Experiments of evil

Israel Keyes killed 8-12 people brutally... looks like a nice guy

      If you could tell who was good and who was bad, this world would be a far easier place. Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. Evil doesn’t come with a warning label. An evil person cannot be recognized by mere appearance. Maybe it could even be said that many acts we consider evil are not executed by people who are evil whatsoever. I think the answer is more complicated than just having The Devil on your shoulder.

Marilyn Manson looks super evil... Actually he's a pretty solid guy

      Many famous experiments have changed the entire way we think about evil. One occurred at Yale in 1964 and is known as The Milgram experiment. It measured the willingness of subjects to preform evil acts on an innocent person when an authority figure told them to. 

      This experiment required separating the teacher (a volunteer) and the learner (who was a paid actor) by putting them in different rooms, but still allowing them to communicate. Then the teacher then made the learner recite and remember word pairs. With each incorrect answer given, the teacher was instructed to give the learner an electric shock that increased with power for each wrong answer. The experiment was ended after the maximum 450 volt shock was administered three times, or if the teacher refused to continue after receiving these four prompts from the experimenter.

Please continue

The experiment requires that you continue

It is absolutely essential that you continue

You have no other choice, you must go on

This is how the experiment worked

      So how many administered the excruciating 450 volt shock three times to max out the experiment and end it? Five percent? Maybe ten percent? Or even as high as twenty-five percent of participants? No, a staggering 61-65% of participants administered what they believed to be the maximum shock on their innocent peer three times. These numbers barely changed, even when the experiment was moved from Yale’s respectable campus to a back room of an office building in an inner city.

      Now, what can this experiment tell us about the nature of evil? It seems to point to a truth that is sickening but entirely logical. Almost every one of us has the ability to become the inflicter of pain and torment on another human. It seems that the perceived good or evil in a person has much more to do with that person’s situation than their personal morality. 

I'll spare you the graphic pictures,
this one says it all

      It is this thought that makes heinous acts like genocide all the more terrifying; the people committing them are not all horrible twisted psychopaths. Maybe some are just cogs in a larger psychopathic machine. This means that all that would be required to get large numbers of normal people to commit abhorrent crimes against humanity would be a few horrible people in power with the intelligence and charisma to create the system. This makes a lot of sense when you think of the holocaust. I'm sure many other genocides also fall into this pattern.

      So tell me, how does this banality of evil apply in our world? From brutal dictators, to religious extremists, to soldiers who carry out war crimes; they can all be seen as evil. Is there a way to stop this, or is it simply a part of human nature? 

      I hope that through more experiments and advances in science, we will be able to one day understand and eradicate the evil in the world.