ABC News report on Milgram's Experiment and follow-up studies confirming that humans are weak-minded when confronted with authority figures.  This is an important feature of human behavior that we tend to ignore, and we do so at our peril. 

This is one reason human systems are NOT self-correcting.  The "Libertarian" model of the strongly rational human, as in Ayn Rand's ideology, is a fantasy that serves to empower elites and aggressive people to exploit others. It is not true.  Peer pressure, social dominants and media elites control far more of our behavior than we are comfortable admitting.