The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2007) is Stanford Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo's psychological analysis of how good people become evil.
He has several intriguing main points. Evil seduces people in institutions where there is no oversight. Any good and normal person can walk the slippery slope from good to bad, step by step. Nice people can become sadistic. The context defines them. They were not looking or wanting to become evil, but random chance put them in an evil institution and they became an accidentally evil person. Take them out of the context and they become normal again.
Zimbardo took 30 years to understand what I learned over several months. Good people, put in an evil institution will degrade, shame, blame, and brutalize you. The evil institution with no oversight is family law and family court. Zimbardo says the guards "were allowed to have too much unrestrained power without top-down oversight." Ditto family court and lawyers.
I like this quote from the book: “Our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards…helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate the next.”
— Albert Bandura (Stanford University)
Just like any torturer, emotional or otherwise, take the attorney out of the context and he was "normal". Father, husband, maybe tennis player.
Ironically, Chris Haney, who helped Zimbardo design the Stanford Prison Experiment, is a friend of attorney Michael Lowy, who was to abandon legal ethics, betray, and lie - all in the context of collaborative law. Oversight is purposefully left out of it. It ditches advocacy, worships a process not a goal, and undermines the people it processes. It is a hugely disrespectful institution, valuable to no one, but it focuses on the greed of the attorneys at the expense of the clients.
Zimbardo says: Good people don’t rush in to do evil where angels fear to tread, instead they start by straying only a small way away from their moral center, and each successive step down is hardly different, barely noticeable, until it is too late and their behavior is shocking and may even be awesome of awful.
The moral center of the law is absent from collaborative law. Within that context, Michael Lowy alllowed himself to become my abuser. He knew I had been traumatized and he neglected to talk to me. He knew I wanted to follow the law and he abused me by telling me it was not appropriate. He abused me by giving the man who stole everything from me a place to rest and renew. He abused me by lying about truth telling and doing the one thing no attorney has the right to do: he shared emails with opposing counsel. He sold me out, he sold himself. Collaborative law has been declared unethical in Colorado. I knew that in Palo Alto.
Craig Haney designed the experiment that would explain Michael Lowy.
The same institution that brutalized me and so many other women, has lead me to using positive psychology to help the abused - the accidental victims of the accidental evil doers: those of the family court.
David Duff, Jeffrey Kaufman, Kirby Burnside, Lynn Yates-Carter, David Prince, Michael Flicker, Susan Chung, Ron Romines, Delman Smith, Michael Lowy, meet Philip Zimbardo.
