I was driving home from the airport last Monday night and happened to catch an elder statesman of social psychology on It’s Your World. If you’ve heard it a few times, it’s easy to recognize Phil Zimbardo’s New York accent, especially as he’s offering up some of the intimate details of his famous Stanford Prison Experiment. I love listening to the inside stories, the human side of social science – all the messy details that never make it into the professional journals – the stuff that makes science an oh-so-human operation.
Dr. Z was talking about The Lucifer Effect, his latest book about “understanding how good people turn evil.” This is a fitting topic for a guy who went to James Monroe High School with Stanley Milgram, the social scientist who proved conclusively with his sixteen Obedience to Authority experiments that more of us have an Adolph Hitler living inside us than we would ever care to admit. But what was most interesting to me about Zimbardo’s talk was his account of why the Stanford Prison Experiment was called off before it had even run half the time it was supposed to.
It turns out that at one point in the experiment, he brought in a number of outside observers to witness how a created context, together with roles assigned by an authority (him) were able to transform intelligent, decent Stanford students into abusive, demeaning nastyboys. One of the people he brought in was a woman who began crying at the sight of what she observed. She confronted Zimbardo and declared that what he was doing was ethically immoral. This strong emotional reaction and the truth of her words surprised Zimbardo to such an extent that he immediately put a stop to the experiment. Then, impressed with this woman’s ability to observe clearly and “speak truth to power,” he later proposed to and married Christina Maslach.
We need more people willing and able to speak truth to power, and to do so skillfully, with clear agendas aimed at carefully considered outcomes. And it is my contention that parents are the people who have the greatest ability to foster and nurture such people … when they’re little. In order to be able to speak truth to power, I think children need experiences of having The Big Brain Question repeatedly and unfailingly answered “Yes.” (This is what Zimbardo did big-time with Christina Maslach!). Rather than being “Shusshed” or dismissed, children need to have frequent experiences, at home and at school and in spiritual communities where they are embraced and encouraged and rewarded for telling the truth as they see it. One suggestion from Dr. Z which I love, is to have parents and teachers spend time deliberately cultivating our children’s “Heroic Imagination!”
I have occasionally stood up and spoken truth to power. Each time has been memorable, challenging and extremely painful. And each time the Big Brain Question was unfortunately answered “No.” If you’re interested, you can read the details of one such instance here: My Difficulty with Dharma Talks. In this case I used gentle inquiry (I thought) and asked the leaders of a popular spiritual teacher’s group about things I found quite disturbing about the day’s activities. But even gentle confrontation, I discovered, can unskillfully hijack a limbic system – both mine and others’. (Years later I came upon a painful account by one of the central characters in my story about later being ostracized from the community himself. When I heard my own interior voice exclaim, “Serves you right, you fascist ass!” it became clear to me that I still had some work to do to heal that experience).
I’d love to hear some of your own experiences with speaking truth to power – what motivated you to speak out and what outcomes resulted? I’d especially love to hear about accounts that worked out well. I will do my best to welcome them with open arms and tender heart.
The Flowering Brain 
Years ago, when my daughter was a pre-teen, she was involved with a local and somewhat famous girls’ chorus. As a parent I was doing everything I could to support my blossoming songbird of a child, but I always felt a bit uneasy about the chorus director. Something about him made me uneasy, so I kept a close eye on the almost daily practice sessions. When the time came for a big performance in a cathedral space, I attended the rehearsals. And I witnessed the chorus director bully and belittle the girls. I watched the parents around me sit mutely. I became agitated and enraged, and in an overpowering need to protect my child and ALL of the other children (whose parents were mute), I stood up in the middle of the cathedral, stopped the rehearsal and in a voice that I barely recognized as my own, I said, “You will NOT be permitted to shame and belittle these children. I am taking my child out of this rehearsal and this organization, and I suggest that the rest of you save your own children from this bully!” Hundreds of parents, one by one, began to applaud, then there was a standing ovation. My daughter wasn’t sure if she should be embarrassed or proud. But she followed me out of the cathedral as did a number of other parents with their own daughters in tow.
Hi Mark;
Your topic here is quite relevant for me right now, although my own explorations don’t seem to be with children, except the one that is inside me. I am someone who has been practicing the sin of quietism up till now. Something about having written this book is changing that. It is amazing how firm the programming has been to keep quiet to fit in and not make mistakes.
Now my life is out there in black and white, mistakes and all, for anyone to read, and it feels really different–like a continuous invitation to be myself in spite of how the world recieves that. This is my own little way of speaking truth to the power of the consensus reality. Strange how speaking up could easily take me into doing “dharma talks” or whatever, even if its a form that doesn’t work in many ways. I guess its just a matter of everything being on its way to something else.
Alice
http://www.wideawawakeliving.com
http://www.awake publishing.com
Author of “Life Beyond Belief, Everyday Living as Spiritual Practice”.
Being something of a conscious and unconscious “truth-teller”, I have many cellular and regular memories of speaking or being my truth and having the world respond radically, often without me understanding its response until much later. My husband says that I have no political instincts (sigh). In middle school I was taunted by friends for having different opinions and speaking them. I have been quietly ostracized from jobs and schools after speaking up about things from blatant sexism to abuses of power in spiritual communities. I have been completely ignored for years by teachers as if I were wearing a bag over my head…just for sitting in the class! (One could think that I am paranoid, but others have often noticed it too.) So both the negative and positive consequences of speaking and even BEING in your truth are not new to me.
I have examined myself well on self-righteousness, competition with authority and arrogance, and have had to work hard on those things. But in the end have found that there is something more than my own shortcomings that are being resisted. Truth itself is often resisted and subversive, especially to insecure powers that be. Truth expands energetic spaces and makes it more possible for others to be in their truth. Automatically…without a word even being said.
I can’t say that speaking up alone is always immediately empowering and liberating….it can in the short term be humiliating and painful. But in over the course of time, healing from experiences of rejection and watching what happened in the wake of these things has allowed me to grow and allowed others to grow if they chose to do so. I have found that I don’t have to be safe being quiet and that I can survive the consequences. I can’t say that I have many regrets. Being tenaciously in this mix is part of what it means to be alive for me.
I just got off the phone w/ my sister. She had to “go” because her husband said “There’s something wrong w/ the computer.” I was dumbfounded….again. But she made a comment about having to attend to him [he had a foot operation]. And, without thinking too much which always detains me, I said “It sounds like slavery to me.”
It was her turn to be dumbfounded. But she’ll think about it. And, maybe some day she’ll even do something about it.
My husband would never interrupt my phone conversation unless it was vital to ADD something I was forgetting.
Thanks for the article. It’s much food for thought. As an educator, I always looked at my students as gentle souls and that is the way they responded 90% of the time. The rest of the time, I just skimmed over it. We all have bad days. Sadly, I was in the minority.
Thanks again.