On the Swiss border with Austria in 1938, a police captain refuses to enforce a law barring Jewish refugees from entering his country. In the Balkans half a century later, a Serb from the war-blasted city of Vukovar defies his superiors in order to save the lives of Croats. At the height of the Second Intifada, a member of Israel's most elite military unit informs his comm On the Swiss border with Austria in 1938, a police captain refuses to enforce a law barring Jewish refugees from entering his country. In the Balkans half a century later, a Serb from the war-blasted city of Vukovar defies his superiors in order to save the lives of Croats. At the height of the Second Intifada, a member of Israel's most elite military unit informs his commander he doesn't want to serve in the occupied territories. Fifty years after Hannah Arendt examined the dynamics of conformity in her seminal account of the Eichmann trial, Beautiful Souls explores the flipside of the banality of evil, mapping out what impels ordinary people to defy the sway of authority and convention.

Dear students. As part of your orientation to Brown, you will participate in a seminar about a book that you and all new Brown students will read this summer. The book we have chosen is Beautiful Souls: The. Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary. Times, by Eyal Press '93. Eyal Press's Beaufiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times. Possessed numberless beautiful things; wishing I had the time to redecorate on a whim, etc. On realized that the essay—especially the 'free-form' informal essay—was my chosen genre.

Through the dramatic stories of unlikely resisters who feel the flicker of conscience when thrust into morally compromising situations, Eyal Press shows that the boldest acts of dissent are often carried out not by radicals seeking to overthrow the system but by true believers who cling with unusual fierceness to their convictions. Drawing on groundbreaking research by moral psychologists and neuroscientists, Beautiful Souls culminates with the story of a financial industry whistleblower who loses her job after refusing to sell a toxic product she rightly suspects is being misleadingly advertised. At a time of economic calamity and political unrest, this deeply reported work of narrative journalism examines the choices and dilemmas we all face when our principles collide with the loyalties we harbor and the duties we are expected to fulfill.

The brevity of the book (183 pages of text consisting of an introductory prologue, four case studies, and a brief epilogue + notes) belies the expansiveness of the material and how much reflection the book deserved. (In my case I needed a respite after each chapter to let things sink in.) I pulled out a quote that, although not Eyal Press's own prose, illustrates a major conclusion: 'Conformists are often though to be protective of social interests, keeping quiet for the group. [.] By contrast, The brevity of the book (183 pages of text consisting of an introductory prologue, four case studies, and a brief epilogue + notes) belies the expansiveness of the material and how much reflection the book deserved. (In my case I needed a respite after each chapter to let things sink in.) I pulled out a quote that, although not Eyal Press's own prose, illustrates a major conclusion: 'Conformists are often though to be protective of social interests, keeping quiet for the group.

[. Ativa At Mc600 Manual Lawn there. ] By contrast, dissenters tend to be seen as selfish individualists, embarking on projects of their own. But in an important sense, the opposite is closer to the truth. Much of the time, dissenters benefit others, while conformists benefit themselves.'

That's legal scholar Cass Sunstein. Here's Press: 'In every society, there are rebels and iconoclasts who don't share the moral code to which most of their fellow citizens subscribe -- who delight in thumbing their noses at whatever authority figure will pay them mind.

The resisters featured in these pages are not among them. Their problem was not that they airily dismissed the values and ideals of the societies they lived in or the organizations they belonged to, buth that they regarded them as inviolable.' He's saying that these 'beautiful souls' ( yafeh nefesh in Hebrew) are those former true believers who didn't go looking for trouble or sought occasions on which to rebel for a greater cause - they were people who held their country/organization/rule of law to a very high standard and then were compelled to go against orders, or lie to save lives, or blow the whistle after the entity to which they devotedly belonged violated its own rules. Which of course leads me to reconsider my pride in assuming that I am an outlier - a natural dissenter who would stand up to authority led by my moral conscience.