The evil that men do is only what comes naturally

sheenamcdonald looks into the dark side of the human soul and finds the potential for tyranny exists in all of us

REMEMBER Rwanda in 1994? Were you there? I was not, but daily we were told what was happening there - attempted genocide, being carried out by ordinary people against other ordinary people. It was similar to what happened even closer to home, in Bosnia, in the first half of the 1990s. Neighbour turned against neighbour, friend against friend, for no valid reason whatsoever. A parallel thing is going on in Burma today: a tyrannical regime is persecuting parts of the population. Imprisonment, torture and execution are a daily reality in that country.

We know these things happened or are happening, because journalists report them, often risking - sometimes losing - their own lives to tell us in print, on radio and television of man's inhumanity to man. If we can bear to hear the terrible news, we shiver and inwardly mutter: "Thank goodness that could never happen here."

But are we right? I have been working on a television programme which set out to investigate how much we might all be liable to turning genocidal. When we began, we rather doubted that the working title for our programme - Five Steps To Tyranny - would be borne out by our research and experiment. It was, and shockingly so. We opted for a psychological approach to our subject, rather than a typical current affairs style, which goes out of its way to be fair and even in its description of events. Does this mean we were unfair and prejudiced? Far from it - there was no need to "spin" our evidence, or miss out information which was inconvenient to our theme. All inhabitants of this planet are prone to the same pressures, and liable to similar responses, wherever they live.

So we ran an experiment which sought to establish how tribally many of us behave. A jogger wearing a certain football strip fell down in front of a known football supporter. If the jogger was wearing the strip of the team they favoured, they stopped and helped. If he was wearing a rival strip, they walked on by. And the same response was displayed time after time after time.

The most frightening experiment of man's willingness not just to ignore but to hurt a stranger could not be reproduced today, because it would be seen as a violation of human rights, and is, anyway, now too familiar. In 1961, a young American psychologist, Stanley Milgram, demonstrated that over half a random sample of citizens of the land of the free and the land of the brave were willing to electrocute a man in the next room whom they did not know, simply for answering a question incorrectly. And I mean electrocute: they were administering shocks which are more than twice as strong as the electrical charges accessible through our domestic power-points.

Many of Milgram's peers were unhappy with this information. They had not expected people to react as they did to his experiment. They had particularly not expected educated residents of a war-free country to react so primitively. What they had failed to realise, and what Stanley Milgram demonstrated, was that human nature has very dark elements.

In making Five Steps To Tyranny, we all began to examine our own predilections and weaknesses. Might we run the risk of becoming tyrannical? Did we allow prejudice to pollute our way of thinking?

Do you? Here's the first step on the road to tyranny - you think you are better than someone else. You think people like you are all better than people who are not like you. You will have been helped to this opinion by insidious propaganda, which may find its way into your life by myriad means - often including, regrettably, the media.

Thus in Rwanda in 1994, a new radio station, Radio Mille Collines, broadcast trendy, funky new programmes, each laced with subtle anti- Tutsi propaganda. The history of that country had been riven for the previous century by quasi-civil war, so the people in charge in the 1990s knew exactly who was being referred to in dehumanising language. And to attempt to write off what happened there as some inevitable form of inter-tribal savagery is to misread what was happening. Many moderate Hutus were also killed.

Germany in the 1930s allowed vile things to be said about, drawn about and done to their fellow Germans who happened to be Jewish. Even when the rest of the world began to find out the truth about the concentration camps, it was felt more important to win the war, rather than set about trying to save the victims of the holocaust, which included gypsies, political opponents, disabled people and homosexuals.

What unites the tyrannical of this world is the human instinct to obey, and to conform, an instinct malignly exploited by evil leaders. We must always question what we are being told, and by whom, however authoritative they may appear. And we should speak out if we do not agree with or approve of what is being told us. This may get us into trouble, but the fear of such an eventuality is what encourages us to keep our heads down, and appease tyrannical forces. That is another step on the road to tyranny - passing by on the other side, not wanting to get involved. We all do it, every day. We should stand up and be counted.

Here I am, sounding like a preacher. What I dared not do was end a discussion of an alarming programme such as this with a little sermon. I am not confident that I have myself not put a foot on the primrose path to tyranny. Having made this programme, I am now super- sensitive to the possibility of behaving badly. I have always disapproved of the human tendency to label and categorise people, but I understand that grouping people is natural, and our way of making sense of the world. And groups can, of course, counteract evil and be a force for good.

Five Steps to Tyranny, BBC2, Tuesday December 19, 9 pm

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