stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

392 STRIPPING THE GURUS
the bathroom activities and food intake of their prisoners, attempting
force-feeding on at least one occasion.
Comparably:
I wasn’t long in the [Irish Sisters of Charity orphanage] and
there was a piece of parsnip in my dinner, and it was dirty. I
politely put it to one side of my plate, and ate everything
else. The nun came down and told me to eat the parsnip. I
said no. So she force fed it to me, and I got sick. Then she
force fed that to me as well. And she started to beat me with
her belt (Raftery and O’Sullivan, 2001).
Note, then, how the sadistic behavior is exactly the same
whether coming from women or from men. That is, the fact that all
of Zimbardo’s guards and prisoners were male is not, in practice,
relevant. (The mixture of the sexes in Abu Ghraib likewise did not
prevent female guards there from allegedly being among the worst
abusers of power.)
Zimbardo’s “bad” guards enacted their sadistic and controlling
behaviors not for having been told to do so by him. Rather, they
evolved those means of control on their own. That is, like the Irish
nuns above, they behaved thusly not because they were directly
told to by an authority figure, but rather just because they were
allowed to.
Consider further that in Zimbardo’s study, the power was divided
up more or less evenly among the guards. Had Zimbardo not
been there at all (as superintendent), one can easily see that the
division of power among the guards would have been just as equal.
Yet things could only have gotten worse, faster. The point, then, is
that a group of people with absolute or near-absolute authority is
no better than is a single individual with the same power.
Nor would such a group act to enforce “checks and balances”
on each other at their own level. For, Zimbardo’s “good” guards,
rather than constraining the activities of their “bad” counterparts,
simply felt helpless in watching the sadistic behaviors of the latter.
How are we to understand why otherwise-reasonable and
healthy men would behave so impotently? First, we may note that
it is typical of human behavior that, in witnessing any objectionable
activity from within a group of comparable onlookers, we assume
that “someone else” will speak up or “call the police,” if that
needs to be done. Indeed, it has actually been shown in controlled
studies that we are less likely to intervene if we are surrounded by