Evil people, or an evil system? What can we do?
Well, Phillip Zimbardo is a social psychologist who studies how people become evil. You’ll probably know his most famous work as the Stanford Prison Experiment. It was pretty messed up, but it was also basically a microcosm of our criminal justice system. The experiment studied perceived power, and the effects it has on individuals. There were two sets of study participants. One group acted as the prison guards, and the other group acted as the prisoners. Within 6 days the experiment was called off due to the immoral and unethical nature of the experiment. This was not even a real prison, it was in the basement of Stanford University. All the participants were aware they were participating in a study, and they all underwent psychological tests to ensure their mental stability at the start. Yet, within 6 days both groups of people had internalized their roles, believing that they either deserved the power they had or deserved to be punished. 6 days. Imagine what would happen to a group of people over 400 years.
Philip Zimbardo published a book about that experiment in 2007. It’s titled “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.” I haven’t read that book, but I did watch his TED talk (because it’s 2020). I strongly encourage you to watch the talk (which deals with very graphic and intense subject matter), because this issue of what makes people go bad is so much broader than the criminal justice system or obvious acts of violence and cruelty. It’s in our places of work, our homes and our closest relationships. In the talk, he says, “The power is in the system. The system creates the situation that corrupts the individuals, and the system is the legal, political, economic, cultural background… If you want to change a person, change the situation. And to change it, you’ve got to know where the power is, in the system.”
That’s something that we’ve all heard before though. We all know it’s the system, right? But we don’t think we’re part of the system. I mean the system is this big complicated thing, and it’s not like we have any control over it. We like to think of the system and individuals as separate. Like a bunch of apples sitting in a barrel. We’re the apples, and the barrel is the system, and the real problem is the people making the barrels. They are our elected officials, lawyers, judges, executives, police commissioners, anyone who has input and power over how groups of people interact with other groups of people. They do this with laws and regulations, but who enforces the law? That’s where the criminal justice system comes in. For white people, it’s mostly homeowners and business owners suing each other over zoning laws, and business practices. It’s the responsibility of the individuals to hold each other accountable. The cops barely get involved. For black people and other people of color, the Police are abusing, bullying, killing and locking up their friends, family and vulnerable members of the community (watch 13th on Netflix if you need more evidence than the constant slew of racial killings and injustices). So there’s this huge racial discrepancy in how different groups of people are being treated by the police, and it is that way because the barrel makers waged a war on petty crime, designed zoning regulations (known as redlining), and used crime statistics (buoyed by those laws) to support racial profiling and unconscious biases within the police force, and broader society.
Hm, that’s a really bad situation, but I’m just an apple in this dirty old barrel. Not much I can do about it, right? Plus, that Zimbardo guy said the problem and the solution lies with the power in the system, and it’s obvious the barrel makers have a lot of power in the system.
Well not so fast. The system is the whole thing. The barrel, the apples and the barrel makers. With power spread throughout. Not evenly, obviously, those barrel makers have a lot of power, with very little accountability and no oversight, and they’ve designed it that way (See Requiem for the American Dream). Which by the way, Dr. Zimbardo says is the key to abuse. “If you give people power without oversight, it’s a prescription for abuse.”
So, what is oversight? Oversight is not your general manager. They’re just another person with power, it’s not even the board of directors, those are just more people with more power. Oversight is an outside indifferent — to the success or failure of the system, certainly not morally or ethically indifferent — observer. It’s the people writing reviews, doing analysis and questioning practices. They aren’t getting paid by the entity they are observing, and no more or less based on the outcome of the review, analysis or observation. That’s oversight, and there’s not much of that going on anywhere. Not in the criminal justice system, not in the government, not in the private business sector. It’s inconvenient, and there’s no capital gain, in fact, there’s probably a significant amount of loss involved, at least initially. It’s just an objective look at where an organization or entity lies on the spectrum of good and evil (corruption). Imagine pitching that to a bunch of billionaire executives.
Interestingly, I can see a lot of value for something like that in the criminal justice system — a system that is supposedly based on the idea of good prevailing over evil.
So now that we have a sense of what oversight is, where does it come from in the apple barrel analogy? Well, it has to come from the apples.
The apples are part of the system, only they aren’t helpless immobile apples. They are you and me. It’s us, human beings who don’t have to sit around in a barrel waiting for good things to fall out of the sky. There isn’t even a barrel. Just more people. The criminal justice system is made up of people, businesses are made up of people, banks and governments are made up of people. Individual people. We are the system. You and me. There is no oversight for the barrel makers unless we demand it. The further up you go, the less accountability and oversight there is, which means more room for abuse — watch Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich if you want to find out how little accountability and oversight people at the top have, and how gingerly the police department deals with white people and privilege.
The action and protests that have been happening over the past few weeks have shown that people, ordinary everyday people can hold the system accountable, influence policy, and enact change. To do that though, individuals need to accept the responsibility they have as part of the system to stop allowing the barrel makers to get away with murder. This is about us, as individuals, and holding each other accountable, from one person to another. According to an experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram on obedience, and discussed in Philip Zimbardo’s TED talk, almost two thirds, 65% of the study participants (mostly cis-gendered, white men and women) will do something they know could kill someone as long as they can believe they won’t be held responsible.
Think about that.
Hint: that’s the classic, “they’re just doing their jobs” argument.
Which is true, most cops are just trying to do their jobs, but evil keeps happening, because there’s too much power, with too little oversight, and limited accountability. The system is set up to enable and reward violence, not deter it. All cops are not bad, but all cops are part of a system that enables and promotes violent and evil acts, and many cops have done bad things. That being said, I am not condoning shaming and blaming. I wholeheartedly disagree with that approach, but I don’t expect it will stop anytime soon (see above article).
So what’s the solution? Well, I think the results of Stanley Milgram’s study would have been quite a bit different if the participants were mostly black and brown, LGBTQ, poor, and other groups of people for whom the system doesn’t work. Why? Because Milgram’s study is about obedience. People for whom the system works, obey, because they trust authority (like doctors in lab coats, or police officers), and they trust authority because the system works for them. People for whom the system does not work, tend to question things more often, and as a result, are more disobedient. I think if you drew a Venn diagram of independence and responsibility, right in the middle you’d have disobedience.
The more people talk about what is wrong, the more oversight there is, and the more willing people are to question the way things are and disobey, the more accountability there is for people in power. The solution is, as it has always been, to listen to that uncertainty in your gut, be brave and say, “No. I’m going to be part of the 35% this time.” Once enough apples make that choice, responsibility wins out over silence and obedience, and the apples are no longer apples, but people holding the barrel makers accountable.
Many thanks to Puppybreath, for providing me with some very helpful feedback on this article.
