[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

"A powerful verse of the Rastafari community sings, “You’ve got to know yourself, in this your time, Man you have to mind, lest you get carried away by captivity, in this time.” This resonates as much truth universally as it does within the confines of the community where it is a parable spoken in common. The center of universe for each individual resides within that individual, and our entire lives are a series of affirmations, decisions and choices. Not all of these are conscious, rather we have filed and buried many decisions to the processes of our subconscious mind. Further, we casually accept that we agree with the options and choices proffered to us. We accept this agreement so strongly that we seldom realize that we ourselves are making the individual decisions to acquiesce to the forces of others around us. So our world, socially, politically, and biologically can be defined as a complex, meshwork of the decisions of billions of interacting, interconnecting people. In this regard, it is careful that we know ourselves, and become fully aware of the power of our decision making processes, both conscious and subconscious. This is the crux of the moral dilemma which is the basis behind many decisions we make within our interactions with the network of decisions. As it is our own decision, there is a kind of buyer’s remorse experienced at the recognition of the decision having been made. We relish in the valley of decision, hoping that the burden of responsibility seldom falls openly on us. However, all life is a decision, every breathing moment and there is no escape.."

"..Though there was no real pressure other then social, moral or internal, a significant proportion of the control group were found to be willing to inflict great amounts of harm to other people. Members of this group failed Nietzsche’s personal test of one’s own convictions. Further, they made their own individual decisions to continue to participate. The very nature of the experiment put the power to harm in the individual. The means of shock were controlled directly by the subjects, and each subject made the individual decision continually to inflict harm on another person. They believed they were hurting a person similar to themselves, and yet they continued to inflict increasing degrees of harm. Their alternatives were simple, to drop out of participation as a few subjects did. Those who passed Nietzsche’s test and made the individual decision to stop the experiment broke away from what Nietzsche describes as “the extraordinary limitation of human development” which is to follow the “herd-instinct” and sacrifice “the art of command.” In accepting the authority of other’s decisions, you have made your own individual decision to accept them, and you have expressed your own agency and, as Nietzsche describes, command. This command is an active process, as Sartre observes, “For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative.” That is, all of life’s activities, be they mundane or miraculous, are part of the creative process of human decision, hence all decisions are creative as they are all created acts of man. As with Kinder, they accepted the decision and authority of the experimenter and made their own decisions to continue. This is especially illustrative of Sartre’s observations of the individual responsibility of existence. In particular, the subjects demonstrated the anguish of decision which Sartre compares with Abraham. Just as Abraham was forced to make an individual decision on the validity of his vision, so to did each person in the experiment have to come to grips with agony of their indecision and express their individual agency in continuing the experiment. Again they, according to Sartre, affirmed the value of continuing the experiment rather then opting out. They put aside their Dionysian self, which was clearly expressed in the visible apprehension observed in the subjects, and continued the Apollonian course of order and rationality. The passions of their empathy with the imagined victims of the electric shock was trumped by the Apollonian desire to participate with the order and authority of the experiment itself, as they had initially intended to do from the outset. In this way, Stanley’s experiment was very Nietzscheian, as it presented a great moral, individual test “for independence and command” while also confronting the interaction of the, rational Apollonian self and the passionate Dionysian self.."