Evil: C'est la vie?

French documentary The Game of Death raises questions about the darker side of human nature.

A French documentary in the guise of a game show has attracted widespread international attention recently, stirring debate about the apparent willingness of ordinary people to obey authority figures – even to the extent of committing great evil.

The Game of Death (Le jeu de la mort), broadcast March 17 by French public TV channel France 2, recalls the famous 1960s Milgram obedience-to-authority experiments. Both recruit naïve volunteer subjects who agree to apply increasingly strong electric shocks to a wired, strapped-down victim. As the voltage is increased, the victim shrieks as if in pain – though, unbeknownst to the subjects, the victim is in fact an actor.

Egged on by a pretty hostess and an animated audience, 64 of the 80 game-show volunteers consented to upping the voltage to what they ultimately understood to be lethal levels. The entire show was a hoax, but it appeared to be ultra authentic. The actor was capable of presenting a highly convincing evocation of the sweating, writhing, and screaming that accompanies severe pain caused by jolts of electricity. Though many of the volunteers expressed serious misgivings, they continued anyway.

Many commentators have since expressed shock and outrage at how few participants refused to harm a fellow human being. There is indeed something compelling about demonstrating how readily ordinary people can be persuaded to do dreadful things. Many have suspected this for a long time, and this “game show” seems to have provided further evidence.

Is there something evil at the heart of human nature itself? Sigmund Freud was only one of many to theorize on the universality of what he called the “death drive,” – our supposed difficult-to-resist inclination towards destruction, aggression, and death.

We have also known for some time that the separation of moral ends from technical ends that is characteristic of modern societies encourages a cold, indifferent, and rationalistic approach to human relations under certain circumstances.

After the show, one of the French participants said, "You don’t ask yourself questions, you apply procedure, even if you know it isn’t necessarily the best option, because that’s how it should be done.”

Reflecting on ordinary people engaging in genocide, German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt came up with the important notion of “the banality of evil.” So much of it is bureaucratic and administrative that it is possible to psychically separate horrible actions from our otherwise mundane existences.

But further insights should make us question the easy assumption that the majority of us are destined to exhibit blind obedience in response to the call of tyranny.

For one, the Milgram experiments were conducted under laboratory conditions, and the Game of Death was created in a TV studio. These are exceptional and highly unusual social environments. A built-in sense of trust is inherent in the contract between participant and leader. It is quite a stretch to generalize to everyday social life from such artificial environments. In the real world, people have the opportunity to reflect, to consult, to doubt, and to refuse.

For another, as the producer of the show pointed out, in game-show mode most people find it difficult to distinguish between truth and fabrication. We need to reflect upon the extent to which volunteers did or did not in fact truly believe what they appeared to be doing or were confused by the appearances of things.

This raises an entirely new and different set of serious questions about our capacity to separate fact and fantasy in our everyday lives. This is not about our capacity to do evil, but rather our capacity to know what we are in fact doing at all. The constant presence of the “hyper-real world” of reality-effects media does not assist us here. Nowhere is this clearer than in the 15-minutes-of-fame world of reality TV, in which participants who share their stories and engage in social relations through selected discourses have nonetheless managed to attain a certain verisimilitude in popular culture.

What we know from the evidence of Nazi Germany and other tyrannical regimes in which many ordinary people ended up committing atrocities is that the process of dehumanization, denigration, and denial of rights of targeted groups was a matter of incremental steps over a number of years. Once a population had been conditioned to accept a certain level of negative treatment of a particular group (perhaps legitimated by portrayals of the out-group as unjust, dangerous, inhuman, and unworthy), then the next level could be prepared and further steps taken. By the time large numbers of people thought to object, they were inhibited by their prior acquiescence or silences, taken as assent.

Important research traditions in political and social psychology demonstrate that under certain conditions, including experimental conditions, people demonstrate a strong propensity to challenge and disobey authority, to express human solidarity, and to creatively organize against regimes and leaders. Just as human nature is not monopolized by evil, neither is blind obedience the only propensity of human conduct in the face of authority.

The fact that the volunteers in the French TV studio were obedient to a particular malevolent authority under game-show circumstances is important. However, this intriguing experiment only begins to unearth ordinary people’s predisposition to relate to authority.