
The Third Wave (experiment) - CDSlice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_(experiment)
======
jolux
I'm not convinced that the kids weren't just looking for something to do that
wasn't a conventional high school activity. It's a very engaging teaching
methodology, but is the ideological content driving the uptake there or is it
the novelty?

------
TheAsprngHacker
Related discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24104732](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24104732)

~~~
dang
For sure there have been other threads about this on HN but I can't find them
at the moment.

Edit: never mind, I found it - from 10 months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21167683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21167683).
There's some question about how much of the story was embellished or distorted
after the fact, especially because decades went by before some of the
interviews about it. But there's at least one contemporaneous source.

------
mdrabla
If anything this 'experiment' just shows that bored teenagers are easily
convinced to bandwagon on an innocuous group. They just had to hold their hand
a certain way and address him as "Mr. Jones"? Come on, they probably were
treating it as a meme.

~~~
KMag
It lacks any semblance of scientific rigour, but (as we're both aware) there
are numerous examples of huge numbers of adults engaging in similar tribalism,
at a tragic human cost.

It's the people who are confident they could never get pulled into the Nazis
or the Red Guards that you need to worry about. That kind of utopian self-
assuredness leads to tragedy.

------
unixhero
Great movie

------
krick
It always makes me sneer when this is brought up. 3 days of some guy trying to
create and manage (in very minor ways) and organization (that ultimately did
nothing of consequence) consisting of way more people (teenagers) than he ever
managed (actually, can you even honestly say a school teacher is adept at
managing even 30 people? the frame within which they operate is largely set
from above, they will do what they always do as long, as a teacher does what
all the other teacher do), then on the 4th day dramatically exclaiming "I
created a monster! and you all are part of it, and never even noticed!" isn't
really much of an experiment. Then everybody accepts "the results of an
experiment", because it supports the existing political narrative and it's
such a nice story overall.

This is way, way over-hyped. Every 14 year old Tik-Tok channel owner with
large enough community (especially if it ever managed to create new "viral"
challenge or any other meme) has more to say about community management, than
this guy.

However, even though I dismiss this so called "experiment", I think there are
some things that could be pointed out about the German Reich in regards to it.
Both are to point out it is really not as surprising that people followed the
leader as we usually pretend it is.

First one is about how "normal people were inclined to support horrible
things". Well, even though Hitler was extremely charismatic figure, the thing
is — it wasn't really him who made people believe something weird, it's
actually rather that his politics were quite populistic and he just said what
almost everybody in the country was thinking to begin with. Even antisemitism
wasn't something Hitler or his party introduced, every other person at the
time was antisemitic, and even many higher-up party members attribute their
commited antisemitism to reading Henry Ford books and not "Mein Kampf".

Second is actually about the teens. Yes, Hitlerjugend was a political
organisation, but if you actually think about it, it was just giving teenagers
what they want more than anything in the world: a sense of unity. Most of them
don't get it today, and they actually suffer from that. In a sense,
participating in an organisation like that is the most beautiful thing that
can happen to a teen. We shouldn't forget that it was actually a very nice way
for kids to spend their free time (which they have way too much of), with all
these hikes and games and traditional boyscout activities. This alone would
make it quite a prolific youth-organisation, as it really did these things
well. But I actually think sense of unity it gave them is way, way more
important, since every other teen struggles (and, in modern society, usually
fails) to find something like that.

~~~
082349872349872
Some of them took wanting a sense of unity rather literally:

> "Zu den Reichsparteitagen fuhren auch Mitglieder vom Bund Deutscher Mädel
> (BDM) und der Hitlerjugend. Bei 900 der BDM-Mädchen, die 1936 vom
> Reichsparteitag in Nürnberg zurückkehrten, wurden anschließend
> Schwangerschaften festgestellt. ... Daraufhin wurde 1937 das Kampieren im
> Freien untersagt."

That 900 nazi girls were knocked up by hitler youth would have been less
problematic if the Nazis had not re-enacted the old anti-abortion laws in
1933, strengthening them in 1935 and 1936. (which still doesn't excuse lack of
condom use)

[http://www.rothenburg-unterm-hakenkreuz.de/nuernberger-
nsdap...](http://www.rothenburg-unterm-hakenkreuz.de/nuernberger-nsdap-
reichsparteitage-brachten-viele-besucher-nach-rothenburg-die-veranstaltungen-
waren-meisterwerke-der-propaganda/)

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwangerschaftsabbruch#Geschi...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwangerschaftsabbruch#Geschichte_vor_1945)

------
chrisco255
One of my high school English teachers showed us the movie this was based on.
It definitely had an effect on me. I do believe, unfortunately, that most
people are sheep and would go along with and get swept up in a popular
movement like Nazism. But too many people focus on the particular ideology of
Nazis rather than the mechanics of the social movement itself. One could
easily imagine a modern movement with completely different outgroups than who
the Nazis targeted, that may not even be considered offensive to ostracize
today, and a good number of people would go along with it and get swept up in
the emotions and the frenzy of it all.

A modern example that absolutely concerns me is the Sunrise Movement:
[https://www.sunrisemovement.org/](https://www.sunrisemovement.org/)

"We're building an army of young people to create millions of good jobs and
stop climate change in the process."

Building an army? Check. Recruiting young, impressionable people? Check.
Strong symbolism and personal sacrifice for "greater good" moral overtones?
Check.

Yeah, if I had to guess the next Nazi movement will be in the name of fighting
climate change or some other quixotic mission like that. As HL Mencken said,
"the desire to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to
rule it."

~~~
esarbe
Don't know why this gets downvoted.

Eco-fascism seems to be a valid candidate for the next societal nightmare. The
"Right" has not yet discovered ecology as a trigger (especially the "Extreme
Right") but I reckon that's only a matter of time.

It might not be any of the organizations that exist today, but the point still
stands.

That said; I don't consider combating the climate crisis a "quixotic quest". I
consider it the only way forward for humanity.

~~~
chrisco255
I don't believe we have a crisis. By any measurable standard the plant kingdom
is doing phenomenally well under the current climate, with CO2 acting as a
fertilizer as noted by NASA. I also do not think that CO2 PPM is a climate
control knob. There are far more mechanisms in the climate system than simply
CO2 and we have absolutely no control over those. A good super volcano would
plunge the earth into a mini ice age and then fossil fuels would be the last
of our worries, as we'd be more worried about growing enough food to survive.
We should be teaching adaptability and be prepared for any outcome, not having
any illusions of control over nature.

[https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-
fer...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-
fertilization-greening-earth/)

~~~
esarbe
> I don't believe we have a crisis

I'm inclined to emphatically disagree, even just on a political level; climate
is already changing, rendering huge swaths of the Earth inhabitable. This will
force people to migrate to (literally) greener pastures. Within the next 25
years we'll have millions of people on the run. This will put unprecedented
pressure on all our political systems. Given how miserably Europe failed
addressing the Syrian refugee crisis, I do not have high hopes for the coming
Climate refugee crisis to result in anything but more political extremism. I
can already hear them say "Das Boot is voll".

> By any measurable standard the plant kingdom is doing phenomenally well
> under the current climate, with CO2 acting as a fertilizer as noted by NASA.

My worry is less about plants and more about human civilization.

> There are far more mechanisms in the climate system than simply CO2 and we
> have absolutely no control over those.

True, but CO2 is the one mechanism we've turned up to 11. Maybe we can start
turning it down to 0 and simultaneously figure out how to deal with the
methane that has started to leak from the Siberian permafrost and from the
ocean bottom.

> A good super volcano would plunge the earth into a mini ice age and then
> fossil fuels would be the last of our worries, as we'd be more worried about
> growing enough food to survive.

There's also nothing that we can do about a super vulcano. Or a galactic gama
ray burst. It's within our capabilities to deal with antropogenic climate
change.

> I also do not think that CO2 PPM is a climate control knob.

I also don't see CO2 PPM as a knob. It's probably more of a ratchet. We should
stop ratcheting.

> We should be teaching adaptability and be prepared for any outcome, not
> having any illusions of control over nature.

Control is an illusion, agreed. But even if you cannot control an outcome, you
can still try to influence it. Also, I don't see how this helps the vast
majority of humanity that has yet to reach a decent living style. Since many
of these areas have yet to build up sufficient educational infrastructure, how
do you expect these countries to be able to prepare? What would a lecture in
"Adaptability" or "Preparedness for Any Situation 101" look like? And since we
already know the situation we're going to be in - why not mitigate the as much
of the damage as we can, while we can?

