stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

GURUS AND PRISONERS 393
a group of others than as a sole witness to a crime or emergency
(Cialdini [2001]; Zimbardo [2004b]). For, we will naturally take our
cues from their outwardly calm, evaluating behaviors, as they take
their cues from ours.
As one relevant example of such covert evaluation and subsequent
going along with the group, consider the reaction of the
guest reporting Ken Wilber’s alleged public miming of masturbation
and frequent, sophomoric requests there for blowjobs:
I laughed with everyone else, but at the back of my mind, I
realized I was disturbed and disappointed by it.... But other
people I talked to weren’t bothered by it at all, so maybe he
just gauged his audience correctly (in Integral, 2004).
In asking other “subjects” about whether they were bothered
by such behaviors, though, one is effectively inquiring: “Were you
disturbed by our emperor’s new clothes?” The obvious answer to
which is, “No, of course not.”
Regardless, having spent sufficient time in silence within a
group of onlookers, the first question one would face should one
finally openly object would be the embarrassing: Why did you keep
quiet for so long, if it was obvious from the beginning that something
needed to be done? We therefore have a personal stake in not
admitting that we should have done things differently—i.e., that
we were wrong to behave thusly. For that reason, and even merely
for the sake of socially rewarded consistency, we instead remain
silent, allowing the problems to continue. (Institutions such as the
Vatican persist in their errors and reported abuses in no small part
exactly for being unable to come out and admit that they have been
wrong in the past [cf. Wills, 2000].) Plus, for Zimbardo’s relatively
sensitive “good” guards, for example, to speak out against the activities
of their more sadistic counterparts, would surely have resulted
in their quick ostracism from that sub-community of “alpha
guards,” who actually enjoyed mistreating their prisoners.
Everyone and everything in the prison was defined by power.
To be a guard who did not take advantage of this institutionally
sanctioned use of power was to appear “weak,” “out of
it,” “wired up by the prisoners,” or simply a deviant from the
established norms of appropriate guard behavior (Zimbardo,
et al., 1973).