Many cults start off with high ideals that get corrupted by leaders or their board of advisors who become power-hungry and dominate and control members' lives. No group with high ideals starts off as a 'cult'; they become one when their errant ways are exposed.
Interpretation
Cults often begin with good intentions but can deteriorate due to the corruption of leaders seeking power.
This quote by Philip Zimbardo highlights the transformative nature of groups that start with noble ideals. It suggests that while many organizations may initially seek to promote positive values, they can become harmful when leaders prioritize their own power over the group's original mission, illustrating a critical point about human nature and the dynamics of authority within communities.
In practice
In a discussion about leadership ethics, this quote can illustrate the potential dangers of power.
Before I knew that a man could kill a man, because it happens all the time. Now I know that even the person with whom you've shared food, or whom you've slept, even he can kill you with no trouble. The closest neighbor can kill you with his teeth: that is what I have Learned since the genocide, and my eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world.
Boys' brains are being digitally rewired for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. That means they're totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive.
Evil is knowing better, but willingly doing worse.
Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.
Heroes are Ordinary People whose social action is Extra-Ordinary/ who ACT when others are passive, who give up EGO-centrism for SOCIO-centrism.
Bullies may be the perpetrators of evil, but it is the evil of passivity of all those who know what is happening and never intervene that perpetuates such abuse.
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.
For this reason, strangers are not really conceived as individuals, but as strangers of a particular type: the element of distance is no less general in regard to them than the element of nearness.
The rich get richer and the poor get - children.
To be radical is to grasp things by the root.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.