EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS

What makes an ordinary person do extraordinary things; in particular, extraordinarily bad things?

That question was answered in part by a French television programme shown last night on France 2. The 80 participants in "The Game of Death" had signed contracts to be in what they thought was a pilot for a new reality show. The contracts stipulated that they should administer electric shocks to a hidden contestant, whenever the latter failed to answer a question correctly. Egged on by a glamorous presenter, and an enthusiastic audience, they did just that, despite the voltages getting bigger and bigger, and the hidden contestant screaming and begging them to stop. Fully 80% of the participants hit the button for the maximum shock of 460 volts, a potentially lethal amount.

The show was a sham. There was no electricity, and the hidden contestant was an actor. What the documentary producers wanted to show was how ordinary people could do awful things, if put in a position where they have to defer to authority. In other situations, that authority could be a military person; in this case, it was the combination of national TV and a persuasive hostess. The result is disturbing.

The first foreign country I ever visited was Germany, as a teenager on a language exchange. As a Brit, I had grown up to believe that Germans were bad, a view reinforced by the fact that my mother's house had been bombed in the Coventry blitz while she was a girl. Yet I liked Germany and I liked the Germans I met. A couple of men in the factory where I later worked had been on the Eastern Front, and I tried to work out how these mild-mannered people could have got caught up in something so awful as Hitler's Third Reich. Why didn't more people disobey or rebel?

The answer, confirmed it seems by the game show experiment, is that we are programmed to obey. If the message is attractive enough and the figure of authority is persuasive enough, then it takes a very large amount of willpower not to be bowled along by it. Before you know what you are doing, you have imperceptibly shifted from being an ordinary person, living in harmony with your Jewish neighbours, to denouncing them and helping send them off to concentration camps. You wouldn't do that of your own accord; but if the system to do it is put in place, then you go along with it.

This has lessons in my view for today. In particular, one should beware of people in public life, who peddle simple messages. The world is a complicated place; and if there were an easy solution to a problem, then someone would have found it by now. Iraq is perhaps the best modern example of a simple message that went wrong. But there will be others.

Walter Blotscher