Advanced Essay #4 Kobe Nabried

The morals of the human heart have been questioned time and time again. Travesties like violence and war are two of prominent contributors to the stress that can be exerted onto the human heart, mind and soul.

The Vietnam war was a conflict that was met with great protest from US citizens. Protesters came from multiple backgrounds. The early on protesters consisted of peace activist and leftist intellectual, but the protest picked reached a prominent level when the US began bombing Northern Vietnam in earnest. This sparked national protests marches and speeches against the war.

People in the US were openly opposing the war because it was an unjustifiable act of violence. The US had been drafting soldiers as young as eighteen to fight in a war that many wanted no role in. Hundreds of potential soldiers fled to Canada as a method of avoid conscription. The soldiers who hadn’t fled to another country weren’t too keen on engaging in conflicts with the Vietnamese people when they were stationed in the country. Vietnam War veteran John Grant had told spoke of how a platoon of soldiers had reached an agreement with local villagers that if neither side fired on each other that they would remain peace and never engage. Even the fighters on the ground in the war were against fighting in the war.

The soldiers in that platoon had a great level of awareness and sense of right from wrong. Though they were put into a position to act violently and were and were often given orders to do so, they took of the responsibility of decision making themselves. Time and time again soldiers who are put in the same exact position relinquish their decision making abilities to a higher power of a system.

Psychology professor Philip Zimbardo conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment. In this experiment the psychological affects of being a prisoner and prison guard were observed through a set of volunteers. Through this experiment it was shown that once the volunteers were placed into their roles as prisoners and prison guards, the prison guards began to carry out horrendous acts of violence. ZImbardo gave a TED Talk a few decades after this experiment to explain some of his findings. One of the most prominent beliefs that he shared in this talk was that either the person, or the situational forces at play in the scenario were responsible for the actions of the guards. The situational forces that are in the scenario, or the system, cannot possibly be to blame for the actions of those prison guards. This is simply for the fact that the volunteers were regular people before they went through the process that Zimbardo called, “Becoming an anonymous uniform.” He believed that when a person put on a mask or a uniform that they essentially took a new identity, or role in the world.

Free choice has occasionally been confused as civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is defined as the refusal to comply with certain laws or to pay taxes and fines, as a peaceful form of political protest. One of the more noteworthy occurrences in the past few years was Edward Snowden. Edward Snowden is an American computer professional and former Central Intelligence Agency employee. He came under fire from the nation for leaking information about how the United States had been secretly keeping track of US phone records. Snowden, as opposed to leaking this information as a form of protest, did it because he felt it was to the benefit of public interest.

It is arguable that people who assume positions of authority spontaneously act aggressively, such as the volunteers in the Stanford Prison Experiment, because in the sudden shift of status. Going from an average civilian to a guard of a prison may lead someone to believe that they are open to more as someone with a more authoritative and aggressive title. However, Snowden, who had been an employee of the CIA since 2006 before leaking phone record information to the public, was not subject to that shift before acting. It came as a realization to the justifiability of what the NSA was doing at the time.

The differences between the volunteers of the Prison Experiment and Snowden vary, but one substantial one is that the former had no basis to act the way they did except for their job title, while Snowden made a choice based on what he had been observing for some amount of time. In the former, there's an automatic evil that exists with nothing but being entered into the system, but in the latter, Snowden found the evil in the system after years. Both actions are the result of systemic evil, but that kind of evil exists in different ways, resulting in different actions.