How humans behave under authority

Have you ever read Night by Elie Wiesel? I read it when I was in 11th grade and it was for a class. I read it overnight and this was the only book that has ever made me weep. Another book on the same lines was "The diary of Anne Frank". Both Anne Frank as well as Elie Wiesel were victims of the Holocaust. The only difference was that Anne Frank didn't survive and Elie was a survivor and lived to tell his tale of the horrors of Holocaust.

[Hitler's racial policies had culminated in the killing of approximately 11 million people, including the genocide of some six million Jews, in what is now known as the Holocaust. In total, the war in Europe cost approximately 45 million people their lives.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust]

Reading both these books is a heart wrenching experience and it's very hard to believe that things like this could ever happen.

What is surprising is that how can so many people be so blinded by Hitler? Were all Nazis ruthless? How could they perform such an act is what surprises me. Did all of them think that what they were doing was right? Were they brainwashed?

The Milgram experiment makes interesting observations on how humans act under the influence of authority. The Milgram experiment was a seminal series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

In this experiment the main participants were 3 people - An experimenter and two subjects. The experimenter who acts as an authority figure orders the subject A to give what the subject A believes are painful electric shocks to another subject B, who is actually an actor (A does not know that B is acting). It was found that many participants continued to "give" shocks despite pleas for mercy from the actor, as long as the experimenter kept on ordering them to do so.

Milgram concluded that "Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment]

Hence, in this power hungry world authority is the modern evil of mankind. Even Ayn Rand in her book "The Fountainhead" shuns people who seek power.

I love the book "The Fountainhead". My brother recommended it to me and I couldn't stop reading it once I started it. BTW my alias "Miss Francon" is inspired by the character Dominique Francon in "The Fountainhead".

Here are some of my favorite quotes from Ayn Rand:

"Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lot of an empty mind."

"The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently; they are most helplessly in its power."