Powerful situations...

We looked at a Memo in class. It was written during the Nazi regime and it talked about murder, which took us about 15 to 20 minutes to find out, because of the abstract and secretive language that was used.

We were debating about the reason for the choice of language and one obvious answer was that the writer knew that he or she was involved in murderous, unethical business but in depth did not want be a part of it. Why did the person not refuse to do what he or she was told to do since it was not right which every person with a healthy mind must have known?

I just learned in Psychology 201 about the power of certain situations and the conditions that promote obedience. Obedience is often a good thing. Imagine running a hospital without employees obeying to their superiors. It would be impossible to work effectively. Unfortunately, obedience also has a very dark side demonstrated most extremely during the Nazi regime.

A mixture of desperate people looking for change, a bad economic situation, and a vulnerable governmental system made it possible for a sick person to put a whole nation into a situation where disobedience for the majority of the people was not an option.

Social psychologists indentified some of the social pressures that underlie a person's willingness to follow a malevolent order. Some of the pressures include the social norm of obedience to authority figures, the difficulty of saying no to an authority who is immediately present, and the absence of a model demonstrating that disobedience is legitimate.

All of these examples of social pressures are found to be a factor of obedience even when there was no punishment for disobeying.

So, going back to the Memo I believe that the person who wrote the Memo and many others found themselves in a very stressful situation where the fear of deadly punishment and the lack of a disobeying model besides other social pressures was too overwhelming for many to even think about refusing.

I think and hope that we all learned from this horrific example.
My personal goal is to never stop thinking critically about whatever is said by whomever. No matter if it is a parent, a professor, your boss, the president or the pope, we should always stay alert and think about our own definitions of right and wrong.