Michael Busby http://www.scribd.

com/doc/32615441/The-Lucifer-Effect
©2010

THE LUCIFIER EFFECT

I recently finished reading this “classic” social psychology book.

The subject matter concerns an experiment in authority and

control conducted by a Stanford University social psychology

professor in 1971. He used 18 student volunteers to create an

on-campus “prison” in order to monitor the effect of

incarceration on both “guards’ and “inmates.” The experiment was

designed to run for two weeks, but the clueless professor let

things get out of control and had to terminate the experiment

after just five days.

It boggles my mind that social psychologists are so clueless. Two

years before Philip Zimbardo embarked upon that ill-controlled

and worse-conducted experiment, I could have given him all the

fodder he needed to write the book without needing to do the

experiment. Any intelligent Marine Corps volunteer could have

written his book in 1969. As far as his conclusions, everyone who

has either been given a little authority and let it go to his head,

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Michael Busby http://www.scribd.com/doc/32615441/The-Lucifer-Effect
©2010

or has been the subject of such authority, knows the game.

Zimbardo seems to think he, and he alone, discovered some deep,

dark, secret about human nature, when most of the world already

knows human nature for what it is.

But, what the experiment really reveals to me is, those cowardly,

pansy-ass Stanford and Berkley draft-dodging, pot-smoking

college students he used as subjects and who professed they

were “revolutionaries” were too weak in spirit and body to be a

“revolutionary” in the real sense of the word. Revolution and

rebellion were a campus drumbeat they followed, but with no real

conviction. It was only a façade to justify their lazy, pot-smoking

behavior.

Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, or any other real revolutionary leader,

would have chewed those weak-ass little boys up and spat out

pure white, bone china. Lenin and Stalin would have stoked the

fires of the gulag with their carcasses, laughing as each one was

fed to the fires of real revolution. Those were the same pathetic

boys who were shamefully drummed out of the Marine Corps in

the first week of basic training and sent running home, crying to

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©2010

momma, because they could not take a little harassment, such as

being called a maggot.

It bothers me they are men who most likely are now in leadership

roles across America (unless they over-dosed on some drug in the

1970s. We can hope, eh?). I feel strongly about those draft-

dodging assholes from the 1960s and 1970s who spat upon the

uniform I proudly wore.

I sat next to a woman in an evening psychology class in the late

1980’s She came into class one evening and sat down beside me. I

could tell she had been crying.

I knew her story well – she and her live-in, draft-dodging, student

boyfriend had fled to Canada in the 1960s and lived there until

the late 1970s when that weak willed and even weaker minded

President Carter offered amnesty to all draft-dodgers. Then

they – the draft dodgers - returned to the U.S. All those years

they were living in exile in Canada, her live-in boyfriend told her

he objected to the Vietnam War on moral grounds. She was proud

to stand by his side.

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Well, she told me that evening before class started her live-in

boyfriend told her before she left for school he really dodged

the draft because he was afraid he would be killed in Vietnam,

not because he objected to the war on moral grounds. She was

stunned at his revelation. All those years she stood by him…for

the wrong reason!!! She started crying again. Before I got up and

found an empty seat far from her, I told her she could find

sympathy in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.