Good and Evil: Issues for Individuals and Civilizations - Essay Example

Good and Evil
There are always people who commit crimes, initiate wars, dehumanize and humiliate other people. However, there is also an opposite power of heroism which balances evil impulses in any community.

It is interesting to what extent social context motivates the behavior of the individual. Surprisingly, it can become a major influence under certain circumstances. Dr. Zimbardo entitles this phenomenon of individual transformation Lucifer effect.

According to Zimbardo, “evil is the exercise of power to harm, hurt and destroy” something or someone. There are certain conditions when dominance becomes the way to cope with huge stress. For instance, the Abu Ghraib prison tortures happened in a totally stressful atmosphere. War motivated hatred between US soldiers and Iraqi prisoners. The prison building was bombarded during the day and all people experienced daily fear to die. They did not leave the prison at all (Zimbardo). As a result, they transformed their stress into dominance over the weak.

Zimbardo’s theory does not seek for the “bad apple”; it aims at finding a “bad barrel”. Any particular situation is a result of the system. If the system has some space for bad things to happen, they will happen. The system can be represented by the organization, community group, or the whole civilization. It involves a wide range of factors; cultural, legal, and social norms restrain the behavior of an individual (Zimbardo). In Abu Ghraib, the US military organization to control prisons was a failure. One person was assigned to control 3 prisons but she never showed up there; there was no supervision at all. People who worked in prisons had no day-offs. They had 12-hour shifts and worked all day long. Higher rank officers were ordered to torture the prisoners creating a situation of diffused responsibility. Functioning in that system required either confirming or rebelling; most people accepted those conditions because they wanted to survive.

If most people tend to follow the way prescribed by the “bad barrel”, it is interesting how heroes appear in the same dysfunctional system. In the case of Abu Ghraib, one low-rank soldier filed the CD to CIA investigation reporting about tortures. Obviously, there were many people who wanted to kill him for this act of heroism. Rebelling against the system always has its price and only some individuals can be heroes during their lives. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Mother Teresa are examples of such heroes. In most cases, heroism is also situational and relative, as well as evil. Some people have the ability to resist a bad system and change it. In this way, they need to overcome passivity and act.

In summary, people are not either good or evil; they are both. They can have no sadistic deviations or mental disorders but there are many stressful situations that can make them act in a bad way. Zimbardo’s social psychology explains that the power of situational and systemic influences is greater than individual dispositions. Not all people who do bad things are responsible for them; sometimes they are forced to act by the situation where they exist.