One of the Stanley Milgram’s experiments caused great controversy over the rest. This was the shock experiment. In this experiment There was a conductor who played the role of giving orders, the teacher, who was giving shocks and questions and the actor who was not being shocked but the teacher did not know. The teacher was shocking the actor every time he got a question wrong. The experiment was created to determine whether people will follow or retaliate against the conductor. This was compared to the holocaust in which modern day people said how could the Nazi soldiers just follow orders and that they would never do that. In the experiment the teacher never stopped shocking the actor. This caused a lot of controversy because other psychologists questioned the morality of the conductor and not the teacher. The conductor had a huge impact on the teacher because the conductor gave the orders. The podcast argues the impact we have on others is far greater than we give credit for because morals, societal standards, judgements, and many more play a big role in the decisions that people make. Although people have morals and they know right from wrong as the teacher did, the teacher kept going and used the excuse that the experiment had to continue. This also relates to the poem Enemies by Wendell Berry where in the very beginning it states “If you are not to become a monster, you must care what they think.” This goes hand in hand in which people in a certain circumstance do feel guilt and are afraid to face the consequences of their decisions by not following the crowd. Stanley Milgram refers to these people as sheep.
I was visiting this family friend in California and suddenly we heard a knock on the door. It is one of his third or second cousins. Some background information on him is that he is homeless and a drug addict. His family doesn’t like him for obvious reasons. He asks for money, a large sum of it relative to his situation. If we put ourselves in my family friend’s shoes, on one hand you can give him the money knowing he is going to spend it on drugs and blow it immediately but potentially feeling good about yourself. On the other hand you can say no with the pressure of everyone in the house watching not knowing how people will react. So the decision was the money and we all knew it was a mistake. I walked him to the bus but we made a stop at a deli. He bought a lotto ticket and beers spending almost a quarter of the amount. I left shortly after knowing what happened but not telling anyone. This relates to the experiment because the cousin was asking a lot of the family friend but also leaving him in the situation almost impossible to say no. I do not know if the cousin knew what kind of position he put the family friend in but it was not easy from our point of view. Morally you could come out on top but I knew it was a power play.
Your friend was definitely put in a tough spot to either be doing something goof or even something bad with giving his cousin some money. Especially that’s family so he felt pressured into it. At the end you said “Morally you could come out on top but I knew it was a power play.” What did you mean by that?
I should have been more specific. I meant the family friend could come out on top morally but from the cousins perspective it was a power play in which he knew the situation and took advantage of it.
I like your connection from the podcast to the poem a lot. Personally, when I read the poem. I thought the concept of caring for what a monster thinks relates to the idea of how most people did not put themselves in the point of view of the conductors. We merely saw that as people forcing others into doing something terrible.