Davis Aurini - We Don't Need No More Heroes
Aired: 2020-11-07
Duration: 08:48


=== Stanford Prison Experiment Misunderstood (03:35) ===

[00:00:02]  The Stanford prison experiment by Dr. Zimbardo has gone down in the annals of psychology as a gross violation of medical ethics, which exposes the evil inside the human soul.
[00:00:18]  But it's his latest project, the Heroic Imagination Project, which is truly terrible for humanity.
[00:00:27]  Because I'll tell you, we don't need no more heroes.
[00:00:49]  The Stanford Prison Experiment.
[00:00:52]  Nobody seems to understand what this thing was.
[00:00:55]  Because, with all due respect to Dr. Zimbardo, the experimental method was way off.
[00:01:04]  The idea was to see how people behave in a militarized prison type of experience.
[00:01:14]  And one week into it, his wife saw what was happening and said, you need to stop this experiment right now.
[00:01:21]  You are brutalizing people.
[00:01:23]  Because it turned into the most abusive, egregious, cartoonish prison experience you can imagine.
[00:01:33]  And quite frankly, this is no surprise.
[00:01:36]  You see, when they put the ad out to get people into this experiment, they advertised it as a study of prison psychology.
[00:01:47]  So immediately you are going to be selecting for a certain type of individual.
[00:01:56]  Second, Dr. Zimbardo put himself as the chief of this prison.
[00:02:06]  So he was studying it, but also involved in it.
[00:02:11]  And finally, you must come to the conclusion that this was not a study in the behavior of prison guards and prisoners any more than a Dungeon and Dragons game is a study in medieval culture.
[00:02:28]  It was a study in how college students think prisons behave.
[00:02:38]  Now these go along with the Milgram obedience experiments.
[00:02:43]  If a man in a lab coat tells you to push a button while somebody on the other side of the screen is screaming in pain, will you push the button?
[00:02:52]  Well, turns out the only people that won't push the button are those that are very high in testosterone and high in disagreeableness.
[00:03:00]  So almost entirely men.
[00:03:03]  Women will cry and beg not to push the button, but it's mostly men, with a few exceptional women, that won't push the button.
[00:03:11]  Very, very few people are willing to stand up to authority.
[00:03:19]  And so modern psychology looks back at the Nazis, the mythology of the red skull, and say, how do we stop this from happening again?

=== Empowering the People, Not Heroes (05:25) ===

[00:03:33]  And they've come to exactly the wrong conclusion.
[00:03:39]  You see, the conclusion they've come to is that we need more whistleblowers.
[00:03:47]  We need to empower the people.
[00:03:53]  And to a certain extent, they're not wrong on this.
[00:03:59]  One of the great advancements in industrial security, in the safety of the job site, is those dumb capitalists finally getting it through their head that a guy getting injured on the job is way more expensive than a six-hour delay because somebody saw something that was unsafe.
[00:04:29]  And so on construction sites, anybody can call out a dangerous situation.
[00:04:36]  And even if you get 99 false positives, that one true positive that you would have missed saves you millions of dollars.
[00:04:48]  So in a certain sense, it's true.
[00:04:55]  We need whistleblowers.
[00:04:57]  Having whistleblower protection is good.
[00:05:00]  All of that.
[00:05:02]  Having structures in place that recognize that authority does need to be questioned.
[00:05:09]  And if it's a valid questioning of authority, that person should not be persecuted.
[00:05:14]  That is good.
[00:05:18]  But the problem with things like the heroic imagination project.
[00:05:25]  The problem with the idea that anybody can be a leader.
[00:05:34]  The problem with this is it waters down what heroism and leadership actually are.
[00:05:44]  And if you go look at the sort of kids hanging out at the Starbucks, when you tell everybody that they're a special little snowflake and they shouldn't follow orders and they should think for themselves, they wind up thinking exactly how the corporations tell them to think.
[00:06:13]  Instead of following the heroes, they follow the shysters.
[00:06:22]  Let's go back to these obedience experiments for a second.
[00:06:27]  That the only people that will truly rebel in the obedience experiment tend to be men with the occasional woman.
[00:06:44]  And if you're concluding from this that women just lack any sense of morality, you're clearly not understanding what's going on here.
[00:06:51]  You're not understanding the differences between the sexes, that there isn't some ideal form of human.
[00:07:01]  There's a spectrum.
[00:07:06]  And we only need heroes once in a blue moon.
[00:07:17]  The problem is not that women, or most men, refuse to call out the corruption.
[00:07:24]  That is not the problem.
[00:07:26]  That is normal humanity.
[00:07:29]  It's good that we only have a small number of people that do this.
[00:07:35]  Otherwise nothing would get done.
[00:07:40]  The problem is when you take people that aren't temperamentally suited for heroism And you let the marketing shister manipulator scumbags shove a funnel full of sunshine up their ass and tell them that they're a hero.
[00:08:05]  Because now you got a whole society of special snowflakes complaining and whining and ratting one another out, and everything falls apart.
[00:08:25]  No, we don't need more heroes.
[00:08:29]  We've got more than enough already.
[00:08:31]  We're full up on crazy in this society.
[00:08:35]  What we need is more people who know how to do their damn job.
[00:08:43]  Carpe futurum, tene tratitum.
[00:08:47]  Greeni Out.