Finding Hope In Knowing The Universal Capacity For Evil Essay

Our behaviors as humans are dependent on many factors. Manifestly, some of these factors include genetics, religious teachings, moral history, and our ambient environment. With that said there are an innumerable amount factors, but which one impacts our decisions the most? What is that that controls our behavior? Dr. Zimbardo writes in Finding Hope in Knowing the Universal Capacity for Evil, “That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The ‘situation’ is the external environment … There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought.” Sometimes doing what seems the right thing to do is just too hard emotionally and physically. We capitulate to our gut instincts and do whatever we can to put ourselves in an advantageous
Manners, proper behavior, and ethics are all things we learn from a small age. We gather these concepts from our parents, mentors, and people that surround us in life. We are taught to strictly enforce these rules in our lives so that our more “barbarous” innate instincts don’t take over. But things do not always go as planned. In Chapter four Lord of the Flies reads, “His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.” This quote depicts the first pig Jack kills in the book. The quote shows us that he is slowing breaking down due to the despondent situation he is currently in. The sentence, “taken away its life like a long satisfying drink” is akin to being given freedom (freedom from the restrictions of morality and ethics) after being deprived of it for a long time. This sentence clearly shows powerful seductive inundating effects of the external environment or