The Lucifer Effect

I have been reading more and more articles and letters in local Pakistani newspapers, where the authors have been questioning how our country has always allowed the state to unleash brutality towards innocent protesters or just simple unarmed civilians who get caught in the cobweb of the law. They have also questioned how we can stoop to such levels of indecency that we feel ashamed of calling ourselves human. I have the same queries, concerns and anxieties.

But we have to understand that we are not alone. We are not the only nation experiencing such upheaval that has destroyed the most fundamental social fabric of a society i.e. tolerance. The title of this article has been borrowed from a book by Professor Philip Zimbardo, who is a psychologist at Stanford University.

He came to limelight in 1971 when he conducted the controversial Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). In the light of this experiment he explains how good people can turn evil when given unaccountable authority. He placed a group of twenty four physically and psychologically healthy middle aged male volunteers in a make- believe prison at the university and divided them equally at random into prisoners and prison guards. To further dehumanise the prisoners they were assigned and called by their inmate number and not names.

The experiment soon spun out of hand and the guards became more sadistic and violent while the prisoners became more accepting and developed learned helplessness (a Psychological phenomenon where the victim feels powerless to control the outcome and so abdicate efforts to change things). It had to be ended only 6 days after it began rather than the 14 days originally planned. While profiling the guards they found that there were three types: First, there were tough but fair guards who followed prison rules. Second, there were "good guys" who did little favors for the prisoners and never punished them. And finally, about a third of the guards were hostile, arbitrary, and inventive in their forms of prisoner humiliation, they appeared to thoroughly enjoy the power they wielded.

The SPE came to attention again in 2003 when pictures were leaked of the atrocities committed by the US armed forces against Iraqi civilian at Abu Ghraib prison. The most disturbing part of all this was, that some of the procedures involved in humiliating the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were the exact duplicate of the ones used in SPE.
In another experiment, which took place 10 years prior to SPE, was the Milgram Experiment conducted at Yale University by Stanley Milgram. He wanted to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. He wrote an article called “The perils of obedience” in 1974 to summarise his findings. He also came to a similar conclusion and observed that most of the average population are capable of doing atrocious things under obedience from authority figures.
We see that humans have behaved in the most despicable manner throughout history.

The human race is divided by so many fragile lines that it impossible to have a conflict free world, but when this transforms into oppression and repression then it should be a wake up call for that society. We have been experiencing the above in Pakistan for more than 60 years and our nation has gone into an apathetic slumber. We have not only experienced tyranny had the hands of military rulers but also by the so called ‘democratic’ politicians.

We need to have systems which put in a check and balance on law enforces as well as authority figures. David Blunkett, Home Secretary in Blair’s government had to resign on December 2004 because it was alleged that he misused his authority when he tried to expedite the resident visa application of his ex-lover’s Filipina nanny. Chuck Rosenthal, the district attorney of Houston, Texas had to resign in February 2008 after a scandal uncovered the release of dozens of pornographic, racist and political e-mails on his office computer.

The only things that can truly slow the decay of our society, is to make sure the rule of law is implemented ‘equally and across the board’ to everyone. And this is not brought into effect by particular individuals but by making sure that justice is served to the common man. We need to stand up and accept our faults and apologise for our misdeeds.

The issue of judicial accountability should not become a blasphemous act and should be followed with more vigour now than before, as the Supreme Court in the UK once said, “Judicial office is essentially public trust. Society is, therefore, entitled to expect that a judge must be a man of high integrity, honesty and required to have moral vigor, ethical firmness and impervious to corrupt or venal influences.”

Only true and unhindered justice will be able to reform our society. Why wait for someone to be reinstated and foster a belief that all is going to be well then. This can and should start from ourselves, we can stop offering bribes, finding short-cuts, looting customers, breaking traffic rules and using nepotism as tool for progression. Or can we?