Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (109 page)

And an actor, a confederate of the experimenter, who had appeared to the true subjects to be someone just like them: someone who had answered the same ad for participants in an experiment on learning, and who had lost a (rigged) lottery and been strapped into a chair, along with the electrodes. The true experimental subjects had been given a slight shock from the electrodes, just so that they could see that it worked.

The true subject had been told that the experiment was on the effects of punishment on learning and memory, and that part of the test was to see if it made a difference what sort of person administered the punishment; and that the person strapped to the chair would try to memorize sets of word pairs, and that each time the ‘learner’ got one wrong, the ‘teacher’ was to administer a successively stronger shock.

At the 300-volt level, the actor would stop trying to call out answers and begin kicking at the wall, after which the experimenter would instruct the subjects to treat non-answers as wrong answers and continue.

At the 315-volt level the pounding on the wall would be repeated.

After that nothing would be heard.

If the subject objected or refused to press a switch, the experimenter, maintaining an impassive demeanor and dressed in a gray lab coat, would say ‘Please continue’, then ‘The experiment requires that you continue’, then ‘It is absolutely essential that you continue’, then ‘You have no other choice, you
must
go on’. If the fourth prod still didn’t work, the experiment halted there.

Before running the experiment, Milgram had described the experimental setup, and then asked fourteen psychology seniors what percentage of subjects
they
thought would go all the way up to the 450-volt level, what percentage of subjects would press the last of the two switches marked XXX, after the victim had stopped responding.

The most pessimistic answer had been 3%.

The actual number had been 26 out of 40.

The subjects had sweated, groaned, stuttered, laughed nervously, bitten their lips, dug their fingernails into their flesh. But at the experimenter’s prompting, they had, most of them, gone on administering what they believed to be painful, dangerous, possibly lethal electrical shocks. All the way to the end.

Harry could hear Professor Quirrell laughing, in his mind; the Defense Professor’s voice saying something along the lines of:
Why, Mr. Potter, even I had not been so cynical; I knew men would betray their most cherished principles for money and power, but I did not realize that a stern look also sufficed.

It was dangerous, to try and guess at evolutionary psychology if you weren’t a professional evolutionary psychologist; but when Harry had read about the Milgram experiment, the thought had occurred to him that situations like this had probably arisen many times in the ancestral environment, and that most potential ancestors who’d tried to disobey Authority were dead. Or that they had, at least, done less well for themselves than the obedient. People
thought
themselves good and moral, but when push came to shove, some switch flipped in their brain, and it was suddenly a lot harder to heroically defy Authority than they thought. Even if you could do it, it wouldn’t be easy, it wouldn’t be some effortless display of heroism. You would tremble, your voice would break, you would be afraid; would you be able to defy Authority even then?

Harry blinked, then; because his brain had just made the connection between Milgram’s experiment and what Hermione had done on her first day of Defense class, she’d refused to shoot a fellow student, even when Authority had told her that she must, she had trembled and been afraid but she had still refused. Harry had seen that happen right in front of his own eyes and he still hadn’t made the connection until now…

Harry stared down at the reddening horizon, the Sun was sinking lower, the sky fading, darkening, even if most of it was still blue, soon it would turn to night. The gold and red colors of Sun and sunset reminded him of Fawkes; and Harry wondered, for a moment, if it must be a sad thing to be a phoenix, and call and cry and scream without being heeded.

But Fawkes would never give up, as many times as he died he would always be reborn, for Fawkes was a being of light and fire, and despairing over Azkaban belonged to the darkness just as much as did Azkaban itself.

If you were given a glass half-empty and half-full, then that was the way reality was, that was the truth and it was so; but you still had a choice of how to
feel
about it, whether you would despair over the empty half or rejoice in the water that was there.

Milgram had tried certain other variations on his test.

In the eighteenth experiment, the experimental subject had only needed to call out the test words to the victim strapped into the chair, and record the answers, while someone
else
pressed the switches. It was the same apparent suffering, the same frantic pounding followed by silence; but it wasn’t
you
pressing the switch.
You
just watched it happen, and read the questions to the person being tortured.

37 of 40 subjects had continued their participation in that experiment to the end, the 450-volt end marked ‘XXX’.

And if you were Professor Quirrell, you might have decided to feel cynical about that.

But 3 out of 40 subjects had
refused
to participate all the way to the end.

The Hermiones.

They did exist, in the world, the people who wouldn’t fire a Simple Strike Hex at a fellow student even if the Defense Professor ordered them to do it. The ones who had sheltered Gypsies and Jews and homosexuals in their attics during the Holocaust, and sometimes lost their lives for it.

And were those people from some other species than humanity? Did they have some extra gear in their heads, some additional chunk of neural circuitry, which lesser mortals did not possess? But that was not likely, given the logic of sexual reproduction which said that the genes for complex machinery would be scrambled beyond repair, if they were not universal.

Whatever parts Hermione was made from, everyone had those same parts inside them somewhere…

…well, that was a nice thought but it wasn’t
strictly
true, there was such a thing as literal brain damage, people could
lose
genes and the complex machine could stop working, there were sociopaths and psychopaths, people who lacked the gear to care. Maybe Lord Voldemort had been born like that, or maybe he had known good and yet still chosen evil; at this point it didn’t matter in the slightest. But a
supermajority
of the population ought to be capable of learning to do what Hermione and Holocaust resisters did.

The people who had been run through the Milgram experiment, who had trembled and sweated and nervously laughed as they went all the way to pressing the switches marked ‘XXX’, many of them had written to thank Milgram, afterward, for what they had learned about themselves. That, too, was part of the story, the legend of that legendary experiment.

The Sun had almost sunk below the horizon now, a last golden tip peeking above the faraway tops of trees.

Harry looked at it, that tip of Sun, his glasses were supposed to be proof against UV so he ought to be able to look directly at it without damaging his eyes.

Harry stared directly at it, that tiny fraction of the Light that was not obscured and blocked and hidden, even if it was only 3 parts out of 40, the other 37 parts were there somewhere. The 7.5% of the glass that was full, which proved that people really did care about water, even if that force of caring within themselves was too often defeated. If people truly didn’t care, the glass would have been truly empty. If everyone had been like You-Know-Who inside, secretly cleverly selfish, there would have been no resisters to the Holocaust at all.

Harry looked at the sunset, on the second day of the rest of his life, and knew that he had switched sides.

Because he couldn’t believe in it any more, he couldn’t really, not after going to Azkaban. He couldn’t do what 37 out of 40 people would vote for him to do. Everyone might have inside them what it took to be Hermione, and someday they might learn; but
someday
wasn’t
now
, not here, not today, not in the real world. If you were on the side of 3 out of 40 people then you weren’t a political majority, and Professor Quirrell had been right, Harry would not bow his head in submission when that happened.

There was a sort of awful appropriateness to it. You shouldn’t go to Azkaban and come back having not changed your mind about anything important.

So is Professor Quirrell right, then?
asked Slytherin.
Leaving out whether he’s good or evil, is he
right?
Are you, to them, whether they know it or not, their next Lord? We’ll just leave out the Dark part, that’s him being cynical again. But is it your intention now to rule? I’ve got to say, that makes even
me
nervous.

Do you think you can be trusted with power?
said Gryffindor.
Isn’t there some sort of rule that people who want power shouldn’t have it? Maybe we should make Hermione the ruler instead.

Do you think you’re fit to run a society and not have it collapse into total chaos inside of three weeks flat?
said Hufflepuff.
Imagine how loudly Mum would scream if she’d heard you’d been elected Prime Minister, now ask yourself, are you sure she’s wrong about that?

Actually,
said Ravenclaw,
I have to point out that all this political stuff sounds overwhelmingly boring. How about if we leave all the electioneering to Draco and stick to science? It’s what we’re actually good at, and that’s been known to improve the human condition too, y’know.

Slow down,
thought Harry at his components,
we don’t have to decide everything right now. We’re allowed to ponder the problem as fully as possible before coming to a solution.

The last part of the Sun sank below the horizon.

It was strange, this feeling of not quite knowing who you were, which side you were on, of having
not already made up your mind
about something as major as that, there was an unfamiliar sensation of freedom in it…

And that reminded him of what Professor Quirrell had said to his last question, which reminded him of Professor Quirrell, which made it hard once more to breathe, started that burning sensation in Harry’s throat, sent his thoughts around that loop of the climbing spiral once again.

Why was he so sad, now, whenever he thought of Professor Quirrell? Harry was used to knowing himself, and he didn’t know why he felt so sad…

It felt like he’d lost Professor Quirrell forever, lost him in Azkaban, that was how it felt. As surely as if the Defense Professor had been eaten by Dementors, consumed in the empty voids.

Lost him! Why did I lose him? Because he said Avada Kedavra and there was in fact a perfectly good reason even though I didn’t see it for a couple of hours? Why can’t things go back to the way they were?

But then it hadn’t
been
the Avada Kedavra. That might have played a part in irreversibly collapsing a structure of rationalizations and flinches and carefully not thinking about certain things. But it hadn’t been the Avada Kedavra, that hadn’t been the disturbing thing that Harry had seen.

What did I see…?

Harry looked at the fading sky.

He’d seen Professor Quirrell turn into a hardened criminal while facing the Auror, and the apparent change of personalities had been effortless, and complete.

Another woman had known the Defense Professor as ‘Jeremy Jaffe’.

How many different people are you, anyway?

I cannot say that I bothered keeping count.

You couldn’t help but wonder…

…whether ‘Professor Quirrell’ was just one more name on the list, just one more person that had been
turned into
, made up in the service of some unguessable goal.

Harry would always be wondering now, every time he talked to Professor Quirrell, if it was a mask, and what motive was behind that mask. With every dry smile, Harry would be trying to see what was pulling the levers on the lips.

Is that how other people will start thinking of me, if I get too Slytherin? If I pull off too many plots, will I never be able to smile at anyone again, without them wondering what I really mean by it?

Maybe there was some way to restore a trust in surface appearances and make a normal human relationship possible again, but Harry couldn’t think of what it might be.

That was how Harry had lost Professor Quirrell, not the person, but the… connection…

Why did that hurt so much?

Why did it feel so lonely, now?

Surely there were other people, maybe better people, to trust and befriend? Professor McGonagall, Professor Flitwick, Hermione, Draco, not to mention Mum and Dad, it wasn’t like Harry was
alone…

Only…

A choking sensation grew in Harry’s throat as he understood.

Only Professor McGonagall, Professor Flitwick, Hermione, Draco, they all of them sometimes knew things that Harry didn’t, but…

They did not excel above Harry
within
his own sphere of power; such genius as they possessed was not like his genius, and his genius was not like theirs; he might look upon them as peers, but not look
up
to them as his
superiors.

None of them had been, none of them could ever be…

Harry’s mentor…

That was who Professor Quirrell had been.

That was who Harry had lost.

And the manner in which he had lost his first mentor might or might not allow Harry to ever get him back. Maybe someday he would know all Professor Quirrell’s hidden purposes and the doubts between them would go away; but even if that seemed possible, it didn’t seem very probable.

There was a gust of wind, outside Hogwarts, it bent the empty trees, rippled the lake whose heart was still unfrozen, made a whispering sound as it slid past the window that looked upon the half-twilit world, and Harry’s thoughts wandered outward for a time.