“They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this.” —Archibald MacLeish

President Dwight David Eisenhower, who understood war as a participant and as a national leader, said in 1953:

“No people on earth can be held, as a people, to be enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice.” ¹

Eisenhower was reflecting painfully on the disruption to peace that followed the end of World War II: the formation of opposing power blocs each armed with nuclear weapons and the possibility of mass destruction. He had been a formidable and victorious opponent to Hitler’s Germany, and he found himself, as President, facing another inimical, powerful foe.

But he refused to name the people of the Soviet Union “enemy.”

Standing firm for democracy and the rule of law, while pleading for true world peace: for negotiation, for cooperation, for a treaty to reduce the number of nuclear weapons held by the great powers, Eisenhower warned:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed.”

In his understanding of the causes and effects of war, Eisenhower articulated an essential truth: the people often called “enemy” are not. They are human beings who long for peace, for prosperity, and for the safety and well-being of their children.

By refusing to demonize the people or the government of the Soviet Union in his public offer of peaceful engagement, Eisenhower held out the possibility that together the great powers could transform the world. He called for a worldwide initiative—a partnership of nations—that would use the savings from disarmament to create a fund for world aid and reconstruction.

“The monuments to this new kind of war,” he said, would be “roads and schools, hospitals and homes, food and health.”

On Memorial Day we honor those who have given their lives in the service of our country. It is right, it is fitting that we do so.

We often say that they have died to protect our “way of life”—not meaning fast food or reality TV or the over-consumption of natural resources, but those values that are so entwined in our perceptions that they retreat into the background: We are a nation “conceived in liberty,” ² liberty protected by a written Constitution, the first in the world; liberty protected by democracy; liberty protected by the “rule of law.”

What Eisenhower proposed as a way to peace when the “free world” faced a powerful and hostile Soviet Union was an agreement to extend the rule of law to world affairs. He looked across the waters to people he might have called our enemies and instead he challenged them to be our colleagues.

He refused to demonize them.

Many things have happened since that speech in 1953. Today, from our vantage point more than half a century later, that era is history; half a century that has seen turmoil, war, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the rise of groups that are not nations but nonetheless have the destructive capacity that in Eisenhower’s time belonged only to nations.

Yet time and study have shown the truth of Eisenhower’s most basic assumption: that demonizing other human beings does not bring peace.

I was shaped irrevocably by the Vietnam War, though I was not a participant—shaped by the events of that era of course, but more significantly shaped by my love and fear for those I loved and whose lives were at risk. So: over the years I have painstakingly gathered an understanding of the causes of war. I have grappled with the nature of good and evil. I have sought to comprehend, among the mysteries of the human psyche, what it is that causes some people to do terrible things to other people, what it is in human beings that propels us to war.

Over the last 30-some years as I was living these questions by my choices, a Stanford University psychologist named Philip Zimbardo came at the same questions from a different direction. Riding on the tide of recent tenure and academic ambition, he created something infamously called the Stanford Prison Experiment and has been living its consequences ever since. ³

He took mentally healthy college students and divided them randomly into two groups, prisoners and guards. He planned a two-week study in an artificial prison “system” that included a warden, family visits, a Parole Board, and observers. Working with the group labeled “guards,” Zimbardo as “Superintendent” agreed to a set of rules for prisoner behavior and management, specifying no physical harm. But the “guards” found other methods to torment and abuse. These mentally healthy young men, who kept daily journals of their feelings, transformed from good, kind, caring people into sadistic bullies.

A day and a half after the experiment began, one “prisoner,” mentally healthy just two days before, had a mental breakdown and was released. He was only the first. By the sixth day, the guards had arrived at the same awful place as some of the young soldiers on duty at Abu Graib prison—gleefully using sexual humiliation to assert their power over the prisoners.

The experiment ended the next day. Ended early, terminated, because one of the observers who had joined experiment the day before was horrified by what was happening. Yes, the newcomer was horrified and insisted that the experiment be stopped. Those involved from the beginning, including Zimbardo, had become acclimated along with the guards to the notion that the prisoners must be controlled, that they were prisoners and therefore somehow wrong.

Every day of his life, since the experiment ended, Zimbardo remembers what happened to the youngsters in his charge. He remembers the guards’ transformation, confirmed by their diaries, from decent young men to men whose conduct can only be described as evil. He recalls the harm to the prisoners, most of whom suffered what we now call “post-traumatic stress.” More than anything, he recalls his own complicity.

His last 30 years of research have been devoted to understanding what happened during those six days, to understanding what he now calls “the Lucifer effect”: the transformation of good people into devils.

The nub of his findings, the core, is that good people, placed in the wrong situation without a system that sets clear boundaries and delivers up constant reminders of what is good and true, will demonize other human beings. And when that happens, when “us” and “them” equate to “good” and “evil,” there is no hope for peace, because the downward slide begins. The “Lucifer effect.”

Like Dwight David Eisenhower, who understood the causes of war, Philip Zimbardo understands the causes of evil. And just as Eisenhower recognized that peace would be possible only through the orderly processes of a rule of law under which no people are called “enemy,” Zimbardo’s research shows that true goodness is the refusal of one human being, no matter what the provocation, to deny the humanity of another.

On this Memorial Day, when we remember those who gave their lives in the service of their country, let us also remember that it is we who decide what their sacrifice will mean. We, the living, must learn from our visionaries and our scientists not merely to end war, but to bring peace, peace and a new hope: world community under a rule of law that respects all people.

Eisenhower said it, half a century ago: Let us “dedicate our strength to serving the needs, rather than the fears, of the world.”

May each of us teach peace.

¹ President Dwight David Eisenhower, “A Chance for Peace” (Speech April 16, 1953). Subsequent Eisenhower quotations are also taken from this speech.

² Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address (1863).

³ The 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, its aftermath, its effect on Zimbardo, and Zimbardo’s subsequent research are detailed in his book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House 2007).

©2006-2012, Philip G. Zimbardo