Bad Apples, Bad Barrels and Bad Barrel-Makers
Why Evil Exists
“The line between good and evil lies at the center of every human heart. It is not an abstraction out there. It’s a decision you have to make every day inside.” — Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian poet imprisoned under Stalin
“You can’t be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel.” — Phil Zimbardo, social psychologist
After his iconic, and controversial, Stanford Prison Experiment, Phil Zimbardo spent a career trying to understand the nature of evil, and particularly the influences on individuals to perform evil acts. He resisted the individualistic notion that evil was perpetrated solely by inherently bad people and strove to answer the age-old question of why “good people” do “bad things.” He concluded with a three-part schema of influences that spanned from the micro to the macro — from the individual to the larger institutions in society. He referred to these causes of evil as “bad apples, bad barrels and bad barrel-makers.”
Bad Apples
This is the straight-forward, linear cause-and-effect logic we’re used to. A bad person does bad things. And there’s certainly some truth to it. One does not have to ponder long before examples aplenty come to mind to prove its efficacy. Adolf Hitler. Charles Manson. Ted Bundy. But rarely are people — bad…
