The 2015 film, The Stanford Prison Experiment,
is not a documentary of the experiment on power aggrandizement that took place
in 1971; actors play the supervising professor s well as the 24 students who were
the subjects—12 randomly being assigned as guards and the other 12 as prisoners.
The film can be characterized as a psychological drama on human nature, given
the salience therein of the will to power. Had Nietzsche been alive to watch
the film, he would have been engrossed, finding much to confirm his theory that
not only the will to power is the basic human motive, but also the weak too
easily resort to cruelty (and pettiness) to feel any pleasure they can out of the
exercise of whatever power they can muster, given their innate weakness.
The full essay is at "The Stanford Prison Experiment."
