stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

404 STRIPPING THE GURUS
who would want to give up that complete control over another person’s
life? (See Zimbardo, et al. [1973]; Haney, et al. [1973].)
* * *
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, too, offers valuable insights
into the dynamics of closed, authoritarian societies. And interestingly,
when a movie version of that book was being filmed, the
problem which the director encountered was not in getting the
child actors into character while the cameras were rolling. Rather,
the difficulty was in getting them out of character when the shooting
was stopped. As Peter Brook explained (in Askenasy, 1978):
Many of their off-screen relationships completely paralleled
the story, and one of our main problems was to encourage
them to be uninhibited within the shots but disciplined in
between them.... My experience showed me that the only falsification
in Golding’s fable is the length of time the descent
to savagery takes. His action takes about three months. I believe
that if the cork of continued adult presence [i.e., of external
checks and balances on the leaders] were removed
from the bottle, the complete catastrophe could occur within
a long weekend.
One may, of course, validly compare that with the role-playing
in Zimbardo’s study—and in each of our real lives—which quickly
ceases to be just a conscious “role.” And as far as “long weekends”
go: The degeneration of character in the simulated Stanford prison
happened literally within three days.
In Dittmann (2003), Zimbardo further traces the parallels between
the mind-control methods and behaviors utilized by George
Orwell’s fictional totalitarian state in 1984, and Jonestown. Christopher
Browning, in his (1998) Ordinary Men, performs a comparable
mapping for the similarities between Zimbardo’s and Milgram’s
studies, and the Final Solution in Poland. Significantly, the
percentage of “cruel and tough,” “tough but fair,” and “good” soldiers,
respectively, in that Solution, “bears an uncanny resemblance”
to the comparable split among the guards in Zimbardo’s
simulated prison.
[U]nder conditions of terror most people will comply but
some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to