DWQA Questions › Category: Problems in SocietyFilter:AllOpenResolvedClosedUnansweredSort byViewsAnswersVotesThe recently deceased Stanford Emeritus Professor Dr. Philip Zimbardo wrote the book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Dr. Zimbardo is famous for his 1971 “Stanford Prison Experiment” that he was compelled to abruptly terminate as it quickly got out of hand and turned into a dangerously oppressive and health-threatening situation for the experiments’ participants after only a week. In the experiment, the prison guards became overwhelmingly sadistically abusive and cruel, and the prisoners became shockingly powerless and submissive to the point of losing their objectivity and grip on reality and actually believing they were real prisoners and not just participants in an “experiment.” The findings of this experiment were deeply disturbing and shocking on many levels. Zimbardo wrote, “One of the dominant conclusions of the Stanford Prison Experiment is that the pervasive yet subtle power of a host of situational variables can dominate an individual’s will to resist.” He continued, “We see how a range of research participants … have come to conform, comply, obey, and be readily seduced into doing things they could not imagine doing when outside those situational force fields.” Can Creator tell us how this MOCK prison with randomly chosen guards and prisoners almost immediately took on the atmosphere and oppressiveness of some of the world’s worst prisons and concentration camps? Zimbardo wrote, “We were surprised that situational pressures could overcome most of these healthy young men so quickly and so extremely.” Is this widespread and disturbing proclivity, to quickly slip into either extreme perpetrator or extreme victim roles, an inherent flaw in the human makeup? What can Creator tell us?ClosedNicola asked 3 weeks ago • Problems in Society57 views0 answers0 votesZimbardo wrote about the Rwandan genocide. The Holocaust Museum website gives this summary: “Under the cover of war, Hutu extremists launched their plans to destroy the entire Tutsi civilian population. Violence spread with lightning speed through the capital and into the rest of the country, and continued for roughly three months. Between 500,000 and one million people, mostly Tutsis, were slaughtered in 100 days. Hutu militias, backed, trained and equipped by Rwandan government forces, were responsible for the majority of the killing.” Zimbardo wrote: “A Hutu murderer said in an interview a decade later that ‘The worst thing about the massacre was killing my neighbor; we used to drink together, his cattle would graze my land. He was like a relative.'” Zimbardo wrote further, “The testimonies of these ordinary men – mostly farmers, active churchgoers and a former teacher – are chilling in their matter-of-fact, remorseless depiction of unimaginable cruelty. Their words force us to confront the unthinkable again and again: that human beings are capable of totally abandoning their humanity for a mindless ideology, to follow and then exceed the orders of charismatic authorities to destroy everyone they label as ‘The Enemy.'” Can Creator help us make sense of this sense-less event in recent human history?ClosedNicola asked 3 weeks ago • Problems in Society64 views0 answers0 votesDr. Stanley Milgram contrived and carried out a famous experiment on Blind Obedience to Authority. Google’s AI provided this summary: “In the experiment, participants were instructed to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to a learner (an actor) for incorrect answers. The study demonstrated that ordinary individuals are surprisingly willing to obey authority, even when those orders conflict with their own moral beliefs.” Zimbardo wrote: “In Milgram’s experiment, two of every three (65 percent) of the volunteers went all the way up to the maximum shock level of 450 volts. … The data clearly revealed the extreme pliability of human nature. Milgram was able to demonstrate that compliance rates could soar to over 90 percent of people continuing the 450-volt with the introduction of one crucial variable … Make the subject a member of a ‘teaching team,’ in which the job of pulling the lever is given to another person.” We want to think of the majority of humanity as good, but Milgram demonstrated rather conclusively that 9 out of 10 people can become, willingly, a party to unthinkable cruelty. Even to an authority that has no means to actually compel them. Can Creator tell us, how can this possibly be?ClosedNicola asked 3 weeks ago • Problems in Society38 views0 answers0 votesZimbardo characterized the Milgram Studies as “Creating Evil Traps for Good People.” Zimbardo extracted ten methods for this: 1. Create a contractual obligation. 2. Give a positive role or title like “teacher.” 3. Present basic rules that “must” be followed – even if vague. 4. Spin the agenda as “positive” – bad-tasting mouthwash “kills germs.” 5. Insist the authority is fully responsible for everything that happens. 6. Start with small acts of evil and work up from there. 7. Keep the amplification of evil so gradual as to hardly be noticeable. 8. Gradually change the nature of the authority from “just” to “unjust” and demanding and even irrational. 9. Make the exit costs high while allowing verbal dissent. And 10. Offer a “big lie” to justify everything. This is clearly a diabolically effective “stacked deck” that Milgram demonstrated works 90% of the time. What is Creator’s perspective?ClosedNicola asked 3 weeks ago • Problems in Society35 views0 answers0 votesZimbardo wrote, “This potential for authority figures to exercise power over subordinates can have disastrous consequences in many domains of life. … Such authority can lead to flight errors when the crew feels forced to accept the “authority’s definition of the situation, even when the authority is wrong.” An investigation of thirty-seven serious plane accidents where there was sufficient data from voice recorders revealed that in 81 percent of these cases, the first officer did not properly monitor or challenge the captain when he made errors. … We may conclude that excessive obedience may cause as many as 25% of all airplane accidents.” What is Creator’s perspective?ClosedNicola asked 3 weeks ago • Problems in Society35 views0 answers0 votesZimbardo wrote about “the strip search scam.” A con man calls an assistant manager at a fast-food restaurant and claims he is a police officer calling about a theft by an attractive new employee. The caller gives the option of the accused coming to the station or being “strip searched” by a fellow employee. Gradually, more and more degenerate instructions are given until overt sexual acts between employees take place. These sexual activities continue for several hours while they wait for the police to arrive which, of course, never happens. This scam has been carried out successfully in 68 similar fast-food settings in 32 states. This bizarre authority influence in absentia seduces many people. In the end, store personnel are fired, some are charged with crimes, the store is sued, and the victims are seriously distressed. The perpetrator, a former corrections officer, was finally caught and convicted. Zimbardo wrote, “So let us not underestimate the power of ‘authority’ to generate obedience to an extent and of a kind that is hard to fathom.” An assistant manager interviewed by Zimbardo said, “You look back on it, and you say, ‘I wouldn’t a done it.’ But unless you’re put in that situation, at that time, how do you know what you would do? You don’t.” What is Creator’s perspective?ClosedNicola asked 3 weeks ago • Problems in Society32 views0 answers0 votesZimbardo wrote about an Iowa elementary school teacher who wanted to teach her third-grade class about “brotherhood” and “tolerance.” She began her “lesson” by informing her students that people with blue eyes were superior to those with brown eyes. The previously “friendly blue-eyed kids” refused to play with the “bad brown-eyed kids,” and the blue-eyed kids suggested that school officials should be notified that the brown-eyed kids might steal things. Soon fist-fights erupted during recess. The next day she switched and told the class she was wrong, it was really the brown-eyed kids who were superior. Old friendship patterns between children dissolved and were replaced by hostility until the experimental project was ended. The teacher was amazed at the swift and total transformation of so many of her students whom she thought she knew so well. The teacher said, “What had been marvelously cooperative, thoughtful children became nasty, vicious, discriminating little third-graders … it was ghastly!” What is Creator’s perspective?ClosedNicola asked 3 weeks ago • Problems in Society39 views0 answers0 votesZimbardo wrote, “The psychologist Ervin Staub (who as a child survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary) concurs that most people under particular circumstances have a capacity for extreme violence and destruction of human life. Staub has come to believe that, “Evil arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people and is the norm, not the exception … Great evil arises out of ordinary psychological processes that evolve, usually with a progression along a continuum of destruction.” He highlights the significance of ordinary people being caught up in situations where they can (gradually) learn to practice evil acts that are demanded by higher-level authorities: “Being part of a system shapes views, rewards adherence to dominant views, and makes deviation psychologically demanding and difficult.” What is Creator’s perspective?ClosedNicola asked 3 weeks ago • Problems in Society33 views0 answers0 votesZimbardo wrote, “From her in-depth analysis of soldiers trained by the Greek military junta to be state-sanctioned torturers, my colleague Greek psychologist Mika Haritos-Fatouros concluded that torturers are not born but made by their training. “Anybody’s son will do” is her answer to the question, “Who will make an effective torturer?” In a matter of a few months, ordinary young men from rural villages became “weaponized” by their training in cruelty to act like brute beasts capable of inflicting the most horrendous acts of humiliation, pain, and suffering on anyone labeled “the enemy,” who, of course, were all citizens of their own country. What is Creator’s perspective?ClosedNicola asked 3 weeks ago • Problems in Society38 views0 answers0 votesZimbardo wrote, “Reject simple solutions as quick fixes for complex personal and social problems. Traditional analyses by most people, including those in the legal, religious, and medical institutions, focus on the actor as the sole causal agent. Consequently, they minimize or disregard the impact of situational variables and systemic determinants that shape behavioral outcomes and transform actors.” Yet Zimbardo was not fatalistic: “In those studies and many others, while the majority obeyed, conformed, complied, were persuaded, and were seduced, there was ALWAYS A MINORITY WHO RESISTED, DISSENTED, AND DISOBEYED.” Again, we come face to face with a divine-level problem. How can Empowered Prayer, the Lightworker Healing Protocol, Deep Subconscious Mind Reset, and Divine Life Support turn the minority into the majority?ClosedNicola asked 3 weeks ago • Problems in Society40 views0 answers0 votesMark Twain wrote: “There is no such thing as material covetousness. All covetousness is spiritual. …Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.” What is Creator’s perspective?ClosedNicola asked 2 months ago • Problems in Society97 views0 answers0 votesWilliam Penn wrote: “Covetousness is the greatest of monsters, as well as the root of all evil.” What is Creator’s perspective?ClosedNicola asked 2 months ago • Problems in Society86 views0 answers0 votesThomas Sprat said: “Covetousness, by a greediness of getting more, deprives itself of the true end of getting; it loses the enjoyment of what it had got.” What is Creator’s perspective?ClosedNicola asked 2 months ago • Problems in Society84 views0 answers0 votesEpictetus said: “Covetousness like jealousy, when it has taken root, never leaves a person, but with their life.” Actually, that is probably not entirely true as covetousness becomes a karmic dilemma that grows and rebirth brings around again and again the circumstances that trigger covetousness, but with greater intensity and imperative with each go-around. What is Creator’s perspective?ClosedNicola asked 2 months ago • Problems in Society72 views0 answers0 votesWilliam Mason said: “Consider the evil of covetousness. That insatiable desire prevents present contentment, destroys thankfulness, yes, and keeps the enjoyment of Christ out of the heart…” Can Creator tell us if this is indeed true as opposed to mostly true? Is covetousness truly an INSATIABLE desire—a thirst that can never be quenched? And if it is, how is it that consciousness can fall into such a condition? Is covetousness only a problem with sentient souls, or can lower life forms struggle with this as well? What can Creator tell us?ClosedNicola asked 2 months ago • Problems in Society82 views0 answers0 votes
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