holocaust and lunatic fringe

Behrens and Rosen asked, “What sort of people were responsible for the Holocaust, and for the long list of other atrocities that seem to blight the human record in every generation? Is it a lunatic fringe, a few sick but powerful people who are responsible for atrocities?” and the responded with “If so, then we decent folk needn’t ever look inside ourselves to understand evil since ever lurks out there.” Behrens and Rosen use this to construe that evil does not lurk only in lunatics but the ordinary person as well. Everyone is capable any act possible, the circumstances and the environment play an important role on what a person is capable of doing.

Doris Lessing uses this to state that individuals will conform to the majority because of society’s pressures and lose individualism. Lessing uses the fact that because of western societies are well educated in different ways, free to make choices that this makes the individual, but people never think to look at their lives and see that they are no longer and individual because they are conforming to the pressures of society. She uses the fact that people often socialize with “like-minded” people often forces to make decisions that our peers make. She declares that, “We find our thinking changing because we belong to a group. It is the hardest thing in the world to maintain an individual dissident opinion, as a member of a group.” She goes on to review several experiments that involved conforming to groups.

Stanley Milgram’s experiment shows that people many times conform to do what an authority figure says or orders. Despite moral apprehensions, a person might continue to do what they know is wrong. Milgram used ordinary people of all different types of life in his experiment and showed that many of them will continue until they are told to stop. It is not a “lunatic fringe” that will go against what is morally right, but it is a majority that will. Milgram says that it is easier going against one’s own principles then disobeying an authoritative figure.

Milgram’s results and Behrens and Rosen’s argument, as well as Lessings all demonstrate each other. Milgram shows that it easy for people to go with authority, Behrens and Rosen state that it is not a lunatic fringe but instead ordinary people, and Lessing saying that people will conform to groups.