The Origins of Evil

When the fire threatens to raze us, there's just one tune pervading our mind, body, and soul: that morality isn't a choice as much as a privilege

- Tanul Thakur

ON June 18, 1961, a half-page ad appeared in a daily newspaper in New Haven, Connecticut. "We will pay you $4.00 for an hour of your time," read its headline. Conducted at Yale University, the "scientific study of memory and learning" required 500 men. The ad's bottom section contained a disclosure form, comprising an applicant's personal and professional details, addressed to professor Stanley Milgram. Hinged on a deceit-the study tested not "memory and learning" but obedience to authority-it sought to unravel the genocide's psychology: "Could it be that [Adolf] Eichmann and his million accomplices were just following orders?" wondered Milgram. "Could we call them all accomplices?" 

Inspired by the trial of Holocaust perpetrator Eichmann-who, according to historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, didn't resemble a vicious anti-Semite as much as a numb bureaucrat, someone embodying the "banality of evil"-Milgram began his experiment. It involved three participants: an Experimenter, a Teacher, and a Learner. The Experimenter controlled and administered the test. The Teacher, who had responded to the ad, delivered electric shocks to the Learner when he gave wrong answers to the word-pair questions. The Learner, however, an actor and a confederate sitting across a thin wall, received no shocks-his crying and pleading came from pre-recorded audio-a fact not known to the Teacher (the Subject). Every wrong answer demanded an incremental shock of 15 volts, ending in 450 volts, a lethal dose. As the jolts intensified, the Learner begged and sobbed and screamed. At 300 volts, he kicked the wall and stayed silent-forever.