Paradoxes of Faith

Oh man, how unchecked power corrupts….Here are two videos chronicling the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo.  Note the striking Guantanamo / Abu Ghraib similarities in the captives’ response to their captivity in the face of the abuse of power…. it’s sickening what evil ‘good’ people can unleash on each other, justified under the guise of authority and legitimacy.

You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy… We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.
— The Stanford Prison Study video, quoted in Haslam & Reicher, 2003.