Vince Trav

Paper #2
April 15, 2015
The Mix of Power and Responsibility “With great power comes great responsibility”, is an infamous line from the movie Spiderman, and even though it is cliché, I’ve always found that to be very true. Power and responsibility can be explored through Phillip Zimbardo’s “The Lucifer Effect”, and how his work is related to two major financial scandals of the 21st century, which involve Enron and Bernard Madoff. In both scandals, there were people in a position of power who carried a surmounting level of responsibility, but used their power in very manipulative ways for their own personal gain. The high level executives of Enron and Bernard Madoff were on a rampant quest for money, which was the key driver that led to a lot of destruction. In doing so, both Enron and Madoff acted with major lack of responsibility. It is easy to make the assumption that the aforementioned individuals in both scandals are clearly the one’s that will be held responsible for the mess they made, but it is interesting to see how through their power they shed as much responsibility as they could on other people. Their power also had an effect on a greater scale involving their control over many people, which is relatable to Phillip Zimbardo’s work on human nature.
The film, “Enron: The Smartest Men in Room”, shows how there was such a great lack of responsibility by the people involved because of their determination to make as much money as possible, whether it was legally or illegally, and did so with their position of power. The film portrays “responsibility” in a way that shows the abuse, or lack there of, responsibility starting with the President, CEO, and other high level executives. While showing how a fraudulent accounting method was used, one can see how responsibility was transferred to many different places both internally and