Huddleson 1

Jacob Huddleson

Mrs. Brubaker

English 4 / 3rd

11 December 2017

“Living through Evil”

Magnifying Evil in Human Nature through Sociological Experiments

Evil exists within everyone. As Eastern philosopher Lao Tzu once taught, there are two

kinds of evils. Evil that is rooted in human nature is called a casual evil, whereas evils that result

from those are called consequent evils. Many sociological experiments that took place in the

1960s and the 1970s proved Tzu’s theory. In Todd Strasser’s The Wave, a teacher named Ben

Ross manipulated the minds of his students by letting them participate in an experiment where

they played the roles of German citizens in Nazi Germany. He did this by making the students

feel like they were part of a club and developed a community around it, where it became like a

fad around the school. As time went on, the students began to bully anyone who was not in the

group, and the members that were not bullying turned a blind eye to it. The experiment ended by

Ben Ross telling them how much they have become like Nazis and that they were doing evil

things based purely on conformity. We see examples of both of the evils as Ben Ross leads his

students to bring malice and wrongdoing into their school. Similarly, in the Stanford Prison

Experiment, college students were placed as either guards or prisoners to simulate how people in

positions of power act. The students that were made as mock guards were shown that, when

given a status of power, they will do evil things beyond what they thought were capable of. The
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guards felt so empowered by their ascription that they began to humiliate the prisoner-students,

which lead to mental breakdowns and hatred among the prisoners. To the surprise of Philip

Zimbardo, the experimenter, the guard students continued to torture the prisoners, despite their

obvious pleas for help. This showed how truly evil anyone can be when granted uncheckable

power. Even in the Blue-Eyed Brown-Eyed Experiment, where its test subjects were young

children, power was still shown to be abused by those who, in their miniature society, deemed

superior as a means to bully and harass other students. The experimenter, the classroom teacher,

Jane Elliot, did this by bestowing privileges to student who had blue eyes, such as extra recess

time or more lunch food, while brown eyed students were treated poorly and picked on by the

superior students, which was supported by the teacher. The reason she did this was to explain to

the impressionable kids that racism and discrimination against people based purely on the color

of their eyes, which is analogous to skin color in the real world, is evil, and that the students

should never bully anyone based on who they are ever again. When it comes to the state of evil,

humans are naturally entranced by its lure towards superiority and power because of their natural

desire to be better than everyone else by keeping others down, the fact that potential evil exists

within all of humanity, and the bounds of government keeping its citizenry from acting out its

definition of evil.

When power is often abused by those with too much of it, it is often desired by the

common man to climb the social hierarchy, so that they may claim that power for themselves. As

seen in The Wave, Robert, the class loser, seems always down and never cares about anything,

but once The Wave was created, he was wholeheartedly invested into it in order to gain power.

When Robert approaches Mr. Ross about his idea of being his bodyguard, as his first step to

gaining said power, Robert says, “…nobody makes jokes about me anymore. I feel like I’m part
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of something special” (Strasser 83). Robert’s constant beta status has led him to love the status of

being able to directly serve Ross, as it makes him feel like he is on top of the social food chain.

Robert’s explicit desire to be better than everyone else reflects in his newly acquired status. In

the Blue Eye Brown Eye experiment, brown eyed students always wanted to the same privileges

as blue eyed students. In Faheem Shuaibe’s video entitled Brown eyes and blue eyes Racism

experiment (Children Session) - Jane Elliott, the brown eyed students are quoted as saying,

“..and it seemed like when we were down on the bottom, everything bad was happening to us”

(00.04.37 – 00.04.43). The brown eyed students, being the victims of their teacher’s experiment,

even though they only understand the fundamentals of equal human treatment, understand that

our natural desire to dominate others socially is incorrect and immoral, because it contradicted

the morals that the children were taught, like respectfulness and courtesy. When concerning the

Stanford Prison Experiment, the guards of the experiment who were granted unlimited power

were modest at first, but soon expanded the power as they pleased. The mock guard, who was

named John Wayne by the prisoners, was the forefather of this line of thinking before any of the

other guards. (HeroicImaginationTV’s The Stanford Prison Experiment) As guards began to

catch on, they began to completely rule over the prisoners, to the point to where guards ran their

world, because all the students ever wanted was power and dominance. Even though the human

desire to govern and dominate other people is instilled within nature, it must be recognized and

quelled so that it may not play a wolf in sheep’s clothing to command a populace to do its

biddings of evil.

Evil, especially the variant that lies within human nature, often masquerades as a good

intentioned ideology, which hardly ever turns out to fulfill its false promises. For instance, The

Wave started out as a game, which turned out to be much more serious than some class activity.
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Ben Ross had exemplified this concept during the conclusion of his experiment, where Ross

states to his classroom, “’Yes, you all would have made good Nazis,’ Ben told them. ‘You would

have put on the uniforms, turned your heads, and allowed your friends and neighbors to be

persecuted and destroyed” (Strasser 135). Ross explains, in euphemistic terms, that the members

of his dishonest movement were blindly following his command, to which it can be observed that

if promises of justice and equality are stated, people will obey every command, even if they

challenge morality and what is and is not evil. Similar to Ross’ students, Jane Elliot convinced

her students not only through the appearance of the experiment being a game, but through her

authority as a teacher. After recess, it becomes known that two children of different eye color got

into a fight. Elliot utilizes her authority as a teacher to ask rhetorical questions to get the children

to think a certain way. An example of her doing this is during her analysis of John, the brown

eyed student who go into the fight, where she asks things that would imply he is wrong, such as

if it had helped that he hit the blue eyed boy, or if his violence made him feel better inside.

(Brown eyes and blue eyes Racism experiment (Children Session) - Jane Elliott by Faheem

Shuaibe) When any human is given authority, it is very easy to push a doctrine on people, as a

result of your status and power without anyone noticing how ill willed your intentions may be.

The Stanford Prison Experiment follows suite from the other experiments, as Phillip Zimbardo’s

experiment went awry. As seen in HeroicImaginationTV’s The Stanford Prison Experiment,

when the experiment went on, prisoners began having breakdowns that were genuine that

Zimbardo had not seen coming, to which he responded, “…every day after that another prisoner

broke down in a similar way, broke down in an extreme stress reaction” (00.10.48 – 00.10.53).

From Zimbardo’s observation, it can be determined that as the experiment went on with minimal

intervention from any of the experiment’s observers, the guards became more and more hostile
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and discriminating, as their inner evils broke out and took it out on the prisoners, which

elaborates that even when an experiment starts out as innocent and run of the mill, it can go

south very fast. As a result of evil being so easy to cultivate by providing an environment for it to

grow, the fall from being in control is creates some unforeseen reactions.

Once you have exploited your evil behavior and potential for power, it creates a sense of

pseudo immortality, and when your power fades, its consequences are calamitous. Ben Ross was

a tyrant of The Wave coveting for more power and success in his classroom uprising, only to

discover his movement was not helping his students, but it was hurting them. As he ushered

himself into a faculty bathroom, Ross found himself in a daze over who he had become, where

he monologues, “He swallowed the three aspirins and avoided looking at himself in the mirror.

Was he afraid of who he might see?” (Strasser 103). Ross’ actions describe his slow slip into

madness as he loses track of who he is, as his evil side has clouded his judgement with its grip on

him, and he knew if The Wave failed, his power would dissipate. In Jane Elliot’s classroom,

however, her power was not lost, but instead her blue eyed students were defeated by their loss

of mental superiority. On the day that the roles were reversed, Elliot tested her students on a pack

of cards to see how fast they could go through it, and the blue eyed students had slowed down as

opposed to the previous day, whereas the brown eyed students had picked up speed. Elliot made

the observation that the only variable was the way she treated her students, and she told the blue

eyed students that the main factor that changed the student’s motivation was the idea that they

were worse than the brown eyed students. (Brown eyes and blue eyes Racism experiment

(Children Session) - Jane Elliott by Faheem Shuaibe) Elliot’s experiment showed that success

and the drive to do well in many walks of life can be removed simply by being treated as lesser,

for something as out of control as race or eye color, and when that privilege is revoked, it can
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have adverse effects on your behavior. In the Stanford Prison Experiment, where no limit to

power could be met or enforced by Zimbardo, evil flourished and it never diminished. According

to HeroicImaginationTV’s The Stanford Prison Experiment, the John Wayne guard, who was

most interested in boasting his ever expanding clout, explained his reasoning for being so wicked

by explaining, “I was sort of fascinated myself that people were believing the act, and I was

trying to see how far I could take it before somebody would say ‘Okay, that’s enough, stop’”

(00.05.34 – 00.05.45) Since the Stanford Prison Experiment uniquely had no limits to how cruel

and malevolent the guards could be, they never experienced a fall from power until the

experiment was forced to be brought to an ultimate termination, which resulted in a power trip

by the guards that toyed with the prisoners, that displayed the full power of evil in its unhinged,

incarnate form. With the human desire to be in control being so dominant, it may have been

thought that the human race would have realized the danger of power and made an attempt to

limit it, but it has been quite the contrary, for the desire to control other is not the only thing

instilled within human nature, as acts of evil dwell deep within our subconscious, waiting for the

perfect moment to display our superiority.

Evil, both potential and premeditated, lurks within everyone’s subconscious, waiting to

lash out. Yet, what first must be understood is that the definition of true evil is subjective to the

observer. For instance, in The Wave, Ross’ experiment, he speaks of outsiders as nonconformists

who must be either converted or removed. When Ross introduces the final word of The Wave’s

motto, action, he explains that those who are not with The Wave are against it; by doing this,

Ross only exacerbated tensions in the school, which promoted inequality among the student body

as opposed to promoting equality (Strasser 60) Ross’ underlying message that promotes

exclusion of other based on beliefs is a pretty fundamental evil. When people are young, they are
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taught that treating other the way you want to be treated is a common rule among children. Ross’

students were completely oblivious to this concept since they believe that Ross, as their leader,

would never mislead them. Continuing on the subject of obliviousness, the students of the Blue

Eyed Brown Eyed experiment displayed their naivety to the racism that plagued their world at

the time of the experiment. As Jane Elliot talks with the students about the bullying at lunch, the

arrogance and the mean spirited behavior of the blue eyed students become better known. When

the brown eyed students attempt to defend themselves, they get laughed and sneered at by the

superior blue eye students. (Brown eyes and blue eyes Racism experiment (Children Session) -

Jane Elliott by Faheem Shuaibe) Despite what morals would normally dictate how you treat

someone else, when it is enforced by a higher authority, such as Elliot, it suddenly, in the eyes of

the students, becomes okay, when in reality it is not. When comparing the guards of the Stanford

Prison Experiment to the children of Elliot’s class, or to the students of Ross’ class, it appears

evident that even the college age guards could not differentiate messing around and pushing the

limits of the prisoners. As displayed in HeroicImaginationTV’s The Stanford Prison Experiment,

On the second day of the experiment, when the prisoners began to rebel against the authority of

the guards, the guards tried to quash the rebellion, where Phillip Zimbardo was quoted as saying,

“…so the guards formulated a plan to use fire extinguishers, take the doors down, drag the

prisoners out, strip them naked, and essentially broke the rebellion a purely physical way”

(00.07.00 – 00.07.12). Zimbardo’s observation brings the concept of how having power might

actually desensitize people to what is evil, to the point to where any given persons definition of

evil may be warped to better suit their own ideologies, even if they are evil in nature. In

summary, since evil is a hard point to plot due to the nature of its subjectivity, it often will morph

different perceptions on the existence of evil in the minds of any given individual. Once evil
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becomes ingrained into your subconscious, it becomes part of your personality, and it becomes

apparent that nothing will hold back evil.

When evil becomes part of you, nothing truly holds it back, as it becomes inseparable

from your normal personality. In The Wave, as the experiment goes on, Ross becomes more and

more invested into the experiment until it begins to bother his wife, Christy. As Ross begins to

refute his wife’s claims that everyone thinks he has lost his mind, his wife began questioning his

actions, as she exclaims, “’Are you sure you know what you are doing? Because frankly, no one

else in the school thinks you do’” (Strasser 107). Ross became so disconnected with himself, as a

result of him becoming so consumed by his power trip that he fails to recognize that Christy tries

to help him. He sees her as an obstacle that he must overcome in order to complete his

experiment. In the Blue Eyed Brown Eyed experiment, when the blue eyed kids realized they

had power over the inferior brown eyed students, Elliot would respond in a condescending way,

as if to almost mock the brown eye kids. When a blue eyed student mentions that Elliot should

use a yard stick to keep the brown eyed students in line, she says, haughtily, “Oh. You think if

the brown eyed people get out of hand that would be the thing to use?” (Shuaibe 00.04.04 –

00.04.09). Judging by her manner of speech, you can tell she chose not to intervene with the

children. By doing this, it allowed the children to say what was on their mind without silencing

them, which enabled them to say some very mean and evil things that would not have been

expected from them, because it always in them and it was never released. In accordance to the

previous experiment, Zimbardo’s prison experiment showed how, with a lack of rules in place,

the guards became more and more evil without remorse. Dave Eshelmen, the guard dubbed by

the prisoners as “John Wayne”, made the guards do various strenuous, more severe acts as his

time as a guard went on. He did this in order to test his boundaries, to which he found out that no
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one would stop him from treating the prisoners like dirt. As to be expected, the prisoners resisted

the guard’s attempts to command them, but it had no effect, as the guards just bullied them more

(HeroicImaginationTVs The Stanford Prison Experiment). Without a person to ask for guidance,

the guards had only their instinct to rely on the choose how to deal with the prisoners. Their

ultimate consensus was to fight back harder and harder until the prisoners submitted to their iron

will. Despite how evil and malicious the treatment got, the guards never questioned it, and

continued to act on the evil that lied in the instinct. With these evil intentions instilled within us,

it seems confusing as to how, at a moment’s notice, anyone could just be evil, without any

second thought. This is easily understandable through the fact that evil is often acted on impulse,

because that is when it is easiest for evil to escape our minds.

When evil behavior is acted out, it seems as if it came out of nowhere, almost like a fight

or flight sense. In Ross’ experiment, when members of The Wave were challenged by outsiders,

or when they made their presence known, members often scrutinized or even fought these

dissenters for their beliefs. When Laurie, the rebel against The Wave, was met with the

opposition of her boyfriend, David, who was in The Wave, he resented her seemingly foolish

behavior, and lashed out and pushed her, where Strasser wrote, “David instantly recoiled in

shock at what he had done. Laurie lay still on the ground and he was filled with fear as he

dropped to his knees...” (Strasser 114). David had not intended to get violent with his girlfriend,

but as his pride and evil behavior took control of him, he lost sense of the right thing to do, and

he pushed his girlfriend impulsively, based solely on the evil that lurked within him. Elliot’s

experiment proved similar results. Since Elliot was in the classroom to push her temporary

doctrine of hatred on the students, just before lunchtime with the students, the students called the

brown eyed people greedy and stupid. While Elliot never said, in that particular moment, what
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brown eyed people were or were not, the students still picked on the brown eyed students,

regardless of any previous classroom hierarchy (Brown eyes and blue eyes Racism experiment

(Children Session) - Jane Elliott by Faheem Shuaibe). Elliot had systematically programmed the

children to hate one another to the point to where the children would make glancing insults at

students, without her having to say anything. Even in children, the potential to act out evil is still

prevalent, maybe even more so, given the popularity of bullying or trying to be a teacher’s pet. In

Zimbardo’s studies, the guards were shy at first when dealing with the prisoners, and would

punish the prisoners ineffectively. During the beginning of the experiment, the prisoners

challenged the authority of the guards, believing they had no power over them. The guards then

began to realize that no one was going to stop them from completely dominating the prisoners.

After this realization, guards went from doing more civil punishments, such as doing push-ups

and making the prisoners repeat their numbers, to having them sing for them and act out

awkward scenes to humiliate them. (HeroicImaginationTVs The Stanford Prison Experiment).

The guards understanding that they could not be stopped by the prisoners, they ramped up the

amount of punishment that they could dispose on the guards, almost as if they had been guards

their whole lives. Such behavior, which was not exhibited previously from them, was completely

out of impulsion of the evil they now had tapped into. With such evil being locked inside of

humanity, it would seem reasonable to attempt to quell evil that would ever wreak too much

havoc; this job is typically left up to the government. What is often forgotten, however, is that

the government, typically, is often the body that has defined evil in the first place.

In order to maintain tranquility and justice, the governing body of your land often defines

what is and is not evil. The best place to look for the definition of evil, based on the

government’s terminology, is in laws themselves. Ross’ studies showed that when rules are set in
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place and are enforced, even if they promote exclusion or evil. When Ross introduces the second

word of The Wave motto, community, Laurie refuses to stand and recite the new motto. Even

though some students rose, others, such as Laurie did not. Through Ross’ enforced repetition of

the motto, and through his utilization of conformity, all students began to rise and say the motto

(Strasser The Wave). Ross set the guideline that total involvement in the activity is not only

important, but it was required. By utilizing his authority and his popularity with the students, he

was able to become a monarch of sorts, by demanding participation as a rule. Contrary to Ross,

Elliot based her experiment more constitutionally, by creating ground rules, and then enforcing

them and watching the responses of children. When the two students of differing eye colors got

into a fight, Elliot interrogated both of the boys, and saw how different they acted, and although

she still made the brown eyed student feel bad, she adhered to the premise that they were both

students that must be treated the same (Brown eyes and blue eyes Racism experiment (Children

Session) - Jane Elliott by Faheem Shuaibe). The blue eyed student acted more smug about being

mean to the brown eyed student, because he thought he had total control over the rules because

of his eye color, to which Elliot denied him that privilege, as her definition of evil in the

experiment was more focused on the social aspects of the two separate groups, not their needing

to fight each other. Continuing on the principle of how each experiment governed its subjects,

the Stanford Prison Experiment, ironically, has a total lack of laws to govern the students. Early

in the experiment, when the guards were at a loss of ideas as to how to control the unruly

prisoners, one of the experimenters made a comment on the lack of input of rules, saying, “…so

the guard’s authority was challenged right off the bat, and the guards had to decide how they

were going to handle that, and they had to decide it without our input…this was not a Milgram

study in which we were standing over them telling them what to do”(00.05.58 – 00.06.10). The
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experimenters statement very explicitly states how uninvolved they deliberately wanted to be, in

order to demonstrate the development of evil in a situation without rules. From what they

studied, lawlessness and anarchy breeds hatred, as without a general ruleset to set limits on

power, it becomes unhinged and unstoppable. In a situation where rules and law are present,

however, they must be enforced one way or another, and the most common way to do that is to

compel subjects by force.

With rules and laws must come a means to enforce them, which typically comes by force.

In Ross’ experiment, a junior at the high school was almost peer pressured into joining The

Wave. Laurie published a letter from an anonymous student that described her situation. The

anonymous students stated how a senior tried to convince them to join. The letter continues to

say that the senior became pushy, and used scare tactics to convince them to join (Strasser 81).

This letter is a shining example of The Waves ultimate governing body, its people. When

students did not conform, they were scared and swayed into joining. In Elliot’s classroom,

however, she was the one guiding the treatment of the brown eyed students. At the beginning of

the experiment, Elliot states the outline of her experiment, and she detailed how the rules would

go when she said, “ The blue eyed people are the better people in this room…oh yes they are”

(Shuaibe 00.01.44 – 00.01.52). Elliot’s clear and defined line of what is good and bad to the

students, regardless of previous morals and rules the students held, transformed them from well

behaved children, to mean, bratty students. This result shows that when evil is enforced, it

becomes much easier to be evil. During the Stanford Prison Experiment, the guards had little

guidance over what they could and could not do to the prisoners, which led them to act as evil as

they did. When a past guard had been interviewed to analyze the events at Abu Ghraib, a similar

situation to the experiments, he had felt reminded of his experience as a guard. While he did
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refute all of the actions at Abu Ghraib, such as the piling of bodies, he did see the resemblance of

the sense of superiority when there was a lack of direction or authority. He even believes that,

given enough time, he may have reached the point that the guards at Abu Ghraib had reached.

(HeroicImaginationTV’s The Stanford Prison Experiment 00.01.33 – 00.01.43). Given this

guard’s analysis, it reinforces the idea that, similar to The Wave, without intervention, evil will

manifest itself unless a governing body is there to stop it. The main contributor to the

development of evil, as seen from the experiment’s situations, is amount of lawlessness in a

group or society.

Lawlessness and a lack of authority is an immense contributor to the creation of evil. The

Wave’s experiment made Ross to be more of a fascist leader. When Ross introduced the symbol

and salute, everyone caught on quickly. Those who did not catch on tried the salute again and

again until it was done right. Ross, who acted by force, enforced the salute and the use of the

symbol for as long as the experiment persisted (Strasser 43). Ross’ controlling behavior

coincides with his lack of direct lawlessness. He creates rules for his students to obey, and, as a

result, the students began to rule themselves. A result of this, however, was that he lost control of

what he wanted them to do. Elliot treated her students similar to Ross’, except much more fairly

and with more control, sort of like a constitutional monarchy of sorts. When Elliot introduces the

experiment, she has the mindset to have control over everything the children do, and she just

wants to see how they would change given a small amount of power over other students. She

determines that blue eyed students would be better one day, and brown eyed students would be

better the next (Brown eyes and blue eyes Racism experiment (Children Session) - Jane Elliott

by Faheem Shuaibe). This shows Elliot’s total control over the rules she has in place, and,

because she does not lose focus of her goals of the experiment, unlike Ross, she adheres to her
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schedule, and teaches the children a lesson about respect. Unlike the previous two experiments,

Stanford had a complete lack of rules or intervention from authority, leading to an anarchist form

of ruling. In HeroicImaginationTV’s video The Stanford Prison Experiment, when Zimbardo

reflected on the guard’s surge of power, he states, “The guards now began to escalate their use of

power, some of them had prisoners clean out toilet bowls with their bare hands. They now taunt,

humiliate, degrade the prisoners in front of each other and they exert arbitrary control over the

prisoners (00.09.03 – 00.09.17). Zimbardo’s analysis shows how, without any sort of interloping

on his part, the guards came up with their own rules, and expanded their power infinitely.

Without someone or some ruling document or ruleset to govern us, we resort to a sort of primal

instinct guiding how we act, and, at its core, that primal sense is evil. With lawlessness

controlling the outbreak of evil within humanity, people seek guidance from higher power, so

that they may be protected.

Through governmental bounds to hinder evil, evils manifestation in humanity and

people’s natural desire to be in power, evil has society by the ear, directing them to fulfill their

evil desires; evil has, and always will be, intertwined with human nature. The government’s rules

and regulations on the amount of evil an individual can express is vital to the comprehension of

their own freedoms. If the government infringes on the rights of humanity and claims to do it in

the opposition of evil, it ought to be humanity’s responsibility to rebel against the infringing,

tyrannical rulers. In addition, evil has the tendency to be in everyone’s subconscious, whether it

is through their subconscious bias or through blatant malice. It is important to recognize these

inner evils, and work every day to quell their control over society. Yet more concealed than that

is the natural born evils within us. All around the world are lures that tempt us to give in to evil

desires, in attempts to gain power. By identifying those who are spellbound by power, it becomes
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easier to seek those who may bring ruin to society by emboldening evil. Through these

realizations, society may enhance its understanding of evil in order to make a just and lawful

populace.
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“Works Cited”

Faheem Shuaibe. Brown eyes and blue eyes Racism experiment (Children Session) - Jane Elliott.

YouTube. 24 July 2016, /www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHxFuO2Nk-0&t=164s.

HeroicImaginationTV. The Stanford Prison Experiment. YouTube, 20 Aug. 2011,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZwfNs1pqG0&t=558s.

Strasser, Todd. The Wave. Dell Publishing. 1981.