"We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but 400 years later, an idea can still change the world."
-V for Vendetta
At the end of the 1960's, elementary school teacher Jane Elliott told her classroom that people with blue eyes were better than people with brown eyes. She established the implications of this truth, reinforced her parameters, and eventually, the children internalized the rules, and acted according to what they believed. But what they believed was just one thing, spoken from one authority figure. Elliott could have said that brown-eyed people were superior, and the same thing would have happened. Just watch the first few minutes of this video and see how easily people can conform to a belief system on someone else's terms.
Around the same time this was going on, another idea was being exploited; this time, in a high school. Watch from 13:00 to 16:10 in this next video. Ron Jones got his entire classroom to act in ways similar to the Hitler Youth movements. With one person perpetuating propaganda and ideas into the malleable minds of others, a similar turn of events happened.
Although what worries me the most is that watching this, I know exactly where these students are coming from. I know the power of authority figures, obedience, reinforcement, punishments, and the like. I know that people are susceptible to confess to a crime they did not commit because of the pressures of social influence. There's no profile for what kinds of people fit into these categories, because it can happen to any of us under the right circumstances. And the fact that people can be persuaded by socialization to believe something that they never thought they would, scares me.
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