how to change the system

“The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson. Often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.”

~ Stanley Milgram

"Zimbardo concludes that situational features, far more than underlying dispositional features of people’s characters, explain why people behave cruelly and abusively to others. He then connects these insights to a detailed account of the abuses by United States soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, where, he argues, the humiliations and torments suffered by the prisoners were produced not by evil character traits but by an evil system that, like the prison system established in the Stanford Prison Experiment, virtually ensures that people will behave badly. Situations are held in place by systems, he argues, and it is ultimately the system that we must challenge, not the frequently average actors."

~ Martha Nussbaum on The Lucifer Effect, a recent book by Philip Zimbardo, who led the infamous Stanford Prison Project

If what Milgram and Zimbardo say is indeed true-- that our propensity for evil behavior is more situational than dispositional, then those of us who hope to change the system from the inside should be very wary. Let’s extrapolate from torture to some “milder” forms of evil—the sweatshop conditions of garment factories, the intentional advertising of cigarette products to children, and the use of workers who are paid less than a living wage. Those of us who think that we are above the questionable morality of profit-oriented corporations should not let pride be our downfall.

We may have noble impulses, but we’re probably not as strong as we think we are. The pharmaceutical officials who conceal information about the harmful side effects of their drugs after conducting clinical studies, probably reasoned to themselves that the benefits of the drugs outweighed the potential risks, and that there’s no cause to raise alarm. The sub-prime mortgage lenders justify their actions by saying that they’re offering the poor a chance at home ownership. The tax accountant writes a check to below-the-poverty-line customer for $500 for their federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), while pocketing one month later, the additional $2,000 from the government, reaping a usurious profit, all the while telling himself that he provided much-needed cash for his customer. The Wal-Mart store owners who cheated employees out of overtime pay were under pressure from upper management to cut costs.

They are not who we’d like to imagine them as--- wicked, evil and sinister bad seeds-- they’re you and me in difficult situations

A friend of mine who is now pursuing a career in nonprofit management and international development once found himself participating in a consulting proposal to try to get a company to sell predatory mortgage insurance to the poor, without the courage to say no. (I myself don’t know if I would have the moral fiber to say no either. Perhaps that’s yet another reason why I had to leave that field).

David Brooks, a New York Times columnists, lamented that all us prestigious college graduates have become organization kids, seeking the security and materials comforts of the status quo by taking jobs in big corporations or lucrative hedge funds, instead of seeking societal transformation.* A recent article was published in response to his opinion, praising our generation for entering the ranks of “the organization” (the corporate industrial complex), and hopefully transforming the system from inside out, instead of calling for all the disruption and chaos of revolution.

My question is… whether or not our generation will really change things from inside out, or whether we’ll succumb to the situation, and conform to the dismal patterns already in place?**


* To summarize his viewpoint in his words: "The young men and women of America's future elite work their laptops to the bone, rarely question authority, and happily accept their positions at the top of the heap as part of the natural order of life."
** Oftentimes, it seems like the costs of changing the system are high. Dr. Patrick Campbell lost his job and his family as a result of his efforts to expose the malpractice and fraud committed by several heart specialists at Redding Medical Center. Biblical characters, Daniel and Esther, who both made their way to the king’s court, put their own lives on line in order to preserve their own integrity and to save lives. Daniel and his friends said: “If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up." Esther declared, “If I perish, I perish.”