The 2%er/98%er Profile and How to Become More Successful

Core Power and Core Helplessness -- Freedom, Health, Life-Extension & Biological/Physical Immortality -- Part 4a

by Frederick Mann -- 10/1/07 (under construction; first version should be completed in about 2-3 months.)

(Note on word usage: Some political words, like "government," "state," "country," "nation," "law," etc., may not represent reality very well (they are often used to mislead) -- see Political Fakery? and the "Concept Formation" and "Does the government really exist?" videos. However, it would be difficult to communicate without using such words, so I'm using "government*," "state*," "country*," "nation*" and "law*." The "*" is the equivalent of crossing my fingers, to indicate that I may be using a "fake word.")

Contents -- Part 4a

• Mind Control, Brainwashing, and Snapping
• Government as a Cult
• How the Second Big Inversion Happens
• The Second Big Inversion as a Control Mechanism
• Politics on Dumbtopia
• The Second Big Inversion, Obedience, and Conformity
• Smash the Idols in Your Head!
• Dehumanization

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Many 2%ers succeed spectacularly well in many ways, without concerning themselves about Mind Control, Brainwashing, and Snapping, and without becoming aware of the Second Big Inversion. A system can be seen as "evil" if it produces bad results. That does not necessarily mean that any people in the system are "bad" or "evil." It's possible for all the people in an "evil" system to be "good" people. The reason for this is that "good" people may suffer from "Selective Blindness" that effectively blinds them to the "evils" of their system.

WARNING: Capture-bonded, domesticated humans with selective blindness (including typical psychologists and psychiatrists) may regard anyone who has recovered from the Second Big Inversion as "insane," a "psychopath," or a "sociopath." In general, the best strategy when interacting with capture-bonded, domesticated, and selectively blind ("normal") humans is to pretend that you're just as capture-bonded, domesticated, and selectively blind as they are!

WARNING: Do not proceed to read anything further on this page, unless you have a strong mind!

"I Ain't Got No Quarrel With The VietCong... No VietCong Ever Called Me Nigger." -- Muhammad Ali (1966)

"No, I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder, kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people the world over. This is the day and age when such evil injustice must come to an end." -- Muhammad Ali (1967)

Did Muhammad Ali speak as:
1. A coward or traitor?
2. A victim of Islamic brainwashing?
3. A courageous hero less brainwashed than most?
4. Other?

Mind Control, Brainwashing, and Snapping

Government* as a Cult

It's not very difficult to describe government* as a cult:

• A messianic, possibly maniacal, authoritarian leader who regards himself as the "great decider," the "decider" (and/or other similar terms) and who claims that he "consults with god."
  
  
• A hierarchical control structure.
  
  
• Top staff members are selected primarily for their loyalty, and very little dissent is tolerated.
  
  
• Some specially selected cult staff members perform all kinds of secret activities (often criminal), not communicated to the general membership.
  
  
• Dissenting staff members are usually fired.
  
  
• Cult leaders often tell lies about their agendas and actions.
  
  
• Deception and/or force is used to gain new recruits -- also called "compulsory education" -- the deception includes not revealing to the victims that the purposes of the "education" include turning the victims into compliant factory or office workers and subservient "citizens of their cult... I mean, country*."
  
  
• New recruits are removed from their families for long hours, kept confined in artificial environments, and brainwashed to "obey authority."
  
  
• Recruits are brainwashed to become dependent and to believe that government* has "godlike" powers to make a wide range of decisions for them and to "do for people what they can't do for themselves."
  
  
• Members are compelled (at the point of a gun if necessary) to pay a large portion of their earnings to cult leaders.
  
  
• Members are not allowed to leave the cult, in that they have to continue paying large amounts to the cult leaders, no matter where the members go.
  
  
• For some important aspects of the government* cult, see column to the right.
  
  
• Check out the video: Law, Order and Anarchy #2: Government is a cult

How the Second Big Inversion Happens

Robert Pirsig: -- (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance): "Little children were trained not to do "just what they liked," but... but what?... Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities. When you are trained to despise "just what you like" then, of course, they become a much more obedient servant of others -- a good slave. When you learn not to do "just what you like," then the system loves you."

Someone who hasn't become "adapted to subjective social reality" -- suffered the experiences of Capture-Bonding and Human Domestication -- or who has recovered from these experiences can be regarded as being in a natural or native state. Before the Second Big Inversion (natural/native state), children use their senses as their primary way to discern reality.

Notice how many of the specifics mentioned in the "Subjective Social Reality" video happen to children in school. Children are not allowed to be independent. They are taught to think, feel, act, and dress in the right way. Their ability to think critically is caved in.

Notice what was said about the "creation of subjective reality" and the "power of cognitive control" -- making it possible for "subjective reality to override objective facts." This is a description of what I call the Second Big Inversion.

After the Second Big Inversion (state of having "adapted to subjective social reality"), children use "subjective social reality" as their primary way to discern reality. They are taught to believe things because their parents, teachers, and other "authority" figures say they are true. Several other aspects of this "snapping of the mind" are described under Second Big Inversion and Gullibility.

Conway and Siegelman: Snapping, as we have come to understand it, may be summed up in a very simple definition: it is a phenomenon that occurs when an indivual stops thinking and feeling for himself, when he breaks the bonds of awareness and social relationship that tie his personality to the outside world and literally loses his mind to some form of external or automatic control. In that sense, the moment of snapping, when the mind shuts off, remains a moment of human decision. It takes place as some invisible switch is thrown in the infinitely flexible human brain, whether volutarily and in good faith or unwittingly and in a state of confusion, as individuality is surrendered to some religion, psychology, or recipe for living [Frederick Mann: including "subjective social reality" and "political ideology"] that requires no real conscience and no consciousness, no effort or attention on the individual's part."

The Second Big Inversion can be regarded as a form of "snapping." However, it most likely occurs over a longer period than the "snapping" described by Conway and Siegelman. It's probably a "gradual snapping" as a child is progressively brainwashed into accepting more and more aspects of "subjective social reality" as valid, because parents, teachers, etc. say, "Because I say so!," "Everbody knows it's true!," "If you don't agree and conform, you won't fit in with society!," etc.

Conway and Siegelman: "In the wake of snapping, after an individual surrenders or lets go, whether in a sudden moment or gradually, he may possibly slip into a level of reduced awareness in which the disorientation and confusion that follow the snapping moment become part of his everyday manner of experiencing the world. This trancelike limbo state represents the suspension of a person's response as an individual and is the first stage in the reorganization of personality."

The "disorientation and confusion" referred to above can also be described as "Reality Disconnect."

The Second Big Inversion as a Control Mechanism

Conway and Siegelman: "But what value can there be in engineering these experiences to shut down the workings of the mind altogether, to stunt the process of thought and leave people numb to their own feelings and the world around them? Throughout history, this kind of attack on human awareness has proved an efficient method of controlling members of tribes, societies, and whole nations in which little value is placed upon individuality. The state of mind it produces has a tradition that dates back to the dawn of civilization... We can describe the process as one of shutting off the mind, of not-thinking... What kind of cultural environment breeds this widespread need to shut off the mind? ...This shift in our basic attitudes, opinions, lifestyles, and relationships has fed into a social and cultural environment that in its own tacit way offers heady rewards for not thinking... Shutting off the mind in this way provides instant relief from anxiety and frustration. It evokes pleasure by default, salvation through surrender, and even better, its simple happiness is self-perpetuating."

Capture-Bonding is central to the Second Big Inversion. The same evolutionary reasoning probably applies: Our ancestors who were captured by hostile tribes had a better chance to survive if they submitted and reduced their awareness to their plight, including to experience less pain from wounds. So, shutting down your mind could have had survival value and could have been selected for. Those with a better "shut-down-your-mind" ability survived and passed this attribute on to their offspring.

Conway and Siegelman basically explore the snapping that occurs when "normal" people "fall under the spell" of cults and the like. But what if the "conversion" from "natural or native state" (where you primarily use your senses to discern reality) to "normal" person (where you surrender to "subjective consensus reality," "subjective religious reality," and/or "subjective political reality") is really a similar form of snapping?

Conway and Siegelman: "Throughout our society, the unconscious control of human beings has become the focus of some of our most powerful institutions. It is taken for granted in education, where the principles of behavior modification govern teaching, not only in school but also in the home. It is the subject of continuing experimentation in factories and other work environments. It has burgeoned in the seventies in a spate of best sellers advising readers how to exploit the tactics of "power," "assertiveness," and "winning through intimidation" to turn the unawareness of others to their own personal advantage."

What if most politicians, preachers, teachers, business tycoons, and others in positions of power and influence are more interested in turning "the unawareness of others to their own personal advantage" than anything else? Check out the "Psychological Control" videos.

Conway and Siegelman are no doubt very aware of the difference between the awareness of a "normal" person and that of someone brainwashed by the Moonies. But they may have no idea that the difference between someone who has recovered from the Second Big Inversion and a "normal" person is as big as the difference between "normal" and Moonie!

The ease or difficulty with which your brain can deal with the "Concept Formation" and "Does the government really exist?" videos to the right, can be regarded as a measure of the degree to which you've recovered from the Second Big Inversion or are still a victim of it. Watching the videos will also be a good exercise to aid some people in recovering from the Second Big Inversion. Developing the ability to question everything -- and actually doing the questioning -- is an essential part of recovering from the Second Big Inversion -- see Learn to Ask Better Questions.

The very act of learning and accepting your native language (this certainly applies to English and all other languages I know of) involves a considerable degree of snapping. See #TL07A: The Anatomy of Slavespeak. To snap out of the Second Big Inversion, you have to question the validity and usefulness of many words of your native language!

Voluntarily Relinquishing Awareness and Thought

Conway and Siegelman: "In America today, aware, intelligent individuals of all ages are being persuaded to stop thinking voluntarily... not thinking becomes the norm, and with it there is a reduction in both feeling and awareness. Moreover, once a person's brain enters this state, the individual may be incapable of coming out of it... may bring about changes in individual personalities, making us less aware, more vulnerable to manipulation, and ultimately, less than fully capable of thinking and acting as human beings... Everyone, without exception, is susceptible to snapping... The physical stress which has been singled out as the potent tool of "brainwashing" in cults is so much a part of our daily lives that its impact on each individual's ability to think and feel may be easily overlooked. ...[M]ost of us can go for days, even weeks, and save scarcely a moment for reflection... This propaganda urges him to surrender to the seductive enticements of our consumer society, to the manipulation of his opinions and beliefs, and the overpowering weight of new and traditional images, roles, and rewards, which, in the seventies, make promises of fulfillment that our society cannot keep. ...[O]ur culture seems to be embarking on a destructive new course of manipulation and escapism, of human abdication."

There's a great deal more on "propoganda" and "manipulation" in the "Psychological Control" videos.

The Second Big Inversion, Obedience, and Conformity

"Conformity means death. Only protest gives a hope of life." -- Bertrand Russell

Conformity and obedience are "close relatives." The Second Big Inversion is about replacing objective reality (what really exists) with the subjective opinions of others. Consider religion. Parent tells Johnnie that "god exists." Is there any way for Johnnie to use his senses to find "god" in objective reality? Obviously not. Johnnie is effectively forced to accept the subjective opinion of Parent. Johnnie is taught that he has to believe what he's told by older, bigger, and stronger people. The only way he can believe is by "disconnecting from objective reality" and surrendering to "subjective social reality." This involves a "snapping of the mind." So guess who teaches that "obedience is a virtue?"

Now imagine Johnnie saying, "This "god thing" you're talking about sounds strange to me. I've got eyes. Can I see this "god thing"?" Whatever Parent says, Johnnie keeps on asking questions based in objective reality. From an objective-reality-based point of view, Parent can only utter nonsense and gibberish on the topic. By the way, have you thought about the word "nonsense?" Non-Sense -- talking about things that can't be sensed? (See also "Conversation between Christian and Chironian.") Johnnie is is lterally taught that nonsense (what he can't sense) is more "real" that what he can see with his own eyes.

Erich Fromm wrote an essay, "On Disobedience," published in his book On Disobedience and Other Essays. Fromm wrote that "human history began with an act of disobedience." He was referring to Adam and Eve whose act of disobedience in eating the apple of knowledge set them "free and opened their eyes."

Suppose Johnnie initially caves in to religious brainwasher Parent (his mind snaps), and starts believing in the "god thing." He has to "close his eyes" to believe. Then something happens to "open his eyes" -- maybe he meets someone who knows about using his eyes to see the world... I know, I know, this is so unlikeley that most people never meet someone like this throughout their lives (or if they do, they dismiss him as crazy!) -- and then Johnnie learns to use his eyes again, he confronts Parent and asked why he pushed the imaginary "god stuff" for which he has on objective evidence? What would happen?

Fromm further wrote: "Man has continued to evolve by acts of disobedience. Not only was his spiritual development possible only because there were men who dared say no to the powers that be in the name of their conscience or their faith, but also his intellectual development was dependent on the capacity for being disobedient -- disobedient to authorities who tried to muzzle new thoughts and to the authority of long-established opinions which declared a change to be nonsense."

Now Johnnie is forced to go to school. He asks Teacher, "Why do I have to come here?" "Everyone has to go to school." "I'm not Everyone, I'm Johnnie." "Well, it's the law." "What's this "law thing?" "The government makes the laws." "What's this "government thing?" "It's the highest authority in the land." "What makes it the authority?" "The US Constitution." "Is all this stuff just beliefs in your head, or is there any of it I can verify with my own senses?" "Go read the Constitution." "OK. I'll do that, then I'll come back."

Fromm continues ...[W]hile we are living technically in the Atomic Age, the majority of men -- including most of those who are in power -- still live emotionally in the Stone Age; ... while our mathematics, astronomy, and the natural sciences are of the twentieth century, most of our ideas about politics, the state, and society lag far behind the age of science. If mankind commits suicide it will be because people will obey those who command them to push the deadly buttons; because they will obey the archaic passions of fear, hate, and greed; because they will obey obsolete clichés of State sovereignty and national honor."

Johnnie get's back to class, after also having read some Lysander Spooner. "Teacher, I read the paper you call the "US Constition"." For the sake of brevity, I'll just give Johnnie's part in the discussion that ensued:

• I couldn't find any evidence of any person called "We the People" having existed.
• I couldn't find any evidence of any group called "We the People" consisting of identifiable individuals having existed.
• I couldn't find any evidence that individuals legitimately constituting "We the People" signed the paper.
• Using a fake name in a contract in order to deceive is fraud.
• I found nothing in the paper that binds anyone except those who supposedly signed it.
• I found nothing in the paper that binds the offspring of anyone to whom it may have applied during their lifetimes.
• I didn't find my name in the paper, I didn't agree to it, and I didn't sign it.
• I didn't find my Parents' name in the paper, they didn't sign it, nor did anyone authorized by me -- anyway, I would never authorize anyone to sign such a paper on my behalf.
• My investigation revealed that it's all a hoax -- the "constitution thing," the "government thing," and the "law thing" are just a pile of crap -- just like the "god thing" my Parent tried to shove down my throat! I have no idea how even one person can be gullible enough to fall for such an obvious scam.

Teacher: "Class, what do you think of what Johnnie has just said?" An uproar of laughter and shouts, "Johnnie is crazy! Everybody knows... blah... blah." Teacher: "Johnnie, you better shut up, sit down, and start learning!"

This may be a good time to watch Asch's Conformity Experiment

Fromm continues: "Obedience is the root of much evil... [I]n order to disobey we need courage, and the capacity for courage depends on our state of development. When we are fully developed individuals, having "emerged from mother's lap and father's commands," and having acquired the ability to think and feel for ourselves, then we have the courage to say "no" to political coercion."

In Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View Stanley Milgram writes: "Obedience, because of its very ubiquitousness, is easily overlooked as a subject of inquiry in social psychology. But without an appreciation of its role in shaping human action, a wide range of significant behavior cannot be understood. For an act carried out under command is, psychologically, of a profoundly different character than action which is spontaneous.

The person who, with inner conviction, loathes stealing, killing, and assault may find himself performing these acts with relative ease when commanded by authority. Behavior that is unthinkable in an individual who is acting on his own may be executed without hesitation when carried out under orders.

...Obedience, as a determinant of behavior, is of particular relevance to our time. It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have been originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.

...Though such prescriptions as "Thou shalt not kill" occupy a pre-eminent place in the moral order, they do not occupy a correspondingly intractable position in human psychic structure. A few changes in newspaper headlines, a call from the draft board, orders from a man with epaulets, and men are led to kill with little difficulty. Even the forces mustered in a psychology experiment will go a long way toward removing the individual from moral controls. Moral factors can be shunted aside with relative ease by a calculated restructuring of the informational and social field."

Milgram conducted some experiments to determine the degree to which people are obedient to authority. In a typical experiment there is a "teacher," a "learner" and the "authority" (experimenter) who conducts the experiment. The teacher asks a series of questions to the learner. If the learner gives an incorrect answer the teacher presses a button that supposedly administers an electric shock to the learner. Actually no shock is involved, but the learner is an actor who pretends that he suffers pain from the shock.

There's a series of buttons to administer a range of shocks, starting at 15 volts and going up to 450 volts in 15-volt increments. Every time the learner makes a mistake the teacher is to administer the next higher level of shock. The teacher is told that high levels of shock will hurt the learner and may even kill him.

Prior to a typical experiment people were asked what they thought would be the maximum shock applied. Among 39 psychiatrists, one predicted that the strongest shock would be 300 volts, two predicted 195 volts. All the other predictions were lower. Among 31 college students, the highest prediction by one student was 210 volts. Among middle-class adults, the highest prediction by three people was 300 volts.

In the actual experiments, generally, about two-thirds of teachers administered the maximum shock, despite the learner's screams of pain and demands that the experiment be stopped. In some variations of the experiment over 90 percent of the teachers administered the maximum shock. The degree of obedience to authority was vastly higher than anyone expected.

Milgram concluded from his experiments that obedience to authority is a "danger to human survival inherent in our make-up." His experiments revealed something very dangerous: "[T]he capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures.

This is a fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival...

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority."

My conclusion: It may be people whose minds were severely damaged by their parents and by "compulsory state* schooling," who easily succumb to authority. The cognitive connections between their behavior and the consequences of their behavior may have been greatly weakened at home and in school. It may be these dependent, obedience-trained, relatively powerless people who submit to authority. Practically everyone experiences the Second Big Inversion -- are there any exceptions?

It may be worth reflecting on how conformity and obedience to "authority" might be associated with Capture-Bonding, Human Domestication, and Selective Blindness.

This may be a good time to watch a More Recent Version of the Milgram Experiment.

In any case, obedience must be just about the greatest of all evils. Obedience is the surrender of personal power.

Milgram concludes his book by quoting from an article by Harold J. Laski, titled "The Dangers of Obedience": "...[C]ivilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain. Within the ambit of that definition, those of us who heedlessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men."

Complete recovery from the Second Big Inversion by a few indivduals could become something positive in the world.

Dehumanization

Phillip Zimbardo's video on the "Lucifer Effect - Psychology of Evil" includes a series of Abu Ghraib pictures. The parallels between these images and those from the "Stanford Prison Experiment" conducted in 1971 are quite striking.

Both the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrate that under certain conditions, seemingly "normal good people" can perform the most evil actions. In the Milgram Experiment, when "teacher A" sat next to a "teacher B" who went up all the way to administer a shock of 450 volts (which could kill the "learner"), 90% of the "teacher As" also went up all the way to 450 volts. This indicates that the presence of someone doing evil things makes it "easier" for those around him or her to also do evil things.

The most important thing to learn from the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment is that when people are put in positions that enable them to exercise coercive powers over others, there's no telling what evil deeds and atrocities they may perpetrate. And if one of them performs evil deeds, then the chances are higher that those around him or her will also perform evil deeds.

If you watch the "Lucifer Effect - Psychology of Evil" video, and then also watch Stefan Molyneux's "Politics as as addiction..." video, you may be able to see why Stefan hits the nail on the head.

"Dehumanization" has to do with the "removal" of human qualities like freedom, independence, individuality, thinking for yourself, compassion, respect for others, and morality. When people get into a situation that enables them to exert coercive power over others, they tend to dehumanize themselves. This was demonstated by the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment -- as well as by Abu Ghraib.

When parents force their children to believe religious and political absurdities, they dehumanize their children.

When children are forced into "schools" and compelled to believe, obey, and conform, they are dehumanized. When "teachers" get into situations that enable them to exert coercive power over their students, they are likely to dehumanize themselves. "Compulsory state* schooling" can be described as "institutionalized dehumanization."

The practice of psychiatry, particularly forced confinement and pushing drugs to children, is mostly about dehumanization.

Organized religion is mostly about dehumanizing their victims (particularly damaging or destoying their thinking skills), so money can be extracted easily from them for the rest of their lives.

Coercive political systems are mostly about dehumanizing people (particularly damaging or destoying their thinking skills sand independence), so they can be controlled and money can be extracted from them with minimum expenditure of force, for the rest of their lives.

Much of what police do as their "jobs" (e.g., capturing, subjugating, and confining people who haven't harmed another or their property), is "legal dehumanization."

Prisons and jails serve primarily as "dehumanization factories."

When soldiers put on their uniforms, are trained to obey and kill without thinking, they tend to become dehumanized killing robots.

What do you now think of Muhammad Ali's refusal to go to Vietnam? Was it a refusal to become a dehumanized killing robot, forced to kill people who had done him no harm?

Notes on the Stanford Prison Experiment

The following extracts are from two articles -- one by Kathleen O'Toole (Stanford Report) and the other by Meredith Alexander (Stanford University News Service).

Strip searched, sprayed for lice and locked up with chains around their ankles, the "prisoners" were part of an experiment to test people's reactions to power dynamics in social situations. Other college student volunteers -- the "guards" -- were given authority to dictate 24-hour-a-day rules. They were soon humiliating the "prisoners" in an effort to break their will.

Using realistic methods, Zimbardo and others were able to create a prison atmosphere that transformed its participants. The young men who played prisoners and guards revealed how much circumstances can distort individual personalities -- and how anyone, when given complete control over others, can act like a monster.

"In a few days, the role dominated the person," Zimbardo recalled, "They became guards and prisoners."

"At that point, I felt there was something wrong with me, thinking here I am, I'm supposed to be a psychologist, I'm supposed to understand, and I was having a hard time watching what was happening to these kids." [Observing the Stanford Prison Experiment for the first time on the fifth day.] "I was sick to my stomach. When it's happening to you, it doesn't feel heroic; it feels real scary. It feels like you are a deviant." -- Professor Christina Maslach, UC-Berkeley, to psychologists gathered in Toronto, Aug. 12, 1996

...Maslach would take actions that made her a heroine in some circles as "the one who stopped the Stanford Prison Experiment." She was involved in a romantic relationship with Zimbardo, the experiment's principal investigator... Yet she had difficulty resisting the group pressure to be enthusiastic about what was going on in the name of science.

...[T]he Stanford Prison Experiment made news in a big way. It offered the world a videotaped demonstration of how ordinary people middle-class college students can do things they would have never believed they were capable of doing. It seemed to say, as Hannah Arendt said of Adolf Eichmann, that normal people can take ghastly actions.

Those assigned to be guards were given uniforms and instructed that they were not to use violence but that their job was to maintain control of the prison.

From the perspective of the researchers, the experiment became exciting on day two when the prisoners staged a revolt. Once the guards had crushed the rebellion, "they steadily increased their coercive aggression tactics, humiliation and dehumanization of the prisoners," Zimbardo recalls. "The staff had to frequently remind the guards to refrain from such tactics," he said, and the worst instances of abuse occurred in the middle of the night when the guards thought the staff was not watching. The guards' treatment of the prisoners such things as forcing them to clean out toilet bowls with their bare hands and act out degrading scenarios, or urging them to become snitches "resulted in extreme stress reactions that forced us to release five prisoners, one a day, prematurely."

Zimbardo's primary reason for conducting the experiment was to focus on the power of roles, rules, symbols, group identity and situational validation of behavior that generally would repulse ordinary individuals. "I had been conducting research for some years on deindividuation, vandalism and dehumanization that illustrated the ease with which ordinary people could be led to engage in anti-social acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or they could perceive of others in ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects," Zimbardo told the Toronto symposium in the summer of 1996.

"I wondered, along with my research associates Craig Haney, Curtis Banks and Carlo Prescott, what would happen if we aggregated all of these processes, making some subjects feel deindividuated, others dehumanized within an anonymous environment in the same experimental setting, and where we could carefully document the process over time."

Maslach walked into the mock prison on the evening of the fifth day. Having just received her doctorate from Stanford and starting an assistant professorship at Berkeley, she had agreed to do subject interviews the next day and had come down the night before to familiarize herself with the experiment.

...[S]he had a pleasant conversation with a "charming, funny, smart" young man waiting to start his guard shift. Other researchers had told her there was a particularly sadistic guard, whom both prisoners and other guards had nicknamed John Wayne. Later, when she looked at the monitor of the prison yard again, she asked someone to point out John Wayne and was shocked to discover it was the young man she had talked with earlier.

"This man had been transformed. He was talking in a different accent a Southern accent, which I hadn't recalled at all. He moved differently, and the way he talked was different, not just in the accent, but in the way he was interacting with the prisoners. It was like [seeing] Jekyll and Hyde... It really took my breath away."

Several prisoners engaged in a debate with John Wayne, she said, in which they accused him of enjoying his job. He said that he wasn't really like that, he was just playing a role. One prisoner challenged this, Maslach said, noting that the guard had tripped him earlier when he was taking him down the hall to the bathroom. No researchers were around to see the act, the prisoner said, which indicated to him that the act reflected the guard's true disposition. John Wayne disagreed, saying that if he let up, the role wouldn't remain powerful.

Later that evening, Maslach said, she suddenly got sick to her stomach while watching guards taking the prisoners with paper bags over their heads to the bathroom before their bedtime... After leaving the prison with Zimbardo, she said, he asked her what she thought of it. "I think he expected some sort of great intellectual discussion about what was going on. Instead, I started to have this incredible emotional outburst. I started to scream, I started to yell, 'I think it is terrible what you are doing to those boys!' I cried. We had a fight you wouldn't believe, and I was beginning to think, wait a minute, I don't know this guy. I really don't, and I'm getting involved with him?"

Zimbardo was shocked by her reaction and upset, she said, but eventually that night, "he acknowledged what I was saying and realized what had happened to him and to other people in the study. At that point he decided to call the experiment to a halt." [Zimbardo, without realizing it when it happened, had automatically abandoned his role as "research director" and shifted into that of "prison superintendent."]

Maslach married Zimbardo in 1972 and became a full professor at Berkeley, studying the processes of dehumanization. "I started interviewing prison guards, real ones, and also people in emergency medical care. Out of that grew a lot of the research I have done over the years on job burn-out," she said. Her work has looked at "how people who are responsible for the care and treatment of others can come to view those they care for in object-like ways, leading them, in some cases, to behave in ways that are really insensitive, uncaring, brutal and dehumanizing."

Zimbardo and Maslach say they feel an ongoing responsibility to communicate about and apply the research beyond the academic world, which is why they generally agree to do interviews about it.

For Zimbardo, the prison experiment also has led to research on a range of social situations that generate pathological conditions. He has studied the social psychology of madness and cults, shyness as a kind of self-imposed prison, and time perspective the way people come to be controlled by their overuse of past, present or future timeframes.

The experiment has not, however, brought about the changes in prisons or even in guard training programs that he would have liked. In fact, prisons have been radically transformed in the United States in the last 25 years to make them less humane, Haney told the Toronto symposium audience. Voters have increasingly voted for politicians who take a tough public stance in favor of prisons as places for punishment, rather than for reforming social deviants. Long, determinate sentences are part of the new trend in policy, he said, as are an increasing number of prisons, like California's Pelican Bay, that put prisoners in long-term isolation.

"Psychology and other social science disciplines have been moved out of any kind of meaningful participation in debates over criminal justice policy," he said, urging the academics in his audience to "figure out ways in which we can re-involve ourselves in this debate." In Zimbardo's view, prisons are "failed social-political experiments" that continue to bring out the worst in relations between people "because the public is indifferent to what takes place in secret there, and politicians use them, fill them up as much as they can, to demonstrate only that they are tough on crime... They are as bad for the guards as the prisoners in terms of their destructive impact on self-esteem, sense of justice and human compassion."

In Milgram's 1965 experiment, the subjects were led to believe that they were delivering ever more powerful electric shocks to a stranger, on the orders of a white-coated researcher. Most were distressed by the situation, but two-thirds delivered the highest level of shock labeled "danger - severe shock." Like some of Zimbardo's guard subjects, some of Milgram's were anguished afterward by the revelation of their dark potential. When asked about the ethics of such research for a 1976 magazine profile, Zimbardo said that "the ethical point is legitimate insofar as who are you, as an experimenter, to give a person that kind of information about oneself. But my feeling is that that's the most valuable kind of information that you can have and that certainly a society needs it."

But it was unethical, he said, "because people suffered and others were allowed to inflict pain and humiliation on their fellows over an extended period of time... And yes, although we ended the study a week earlier than planned, we did not end it soon enough."

Steadily increasing levels of incarceration in the United States also have fueled interest in the experiment. Between 1986 and 1997 alone, the male adult prison population increased by over two-thirds and the female population doubled.

Zimbardo has strong opinions on the harmful effects of harsh prison sentences. "Prisons are evil places that demean humanity... They are as bad for the guards as they are for the prisoners," he said, pointing to results of his experiment showing that both guards' and prisoners' personalities were warped by their given roles.

What drives much of the fascination with the experiment is the sense that any individual could become a brutal dictator if given the chance. Zimbardo is still surprised at how quickly the participants changed their stripes. "These guys were all peaceniks," he recalled of the students chosen to be guards. "They became like Nazis. It shows how easy it is for good people to become perpetrators of evil."

"It's this old thing that has legs," Zimbardo remarked about the experiment. For him, those legs took him to the next level in his career. Zimbardo explained that his 1971 discoveries led him to examine another type of prisoner-guard situation: the voices that shy people hear when confronted with social situations. Shy people, he realized, act as their own guards. "The shy person is the quintessential combination of one's own prisoner and guard," said Zimbardo, who went on to found the Shyness Clinic at Stanford in 1975. [Check out "The Century of the Self 3/4 - There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads" video.]

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