However, there are extreme cases in which a person is lacking all of their humanity, but on the other end of the scale there are extreme cases in which a person has all of their humanity intact. The Judge in Buffy, an immortal demon, is an example of an extreme case in which he lacks all of his humanity. Since it is not just black or white, there are grey areas or intermediates in which a person has more or less humanity than the next person. Drusilla and Spike, bad vampires, are an example of an intermediate case in which they have some humanity left and are not completely soulless. In their case, their humanity is suppressed by the presence of the Judge and their desires to want to follow the orders to destroy the slayer, Buffy, and the world. Drusilla and Spike are metaphors for people such as military officers, who lack some of their humanity due to the fact that they want to obey the orders given to them by higher up authorities. The military officers, just like Drusilla and Spike, are not all dehumanizing people or bad people.
Even though they may seem to be lacking their humanity, in the big scheme of things they just want to be obeideant and demonstrate their loyalty to their country. Overall, it is mostly the situation that masks their humanity and makes is seem as if they are heartless.
The personal testimony of the head of the Stanford Prison Experiment is a good real world example of how the powers of an authority position and the situation can suppress a person’s humanity and causing them to appear “soulless.” The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted in 1971 by a psychologist named Philp G. Zimbardo. It was experiment in which Philp Zimbardo conducted a study to see which would trimpuf, “good people or an evil situation” (Zimbardo para 4). They picked out 24 healthy, physically and emotionally, male college students and divided them into two groups, the guards and the prisoners. The participants were then placed in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department (para 5). The experiment was planned to take two weeks in order to receive enough evidence to answer Zimbardo’s question of who would win. The experiment first started off slow and it took the participants about a day to get into their new roles. By the second day of the experiement, the prisoners began to get into their roles and even rebelled against the guards (para 6). The guards then began to think of the prisoners as not their classmates, but actual prisoners. The guards soon began to come up with rougher punishments and games as the experiement went on. Even though, Zimbardo clearly stated in the rules of the experiement that physical punishment was limited and that the prisoners were to be punished accordingly, the guards still felt they had to do what was necessisary (para 6). The guards each created their own set of rules and games during their shifts. One example of a games described in Zimbardo’s article, “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: a Lesson in the Power of Situation,” was titled the camel game, which was a sexual game where one prisoners is the female and the other is the male and they are forced to hump each other (para 9). Zimbardo then states, “by day 5, five of the student prisoners have to be released early because of extreme stress” (para 11). All of theses men before the experiment were healthy and mentally stable and now their either monsters or scum. None of the visitors, family memebers, of the prisoners or guards said anything about the experiment or asked that it should be stopped. This helped make it seem as if the torturing and the pressures that the men were facing was okay. Another psychologist, who happen to be Zimbardo’s girlfriend, saw the experiment and what affects it had on the men and she was the one who said it was wrong. She made a point to him that “human beings were suffering” and that the experiment should be stopped (para 14). Zimbardo argeed with her and decided to terminate the experiment a week early.
