For aeons, Isis was a sloe-eyed Egyptian goddess; a patroness of Nature and Magic. Then, her cult began to wither away. Her name came into prominence again when a bunch of militants expropriated the name ISIS for their state! This allegedly bans the worship of forms so harshly that teaching of art has been outlawed from schools. Music too is taboo. But these bans pale into insignificance compared to the sectarian killings unleashed in the name of the so-called ‘State’.
Now, is this all the work of naïve souls ruthlessly brainwashed into a fanatical ideology? Some psychiatrists warn that the explanation might be too simplistic. That simpler paradigm rose from social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s controversial work in 1960s on obedience experiments at Yale. It provided a literally shocking view of humanity’s propensity for groupthink and obedience to authority.
Milgram claimed to have exposed what was called ‘banality of evil’ in the Holocaust in the Adolf Eichmann trial. His work referred to the alacrity with which ordinary people followed unconscionably cruel orders and tortured their peers and colleagues with large amounts of electric shock!
Milgram’s portrait of the sadist or terrorist as the friendly neighbourhood Chap who has nothing personal but ‘only following orders’ sparked such outrage that the psychologist was denied tenure at Harvard. Subsequent work provided a more nuanced view. Other experts have implicated the ‘Inner Devil’, or the supposedly darker side of our highly social selves — ritual and group-bonding and not just that of religion!
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