French Reality Show All Too Real
This article in the WaPo has few surprises. It describes people’s behavior on a game show; it also provides a summary, by indirection, on the ambiguous nature of human character.
…according to a new French documentary series, people would be willing to kill their countrymen for their 15 minutes of fame.
Now this is a perfect opportunity to make a joke about the French. But let’s let that go: The article reveals, among other things revolving around the lust for fame, that human beings are by nature conformists and will adhere to authority (especially if there is a crowd involved) as though they were hollow vessels. Or vassals. The show is based…
…on the work of psychologist Stanley Milgram, who conducted the experiment [on which the show is based] at Yale University in the 1960s. Milgram found that most people, if pushed by an authority figure, would administer ostensibly dangerous electric shocks to another person. His experiment became famous, having been conducted at the same time as the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.
The weak structure of personality falls away when people are told to do things. The moral sense, the values by which we define ourselves, are evanescent as the sunset. This is one reason crowd behavior is often so horrifying — it raises the me-too characteristic exponentially. We protest, saying “that would not be me”, and sometimes that’s true, but a quick survey of human history contradicts an easy fuzzy assumption about human beings.
Fiction tries to make us feel there are good guys and bad guys. There are pure examples of both historically of course, but the reality is that they both live within us as well. The Manichaean battle is external and internal. Much of the partisan nastiness in the public sphere, sometimes described as ironic or snarky, to give it a putatively intelligent sheen, is really an internal battle made manifest — a projecting of one side of an interior dispute onto “the other.”
