The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo is two things in one book and has been in progress for me for 3 years now. Firstly it is a first hand and incredibly detailed examination of the Stanford Prison Experiment as conducted by the authour in 1971. And then it's a follow up on the lessons learned and the present abuses of other systems that we cannot understand easily - like Abu Ghraib.It is a brilliant book and I would recommend anyone to read this, but be warned it is not easy. Apart from the 500 page length and the tiny type filled with big words and not many pictures, it's personally confronting. Not shocking or disturbing even though it is both of those things. It confronts the ordinary origins of "evil" - this is that road to hell paved with good intentions.
I'd like to say I'd be a hero as defined in this book, my ego certainly wants that - but it's confronting because I don't know that to be as true as I once thought. It's easy to conceive what would make me cross moral lines, but impossible to know what won't.
Hard work but ultimately worth it. With two weeks to go to the end of my year of books I'm glad this one is done and dusted.
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