Don’t Fear the Truth

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The administrator would continue to tell the person to increase the voltage, until the test subject was dishing out the maximum voltage - 450 volts.

Guess what percentage of people continued to push shock the other person, all the way up to 450 volts?

Sixty-five percent. And no person refused to administer the shocks until they hit the 300 volt mark. (Which is interesting since most people, I think, would assume that the power would be based on household power, where 220 volts can kill people…)

The experiment of course, provides evidence that a lot of Nazi’s were not evil - they were just following orders, and even decent people do bad things when told to do so, as this experiment shows.

I have an issue with this. When I read about this experiment, the author stated that it showed humanity was doomed. He assumed this study gave an example of human nature, when to me, this shows how strong societies’ rules are. In another experiment in the 70’s, a teacher told his students to ask someone on a subway for their seat. The test subjects found it almost impossible to do so.

In America, we are taught to respect authority, even more so in 1961, I would think, than today. What if this experiment were performed in a society that taught children that questioning was more important than discipline or being well behaved?

What if our society thought the idea of following one leader was silly? Or if we were taught that to question teachers, parents… the Government was healthy? Amazingly, many people in the US don’t question the government, and we are all taught to do what our teachers tell us in school, mind our parents, etc. In 1961 the disciplinarian mentality was, from what I have heard over the years from people in my parent’s generation, even stronger in our society. My grandfather would tell my father when he was young to ‘respect his elders’ while today kids are taught ‘respect has to be earned’. My grandfather would also tell my father to cut a switch off of the cherry tree (no joke) in the back yard to whip him with when he misbehaved. My father rarely even spanked me as a child. This has to affect our society, wouldn’t you agree?

Also, what about people being involved in an experiment in *Yale* University? If someone came to my home and performed this experiment, I would be much less likely to administer the shocks than I would being in Yale University. People would obviously be more inclined to follow crazy instructions when they thought the people creating the experiment were amongst the most intelligent people in the country. Yet if this experiment were given by just some random person, and you had no idea what his credentials were, you would be much more likely to disagree, and stop the experiment.

I would bet that if this experiment were just given on the street to random people today, the results would be much different. And I think that if it were given in a completely different society, one that promoted the questioning of authority, the results would be drastically different.

Yet when experiments like this are done, the results are given to us as evidence on what humans do, not what society has trained us to do.

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Putting this information into text books is likely to offend some idiot that thinks we should only be patriotic cheerleaders, even if it means omitting important information. As you can see the Wikipedia entry, unlike high school textbooks, contains this information.

As long as Wiki articles cite sources, why would schools its use?

What is really interesting is that Wikipedia, to me, shows how companies and the government fight for information, for people’s minds. How? Try Wikiscanner.virgil.gr. This is a site that scans Wikipedia entries, logs their IP addresses, and then finds out where those edits came from. After setting up this site, people found that corporations and governments were editing Wiki entries to hide information, or change how things were worded to make them less damaging. Some examples:

• Diebold, the company that makes electronic voting machines, removed all criticism and controversy about their company.
• “Somebody from the Turkish Treasury removed the part on the Armenian genocide.”
• Someone at the NRA added that Iraq was involved in 9/11 to a 9/11 entry.
• “Dow purges an entire section labeled ‘Environmental and human rights controversies’ that included information about the Bhopal disaster, Agent Orange, and silicone breast implants.”
• Someone at Fox News edited Al Franken’s entry, with respect to his problems with Fox News
• Someone in the Republican party changed the word ‘occupying” to “liberating” in an entry about Iraq. “Over two years after the invasion of Iraq, someone from the Republican party edited the entry on the Baath Party from “In June 2003, the US-led 2003 occupation of Iraq occupying forces in Iraq banned the Ba’th party” to “In June 2003, the US-led 2003 occupation of Iraq liberating forces in Iraq banned the Ba’th party.”"

In “Lies My Teacher Told Me” the author talks about political pressure can change what appears in high school text books. Would Texas allow text books that openly criticized religion, or presented studies that promoted gun control? Would any of the heavily Republican states allow a negative (honest?) presentation of the US “occupation” of Iraq? I doubt it.

But Republicans are not only to blame, and not just politicians either. America is very patriotic, almost Nationalist, and unfortunately a lot of people would take issue with children learning the truth. Like say… how Christopher Columbus was so brutal to American Indians, that women often killed their newborn babies, so that they would not grow up under Columbus’ rule. If an American Indian failed in his gold quota, he cut off fingers or hands.

I would say that Wikipedia is a better tool for children to use. Do any history books talk about the US overthrow of Guatemala in 1954? I posted about this event here, and had thousands of visitors read it. (It was voted up to the front page of Reddit.com) If it was common knowledge that the US had overthrown a *democratically* elected leader of a country, and installed a brutal dictator, why did so many people read my article?

They did because it is NOT common knowledge, except to people who seek out this type of knowledge, or happen to take a college history course that discusses it. (Is there a connection that *government run schools* seem to censor information, but private universities are more open? Possibly because politicians cannot, or at least have a harder time, swaying what books and information a University teaches?) Why is this not taught in high schools? Would our country be so full of blind patriots Nationalists if more of us were taught how the US government REALLY treats poor countries?

If you look at the Wikiscanner page tracing edits on the page about the History of Guatemala you can see where people disagree and change information about Operation PBSUCCESS, the CIA operation that overthrew the Guatemalan government.

You can see people ‘arguing’ over the causes of the coup. Was the United Fruit company’s political pressure to blame, or McCarthyism and the fear of Communism (Arbenz, the president that was overthrown, had allowed all political parties into the country, including the Communist party).

As the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me states: “History is not facts, history is furious debate.”

And most importantly, here on wikipedia, people are debating what forces were mostly to blame for the US overthrowing a democratic government and installing a brutal dictator. In high school text books, the fact that the US did such a thing is not even mentioned. If they DID, possibly more people would have questioned attacking Iraq, and the world would be a much different place. Possibly a nicer place…

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