This week I finished:

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip Zimbardo: Many of us know something of the Stanford Prison Experiment. It was a psychology experiment in 1971 where a Stanford psychologist led a team that turned the basement of a building into a temporary prison-like space. They recruited two dozen local people whom they randomly assigned to play guards and prisoners for twelve days. All were tested psychologically and found healthy and in normal ranges on all psychological traits they tested.

They had to stop the experiment on the sixth day. The participants lost themselves in the roles. The guards became authoritarian and sadistic. The prisoners became learned-helpless and compliant. Some had to leave even earlier for their traumatic reactions. The psychologist in charge had played the warden and also got lost in the role.

That psychologist was surprised at how ordinary people could become in his word evil so fast, so easy. He spent much of his career finding out what happened and working with peers who studied similar patterns, especially those trying to understand the pattern in the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda, massacres in Vietnam, sexual abuse of parishioners by Catholic priests, Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple cult who drank the Kool-Aid in mass suicide and murder including of their own children, torture and abuse in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Shortly before writing this book, he was an expert witness in an Abu Ghraib case.

Two main points:

First, it’s tempting on seeing people doing things that seem morally wrong or evil, “I would never do such things,” but neither would they. The evidence of many experiments and histories conclusively shows how likely you would if you were in their situations. It’s humbling and scary, but also motivating if we want to prevent future Holocausts, genocides, and so on. He barely mentioned the environment, but nearly everything in the book applies.

Next is I think his main message: as easily as any of us could become Adolph Eichmann or a Rwandan Hutu—examples of the banality of evil—we could embody the banality of heroism and become everyday heroes.

I can’t overstate how valuable I found this book in understanding how our culture has formed. It informed my upcoming book more than I expected. Coincidentally, I found it because Zimbardo worked with Edith Eger, author of The Choice.

I recommend this book.

A Brighter Summer Day, directed by Edward Yang: An ex-girlfriend who loved movies used to get annoyed at me because nearly any drama we watched, I would say it didn’t match Yi Yi, a later movie by Edward Yang. It simply

Occasionally when reading about Yi Yi, I’d see mention of Yang’s earlier work A Brighter Summer Day, nearly always saying it outshone YI Yi. It’s four hours long, so I took a while to start watching it, then a while to finish it.

It does something different than any other movie I can think of. On the one hand, it’s not telling a specific narrative. It’s not documenting either. It’s different than entertainment, documentary, or storytelling. How do I describe it? It’s vaguely like Godfather or Goodfellas, or like a coming-of-age movie, but not. It reminds me of The Wrestler in some ways, in how it seems like we’re in the movie ourselves, not watching a story.

I don’t know how to describe it. After watching it and learning more about the Kuomintang arriving in Taiwan, therefore some backstory, more made sense, but I can tell I’ll watch this movie several times.

I don’t know how many viewings it will take to start piecing together enough threads to give it justice in describing it.

Overall, I’m amazed at how Wang could envision something so far beyond what movies had been. I wonder how watching 400 Blows must have felt after all those big studio films. Even The Grand Illusion, or other movies that mean the most to me, didn’t advance the art like this one.

Anyway, I’ll stop writing how I don’t know how to write about it. I recommend this movie.

Retry later

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