5.06.25. The past isprologueJust...
W Shakespeare Thunderstorms (for Stanisław Barańczak, Wydawnictwo Znak, Kraków 1999) Antonio, 1 of the drama characters, says at 1 point:
We barely lost, though fate
Some of us threw on the phase of this island
Actors in a play where past
It's a prologue only, and the remainder of the action
It's up to both of us. (Act 2, scene 1, p. 58, discrimination kw).
Here's a small reminder:Past – prehistory of events shown in Thunderstorms: The Renaissance, Italy, the Duke of Milan, Prospero, deals with the taste of studies, including magic. He leaves the prose of immediate regulation to his brother. Brother Antonio, however, wants to do so in his own name. In agreement with King Naples, Alonz, he organizes a coup. He takes over the principality, Naples pays the Tribute, Prospera with three-year-old daughter Miranda has him flushed into the old boat to sea. King of Naples's adviser, noble Gonzalo, commissioned to carry out the full action, provides Prosper with any food, clothing, pots, and any books for this boat. Prospero happily reaches an island that has only 1 resident, a boy of the dead witch Sykoraks, exiled in time from Algiers for practicing black magic. Prospero will call him Caliban. It will besides turn out that she has been trapped in the pine for 12 years by the same witch her erstwhile assistant with magical abilities – Ariel. Prospero will get him out of this prison.
Right action – close past and present: Everything happens on the island, Prospero subjugated both Caliban and Ariel. Caliban becomes his slave, Ariel serves him in exchange for the promise of future freedom. It's been 12 years. Miranda is 15, Caliban most likely 24, Prospero 45. A ship flows close from Tunis, where Alonzo sails with his boy Ferdinand and his brother Sebastian and Antonio, taking over the title of Prince of Milan. There's Gonzalo. They return from Tunis, from the wedding of Alonz's daughter, Claribella, issued for African Maura. Prospero with Ariel's aid creates a magical storm, traps and distracts the ship's passengers on the island. He's making them crazy. Convinced that their ship sank, they are to experience madness, horror to account for their own past and then meet straight with the large magician. Actually, they do things differently. Gonzalo dreams of utopia, Antonio and Sebastian are determined to plan the future, i.e. the fresh crime, Ferdinand falls in love with Miranda, Alonzo despairs of the alleged failure of his son, their servants get drunk and, utilizing Caliban's help, prepare their own villains. Prospero, however, controls everything and directs everything. In the final, he regains his princely throne, although Antonio inactive does not look remorseful. He besides secures Prospero emotionally and dynically his daughter, his enemies forgive, Ariel releases. It announces a joint return to Milan.
Epilogue: Prospero breaks his magic wand, a sign of his art.
As quoted above, Antoni’s message signals, as can be seen, the eternal problem of the functioning of various communities. Here's any Antonio and any Sebastian waiting for a favorable chance to gain power, control the surrounding world, and prosecute their own ambitions, setting it up according to their ideas.
Antoni's thought could be addressed, without looking far enough, to our current, pre-election and post-election political situation, and as a consequence give thought to the possible answers to any rather fundamental questions about this situation. Including questions about the characteristics of the distant and not yet rather distant past as a prologue to what the Polish future seems to find after the election, or alternatively a imagination of that future. In particular, whether this imagination is not sometimes about a complete upheaval and, as a result, about a return to the distant past, erstwhile during the election evening, the President-elect compared the results of the current elections with the transformation that the 1989 elections started.
In this context, it might be worth looking for a small distance, for example, in a book Krzysztof VargaA laughing dog (Black Publishing, Beef 2025). Her narrator, frustrated to the end after divorce with his wife Wojciech Borsuk, diligently teaches his dog Ziutka how to live and how to perceive the surrounding world. In an incorruptible monologue, he tells the dog, his only friend, his own past and “the fact about this country, about its inhabitants, the fact about the culture of everyday life, social life, tradition and modernity” (A laughing dog, p. 40). At any point he says:
I remember with affection, Ziutku, the 1990s not due to the fact that I was young at the time, but due to the fact that I was stupid.
There was a large modernization, a gigantic technological leap, a civilizational leap, but besides a intellectual leap, driven by optimism, which is fundamentally arrogance. Arrogance comes from forgetting that the past of humanity is not eternal progress, endless enlightenment, and unrestrained growth. From today's perspective, I am reasoning of the 1990s with exasperation and indulgence for that self, foolishly enjoying his own future. Truly, enjoying the future is simply a sign of complete insanity. But then we had the right to be idiots welcoming the 21st century with the hope that all the problems would be solved due to the fact that man had reached specified a level of evolution that he was simply incapable to screw up the planet anymore. Meanwhile, it turns out we're dumber than the stupidest Pekinese.
[...]
Yes, Ziotka, we choked on our freedom, we prided ourselves on the fact that in a few, well, 10 years, we leapt through an era. We have done what they have not done, and have not experienced the erstwhile generations: we are fresh men, better, wiser and happier. We are superhumans of the fresh wonderful world, superhumans rising by respective heads above our ancestors possessed by prejudices, superstitions and diseases to which modern medicine has found excellent remedia. We are a race of masters, who were the first to regulation full over the forces of nature. In particular, we, inhabiting this country cursed by the non-existent God – were filled with complacency that we became actual Europeans, citizens of the world, free tenants with unlimited opportunities and unfettered elections. We have become so wise, weighed, open, and progressive, and from this we have become completely stupid, forgetting that we are only washed, dressed, painted Neanderthals, as we have been for centuries (A laughing dog, pp. 127-128).
Involuntary reflections match here Martin the King We were stupid. (Red and Czarne Publishing, Warsaw 2015) is simply a certificate of intellectual accounting with Polish post-transformative democracy. In view of fresh events, the thought that everything has been overturned...
But if you return to the communicative shown in Thunderstorms, It would should be said that the real reason for recalling present Records Shakespeare is not our presidential election, but a fresh book published in the Polish translation and the fact that 1 of its authors spent almost his full professional life dealing with the psychology of evil.
This book is Philip G.Zimbardo and Robert L. JohansonShakespeare and psychology. What does the large works of Shakespeare tell us about human nature? (interview: Dorota Przygucka, PWN, Warsaw 2025). Its authors mention to Antonio's message quoted at the beginning, formulating the main thesis of his work. That's what they say:
Shakespeare made intellectual observations in a planet that underwent a transformation from medieval to modern. He identified intellectual habits and patterns of human behaviour that will later form the basis of modern psychology. Taking specified an understanding, you can say that Antonio with Thunderstorms predicted psychology erstwhile he stated: “The past is simply a prologue” (Shakespeare and Psychology, p. XXI).
Of the depth and focus of human reflection and society, the creations of Shakespearean art characters have, of course, been written over the past 4 100 years dozens of works, which constantly confirm the actuality and universality of these works (see, for example, these works). Records The text entitled The planet as a theatre of 29.08.2024). In addition, all theatrical staging requires an analysis of the characters in it. However, the speciality of Zimbardo and Johnson's position on these issues is that they are looking at Shakespeare's creations from the professional position of "psychologists from the future", discovering in Shakespeare a "psychologist from the past", so from a time erstwhile no 1 had even dreamed of psychology as a science, erstwhile there was no technological investigation in this field, and there was no specialized language for naming phenomena characterized by human behaviour and actions. In the introduction to the work of Zimbardo and Johnson, we read:
While writing this book, we discovered that Shakespeare and psychology share interests in 4 crucial areas:
- Heritage or the environment: what affects us more, nature or culture, biology or experience?
- Person or situation: Is our answers to fresh situations due to interior factors specified as personality traits and biology, or external factors specified as the social requirements in which we are in?
- What is the nature of the human mind: Do conscious or unconscious intellectual processes origin us?
- Reason or emotion: or as homo sapiens We evolved into rational beings that only sometimes origin emotions? Or are we emotional creatures who want to be rational, but who are guided by reason only occasionally? (Shakespeare and psychology...(p. X).
According to this order, the findings of authors are presented in the published investigation book. They could be considered a kind of guide to Shakespeare’s work. A guide that helps to discover the behaviour of the protagonists of subsequent dramas as examples responding to the above questions. "To this day, for example, we will read in it – no better description of the psychopath was created than Richard III, a more moving image of dementia than in King Lear. nor the equally memorable illustration of obsessive-compulsive disorders than woman Macbeth's attempts to wash off blood stains" (Shakespeare and psychology..., p. VII). You could besides usage the categories indicated by Zimbardo and Johnson as tools to analyse our various election decisions...
The fact that the co-author of the signaled work is Philip Zimbardo (1933-2024), provides an additional chance to callback another book due to the expression “the past is only the beginning”, namely Lucifer's effect. Why do good men do evil? (crossed Anna Cybulko and Others, PWN, Warsaw 2008).
Zimbardo, as has already been mentioned, has devoted much of his professional career "to learning the psychology of evil – violence, anonymity, aggression, vandalism, torture and terrorism". Problems Lucifer Effect He said:
The structure of this book is somewhat unusual. It begins with a chapter in which the subject of the transformation of human character is presented, erstwhile good men and angels are able to do bad, wicked, even devilish things. This raises the fundamental question of how well we truly know ourselves, whether we can confidently foretell what we would be able to do or what we would never do in completely fresh circumstances for us. Like God’s favourite angel Lucifer, can we besides succumb to temptation to do to others what is unimaginable? (Lucifer's effect..., p. 18).
Zimbardo recalls in this book an experimentation aimed at examining obedience to Stanley Milgram's authority, thoroughly describing the incredible past of the alleged Stanford Prison Experiment, in which he himself participated in the appointed function of prison director, and as all another participants of the experimentation were subject to the force of the situation so far as it was essential to halt experimenting before the prescribed time, and studies of this kind were highly unethical as a consequence were banned. However, the human behaviour observed during these experiments was confirmed by events rather unexperimental. For example, what happened in the Iraqi prison in Abu Ghraib. Zimbardo besides writes about this, stressing that all specified situations prove to be expeditions to the core of the darkness of human nature. Conrad could be a witness. Outside Lucifer's effect can besides be read in the book Zimbardo in Conversation with Daniel Hartwig (in turn Olga Siara, PWN, Warsaw 2019).
In any case, investigation into both the sites where these events occurred and the persons active and the situations active and, above all, the investigation of the strategy which organises and supervises certain activities are crucial to the essence of the reported events. The strategy sets out various reliances, and these give strength to institutions and circumstantial situations. These trap people into the traps of evil, offering them in the way, would seem to be a insignificant manipulation of a kind of "faust contract":
You'll be safe from evil if you quit for this power part of your freedom, whether individual or civic. specified a mephistofelian temptress will convince that his ability to save you depends on whether all men make insignificant sacrifices, denouncing this small law or this small freedom (Lucifer's effect..., p. 435).
In the Last Chapter Lucifer Effect Zimbardo explicitly proposes:
For the last time, let's specify Person, Situation and System. individual (Person) is an actor on the phase of life whose freedom of conduct is determined by its (or its) structure – genetic, biological, physical and mental. Situation (Situation) is simply a behavioral context which thanks to its rewarding and normative functions has the ability to give meaning and identity to roles and position of actor. strategy (System) consists of officers (Agents) and institutions (agent) whose ideology, values and power make situations and dictate the roles and expectations of the approved behaviour of actors in its spheres of influence (Lucifer's effect..., p. 429).
All of this shows how hard it is within a group or society as a full to keep the independency of reasoning and acting. Zimbardo adds, however, that in all the situations analysed "there were always respective people – a number – who did not give way". And then...
Rather than distance ourselves from those deceived by attributing to them negative dispositional qualities – stupidity, naivety – we request to realize why and how people like us were so easy brought into the field. Then we will be able to defy and disseminate cognition of methods of resisting fraud and hoaxes" (Lucifer's effect..., p. 430)
As a result, Zimbardo presents a ten-point program of resisting undesirable social influences and developing at the same time individual resilience and civic virtue (Lucifer's effect..., pp. 431-436. This programme is worth examining due to civic education, including school education. Here we add that in time the author Lucifer Effect worked with teachers from different countries, including Poland, as part of the programme under the name The plan of a heroic imagination. This task aimed, among another things, at learning to defy violence, to act in hard situations or to say no. present it would surely cover, and in any case it should surely include situations concerning digital media dependence, including problems of net hatred and dealing with it, as well as examples of reversal of meanings and mechanisms of political brainwashing, so actions that, for example, are able to convince many people within 5 months that extortion constitutes de facto A Samaritan gesture...
