to another human being when instructed to do so by a researcher. Two-thirds followed instructions and kept raising the voltage–right up to levels marked danger: severe shock and xxx. Milgram found that compliance was greatest when participants couldn’t see the face of their subject (although they could hear an actor’s fake screams) and when they took their instructions from an official-looking scientist in a white lab coat.”
Like a lot of people, I first became aware of Milgram’s experiment through the next-to-last song on Peter Gabriel’s So. It’s the album that made him “an international star” through such hit singles as “Sledgehammer” and “In Your Eyes,” but buried deep at the end of the songs listing is “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37).” Nothing in the lyric or the liner notes explains the title, but Gabriel was quite candid about it in contemporary interviews.
And now almost 20 years later, the words rise up to meet us with quite chilling appropriateness:
we do what we’re told
we do what we’re told
we do what we’re told
told to do
one doubt
one voice
one war
one truth
one dream
