TED talk: Evil - What makes people go wrong?

[foofighter]

A new TED talk has been published on YouTube, with Philip Zimbardo discussing the topic "Evil: what makes people go wrong?". You can find it here:
hxxp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsFEV35tWsg

I think he does a good job in describing how easily malleable "ordinary people" are, and what the consequences of this is. He does not explain why these systemic problems arise in the first place, which is so well described by Ponerology. On the one hand you can see the ease with which people are routed down the path of evil as being quite depressing, and yet on the other it can also be seen as an opportunity, as it could probably quite as easily be made to go the other direction, if the proper knowledge about these issues were disseminated. And that's sort of the point of "knowledge protects", in a sense...

 

[foofighter]

I deeply apologize for not doing my homework properly on Zimbardo before posting this. I just found Henry's post on his theories which puts them into perspective properly with regard to ponerology and psychopathy. Read it here:
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/129924-Environment-of-Evil

 

[Approaching Infinity]

I deeply apologize for not doing my homework properly on Zimbardo before posting this. I just found Henry's post on his theories which puts them into perspective properly with regard to ponerology and psychopathy. Read it here:
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/129924-Environment-of-Evil

Well, it's not so simple. Zimbardo has read ponerology and gave it an endorsement (go to redpillpress.com to read it). His book focuses on what Lobaczewski called "transpersonification", in extreme cases, and the systemic "ponerogenic" forces that act on normal humans to make them do things they wouldn't ordinarily do, as is made clear in both Milgram's experiment, and Zimbardo's prison experiment. He is very aware that not everyone reacts the same way, and there are always those who refuse such influence.