David Wenham is menacingly cold.


I forgot about that experiment. It's pretty telling. Still Jonestown is something else altogether. Getting 900 people to kill their children and themselves is just beyond comprehension.

Yeah, just read about Jonestown. That was nuts. To be honest though, it's interesting what any authority figure can get you to do. Especially religious and political ones...

people will do (literally) anything when they believe it's the right thing to do. the trick of authority doesn't lie in telling people what to do, but rather in changing the conception of what 'right' is, and then telling people to do the right thing. If the authority succeeds, people will punish themselves if they fail, or get punished by the group as rebels without the authority figure lifting a finger. this is built really deeply into our psyches (fortunately or not): socialization relies on it, and I doubt you could have anything resembling a community (much less a nationality or a religion) without it.

I saw a PBS show on the training of Marines a while ago - I tell you, the Corps puts even the most notorious cult to shame when it comes to mind control...

I know enough about US Marines to know that they scare me and that I'm glad they are on my side. But hey, what are you expecting? They are, for lack of a nicer way of saying it, trained killers. And you don't want insubordination on the battlefield, that's for sure.

eh, I know a handful of marines (a friend of mine just got divorced from one, and a few ROTC students have passed through my class). they've always struck me as basically good people: a strong sense of honor that blurs into righteousness, and a tendency to be excessively serious about things that annoy them, but I've seen plenty of worse flaws... and frankly, if I had to choose between a world with professional killers and a world with people who kill because they enjoy it, I'd opt for the first... :o but they don't tend to negotiate the non-military world very well (hence the divorce). I just wish the military would be upfront about it - they know they brainwash the soldiers coming in, they out to at least take the effort to deprogram them coming out.