Aristotle had established that rule had to be for the commonweal of the city. The more ancient line concerned the moral purpose of the exercise of power. The idea of tyranny has evolved along two lines. For aristotle, tyranny was the degeneration of kingly rule into rule for the personal interest of the tyrant rather than for the common interest of the city. As his rule became more permanent, it became also more oppressive, often being exercised against the citizens. The tyrant was a popular leader who arose either to combat external enemies or to represent the lower classes against oligarchy. Originally, it had no pejorative connotation. But by what men, by what kind of rule? The concept of tyranny arose from early Greek experience. And what that means is to become sensitive to the conditions under which ordinary people can do these evil deeds - what we have been demonstrating throughout this program - and to take a position of resisting tyranny at the very first signs of its existence.A form of government characterized by the deviation of political rulers from commonly accepted standards of moral and political behavior or by the illegitimate title to the exercise of power of the persons who actually rule. Zimbardo himself offers this final word in the program:įor me the bottom line message is that we could be led to do evil deeds. When he came to power in 1932, he found that German medical professors and biologists had already installed a racial ideology for him, one which had already theorised about the elimination of sick or disabled German children, and the rejection of Jewish professionals as agents of pollution. It isn’t clear why the majority is so often compliant, but the implication is that democracy should always be grateful to the protesters, the members of the awkward squad, the people who challenge authority.īut don’t take it for granted that the awkward squad must be a force for good: in Germany, in the 1920s, Hitler was an outsider, a protester, a member of the awkward squad. Programmes like this can show such things with great vividness - and there is news footage from Bosnia, or from Rwanda, or from Burma to back it up with terrible clarity. From a review of the show in The Guardian:īut there is no doubt about the programme’s bottom line: tyrannies happen because ordinary people are surprisingly willing to do tyranny’s dirty work. The program also shows how real-life tyrannies have developed in places like Rwanda, Burma, and Bosnia. All the participants continued to 300 volts. teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. The results?Ħ5% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e. The “learners” were in on the experiment and weren’t actually shocked but were told to react as if they were. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger - severe shock). The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. To illustrate each step, the program uses social psychology experiments and explorations like Jane Elliott’s blue eyes/brown eyes exercise on discrimination, the Stanford prison experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo (who offers commentary throughout the program), and experiments by Stanley Milgram on obedience, including his famous shock experiment, in which a participant (the “teacher”) is directed to shock a “learner” for giving incorrect answers. exterminate (the elimination of the “other”).“stand up” or “stand by” (standing by as harm occurs).do “them” harm (obeying an authority who commands actions against our conscience).obey orders (the tendency to follow orders, especially from those with authority).“us” and “them” (prejudice and the formation of a dominant group).“I’d never been to the former Yugoslavia before in my life, so what actually struck me about the country was how beautiful it was, how nice people were, and yet how ghastly they could behave.” But tyrannies are created by ordinary people, like you and me. We would like to believe only evil people carry out atrocities. Horrific things happen in the world we live in. In 2000, the BBC broadcast an hour-long documentary called Five Steps to Tyranny, a look at how ordinary people can do monstrous things in the presence of authority.
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