(EDIT: Well, supposed to be brief, anyway. You know how I am.)

In my Soc 101 class I had this talented West African professor who had to learn to basically go through the motions, because 101 classes are basically teaching high school. 300 was recent and there was presumptive support for the position that torture be used for intelligence. Fuck yeah, said the man who nearly drunkenly murdered a friend while slaughtering drugged-up game birds, we torture.

As it must eventually, we came up to the Milgram Experiment. They had footage, and it went exactly the way you learn: these people said they wouldn’t hurt someone in X way, insisted they were moral people, and then, under pressure from authority, all but one smoking man - though fretting a little at some point, after the screams stopped - kept on going.

As the actor screamed in pain, started shouting for help, and eventually went silent - and with each expression of worry or anguish on the subjects’ faces - the classroom busted up laughing. The experiment was introduced in detail. It was understood that the subjects thought they were electrocuting a human being to death. Peals of laughter, every time. He watched wordlessly in a sort of shell shock as the students filed out at the end, and in an email I sent to him the next day I apologized for other people’s behavior for what I believe to be the first and only time in my life.

I went home dazed. To this day, the incident remains the most horrifying thing I have ever witnessed, and I watched my grandparents attempt to neglect my severely ill mother to death. At the time I could muster nothing but fury or tears.

This is how I usually end that story, or with the 300 analogy. (I’ve beaten that horse to death by now.) But now I look back on it, I remember the smoker. I don’t recall if they gave his name, but he was a raw-looking chain-smoking man who reacted with outrage to the proceedings. He stopped shocking the man after it became clear he wasn’t conscious. In the interview before they debriefed him, he seemed almost remorseful about it, but insisted that whatever they were after wasn’t worth his conscience. Society does a good job of twisting people into monsters, but there is enough courage in the human animal that some will sooner break than bend. And those fuckers didn’t seem to think he was so funny.