#social experiment

_{I am not going to school; though they have told me I am to start attending in two weeks time.}

I am here– though I do not wish to be.

Good evening.

Breakfast is not until seven.

They intend to starve me.

To my dismay; I am awake at this ungodly hour.

I do not wish to do anything.

The nurses will not allow me to rest, though. 

What am I supposed to do? There is no television, books– nothing in this room. 

I do not wish to be conscious at such an hour.

The nurse is telling me to rest.

Good bye.

I don’t even have a phone.

courtneymack:

this video is making me SOB

So today I walk into my history class. My teacher then proceeds to tell us that he had to show a video to his first class and it had taken up the whole period so in order to keep all of his classes at the same pace he was giving his other periods an off day. However, he said that the previous class was too rowdy so he decided that we would play a game together instead. He asked for suggestions and eventually someone said Simon Says and he agreed.

He started off by giving us easy instructions like ‘put your hand on your head” or “jump once”. Some people messed up but he told them that they were still in.

Then he told us to all put our phones on top of the projector. We thought that it was a bit odd, but this teacher had been known to do odd things so we all went along with it. He then had us take out a pencil and paper and had the girls go to one side of the class and the boys on the other. He then told us to make eye contact with someone across the room. The girls were then supposed to write something mean about the person they were looking at on their paper and crumple it up and throw it at the boy. A lot of the girls didn’t want to be mean to the person, however they followed the instructions and wrote the mean comment and threw it at them.

He then had the boys write something nice about the girl they made eye contact with and present to the girl nicely. This of course made the girls feel bad but nobody apologized to the boys. After all, they were just doing it because we were playing Simon Says.

Next, all the boys had to get in a line from tallest to shortest. He then told all of them to sit down except for the four shortest boys. One of the boys was then instructed to put all the mean comments the girls wrote in the trash while another one was told to grab his backpack. 

My teacher then had the four boys stand in the middle of the class and called up one of the girls. She was then instructed to dump the contents of the boy’s backpack on the ground, turn his backpack inside out, and then put his stuff back into backpack. The class was shocked, but my teacher said “Simon Says” and that’s the rule of the game so the girl followed what our teacher told he to do.

He then called up another person in the class and told one of the boys to take off their shoes and hand it to them. After that, he then instructed the person to completely unlace his shoes. The class was shocked yet again, but our teacher said “Simon says” so the shoes were unlaced.

Another kid was called up. This time, the kid who had picked up all of the trash earlier was instructed to sit in a desk that was in the middle of the class. The kid who had been called up was then instructed to take the trash can that the boy had filled earlier and dump it over the boys head. They followed the orders without question like the others and dumped it over him (luckily there was only paper in there.)

Finally, four other kids were called up. The last of the original four boys was told to stand at the front of the class and the four new people were told to form a line in front of him. My teacher then handed them some of the crumpled pieces of paper from earlier and told them to throw it at the boy with all their strength. The boy was then pelted with wadded up balls of paper and my teacher told us to all go and sit back down and that the game was over.

Now, we had all agreed that this was the strangest game of Simon Says any of had ever played and like I said, my teacher was known for doing crazy things. He then asked us why we did everything that he told us to do. We replied that it was part of the game and we didn’t want to get out. My teacher then pointed out that people who didn’t follow everything he said at the start didn’t get out. We did some pretty horrible things to each other for a game of “Simon Say” in a high school history class, but why? 

You see, if he started out by having us dump trash cans onto kids, we probably would have said that doing that was wrong and not have done it. But by starting out small and gradually making what we were doing more and more wrong, it got us used to obeying what he told us to do to the point where he threw crumpled up balls of paper at a kid without hesitation. At any point, one of us could have said “hey that’s mean lets not do that” but we didn’t, we just kept going along with what he said. If he hadn’t had stopped the game, how far would we have gone? Would we have slapped a kid across the face all because “Simon says”? Or instead of writing a mean comment, say it directly to their face?

When you look at history and see things like the Holocaust, you can’t help but wonder how so many people were roped into doing such heinous acts against other people. But by starting off small and building a pattern of obedience, you can tell a person to kill someone and they’ll do it without hesitation. Would the Holocaust still have happened if people stopped and looked at what they were being told to do and said “no that’s wrong I’m not going to do that”?

This doesn’t free you from responsibility though. The person who emptied out a kid’s backpack is still responsible for emptying out his backpack, playing “Simon Says” doesn’t change the fact that it was a huge invasion of privacy. Even if they say you won’t be held responsible for what you do, you’re still responsible for your actions. No one decides what you do but yourself.

So the moral of the story is: don’t fall into a pattern of obedience and blindly do whatever someone tells you to do. You always have the choice to say no and even if you’re the only person saying it, sometimes you’re the person who inspires everyone else to say no as well.

if you’re reading this and have my phone number, text me