THE LUCIFER EFFECT AND YOU

                               THE LUCIFER EFFECT AND YOU.
                                 CHIBU NDUBUISI. 20/03/2017

Peace be to you.

Lucifer Effect is a concept developed by renowned psychologist Philip Zimbardo to help us understand the point when normal persons crosses the boundry between good and evil to engage in evil actions. He used the Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) a mock prison session used to illustrate prisoners and guards who were normal people before their enlistment but afterwards  shows how their individuality so easily melts away as social environment begins to define the individual.

The mere act of assigning labels to people calling some Aryian and Jews is sufficient to elicit pathological behaviour. His Stanford Prison Experiment was later justified by the inhuman actions meted out to prisoners at Abu Gharaib prison facility in Iraq by American military personnel in charge of the facility.

He argues that a set of dynamic psychological processes can induce good people to do evil.
1. Obedience to authority.
2. Self justification and rationalisation.
3. Passitivity in the face of threat.
4. De individuation.

When we see some people as enemies deserving of torment, torture and annihilation,  the "lucifer effect" comes to play. In his article "Evil" (1991), Lance Morrow argues that getting people think in categories is one of the techniques of evil. The impact of this effect works when their is a veil of anonymity of the perpetrators, inadequate vigilance,  connivance and passitivity  on the part of leaders.

We in Nigeria,  have had our own share of the "lucifer effect" in all facets of our national life. The mantra of "UNKNOWN SOILDERS" is a case in point were military men are used indiscriminately to oppress, intimidate and kill people without qualms. We know too well about how enemies are created, Zimbardo argues that the powerful don't usually do the dirtiest work themselves they leave it to the underlings. Systems create hierarchies of dominance with influence and communications going down and rarely going up the line. Some of those military men enlisted in the UNKNOWN SOILDERS operations might be good men but the environment they were at that particular point vapourised their individuality because  In the military and para military setting we know what disobedience to orders can do, it is better imagined than experienced. During the era of the late dictator Sani Abacha, we saw how his CSO Hamza Mustapha terrorised his principals opponents through outright blackmail,assasination or fabrications of stories of attempt to overthrow Abacha's government. The Oputa panel of reconciliation set up by the government of Obasanjo helped us to see how Sergeant Rogers helped carry out instructions of terror on people because of his obedience to higher authorities. Sergeant Rogers later in life regretted all his actions and became a 'born again' a christian term used on people who have repented  of their sins and are ready to follow Christ's path. Now the question is, were was the moral mind of Rogers? Jonathan Haidt argues that our moral disposition binds and blinds us. He outlines the foundations of the moral mind:
1. Care/ Harm
2. Fairness/Cheating
3. Liberty/Opression
4. Loyalty/ Betrayal
5. Authority/ Subversion
6. Sanctity/ Degradation.
They can
1. Unite us in to a team
2. Divides us against other teams
3. Blinds us to the truth.

Albert Bandura explains that "our ability to selectively engage or disengage on moral standards helps  explain how people can be babarically cruel in one moment and compassionate in the next". Some might be following the advise of John Kennedy that ' Here on earth,God's work  must surely be our own" to unleash terror on people. The Boko Haram, the ISIS and all terror groups who maim people without batting an eyelid is a case in point of the moral foundations they uphold.

Dehumanization is central to this 'lucifer effect'. Evil works by dehumanizing the others. Identifying others as evil justifies all further evil against them. The police men that murdered six traders at Abuja(APO SIX) is a case in point. The brutalization of a cripple in onitsha by some military men for wearing their camouflage is another case in point.Dehumanization as defined by Zimbardo is like a cortical cataracts that clouds one's thinking and fosters the perception that other people are less than human. Dehumanization is one of the central processes in the transformation of ordinary normal people in to different or even wanton perpetrators of evil.

Lance Morrow notes that ' evil is easier than good, creativity is harder than destructiveness, evil is anyone outside the tribe'. Anyone outside the tribe of our race, ethnic stock, religion might be evil and good for annihilation. We hide behind egocentric biases and generate the illusion that we are more special people than others. Evil is then 'essentialised'.

Zimbardo notes that when a power elite wants to destroy an enemy nation, it turns to propaganda experts to fashion a programme of hate. A hostile imagination is created turning others in to 'The Enemies', " The  Danger of The Single Story'  ensues and people are labeld as 'cockroaches'  as in the case of the Tutsis in Rwanda and exterminated without qualms.

When the 'lucifer effect' comes knocking, we must heed to the advice  from Franklin Roosevelt " that men are not prisoners of fate but prisoners of their own minds".

Peace be with you.