RE: Projection: How can someone do such a thing?
Murder, beat a child, become a prostitute. But what it really is, is a projected judgement of the self onto another saying, I can't imagine myself doing such a thing.
I would argue that in this situation one either has a poor imagination or hasn't thought hard enough.
I mean, if there was a situation where a good friend of mine, irreplaceable, was kept as a hostage and I was threatened to murder someone, an unknown person, for letting my friend free. If not, they would kill my friend. and for the sake of this thought experiment, let us assume there would be unquestionable proof that my friend wasn't getting out of it alive if I wasn't to commit the murder.
In a just a minute I have a premise where I would have to at least consider committing a horrendous act – I can only imagine the situation for those who have a family that their all. What if my own life was threatened? Maybe that would change it to even more likely for me committing a murder.
Of course this is only a simulation in my head and highly unlikely scenario – real life is much more complicated. But to completely refuse to recognize one's own potential for committing horrible things in even the most "fitting" setting period, is a sign of poorly integrated character to me. Sure, it's scary to think of a situation where you could murder someone, hence why people probably reject this "dark side" right away, but that in itself can proof to be dangerous as when they unintendedly commit harmful actions, it might actually go unnoticed from themselves because "they wouldn't do it".
If imagining a setting for oneself only is an impossible task, it's no wonder how bad we fail to understand the people that are different from us regarding to personality and life experience. But here we still act like understanding someone else's position better even when we don't know ourselves.
I'm always reminded of the Milgram experiment, where someone is told to shock someone in increasingly high levels for getting answers wrong. They hear the voice of an actor on the other side, giving wrong answers, freaking out, and screaming. The majority always put it up to lethal levels, were paid, and left. For all they knew, they killed someone.
Anyone, given the right circumstances, would kill someone. Well, almost anyone. What those circumstances are though, is likely far less than we would like to imagine. In reality, someone who is an authority figure telling us to might be enough. We could all be possible complacent actors in some future atrocity.
Yes, that is a famous experiment.
It's scary how much authority really has an overhand on most of us. If I'm not wrong some of the "victims" of the experiment were quite traumatized of the experiment, but they still didn't stop. That's the scary part: they never would've thought they would be able to do such thing, but it seems it's harder not to when faced with a convincing authority.
That experiment is as you say, but that part wasn't the most interesting part to me.
Most interesting to me was that people would injure the person they were asked to (the actor) but only as long as they thought they were doing good. As soon as they were ordered to, they had a very high rate of quitting.
The greatest of the world's atrocities all happened with normal people supporting them.
I spend way to much time running scenarios like that and much worse but, it helps me prepare for things at an emotional level and has served me well over the years. people don't like discomfort so avid it, even if it is just psychological.