To hurt another human...

Today I was reminded of when I used to play "Mercy" with my friends. It's a game in which one person grabs onto another, wrenches his/her body around and tries to inflict enough pain so that the attacked might utter "Mercy!" with a pained fervency. I then thought of "Indian burns" in which someone grabs onto the forearm of another person with both hands and wrenches the skin of the forearm in opposite directions, causing a burning sensation and making the skin red and painful. (This is better described here.) Even now, simply trying to explain these simple, common elementary (well sure, probably middle school too) "games," I'm kind of shocked at how horrible they sound. The whole point of the game was to assert one's "power" over another person; it was a battle of tolerance. Who could "take" the most pain? Who could inflict the most pain? But who won?

The most pervading question from today's class was, "How could any human inflict such suffering to another?" And it wasn't just the SS or the Hösses of the world who inflicted the pain. It was also every single civilian who knew what was going and pretended they didn't, everyone who ignored what was happening around them, everyone who turned their backs on their neighbors and let the Holocaust happen. Debriefing class with a friend, he mentioned The Milgram Experiment, which I'd never heard of. To summarize it:

-Three people: "Experimenter", "Teacher", and "Learner"

-The Experimenter explained that the Teacher and the Learner were a part of a study to examine memory and learning situations.

-The Teacher and Learner were placed in two different rooms. The Teacher was given lists of words he/she needed to teach to the Learner.

-If the Learner failed to learn the words, an electrical shock would be administered to the Learner by the Teacher. This shock would increase by 15 volts for every missed word.

-The Teacher was shocked prior to commencing the experiment so he/she would know the level of pain the Learner would be exposed to at first.

-If the Teacher showed reluctance to shock/punish the Learner, the Experimenter would intervene, saying, in this order:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

-If after all four verbal interventions, the Teacher still wished to stop, the experiment would end. The experiment also ended when the voltage of the shock reached 450 three times.

-The Learner would bang on the wall after several shocks had been administered, complain of a heart condition, scream, and then fall silent.

-The experiment was designed to test, "The willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience" (Ibid.).

Thankfully, the Learner was actually an actor, the sounds of shocks were pre-recorded, and no harm was caused by the experiment (unless you count the psychological trauma induced on the Teacher)
The results were shocking.

Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology majors as to what they thought would be the results. All of the poll respondents believed that only a few (average 1.2%) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock.[1]

In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40) of experiment participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. Only one participant steadfastly refused to administer shocks before the 300-volt level.

So, what might be taken from this? We are more prepared and capable to hurt another human than we'd ever like to think, even with our consciences.