The older I get, the more I wonder why no one ever thought to run this experiment again, or use it as a model for similar ones. Or, if they have, why does no one talk about it? It just feels very… propagandic. Like, a strawman argument for individualism being the highest virtue and citing one teacher’s nonscientific social experiment as evidence.

You would think, but it was only five days - and the fifth day was him revealing it was Nazis all along: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_(experiment)

I watched it when I was in school years ago, but iirc, it doesn’t. From my understanding, the guy who did it pulled the plug after 4 days because he didn’t like how many people actually joined the group when he told students to recruit. His language was fascistic, and he had students salute fellow members, but nothing he did was expressly fascist as far as I could see. He encouraged group calisthenics, standing taller, a sense of community, etc.

Tbh, it always gave me the same energy as “authoritarianism bad”. As a message about how easy it is to potentially build a fascist group in American schools by influencing children, it’s a good cautionary tale, but even as a kid I didn’t understand why they didn’t just use the experiment to go a different direction with the lessons. Like, yeah, you could organize impressionable people to be fascists by spouting some stuff about unity and community then introducing bad shit later, but you could also… not introduce the bad shit?

I should rewatch it before I pass a final judgment, though. It’s been a hot minute.

EDIT: I totally forgot the part where the group’s mission was to “destroy democracy”, lol. But in this context, he associates democracy with individualism, and his system with strength through “discipline, community, action, and pride”. I still don’t understand how American schoolchildren supposedly leapt from normal kids to Brownshirts in 4 days with such a vague concept, or why so many were interested in joining a group bent on destroying “democracy” or “individualism”.