I know most of you probably do not, but in case you do, read the Milgram experiment. Most people suspected very, VERY few to actually deliver the lethal shock, but 65% did.
I'm actually surprised it's only 65%, I thought it'd be much higher. I remember the experiment, but I didn't remember the statistic being so low.
At least from what I've seen myself, the only ones capable of goodness are typically only capable because of being naive. The more life experience gained, the less likely they are to be good people.
Oh please. The people who refrained from inflicting pain were brighter than the rest, and in terms of what it is to be a greater expression of stability within a species, the good humans are the success, while the rest were lemmings. With age comes wisdom, a person who grows colder over time, either fails to learn, or are in some way inexperienced.
As people face more and more hardship in their lives, they gain wisdom, but more often than not alongside wisdom comes pain. With enough pain someone becomes hardened, and begins to understand the idea of sacrifice, if not simply turn inward or selfish.
Altruism is a hard road, and most choose not to take it. It's only when the path still looks easy that people bother, unless they happen to be more resilient than the norm.
If heroic qualities were common, we'd not see them as so magnificent.
Not usually a fan of the double post, but this response is a bit more of a stand alone:
I had a professor at my college for my World Health class. There was more to him than the usual professor, so I spent some time after classes getting to know the guy beyond his lesson plan. I took an interest in him since his words had no emotion in them whatsoever, his face a frozen mask, even when discussing horrible tragedies. His opinion was one of the most objective I'd ever seen, but with his background, that was not how he started.
He had traveled the world, using his knowledge of US medicine to help places where they lacked the proper equipment and knowledge to help their situation. He tried to save as many lives as he could, but each life lost took a piece of himself with them. Location after location, he saw more and more grief, disease, malnutrition, things he could only help so far. As one man, no matter how much strength he had, he could only help so much.
He grew cold, traumatized, he had hit his limit. When he couldn't take it anymore, he decided to teach instead. He admitted to being highly post-traumatic, taking anti-depressants to keep himself from ending it all, but even on high doses of uppers, the guy was stonefaced through everything.
He knew sacrifice, he knew pain, yet he kept pushing on, until even he broke under the strain. He's one of the strongest men I'd ever met, and even he was capable of being broken from simply knowing too much, experiencing too much. His purity was darkened from his experiences, and it showed me a greater lesson about life: Life is pain.
Not necessarily.
All it says is that those people don't automatically bow down to authority. Which is neither here nor there with regards to "intelligence", "stability" or "goodness".
And the ones that didn't refrain might not necessarily have been lemmings either. Perhaps some enjoyed it.