People Are Bad People

A series of studies carried out by Stanley Milgram during the 1960s show that it wasn’t just the Nazis who were willing to do horrid things to the people around them. Out of a large number of participants, the majority of the people tested during Milgram’s experiments went through with the “electrocution” of an innocent individual. These people sat watching a man in what they were seeing as unbelievable pain, yet they continued with the process of electrocuting him, an innocent man whom they had just met. This is astonishing and sickening, but does the fact that these people were willing to commit a terrible act after being told to do so make them “bad” people? This is a complicated question, since there are a myriad of possible reasons…show more content…
Douglas Fields, a professor of Cognitive and Neurosciences at the University of Maryland, stated in an article, “the incessant repetition throughout recorded history and in prehistoric times of murder and war among all cultures of human beings has its roots in our evolutionary stalk” (Fields, R. Douglas. Humans Are Genetically Predisposed to Kill Each Other). His theory is that of many; human beings are still hard-wired to kill, due to the habits of their predecessors from long ago.
Homo sapiens, in their early stages of existence, were accustomed to killing members of their own species in order to gain access to resources or simply to survive. If an individual felt threatened or endangered by another, it was not uncommon to get rid of them by way of murder. This means that the tendency to kill may still exist in humans today, deeply rooted in our DNA. Over time, this need to kill has become less necessary since finding ways of survival is not nearly as difficult. However, it is highly possible that the impulse to kill is still inside us, suppressed of course, but still there nonetheless. This causes us to ask ourselves if the social constructs we have since created are a subconscious attempt to further suppress the need to kill. The people as a whole have made murder into such a horrible idea that not many people attempt it, for fear of being punished. In this case, the idea of a constructed society with pressures and expectations may be considered quite beneficial to…show more content…
As children these figures are our parents, then our teachers, and then our bosses, elders, government, etc. We are conditioned to obey these authority figures without question, and those who stand up against this system are often punished. Because we are conditioned this way, we often tend to abide by rules and regulations that we do not agree with. Over time, a large portion of the population may become desensitized to the fact that they are going along with something they do not agree with because their mind has subconsciously decided that it must listen to whatever it is told to do, since that is the way it has always been. This could potentially play a large part into the Holocaust and events similar to it. The rise of a dangerous man like Hitler meant that he had control over all of these people who were preconditioned to listen to him, regardless of what he said, without even knowing what was happening. People simply complied because they thought they were supposed to. This is an exceedingly dangerous concept, as demonstrated by the Holocaust, since having so many people unwittingly submit themselves to the control of such an individual as Hitler meant that these people had the potential to do virtually anything so long as their leader told them to. This is also observed in the findings of Milgram’s experiments, as discussed earlier. The presence of a person with even an