A Substantial Proportion Of People Do What

The Soldier Does Not Wish To Appear A Coward, Disloyal, Or Un-american. The Situation Has Been So Defined That He Can See Himself As Patriotic, Courageous, And Manly Only Through Compliance.

I Would Say, On The Basis Of Having Observe A Thousand People In The Experiment And Having My Own Intuition Shaped And Informed By These Experiments, That If A System Of Death Camps Were Set Up In The United States Of The Sort We Had Seen In Nazi Germany, One Would Find Sufficient Personnel For Those Camps In Any Medium-sized American Town.

But The Culture Has Failed, Almost Entirely, In Inculcating Internal Controls On Actions That Have Their Origin In Authority. For This Reason, The Latter Constitutes A Far Greater Danger To Human Survival.

Ordinary People, Simply Doing Their Jobs, And Without Any Particular Hostility On Their Part, Can Become Agents In A Terrible Destructive Process.

It May Be That We Are Puppets-puppets Controlled By The Strings Of Society. But At Least We Are Puppets With Perception, With Awareness. And Perhaps Our Awareness Is The First Step To Our Liberation. (1974)