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Originally posted by v3d4
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id like everybody interested to read thru it and tell me what you think b4 i say too much on this, but i have a couple specific questions im interested in ...
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Are we gonna get extra credit for this?
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are all acts of punishment really just acts of cruelty?
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Not at all. Competent parent punish children out of love. A competent penal system would punish out of a desire to improve
all of society.
I'll stick by an earlier post and say that the difference between punishment and cruelty has everything to do with the mindset of the person in change. If the 'guards' are on a power trip, cruelty follows. If the 'guards' are compassionate, punishement doesn't cross the line.
But when have you ever heard of a compassionate prison guard?
There is a book that I am too lazy to look up right now written by one of these Tibetan monks who was thrown in a Chinese jail and tortured. What does he have to say" He prayed for his guards everyday. They are not bad people though they may be stuck in the ignorance that allows violence to be perpetrated.
If you read what Gandhi, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi and others devoted to peace you get the idea. It's about changing yourself to see the value of universal compassion.
Universal compassion isn't the easy road, obviously (obvious to me anyway) but it is the salvation the guards against inhumanity. If Zimbardo had recruited Buddhist monks instead of college students he would have had drastically different results. Sadly, we place no value on compassion in our society. In fact it is discouraged in the business world.