Real History

Right now, I honestly have no idea what's going to come out of this post. I'm just awake and can't sleep and I've had an average day that was preceded by a few more average days. But as usual, I've had some not so average thoughts.

There's been a lot on my mind. I started reading The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo just this past week and it's been very interesting. For those of you (if there are any of you) who aren't familiar with this book, in short, it's about the Stanford Prison Experiment. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Stanford Prison Experiment, I'll give you a short recap.

Dr. Zimbardo planned to simulate a "mock" prison, in which paid volunteers would be randomly selected to either be guards or prisoners. It was originally scheduled to last for two weeks. The study started on Sunday and was terminated early that Friday morning due to... well, a lot of crap that happened. I won't go into details here. But many of the prisoners had emotional breakdowns due to stress. I'll stop there and let you go buy the book.

I don't really know why I brought that up. This study has been used for a lot of things though. Such as the power of immersive role-playing, motivation, authority (real or imagined), fear, rebellion, group dynamics, and the influence of the System.

When I was originally introduced to this study in high school it was casually mentioned as an important study that contributed to the creation of ethics boards in psychology and much more. But due to the amount of material that we were covering it was merely mentioned.

Reading this book though has brought life to this study. I was amazed at some of the reactions of the prisoners, such as 416 and 2093, to the guards. They weren't just people that had been chosen for a study anymore, but instead they became real. They had real emotions. Real pain. Real anger. Real fear.

The changes in the guards were just as incredible. Some became "heartless" while others were the "good" guys. But this study had just as much of a changing effect on the principal researcher, Dr. Zimbardo, who became the prison superintendent and fell just as deeply into his role as anyone else that was involved in the study.

I guess part of what I realized by reading this book (which I haven't finished yet, but will soon) is that EVERY moment in history has real people in it. Even the things that are only mentioned in passing had real impacts on real people.

There are always the grossly tragic events that people easily remember. The events of 9-11 or Pearl Harbor, or the Cambodian Holocaust. Each of these are singular events in wars. I started to think about the individual battles instead of the war as a whole. For instance, the American Civil War, one of the best known battles is the Battle of Shiloh where about 3,500 soldiers were killed.

But there was also the Battle of Carnifex Ferry where perhaps 20 soldiers were killed.

History always reports the larger numbers. There are several reasons as to why, but I'll only mention a few of them and move on. Media needs a bigger story and bigger numbers mean a bigger story. People love to hear about tragedy. Propaganda. And many more.

But after reading what I have, I realize just how real those 20 people were. They were probably brothers, or fathers, and most definitely sons. They probably had dreams. Maybe they wanted to be there, maybe they were terrified of what was about to happen. That's all just speculation. But to the families of these 20 soldiers, that number meant a lot more than 3,500. And that 20 didn't mean as much to them as that 1. That 1 that meant so much to them.

I only now am beginning to realize that even the smallest event recorded in history had someone real there. Someone who had family and friends, felt pain, love, loss, and thought about things other than that one day they were at something that would be mentioned loosely in high school history classes later on.

Like I said, I didn't know what was going to come out of my fingers tonight. I had very different things on my mind when I sat down to write this, but I'm glad that I've said what I have. Take it as you will.