Evil Humanity

A couple of days ago I was sitting in the lunchroom, munching on a Rice Crispy bar and reading a sci-fi paperback when I overheard one of my co-workers complaining about her love life. Even though I missed most of her tirade I did manage to catch the last phrase – “I am a good person; why does this shit always happen to me?”
Now, I like this girl – she is indeed a very nice and intelligent person. However, being my own cynical self I simply could not resist the temptation of torturing my fellow human being; I put away my book and said, “What makes you think that you are a nice person? Most people are inherently evil – how can you prove that you are not part of that majority?”

Before the poor girl had a chance to reply I attacked her with a barrage of facts, spitting out a flood of examples that don’t show humanity in the best of lights. I spoke of things like the My Lai massacre which involved American soldiers killing over 350 men, women, and children in a small village in Vietnam. I gave her examples of the 1989 events in Tiananmen Square where soldiers drove tanks over unarmed protesters, massacres in Cambodia and national cleansings in Africa.
My speech was interrupted by another girl. She argued that “we are not soldiers, we are regular people.” The thing is, none of the people who participated in any of the aforementioned events were born soldiers… Even the most current events in New Orleans seem to indicate that average everyday people who go to church on Sundays and participate in school bake sales are not above looting if they think they can get away with it.

The crowning touch of my speech was the story of Milgram’s experiment. Milgram was a psychologist at Yale University in the 1960s – 1970s. He became fascinated with the fact that most of the defense cases for acts of genocide during the Nuremberg War Criminal trials were based on “obedience” – that the accused were just following orders of their superiors. Milgram recruited a group of people who were designated “teachers”; they were asked to administer an electric shock of increasing intensity to a “learner” for each mistake the “learner” made during the experiment. The “teachers” were given a fictitious story that the experiment was trying to find correlation between punishment and learning behavior. The “teachers” were not aware that the “learners” were actors hired to fake discomfort or pain as the “teachers” increased to voltage of the electric shocks. Whenever a “teacher” hesitated whether the increased shocks should be given, he or she were encouraged by Milgram – he would tell them that he would assume full responsibility for the consequences of the experiment. Sixty percent of the “teachers” obeyed orders to punish the learner all the way to the end of the scale (450 volts). Not a single “teacher” stopped before reaching 300 volts.

Do the results of Milgram’s experiment prove beyond reasonable doubt that people are inherently evil and that they will do anything as long as they won’t be held accountable for their actions? More importantly, do I believe that all people are basically evil? I don’t know. But is sure seems like it; every day I read something in the news that makes me cringe. The really sad part is that I don’t get upset anymore about things like hungry children in Africa or a terrorist act in Israel. What really bothers me is the pettiness of your average Joe. When I read an article about how a trivial argument about a ham sandwich escalates into a major conflict that ends up with two women losing their jobs (http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,16528158-1242,00.html), I want to scream.

A couple of days ago I overheard two older women in a supermarket checkout line. One of them was holding a copy of the National Enquirer; they were talking about the pregnancy of Britney Spears’ sister. The woman holding the tabloid said something along the lines of “What a stupid slut.” Such petty attitude did not really bother me; what really shocked me was the fact that there was so much venom in that woman’s voice that one might think that Britney’s sister did something to personally offend the speaker. Unfortunately, this supermarket-checkout line woman was not a rare case; there are always plenty of people who are happy to blame their problems and frustrations on someone who is more fortunate or successful than they are.

There are days when I believe that humanity is doomed. Every time my wife and I talk about having children I begin to think, “What’s the point?” As much as I love kids more often than not I have serious doubts about bringing new lives into our screwed-up world. I don’t want to be alive on the day when my own child hurts someone just because he can get away with it or calls someone he never met “that stupid slut.”