Friday evening, I did something I rarely do: I watched one of those pseudo-news shows, the kind that generally focus on soft news that everybody but me seems to be interested in.  Generally it is some kind of pop culture junk like Brittany’s latest antic (WHO is Brittany anyway and why does everyone but me know her by first name?).  But a Friday night spent under a cozy quilt, nursing a slight malaise left from New Year’s, left me sprawled in a recliner with a TV remote and nothing worth watching.  I happened to catch Primetime, an ABC show that left me deeply disturbed.

The show was about the Milgram experiment conducted in the early 60s and a 2006 similar replication of the experiment.  In 1961, just a few months after the trial of Adolf Eichmann began, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram began an experiment to test to what degree people would obey authority even when it was in direct conflict with their personal beliefs.

The subjects of the experiment were people like you and me.  They were asked to participate in experiment about whether pain assisted the learning process.  The second individual, complicit in the experiment, was set up in another room as the “student.”  The “teacher”, the actual subject of the experiment, was placed in front of a panel of switches labeled with increasing voltage.  Whenever the “student” missed a question, the teacher was directed to flip the next highest voltage switch, giving the student an apparent electric …