In today’s show we take a look at the work of Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist whose experiments have demonstrated that there is the potential within all ordinary law-abiding folk to become evil.
Zimbardo’s “prison experiment” involved recruiting a group of normal young people and arbitrarily assigning them as either prisoners or jailers in a mock prison. It only took about three days before the experiment began to run off the rails, with the “jailers” becoming completely carried away with their power, and the prisoners experiencing mental breakdowns.
Many years later Zimbardo wrote the book The Lucifer Effect, the first detailed account of the disastrous experiment, with the aim being to shed light on evil as it is currently unfolding in the world.
Zimbardo stresses the point that in institutions that have become systemically evil it is very much up to the lone individual to do something about it. We need real heroes, people willing to risk their livelihoods and their personal safety to restore civilised norms. We cannot simply sit back and wait for the institutions to fix themselves.
In the 2nd half of the show today we look at one such hero, Dr Andrew Wakefield, who has confronted the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical giants who are poisoning children with toxic vaccines.
We bring you some audio clips of recent interviews with Dr. Wakefield and provide some further analysis.
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