Article Analysis: The Lucifer Effect

What makes people go wrong? Am I capable of evil myself? These are some questions that we all might have asked to our selves at one point in life. The Lucifer Effect intends to make the audience, anyone that might be interested, understand how good people turn evil. The articles purpose is to give us, the audience, the psychological explanation of why people go wrong. I read myself The Lucifer Effect and what I understood is that evil is the exercise of power. What I mean by this is that people with power usually go badly, they never get in trouble or don’t have that much trouble to get to do what they want, the more power they have the worst they can be. “It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable”, are Eric Hoffer’s words and I have certainly agreed with him. When we are scared of
something to occur is when we use our power to try to stop it, fear is a strong weapon to someone who has power. As I read the article it made me understand that the powerful don’t usually do the dirtiest work themselves, they are smart. Systems create hierarchies of dominance with influence and communication going down the line. When a power, elite wants to destroy an enemy nation, just like in the World War one or two, it turns to propaganda to use it as a method to make people hate someone or something. They use words and images to establish hate in people. What does it take for a citizen of one society to hate the citizen of another society to the degree that they want to segregate them, torment them, and even kill them? It requires a “hostile imagination”, a psychological construction embedded deeply in their minds by propaganda that transforms those others into “the enemy”.
That image is a soldier’s most powerful motive to kill, to load a riffle with ammunition of hate and fear, fear that is making them detest others. We can use Adolf Hitler as an example. He was the leader of the Nazi Party in Germany; he was the cause of the deaths of many Jewish people. Hitler brain-washed all the Nazis to make them hate the Jews to the point where they would kill them, all done with words and images. Nazis believed their leader, they wouldn’t even consider Jews as humans anymore, they would see them as animals, monsters, and worthless, as a fundamental threat to their values and beliefs, and all this only because their leader made them feel this, believe this. With public fear notched up, just like Hitler feared that the Jews would take up Germany, any reasonable people can act irrationally, independent people can act in mindless conformity, and peaceful people act as warriors. The Lucifer Effect made me understand this, and I believe that it is credible, that Philip Zimbardo is
right.