If they’re productive jobs that help improve the lives of the majority of the public they certainly aren’t.

If they don’t benefit anyone except the business men that profit from them that may be a different story though.

Should we continue assuming that the Capitalist system is the most efficient when it eliminates teaching jobs that are needed for the lower and middle classes and creates advertising jobs to promote items that have little or no benefit to the public?

(This is a follow up entry on the previous entry titled “It’s the economy stupid…. Have the corporations created a capitalist cult?” found in the table of context link below)

If the capitalist system really is as good as people claim then a closer look should only confirm that; however it is clear that many jobs aren’t being created or are being eliminated that are beneficial like environmental protection jobs or educational jobs to help the lower or middle classes. Another problem is that the beliefs that the government is inefficient and should do as little as possible tend to be presented in a very selective way. When this means cutting programs for the poor it is often portrayed as wasteful but if the government spends money that bails out the corporations of helps them conduct business more effectively it is often done without complaint or much public comment. The biggest example is the military which is considered above reproach and is often used to fight wars that often seem to be more concerned with protecting the business interests of the multi-national corporations. The government has also been used to break up strikes, subsidize the railroads in the nineteenth century and the internet in the twentieth as well as many other institutions then when they are profitable they have been handed over to the private sector. In fact the government has recently been used to protect the media domination of a handful of corporations when a few low budget companies tried to create micro radio stations that tried to compete with the incompetent radio stations that are no longer giving the public what they want. It seems that a closer look indicates the concerns about big government are only raised in a large manner when it is used to protect the majority from the corporations not the other way around.

As discussed in the previous post about the economy and other entries the current capitalist economic ideology was developed over the last couple hundred years through propaganda that was given to the public without much scrutiny from the opposing sides. When people of different beliefs tried to get their points of views across they were often demonized without addressing their arguments in a rational manner. This happened during the McCarthy era, when the American Protective League was active or even in the nineteenth century when there were lecturers talking about “Acres of Diamonds” and other speeches controlled by the upper classes. For the most part the ideology that has been presented to the public hasn’t been a fair one based on a rational discussion of the details of different ideologies therefore it would be unreasonable to assume that other beliefs have been discredited since they haven’t been addressed in a rational manner; however if they have been discredited in a rational manner as many capitalists claim then a second look should do so again and there is no reason not to take that second look.

Neither the Capitalist ideology nor the Communist ideology as they were practiced by the USA or the USSR has done what they claimed to do. In both cases those that control the system receive the majority of the benefits; while those who don’t control it, or in most cases even understand it, pay the price. A close look at the best details of each might help develop a better ideology that will benefit the majority instead of just those who control the message. In order to do this it will be necessary to educate the public about the details of both and allow them to understand and ratify the final product.

The Communist belief is that all people should be equal; the Declaration of Independence also says that “that all men are created equal”; this implies more in common between the two beliefs than many people have been led to believe based on the propaganda. One of the core beliefs of the communist ideology is “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. This is worth considering on its own merits without demonizing it. The capitalist beliefs system doesn’t embrace this belief for some reasons that are at least partially reasonable. The basics of capitalism is that people who work hard should be rewarded based on the merits of their work. If they work harder and or if they have better skills they should be paid more which is reasonable. Unfortunately this isn’t always the way it works as many people seem to imply. The statement “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” seems to imply that those that need more should get what they need and those that can work harder should do so yet if this is put in practice many people may not bother to work too hard since the benefits of their work may go to those that need it more regardless of who works harder. So putting this belief in to practice without scrutiny won’t provide the incentive to work as hard as people can. Another way of interpreting this principle could be that since some people are accustomed to living with a certain life style their needs should be higher than those who are accustomed to living with less. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it should be dismissed in its entirety though; instead it should be considered carefully and interpreted in a rational manner when it fits. In some cases there may be many people that will work harder if they think the system will provide the benefits to themselves and society as a whole in a fair manner. Neither the Capitalist system nor the version of Communism implemented by Joseph Stalin has done this. In the case of Stalin and his collectivization programs he took the decision making out of the hands of the local farmers who had experience and incentive to work as efficiently as possible and put it into the hands of bureaucrats who knew little or nothing about the subject then tried to cut back on the benefits to those who did the work without any input from the people at the local level.

The capitalists in the USA and other counties rightfully criticized this but they didn’t point out the fact that this wasn’t what was intended by the people that developed the Communist ideology. It served their purpose to demonize this and say that this proves that communism doesn’t work. They continued to use strike breaking tactics that turned the lower classes against each other and keep wages down and they used the fear of war at various times to demonize Communism in a manner that didn’t look at the principles. The supporters of the capitalist system claim that free enterprise will provide the competition and incentive to encourage people to work as hard as they can. Presumably those that work the hardest make the most money. In practice this doesn’t work the way they claim though. The people that control the system routinely manipulate the public with their control of the system which enables them to use divide and rule tactics. The control of the system also enables them to prevent small businesses from starting up in many cases or drives them out of business. The competition has been eliminated in most industries leaving monopolies or oligopolies controlled by a small percentage of the public. No new business can hope to start up a department store that can compete with Wal-Mart or many other industry giants; these industry giants have enough power to manipulate the consumers and the workers as well as any small businesses that want to get started. This has turned into multi-national corporations that often have more power than many third world countries and they also have much more political power with the people running the biggest countries. This essentially means that the checks and balances that were intended in the constitution were eliminated by the consolidation of these corporations and the distortion of the only provides candidates that support this corrupt system. The capitalist system doesn’t provide incentive for many if any jobs unless they enable corporations to make a profit off of them. The exceptions that happen in the USA are not because they adhere strictly to the capitalist system; instead they are the cases where they make exceptions for reason or another. These exceptions have often been because of public support that overcame the capitalist ideology or in some cases it was done because the business community had something to gain from it. One example of this is when they found that they needed educated people to work in factories they supported education but only enough to benefit the business interests. Other improvements to the education system came because of public support often despite the objections of the politicians and the business leaders. 

There are some cases where the best way of accomplishing the best results may involve cooperation by the government to do certain jobs that the private sector doesn’t do as well. The assumption shouldn’t be that we should automatically trust the private sector especially when there are so many examples of cases where the private sector is suppressing wages and destroying the environment without providing an adequate education for many of the lower and middle classes. The private sector doesn’t automatically provide necessary social programs for the poor and in the absence of these programs many social problems tend to get worse. When this happens there have often been many calls for building more prisons and standing up for Law and Order or fighting wars to protect our society. These are considered nonnegotiable yet they don’t work. There is an enormous amount of evidence to indicate that when governments in the past have addressed problems before they escalated by educating the public or addressing violence at an early age it can reduce crime in the long run. Some of the social programs that have been targeted for cut backs have been the most successful at reducing crime in the long run while the prisons that are considered above reproach waits until these problems are much worse and tends to be less effective. They lead to putting a much larger number of people in jail where they aren’t productive providing more cost to the public than the social programs that are being cut would have. This doesn’t mean that many of the most violent people should be let out of jail since many of them continue to be a threat to society; however if the social programs were in place when they were children did their job in the first place they wouldn’t have become violent in the first place. This means that long term prevention programs need to be put in place before prison population can be reduced and violent offenders need to go through real rehabilitation programs before they should be released. The capitalist system doesn’t do this. The most effective way to accomplish this may be a public education program to teach members of the public about the most effective ways of raising children and social workers that provide direct help for the most at risk families. In the long run this will be much cheaper than maintaining the massive prison system that only treats the symptoms while ignoring the causes of these problems.

One of the most important things that the public needs is a good education in order to address the inequities in society. The current education system does very little to educate the public about many of the most important issues that affect our society including war. We have been taught that the USA has always been fighting for a good cause which most of us want to believe but unfortunately this is often not the case. Most if not all of the wars the USA has been involved in the past have included lies that often weren’t exposed until after the fact and even then they usually aren’t reported widely enough including in schools. This essentially leaves the majority of the public unprepared to hold the government accountable for the most important activities in our lives and present a serious and continuing threat to democracy. The biggest war controversy was of course Viet Nam. Most people are aware that there was a lot of controversy over it but they may not understand why. The war was supposed to be to defend democracy against communism; or at least that is the impression many people have been given. This impression is false. The USA set up a puppet regime that was loyal to the USA; with the support of the USA this regime decided to cancel elections when it was clear that they had little or no popular support; then when it was clear that they couldn’t gain any support a coup was carried out with the support of the USA and the CIA. From there it escalated into a war to suppress democracy in a country that didn’t want anything to do with the western world after living under colonialism under France. This country was no threat to the USA and most if not all the justification for the war was based on lies including the escalation that resulted from the gulf of Tonkin incident. There are still many cases today where politicians consider the fact that they supported and in some cases even participated in this war to make them more qualified to hold office. There are also a lot of voters who believe this based on the assumption that the USA was on the right side of this war as well as every other one they participated in. If it was reported that politicians in Russia were promoting their participation in the invasion of Afghanistan in the eighties as a qualification there would be outrage in the USA and rightfully so. Yet when you consider the details it is clear that support of politicians who favored the war in Viet Nam it is essentially the same except for the propaganda that was given to the American public. This is just one of many examples where the public isn’t being told the truth about many foreign conflicts the USA has been involved in. This includes manipulations in Iran, Iraq, Congo, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, Chile and many other countries. These wars and participation in lower level conflicts weren’t done for much if any benefit for the public; instead they were fought mainly for the benefit of those in power. There is plenty of information available for those who take the trouble to figure out what is being reported from other more sincere sources, many of which I have included in the bibliography who often  cite government documents or admissions that are not well reported but are undisputed. 

There also needs to be more education about many other subjects including the civil rights movement and the fact that the vast majority of improvements haven’t been instigated by the government but by the people. In most history books and classes they usually teach that the politicians implemented many of the biggest changes in society; what they often fail to mention is the fact that they rarely ever do this unless there is a lot of pressure from the public. In fact more often than not only don’t the politicians implement these changes on their own but more often than not they initially resist them and agree to make them only when they realize it is in their own best political interest to do so. Many other authors including Howard Zinn and Martin Luther King Jr. have done a much better job explaining this to the public.

There also needs to be more efforts to educate the middle and lower classes in the most effective way possible. The current system doesn’t do this. The current system provides funding at the local level which guarantees that those that live in poor areas will have little money for quality education. These are the people that need it the most. The capitalist system claims that anyone can work their way up the class system but this is clearly not true and in order to change it there has to be more equal access to education. Depriving the poor of educational opportunity, for one reason or other, guarantees that they will be stuck in the lower classes from one generation to the next. The current use of copyright laws is also designed to benefit those that have the copyrights and often means that the poor can’t have access to many of the books or other educational material they need to address this problem. With current technology it is virtually free to make as many electronic copies of many books if the public has access to computers. A change in the copyright laws could make much more information available to a much larger percentage of the public at virtually no extra cost. The current system is inexcusable corporate welfare as Robert McChesney has indicated on several occasions. It is rare where anyone comes out and says that they want to deprive the poor of education so that they can manipulate them but there have been a few notable exceptions where people have done so or come close to saying this. The reason this isn’t discussed much is of course because that it doesn’t sound good to come out and say it if that is what you want so they usually do it without saying it or say it in a confusing way that can be interpreted differently. One of the most notable times where this was said was when Woodrow Wilson said "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."  This was also stated or implied when they were trying to maintain slavery of the blacks or prevent them from obtaining their civil rights. They often tried to outlaw the education of blacks and when that didn’t work they often tried to accomplish the same goal in other ways by either preventing them from going to schools or having access to libraries. This is one of the things the civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther king, tried to overcome by educating the public. In some cases they indicated that the civil rights movements must be communist, for one reason or another, when they attempted to educate the poor. They have also indicated that unions are communist when they attempt to stick up for workers rights. The implication is that it is communist or tyrannical to stand up for workers or students rights. In 1950 Illinois Representative Harold Velde, former FBI man and chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, said “Educating Americans through means of the library service could bring about a change of their political attitude quicker than any other method. The basis of communism and socialistic influence is education of the people.” This statement was made in reference to the Mobile library service for poor people living in rural parts of the country. This took place during the height of McCarthyism when anti-communist propaganda was at its peak and efforts were being made to control the education process to make sure no one understood the truth about either communism or capitalism. This ended when Joseph Welch said “Senator McCarthy have you no sense of decency?” after this happened Senator McCarthy’s popularity ended and the rabid anti-communism slowed down but there was never any attempt to correct the beliefs drilled into the heads of the public by using intimidation and scare tactics. Many of the people that may have supported some aspects of communism didn’t push them and attempt to sort through the details to avoid starting the anti-communist witch hunts over again.

Reforming the education system and many other problems with democracy would be much more effective if we truly did have a free press instead of one controlled by the same corporations that corrupt the government. Robert McChesney has also reported extensively on this; other people that have written on this include Noam Chomsky, Ben Bagdikian, Erik Klinenberg and other people that work with McChesney at Free Press including Josh Silver and John Nichols. The current media system is far more concerned with ratings and selling advertising than with informing the public. In order to have a truly free press the people that are well informed about any given subject need to have an opportunity to get their message across to the public and the public needs to have a chance to express their concerns in a fair way. The current system doesn’t do this. By charging for the use of the air ways or requiring the Mass Media to give air time to others chosen by the public we could have a much more sincere reporting system. There also needs to be more investigation from journalism that holds the corporations and the government accountable about any given subject which the current system isn’t providing.

Another example is the protection of the environment. The current capitalist system doesn’t require the major corporations to pay as they go for the damage they do to the environment. This enables them to obtain profits by taking the resources from the land without restoring what they are taking as they go or worrying about how much pollution they cause in areas where the local populations have little or no political power. This is leading to the stripping of many of the forests and the polluting of the environment for many of the most desperate people around the world and it also leads to dealing with many dictators that allow the resources of their countries to be stripped for the benefit of the multi-national corporations and the profit of the dictator without providing any benefit to the local populations. In fact not only don’t they benefit from industries but they have their environments destroyed and their old ways of life are often destroyed leaving them in destitution. In one extreme memo (link to source below) that was disclosed to the public Lawrence Summers, former chief economist for the World Bank, said “Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]?” this was later explained as an attempt to be ironic and attempt a thought experiment, there were also claims that it may have been written by someone else in his name although I’ve heard no explanation why he didn’t immediately deny it in that case. If this was followed up by efforts to avoid global pollution it might be reasonable to assume that it was a thought experiment intended to lead to a solution; however that doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead this “ironic thought experiment” seems to have been turned into standard policy.

Even in the US the public can’t count on protection from the damage being done to the environment as recent coverage of the Gulf oil spill has indicated. A closer look at this coverage may indicate that in many ways the damage is even worse than what is being reported not just in the gulf but around the world. Most of the coverage about this disaster has been repeating the same things over and over again without elaborating or offering solutions but if you pay close enough attention there have been some hints of bigger problems. They had a brief reminder of the Exxon Valdez spill and the long term effect this has had to people in the area. Many people, including fisherman and other people without much political power, never received much if any compensation for the damage that was done twenty years ago and the environment still hasn’t fully recovered. The current spill is in a much more populated and more vulnerable area. Since there is more life of all kinds in the gulf than there is in Alaska there is more at risk. BP is already trying to avoid responsibility and if they do what Exxon did without opposition from the public they’ll succeed. Another problem that has been barely indicated in the coverage is the fact that there have been over 2,500 other oil spills. This was mentioned briefly on CNN without elaborating on what time frame or where these spills were; nor did they say how big they were. The recent show on sixty minutes mentioned that their expert had experience in at least twenty other oil rig disasters. This implies that there are many more environmental disasters than the public is being informed about. The mass media has made a point of telling the public that the tar found on the Florida Keys isn’t chemically the same as the oil from the current disaster. This seems to imply that the public shouldn’t worry about the tar balls, which for all the public knows, might be from another environmental disaster that has received less attention. There should also be a better explanation about why there is so much oil that continues to leak into the gulf. The way it is being reported seems to indicate the spill is ongoing at a large rate; which when you consider some of the basic principles of the subject, doesn’t seem to make sense. The initial spill, which presumably involves a leak from the storage tanks or a tanker at the rig, is understandable and serious but they shouldn’t be continuing to pump oil into the gulf weeks later without some kind of failsafe to shut of the pump assuming it is being pumped. They didn’t explain what is causing the oil to continue to leak but basic hydraulics shouldn’t cause it to leak at a high rate unless there is something forcing the oil out. The fact that the oil is a little less dense should cause it to lowly leak without the help of a pump but this should be easy to shut down. If they explained the basics of the subject to the public it would be easier to understand this. Do they have a new high tech pump that continues to pump at a massive rate without a failsafe? Is that absurd conspiracy theory about using this to stop oil drilling true? This is hard to believe but they certainly are doing something wrong in the way they are handling the subject and reporting it which makes little or no sense at all.

This problem is certainly not limited to oil spills but it surely includes issues like deforestation and air pollution and much more. Without a better reporting system or other accountability system these disasters are guaranteed to continue going uncorrected until it is too late. There has already been way to much damage to the environment and not only is there little effort to fix the damage done in the past but there is little effort to prevent future disasters. If the multi-national corporations are allowed to continue conducting business as usual then the whole world will have to pay the price for their profits and eventually it could lead to much more damage destroying civilization as we know it.

The capitalist system also doesn’t handle charity in a very efficient manner unless someone is making a profit out of it; and then the primary concern is often to make money not to conduct charity. There is much more talk about charity than there is actual effective charity that helps the poor or other worthy causes. In the current system many of the things that are done for charity do little if anything to directly help the cause they claim to be advocating. For example if there is a walk for hunger or something like this there is an enormous amount of effort for people to ask for sponsors, they make a lot of effort to go for a long walk and there is a lot of media coverage. None of these things directly help the cause. Yes they collect some money which is better than nothing but there have been other efforts to do the same thing that would be much more effective that have been shot down and demonized as socialism. It would be much more effective to collect money if the public could vote on whether or not a portion of their taxes could go for this cause or any other cause and they could be done with open books so that there could be scrutiny. This idea is often shot down by many of the same business interests that criticize all programs for the poor and often benefit from the desperation of the poor. If the poor are hungry and they have little or no unemployment insurance they are at a much worse bargaining position to negotiate for good wages which may be what the corporations want. Many of these social programs often reduce the dependency of the middle and lower classes on the institutions controlled by the upper classes. This enables the upper classes to use divide and rule tactics more effectively; which keeps the majority under the rule of the few. This doesn’t mean we should allow the poor to live on the dole without accountability but it could include a safety net that prevents excessive poverty and helps educate people that need retraining for new jobs when the economic system changes and some people are thrown out of work. For example this could include some programs that could retrain people for green jobs or teach people about cleaner energy like household solar panels or geo-transfer heating and cooling systems that don’t leave them dependent on the corporations. If more money that is spent on corporate subsidies, prisons and military was diverted to charity for effective causes that help the majority it would prevent many of the social problems that lead to crime wars and other much more expensive problems.

There could also be more done to provide financing for research on subjects that benefit the public. The current capitalist system doesn’t fund much research unless it is designed to help corporations make more money or to help the military fight wars and in some cases like the experiments done by Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram study ways to maintain authority over the public. The choices for research projects are rarely as open as they should be to have the most positive affect. In many cases corporations often do their research in secret which means they often duplicate research some of which involves abusing animals. Peter A. Singer has looked into this and found that in many cases the research that has been done in secret wouldn’t pass ethical standards especially since in many cases it isn’t even done for important causes. In many cases research is done to develop cosmetics for profit but not done for other causes that may have more impact on the health of the majority of the public. If research was open to the public in a social system then there would be less ethical problems since they wouldn’t be done in secret and the researchers could share the information dramatically reducing redundancy.

The upper classes with an access to a good education have much better information available to them to make their choices including, in some cases, the education about subjects that involve manipulating the public. This includes political science, marketing research and some psychology courses. If the upper classes have the education about political science to manipulate the voters about politics and fiscal ideologies then they can control the votes of the masses against their wills. The same could be said for marketing to understand which way to present their products to the public in a manner to sell as many as possible. More often than not this involves deceiving the public one way or another. This could also include the research that Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram did to understand obedience to authority. In all these cases the most effective way to overcome these deceptive tactics would involve educating the public about the manipulation tactics being used for one reason or another. This will enable them to recognize and avoid fraud in several forms.

The public hasn’t received an accurate impression about what socialism or communism is supposed to be about any more than the public in the USSR was given an accurate impression about what capitalism is about. In the USA this began in the nineteenth century if not earlier and escalated whenever communism appeared as if it might gain more support. Some of the people that advocated Communism claimed that there would be no need for violent revolution in the USA due to the fact that the USA allowed free speech and wouldn’t object to letting people review the ideology; unfortunately this hasn’t proven to be the case. Red scares escalated after WWI when the Russian revolution resulted in something that called itself communism. This led to the emotional attacks carried out by the American Protective League and censorship and harassment of people like Eugene Debs, Sacco and Vanzetti and others. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed for a crime which they may have been implicated for political reasons according to many people. Eugene Debs was put in jail for exercising his right to free speech during WWI. Red scares escalated again after WWII during McCarthyism. During McCarthyism they came up with a pamphlet called “One Hundred Things You Should Know About Communism” which was full of lies and distortions. A large percentage of the public was coerced into believing in the Capitalist system and hating the communist system without understanding either one of them. In both cases anyone who wanted to review the issues in a rational manner and educate the public about other ideologies was harassed, deprived of employment or suppressed in other ways and in the most extreme cases perhaps even murdered. If we are going to have a rational, fair and democratic system in place we should allow the free exchange of ideas whether we agree with them or not. In many cases the ideas many people believe in aren’t based on rational through but intimidation and manipulation tactics. If one system or another is more worthwhile then a rational review will confirm that. If none of the existent ideologies is perfect then a rational review could lead to finding the best of multiple systems and coming up with the best one. This review wouldn’t mean allowing tyranny instead it would involve allowing the democracy and free exchange of ideas that we’re already supposed to have. This shouldn’t mean only that we have the freedom to agree with the powerful but no freedom to reform the system for the benefit of the majority. Contrary to what the anti-communist people claim Marx was never opposed to democracy; quite the opposite he thought we should have a democracy. Just because the USSR wasn’t democratic doesn’t mean that Marx wasn’t. In his Critique of the Gotha Program Marx said “Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it.” This doesn’t mean that we should accept Marxism without scrutiny or assume that anyone who advocates democracy while out of power will back it up when they gain power but it does indicate that the public has been misled and should review what they’ve been told before coming to final conclusions.

The bottom line is that in a free democratic society the public should understand how the most important institutions are run and they should be able to make the most important decisions based on an accurate perception of reality not propaganda.  

 Statement from Lawrence Summers and reviews from several sources:

http://www.counterpunch.org/summers.html

http://www.mindfully.org/WTO/Summers-Memo-World12dec91.htm

http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/209/43247.html

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/lawrence_of_absurdia_1/

http://www.whirledbank.org/ourwords/summers.html

To read the writings of Marx yourself and come to your own conclusions regardless of what the opponents or advocates claim see the following:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Marx%2c%20Karl%2c%201818%2d1883

Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm

The US Constitution:

http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html

Partial lists of oil spills, this doesn’t cover the vast majority of smaller spills which surely have an enormous cumulative effect nor does it cover other types of pollution:

http://www.endgame.org/oilspills.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills

http://www.oilrigdisasters.co.uk/

One Hundred Things You Should Know About Communism pamphlet:

http://www.archive.org/stream/100thingsyoushou1949unit/100thingsyoushou1949unit_djvu.txt

For Howard Zinn's commentary including reference to comment by Harold Velde:

http://www.zcommunications.org/a-world-without-borders-by-howard-zinn 

For the full HTML version of this blog with table of context see:

https://zakherys.tripod.com/nonviolence.htm

Posted by zakherys at 1:50 AM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 26 May 2010 10:46 AM EDT

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There have been several calls for a truth commission or a truth and reconciliation commission about several events including possible war crimes committed in Iraq. This may be a good step in the right direction if it is done right. In order to have a true democracy the public needs access to the information and education necessary to make rational decisions about all major policy issues. Even if the public doesn’t make the decisions directly they need accurate information to hold the representatives that do accountable. Under the current circumstances at best only a small percentage of the public has access to the information and education they need to run a sincere democracy. Past requests for the truth from a government that claims to be democratic were perfectly reasonable and should have been granted yet they weren’t. What many people may not fully understand is that if they start revealing the truth about one subject it may lead to questions about another one. For example a truth commission about the activities at Abu Ghraib may lead to disclosures about the CIA as many people already suspect. This could raise more questions about other activities being conducted by the CIA which may involve many other things including activities overthrowing governments, some of which may have been more democratic than the ones installed by the CIA; and tacit approval if not active participation in drug running operations run by allies of the CIA like the Nicaraguan Contra’s and other organizations; and corporate involvement in military activities like the incident where ITT was exposed helping to overthrow the Allende government in Chile. Information from credible sources has already been released about these activities but they have been confused by a lot of propaganda and conflicting reports.

Once a good and sincere truth commission gets started and the public becomes accustomed to finding out the truth the flood gates may open and the truth about many incidents may be revealed. In fact a large portion of the truth may have already been leaked to the public one way or another. This hasn’t happened in a manner that is well organized in a way the public can understand it but if this information is organized in the most efficient way possible and other potential factors that may effect a formal truth commission then it will help set up the commission in the most effective way possible. This is especially important if there is going to be some degree of immunity granted to people that come forward with the truth. In some cases this may involve deciding whether or not a dangerous person guilty of murder will be released to the public again. Proper planning will also help decide what if any reparations should be made and in what forms this should be done. Past Truth Commissions may not have been quite as successful as they have been made out to be; therefore it would be a good idea to review them and find any flaws so they don’t happen again. If they were as successful as they have been made out to be this review will only confirm that; however there is at least one example where the most famous one has turned out to be flawed. The South African truth commission let members of the former South African government free without any job training for non violent lines of work and many of them wound up working for mercenary organizations like Executive Outcomes.

A good truth commission should carefully consider priorities before formalizing the conditions. In most cases a truth commission gives a higher priority to revealing the truth and reforming democracy than it does to punishing people for their wrong doing. Some exceptions may be necessary. Most people wouldn’t want to risk putting a dangerous mass murderer back on the streets like Gary Ridgeway or Joseph Kony. In some case a truth commission may reveal more mass murders which people may not want to release. In some cases it may turn out that these mass murderers were once people that were put above reproach in the past. This may be due to the fact that the Mass Media isn’t nearly as unbiased as it pretends to be. Other priorities may involve deciding what subject should be explored first. The highest profile incidents include the war in Iraq and the war on terror but there may be many other subjects that are also just as important. In order to find this out it could be helpful to start by making a list of different subjects and goals and deciding the priorities after considering all of them. Generally speaking some of the top priorities should include setting up a good education system so that the public would have the information they need to make decisions; protecting the environment and preventing the downward spiral that could destroy the ecosystem currently being pursued by the corporations; stopping wars of all kind around the world by supporting peaceful alternatives; and a better effort to reform health care. All these goals should start by looking at the basics in any given subject and working up from there. Allowing the government to ignore the basics as they pursue a pseudo reform of any subject including the health care program they passed last year shouldn’t be considered acceptable. A truth commission shouldn’t be limited to violent situations as it has in the past and it should include improved education. It would be foolish to allow the Mass Media to set the priorities by focusing on one issue obsessively and ignoring subjects they don’t want to address. If the Mass Media was willing to do a good job they would have done much better already. People should always remember that one of the most important objections of any truth commission regardless of what you call it is to avoid a revolution that “eats its own children”.

Since the government and the Mass Media are currently unwilling to address the manner in an honest manner it might be better to start with an informal truth an education commission. In fact this is already happening. There may not be people referring to it in that manner but there are people trying to do their part to reveal parts of the truth to the best of their ability. This includes many authors and low profile web sites that the government and the mass media aren’t paying much if any attention to right now. These efforts could be better organized simply by making a list of all these organizations and books. For example some good organizations that are producing books about reforming the government are The American Empire Project and Free Press (founded by Robert McChesney). They have provided some good books that organize many of the information released in the past about government activities that have been undemocratic and how the Mass Media has been corrupted by commercial interests. There are many other academics that have addressed different subjects that are also important that are not included in the American Empire Project or Free Press like some of the authors who have research into the damage done by child abuse. The long term damage done by child abuse is mostly underestimated by most people.

Organizing a lot of information from a lot of different sources will be helpful but once this begins it will quickly become apparent that many of these sources often contradict each other and in some cases even themselves. The most credible ones will usually have the least amount of contradictions and mistakes. But in order to find out which organizations and individuals are credible it will be necessary to confirm their work even for the good ones. The most credible ones shouldn’t see any problem with confirming their work since if they did as good a job as they claim it will stand up to scrutiny and this will only confirm their credibility. When it comes to confirming the credibility of any one source the first thing to do may be to look at the quality of their organization skills. This won’t guarantee that they are credible or not but if they did a good job organizing their information it will be much easier to either confirm or refute the information. Surprisingly some sources have provided reasonably good organizational skills and when checking them it becomes clear that they are misrepresenting their sources. In most cases that I have seen where this has happened there have often been other red flags indicating problems without even checking the sources though. Other sources have done much better which clearly appear more credible but if they have a few bad sources in there it will be necessary to find them. In some cases this may involve sorting through tough subjects where a misinformation may have been spread to confuse the issue. If someone does a good job citing his sources and organizing his information then any one who believes his conclusions are false should review the sources and the work. Any effort to discredit someone with good organizational skills that doesn’t also discredit the sources or the way they were presented should be considered suspect.

One example that might be worth considering is the hypothesis presented by Philip Zimbardo in “The Lucifer Effect” (2007). Philip Zimbardo indicates that he believes people father up the chain of command should be held responsible for the abuses and torture in Iraq and other locations around the world. He presents himself as an authority primarily because of an experiment he conducted in 1971 known as the Stanford Prison Experiment and a review of other similar research projects. He attempt to argue that the situation was the primary cause for the abuses at Abu Ghraib. There should be no doubt that many of his claims have some legitimacy however a closer look may indicate there may also be some flaws in his work or even a conflict of interest. This doesn’t mean his work should be dismissed especially since some of it may be relevant and it may be better in some ways than most other sources; however it should be held to a thorough review by other people in the appropriate academic fields and he shouldn’t be the lead source of review for this as I will indicate.

There are several ways to confirm or refute Philip Zimbardo’s work including some criticism from Phillip Greven and Alfred McCoy; a review of his career in chronological order which isn’t necessarily the way he presented it; and a review of the way other prison researchers conduct their work to see if it supports his work. The biggest problem may be that he seems to claim the Stanford Prison Experiment was primarily to study prison psychology but if that were true this may not be the right way to go about it.

The criticism from Phillip Greven and Alfred McCoy was actually directed at the work of Stanley Milgram but it could just as easily be applied to the work of Philip Zimbardo. Philip Greven criticized Milgram for declining to look into the background of his research subjects to see how they were raised. He claimed that he might have done a much better job if he had read Alice Millers book “For Your Own Good”; however this wasn’t a very good example in Milgram’s case since Milgram went to press first. It might have been better if he sited Benjamin Spock or other work that went to press earlier; however in Philip Zimbardo’s case he didn’t go to press until 2007 so even though he wouldn’t have known about it when he did his experiment he could have and perhaps should have known about it and many other good books similar to it when he wrote his The Lucifer Effect. Greven, Miller and many other psychologists that studied the upbringing of children have found that violent behavior and disciplinarian teaching encourages violent behavior later in life and it encourages people to be more likely to follow orders blindly which should be applicable to the work that Philip Zimbardo did. The early upbringing of a child is just the beginning. Child abuse often leads to bullying in school which could be followed by hazing. Hazing is a manipulation tactic that involves using coercion to encourage conformity this is similar to what they do in boot camp and in religious organizations. There were similarities present during the Stanford Prison Experiment. The situation that Philip Zimbardo claims to be an important factor is of course part of it but the earlier upbringing may be just as important if not more important. If he reviewed the upbringing of his subjects he could have found out if the ones that were more violent came from a more violent background with more abuse from their parents and perhaps bullying or hazing later. In the beginning of The Lucifer Effect he indicated some knowledge of this when he said that someone he grew up with became violent partly because of the way he was abused by his father; however he provides little more review into this subject throughout the rest of The Lucifer Effect. There may be few hints but unless the reader is looking for it he won’t find these.

Alfred McCoy indicated he thought Milgram may have been working for the CIA. McCoy didn’t directly indicate he thought Philip Zimbardo was working for the CIA but he did claim there were similarities with the Stanford Prison Experiment. McCoy has been researching the CIA for over thirty years. In the case of Milgram he claimed that he came to this conclusion for several reasons including the fact that Milgram initially tried to get a grant to research the use of mescaline on people which was turned down. This is similar to several of the projects that the CIA has been involved in the past that were exposed including a similar research project on the use of LSD. Milgram did his research project with the help of a grant from the National Science Foundation that was supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR). Other requests for support that weren’t supported by the ONR were turned down and when his career was in trouble as a result of the controversy around this study he was hired by someone that just left the ONR and this saved his career. McCoy also claims that several of the most prominent psychologists of the twentieth century including Milgram and several former members of the American psychiatric association and the American Psychology Association may have contributed, unwittingly or not, to research to help the CIA understand how to use coercion tactics and psychological torture. In Philip Zimbardo’s case he received his grant directly from the ONR. Philip Zimbardo claims to be an opponent of the Viet Nam War which should raise some doubt about why he was doing this type of research with a grant from the ONR. Why would he accept the grant and why would they give it to him if they had opposing goals? One possibility worth considering might be that he was only providing a token opposition to the war and he may have used this to lessen the criticism that may have been even greater than what Milgram faced otherwise. A review of his anti-war activities could either confirm or refute this hypothesis. If he was a sincere anti-war protester he almost certainly could have done more to warn the public about the manipulation tactics he was studying. Another indicator of why this project was done could be the potential uses it could have had and whether or not they would have known when they were in the planning stage. Even if he wasn’t working for the CIA he knew he was receiving support from the ONR which was a branch of the military; and he knew or should have known that this could have potential benefits for improving the way boot camp is run and other coercive activities including those eventually used at Abu Ghraib. Also it is virtually guaranteed that even if Philip Zimbardo didn’t know it the CIA would have taken notice of this research or any other research like it since it would help them with coercive activities. There have been several investigators of the CIA that claimed that they consulted with Psychologists working in the academic world; former CIA director William Colby even admitted this before congressional hearings. He couldn’t have known it would be used this way assuming it was but he could have anticipated the possibility and done more to warn people much sooner.   

A review of his career in chronological order could help understand what the primary focus of his research was and whether or not it is research into prison behavior or other activities. He was a classmate of Milgram in high school and they both told the story about how Milgram was the smart one and Philip Zimbardo was the popular one and the later found out that each of them wanted the other distinction. He claims he grew up in the Bronx and he learned how to be street smart and become the leader of the crowd. He acknowledges using the basement later used by Milgram in his Obedience to authority experiment. He also acknowledges that he discussed it with Milgram and in 1969 he conducted another lesser known study that was a variation of Milgram’s obedience to authority experiment. His Stanford Prison Experiment appears to be as much about obedience to authority as it is about prison activities. He followed this up with another project to help people opening a new jail conduct a mock prison which seems to a lot like his Stanford Prison Experiment; this didn’t involve realistic research about actual prison life for the same reason as the first experiment but it could have advanced research in manipulation tactics. He reviews dozens of other research projects that were primarily about obedience to authority.

A review of the way other prison researchers conduct their work might help indicate whether or not the way he went about things with his Stanford Prison Experiment was the right way to go. He claims that the reason he didn’t study people in current prisons was because they would have a hard time getting in and out of them without better cooperation from authorities and that they wouldn’t be able to observe everything. This is partially true. Both Dorothy Otnow Lewis and Lonnie Athens researched prison behavior and they had problems obtaining cooperation from authorities to conduct their interviews but they overcame them and things seem to have gotten easier for prison researchers in the late eighties and nineties. There appears to have been much more cooperation based on a review of the books about several mass murders and books by the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI. These improvements in cooperation escalated after 1971 when Philip Zimbardo did his research project. Philip Zimbardo could have gone about things in a different way that probably would have been much better if he was primarily interested in researching prison behavior but it is conceivable that he didn’t find out about that until after he did his experiment. Even though there were problems with studying activities there were also other problems with the way he went about it perhaps even more serious problems. His prisoners and guards weren’t real. They weren’t brought up in a criminal environment or trained as guards. There was no trial or many of the other activities that would have been relevant and important to researching prison life. He still could have and should have found out of the research done by others by the time he wrote The Lucifer Effect in 2007. If this was primarily about prison research you would have expected him to do much more to cite the work of other researchers to confirm his findings. There is very little of that in The Lucifer Effect except for a few token statements which are mostly accurate about general principles and some claims that some of the people went on to conduct more research in prisons but he doesn’t review their work. The Lucifer Effect spends much more time discussing research projects into methods that could be used to manipulate people than it does in discussing legitimate prison research. If this research is presented to the leaders and withheld from the public it may enable them to manipulate the public and lead them into wars against the best interest of the public. There are many cases within The Lucifer Effect where he confesses to manipulating people as part of the experiment. There are also some cases where this seems as much like a form of espionage as it does a research project into prisons. He says that the conditions of the experiment were that they could quit the experiment at any time if they chose. Later when many of them clearly indicated that they wanted to quit but didn’t come out and say it clearly that “I want to quit in accordance with the agreement” he ignored them and tried to coerce them to continue. He attempted to convince someone to inform on the other prisoners which could have been similar to a prison incident and he didn’t agree or at least not initially; perhaps if it went on longer it would have worked and he could have cut a deal with someone. He attempts to put what he refers to as a spy in their ranks when one prisoner is released as a replacement. This spy winds up sympathizing with the prisoner and doesn’t provide any “actionable intelligence”. The use of this term seems more like something the CIA would use than something an undercover cop would use; they would probably more likely to refer to it as evidence that could be used at trial. There is an incident where they are concerned that the prisoner released would come back and disrupt the experiment. They go to great lengths to prevent this. When one of the parents expresses concerns about his son he confesses to appealing to his “masculine pride” when he asks “Don’t you think your son can take it?” There is reference to a perceived conspiracy to use this experiment to find out how to imprison Viet Nam protesters after someone finds out the project is being funded by the ONR. This conspiracy theory is dismissed out of hand without explanation except that he claims he is opposed to the war so that isn’t the case. He makes no attempt to explain why a war protester is accepting money for research from the ONR or to explain why they would provide it if they couldn’t use it to help accomplish their goal. This doesn’t mean the conspiracy about them using the experiment to arrest people protesting the war is true; it almost certainly isn’t. However the experiment could be used to better understand how to run boot camps and manipulate people. Many of the activities they are conducting are similar to the activities that the CIA participate in and as some people including Alfred McCoy and Philip Zimbardo himself indicated it is similar to what went on at Abu Ghraib.

Philip Zimbardo claims that he changes his attitude after he is confronted by a younger research assistant whom he is also dating that raises concerns about the experiment. He initially claims he doubted whether or not she “could ever be a good researcher if she was going to get so emotional about a research procedure.” This statement may be valid from a scientific point of view; however from an ethical point of view it may be different. After she responds he later agrees to end the research project but he still goes on with a semi-mock procedure where a public defender related to one of the prisoners comes in and conducts interviews with the prisoners. He states that he will file reports with a real court on Monday. Only then does he tell the public defender and the prisoners that he is ending the experiment. After he ends the project he writes ”Then and there I vowed to use whatever power that I had for good and against evil, to promote what is best in people, to work to free people from their self imposed prisons, and to work against systems that pervert the promise of happiness and justice.” This sounds like something that people like Howard Zinn have attempted to do; however Howard Zinn seems to have been much more active in his attempt to achieve this goal and to the best of my knowledge he never mad such a dramatic statement; instead he demonstrated his sincerity with his actions. If you revue the work of Howard Zinn and other war protesters you will find much more activity to protest against wars than what I know of Philip Zimbardo; as far as I can tell his claims to be against the war were all vague general claims without addressing the problems of the war the way other war opponents that I’m aware of until recently. This seems to have changed with the writing of The Lucifer Effect and his opposition to the torture in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. For the most part his current work may be changing to a point. He is right that more people higher up should be held accountable for this scandal and that the situation is a major factor although it may not be quite as important as earlier upbringing as indicated by Philip Greven. However there are still some problems including the end of The Lucifer Effect where he tries to reinforce hero worship to a point and encourage people to be obedient to a benevolent authority in what he seems to refer to as a reverse Milgram experiment. The problem with Hero worship is that the most effective solutions aren’t dramatic or heroic they are mundane practical things that can be done to solve problems before they escalate. As indicated by Greven and many other researchers violence early in life leads to violence later in life; once you understand this than it indicates the way to solve this problem involves teaching young parents to avoid abuse and spanking instead to spend more time with their children doing little mundane things. This is hardly perceived as heroic yet it is an example of ways to solve problems. Heroism is often based far more on hype biases and lies than on practical solution. Once you have a hero they are often put above reproach and biases tend to escalate. A similar problem comes up when teaching people to be obedient to a benevolent authority since the authorities they have obeyed in the past have always portrayed themselves as benevolent and he doesn’t put more than a toke amount of focus how to recognize which authority is benevolent or not and setting up a set of checks and balances. Until there is a better education system and the masses do a better job learning for themselves to tell who is good or not there may be little choice but to encourage some people to obey authority; however if this is necessary there can still be more done to set up a set of checks and balanced controlled by educated people and set up a plan to educate the rest.

Philip Zimbardo also reviews the ethics of his own project; however he doesn’t focus much if any attention on what the research may be used for. He claims that from an absolute version of ethics the rule is first do no harm which he didn’t obey since he acknowledges that he did psychological damage to the subjects of his experiment. He also reviews a relative version of ethics which weighs whether society gains more than they lose from the experiment. This is based on the assumption that the people being used for the experiment will pay a price but if it goes well then the information gained from the experiment will more than justify the expense. There is no way of knowing for sure whether or not this will happen until after the experiment is done but that is what they are aiming for. This is based on the assumption that the research information gained from the experiment would benefit society instead of being used to harm society. The experiments that were committed by the third Reich were of course considered unethical because not only did they harm the research subject but they also were used to learn how to kill much more effectively. This is actually standard procedure for military research although it receives little attention. If the military produces a more powerful bomb they’re learning how to kill more efficiently. In the case of Philip Zimbardo’s experiment he is studying psychological manipulation tactics many of which were partially understood by a lot of demagogues. This could be used for better by warning the public, or worse by withholding the research from the public and providing it only to those who are using it to manipulate the public. Philip Zimbardo didn’t do either one of these instead he did something in between. There was some information shared with some members of the public but not the majority. This could give him some degree of plausible deniability. The information was much more widely available to the college educated and the members of the military and the CIA than it was the vast majority of the public. He would have had more plausible deniability if he had published a first edition of The Lucifer Effect in the seventies. This couldn’t have included research that hadn’t been done or any information about the incidents in Abu Ghraib since they hadn’t happened and perhaps if the public was warned they might never have happened. He could have followed it up with improved editions as more research became available. Instead he did a few TV shows and perhaps provided more detailed reports to those within the academic community. Philip Zimbardo for the most part ignores the ethics of how his research was used and even goes so far as to claim ignorance when it was used for the Navy’s Survival Evasion and Escape (SERE) program. The SERE program may have been used to develop methods to overcome resistance to torture as well as to develop it. Philip Zimbardo was doing this research project with a grant from the ONR he should have known or at least suspected it could be used for this purpose. Another aspect of his research which should have been considered more carefully was the fact that he relied on the help of research subjects who had a hard time paying for college. They were paid fifteen dollars a day which wasn’t very much for this type of research even in 1970. Like a lot of other researchers he relied primarily on the lower or middle classes for his research and the benefit was evaluated and controlled by the upper classes. Like participants in this research project, Stanley Milgram’s project and many others the people participating in the research were happy to know that the research was being done for the benefit of science which was presumably being used to help everyone in society. A closer look almost certainly will indicate that this is a false assumption. The benefit of this research project is controlled by those in the academic community, the most powerful political institutions and the Mass Media. Unfortunately in most cases especially this one the benefit is provided first to the rich with access to and education and then to a lesser degree to the public but the quality of the education the public as presented by the politicians and the Mass Media is routinely distorted and often involves indoctrination instead of education or insufficient review for the majority of the public to understand.

Philip Zimbardo was the president of the American Psychology Association in 2002 and is now director of the Stanford Center on Interdisciplinary Policy, Education and Research on Terrorism. This may mean he has some influence in the academic community and perhaps in the political community on how to deal with terrorism. His handling of this may be flawed as well; he cites a study of four hundred al-Queda members by Marc Sageman which claims that three quarters of these people came from the middle or the upper classes. This may be true but I suspect it may also be out of context. I don’t know for certain what all the contributing factors are that lead people to become what the USA labels as terrorists but I suspect that generally speaking two of the leading causes are indoctrination that includes coercion and some form of legitimate grievance although they may not be able to express it very well. The indoctrination could include child abuse early in life from those that raise them and mythology about Armageddon and the demonization of those they consider enemies. The legitimate grievance may be more difficult to recognize in some cases since we now have complex systems that control all the most powerful institution in the world which many people can’t comprehend. However they may see that the people that control the systems get the benefit and those that do a large portion of the work pay the price. They are aware of the collateral damage that is done by many sources including the USA military. The people living in the Middle East receive a different version of the news than the people in the USA; while the US media downplays the fact that the CIA has intervened in foreign countries to overthrow governments the people in the Middle East live with it and perhaps even exaggerate it in the other direction. The truth is almost certainly somewhere in the middle and a truth commission that sorts through the details to get it may help reduce violence than ignoring inconvenient facts. Philip Zimbardo doesn’t seem to do much to acknowledge many of the legitimate grievances except for the torture which is now so obvious it should be beyond dispute.

Philip Zimbardo displays more familiarity with the CIA and their activities than he does with prison psychology. This doesn’t mean he always presents them accurately though. Even if it turns out that Philip Zimbardo is sincere it is worth considering the possibility that if there is reform there will be someone involved that may have an ulterior motive and they may attempt to subvert the process one way or another. Even if Philip Zimbardo isn’t entirely sincere it wouldn’t be appropriate to dismiss his work in its entirety either; when it comes to manipulation tactics some of the people who understand them the most are those who have used them in the past. A close look at Mien Kampf indicates that Hitler understood war propaganda and manipulation tactics better than the vast majority of the public but it also requires discretion while sorting out the details; for example when he describes manipulation tactics he attributed them to the enemies including the WWI opponents, the Catholics and of course the Jews. In the case WWI opponents and the Catholics he was at least partly right but in the case of the Jews they didn’t have the power and there is little or nothing to indicate they were a legitimate threat at that time. Instead he was of course catering to the prejudices of his followers perhaps because this was the most effective way to manipulate them. Another thing worth considering is the fact that although many people may not have the critical thinking skills to recognize his flaws others clearly do and Philip Zimbardo may know this. If that is the case why wouldn’t he do a better job manipulating the public and why would he provide so much information about how to avoid manipulation tactics? One seemingly farfetched possibility is that this may be for some people another obedience to authority experiment and a partially controlled disclosure plan. As time goes on more people will come to learn how to understand these principles and they may realize that Philip Zimbardo isn’t being completely sincere. This would enable some members of the public to cope with the truth gradually. Believing this hypothesis without further evidence would be foolish but even if it isn’t true it may work out that way in the long run. If there is a truth commission it will help to learn how to sort through the details and check facts and the public should be involved in that. There will almost certainly be some people who don’t come out with the truth unless they realize they have no choice and it is in their own best interest. Many members of the public may also have to do a better job dealing with the fact that their leaders haven’t been nearly as honest with them as the public wants to believe. Many members of the public have developed an emotional attachment with some of their leaders and an emotional distrust of others and in some cases they may not have gotten either one right. A truth Commission may have to do as much to de-cultify many people as it does to educate them.

Informing the public of these indoctrination or manipulation tactics needs to be a very important part of a truth commission so they can learn ho to avoid being taken in again and led to one war after another for the wrong reasons. If Philip Zimbardo had done a much better job organizing his research and presenting it to the public thirty years ago then much more could have been done to prevent the wars that have occurred since then. The fact that this didn’t happen can’t be changed so it will be important to do it now in the most effective way possible and even though Philip Zimbardo probably hasn’t as sincere as he could have been he could still make partial amends by helping to educate the public now if his work is checked. If he is called out and punished to severely when he was coming out with at least part of the truth and an important part then others may be reluctant to follow suit. Whether Philip Zimbardo or others like him disserve some form of immunity may not be the most important issue but whether or not it is the most effective way of getting the truth out and reforming the system without a revolution that “eats its own children”.

Posted by zakherys at 1:55 PM EDT

Updated: Tuesday, 10 May 2011 12:51 PM EDT

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