Obediance is Human Nature

When the Meyer article was assigned, and I saw that the title was "If Hitler asked you..." I immediately knew what my response was: no. I thought to myself there is no way I would ever obey Hitler, because what he did was so horrible. Even as a read and annotated, I disagreed with the author's assertions that people would probably obey Hitler, because I didn't have an open mind to the concept Meyer was trying to prove. I believe thats how the majority of people now would react to that question. No chance would I obey Hitler, because that would be wrong. However, Stanley Milgrim's study proved otherwise. It proved that humans as a majority submit to authority, even if that is at the expense of the subject. If personal responsibility is non existant, which it was in the Milgrim case, then people will obey because its not their fault; they were just doing their job. And the same can be said about the people that obeyed Hitler. They were submitting to his ultimate authority because they could blame Hilter's orders and alleviate their own responsibility. People don't necessarily care about the subject if what happens is not directly their fault. I think this is a major flaw of human nature, because the people are not really thinking for themselves. The "teachers" knew they were hurting the "learners", but decided to ignore their own morals for the betterment of the study. I don't like how it works, but unfortunately I also believe it's human nature and is present in each of us.

I'm Me

I'm Matt and I've never blogged before. I do a bunch of things that define myself. I am an athlete; I play baseball in the spring and basketball in the winter. I love playing sports, and I do so all the time. I was on the varsity baseball team last spring and I'm hopin to grab a starting spot this year. Not only do I play conventional sports, but I also water/snow ski and scuba dive. I got my scuba license in seventh grade so that we could go diving as a family on our first vacation to Hawaii (my dad previously had a license for several years). Scuba diving is an incredible experiance and is so unique to all my other sporting experiances. Besides my sporting background, I spend a lot of time with friends and family, including my two golden retrievers, Bandit and Boomer. My dad is a big part of who I am today, mostly because of his discipline. He expects nothing but the best. I've always worked hard at everything I do in order to meet his standards. A month ago I got into U of I engineering, and I am planning on going into mechanical engineering and finding a career there. I have no specific aspirations career wise yet, but I'm sure my college experiance will take care of that. Some other quick notes about me is that my favorite type of music is rap, namely Kanye and Lil Wayne, but my favorite bands include avenged sevenfold, red hot chilli peppers, and aerosmith. Im a big cubs fan, so no messin around there. So now I'm just kickin back and crusin through senior year. Keep an eye out for that baseball team we got. Should be unreal.