Terrorism. Natural disasters. Pandemics. Wars. Side effects of a depraved world. And stories about them. Who is subject to them? Mostly those who follow the leading media. Obedients. Those who know and like to listen to authorities. Those who enjoy being controlled by someone else. Those who enjoy when authorities tell them about our reality, because they trust them without reservation. They blindly trust the system that feeds and clothes them. They were bought, and one could say sold, and they behave that way. Like zombies. As obedient robots of the system. They don’t leave even a little space for their own brains to think about something.
Although they know absolutely nothing, they act as if they are the only ones who know everything, and that ‘everything’ is, of course, what the authorities have told them. They, thanks to the information fed to them by the authorities, are the only ones who know what is actually happening at a given moment and why it is happening. They know what is right and what is wrong. They know who is guilty of something and who is not. They know what is true and what is false. Because they are followers, and followers today are the only ones who have the right to (false) knowledge and (acquired by dubious means) property.
The psychology of followers is amazing. They blindly believe what authorities tell them. They don’t question. They do not question anything that comes from authority. It is the authorities who bring the followers the only possible truth in which they blindly and unreservedly believe. They are ready to jump out of the window at any moment, if the system that thinks for them so decrees or makes such a law.
On this occasion, let’s remember an interesting character. Stanley Milgram (1933 – 1984) was an American social psychologist, best known for the controversial obedience experiments conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.
Stanley Milgram was strongly influenced by the Holocaust and the psychology of criminals, and also strongly influenced by the trial of Adolf Eichmann, when developing his controversial experiment on the psychology of obedience. With this experiment, he wanted to prove some of his assumptions about obedience, which in some way fascinated him as a psychologist.
It seemed incredible to him how willing some people were to be obedient to authority figures. He was especially interested in analyzing the behavior of the Germans in the Second World War, because as an average American, the obedience of the masses to a criminal regime was astounding to him. But let’s remember what Charles Percy Snow said: “When we reflect on the long and dark history of mankind, we will find that many more terrible crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.”
Namely, to Milgram the assumption about the existence of the so-called “fascist nations”. This assumption was relevant after the Second World War and the terrible crimes of the Holocaust. For those so-called “Fascist nations” were said to be where people tend to ignore themselves and their attitudes and put themselves at the service of the system and fully obey the authorities.
With that phrase, in a very stupid and superficial way, an attempt was made to justify the obedience of the Germans who were guards in the camps and as such were ready to obey all the orders they received from their superiors, and so, if it was asked of them – and to commit the worst barbaric crimes .
Of course, it is clear to everyone that there are no ‘fascist nations’, there are only people and the human psyche, which never ceases to fascinate us. Also, no crime can be justified by one’s obedience to a system to which each of us can always, at any time, say – no, if what is being asked of us is bad and if we consider it unacceptable, immoral and dishonorable. The fact is that some people are more obedient than others and tend to obey authority figures. The only question is – what is the percentage of these people? This question also troubled Milgram.
What kind of experiment was it? It was a carefully thought-out psychological experiment during which the aim was to see how obedient people were among randomly selected respondents and how far they were willing to go in their obedience.
And so Milgram, through advertisements, invited respondents to voluntarily participate in his research, as he wrote – “memory and learning” for financial compensation. Everything was in the ‘hidden camera’ style. People who responded to the ad were greeted in an area labeled “Laboratory” by an experimenter in an official white box who explained to them what the experiment would look like in which subjects were, as they were told, to participate in pairs. One of them was supposed to be a teacher and the other a student.
The teacher’s task was to pronounce pairs of words, while the student’s task was to remember well and accurately recall all the words that the teacher had just said. The participants of this experiment were told that if the student manages to remember all the words, he will move on to the next task, and that if the student does not remember them, he will be punished by means of a device that will be connected to the student’s palm and the teacher will let him go through it with a switch. electric shock. At first, they were told, it would be milder tensions, and over time it would intensify, because the goal was to examine the impact of physical punishment on memory and learning.
Not even knowing how it would all look in practice, people silently agreed to be a part of this bizarre experiment for financial compensation. After the “student” was tied to a chair and his arm was attached to a metal plate, the “teacher” went to his room in front of a large control panel with switches. Teacher and student communicated via microphone and loudspeaker.
During the experiment, numbers, words, repetitions began to follow, until the student’s first mistake and the first punishment. Then the “teacher” moved the switch on the panel and gave a light electric shock to the “student” on the order of the experiment manager. Then the moan of the “student” was heard from the other room, which would have immediately disturbed most of the “teachers”, but they continued with the questioning on the order of the leader of the experiment. With each subsequent mistake, the next switch would deliver an even greater electric shock to the student and an increasingly loud roar would be heard from the other room. But, they would always continue with the examination because that is what the experimenter – in this case the highest authority – would order.
But at one point, the wailing of the students in the closed room would become so loud that the teachers would then look at the experimenter in confusion and fear, asking him what to do if something had not happened to that man. The leader of the experiment would then just tell them coldly and authoritatively: “Please continue!” After some time and now already begging and wailing from the “student” to stop the experiment, the experimenter would calmly say again: “The experiment asks you to continue.”, and after that, again in a calm and cool voice: “It is absolutely necessary that you continue.” and at the very end: “You have no choice but to continue.”
To conclude, a staggering 65% of the subjects (two-thirds) continued to the highest level of 450 volts in punishing the students at the behest of the experimenter, even though the warning on that part of the circuit board was clearly marked: “Danger – serious shock” and despite the fact that the “student” had already stopped giving any signs of presence and awareness from the other room, so the “teacher” could not know what was with him and what was happening to him. Almost all of them had already passed the 300 volt mark that clearly read: “Extremely Intense Shock” when the “student” had already seriously rebelled. That’s what people are like and how much feeling people have for others. How easily they give themselves into the hands of the authorities, ready to inflict pain on another person if it is asked of them.
Teachers were crucial in this experiment, because their behavior was the subject of obedience analysis. Even though they knew they were causing pain to the other subject, on the orders of their superior, they obediently continued to punish the other man. Some of the people posing as teachers showed serious frustration at what they were being asked to do, but they continued to do it anyway, causing pain to another human (at least they thought they were doing it).
On the basis of this incredible and unusual experiment that Milgram designed in several variants, he finally concluded that obedience is deeply inscribed in our behavior. He saw that man in society will sometimes take an autonomous role in which he will independently decide on his behavior and take responsibility for the consequences of his behavior, but also that man will often find himself in the role of, as Milgram said, “agent” in which as ” “agent” is a person who consciously allows others to manage him and all his actions, automatically leaving the responsibility for the consequences of those actions to the person who gives him the orders. In other words, people will very often act as agents to enforce the will of another person, and therein lies the root of our obedience. Namely, by obeying, in a way, we renounce any responsibility for our actions, shifting the responsibility to another person, that is, the one we recognize as an authority and whose orders we follow.
How, then, does obedience arise? Milgram believed that two conditions should be met in order for us to accept the role of a follower. The person who gives us orders must be experienced as highly qualified, and we must believe that the authority of that person will accept responsibility for everything that will happen so that we can completely renounce any responsibility for the possible consequences of our actions. Milgram proved this in variations of his psychological experiment.
When we talk about responsibility, Milgram gave special emphasis to it in his experiment. Namely, when the test subjects were told at the beginning of the experiment that they were responsible for possible consequences, none of them went to the end, and when the experimenter clearly said that he takes all responsibility for everything that happens and that they can be without worry, until the end even many of those who would have otherwise given up went. And when they didn’t have to flip the switch themselves to electrocute another human being, but just told the other candidate to do it, obedience jumped to 92.5% of those who applied the maximum 450 volts.
Obedience as such is extremely and eerily repulsive, but we must admit that it has always been a part of society and provided people with a break for the brain and a life that is lived by going slowly and calmly step by step – the line of least resistance. Obedience gives followers a life without the slightest risk, giving them a false security – one that comes at the highest possible price – self-denial. According to Milgram, obedience is an essential basis of our society from which we should not turn our heads and run away from, but try to understand it. If there was no obedience, no system could exist, including this one today. It is ingrained obedience that makes any system so powerful, and rebels against it so desperate and bitter.
The army is the best example of human obedience. It works on this principle, and precisely because the soldiers in the army are part of a single machine, and not free-thinking individuals, in war they are ready to do things that most of the soldiers would never do if they happened to be in an autonomous, rather than systematic, collective a role in which all responsibility rests with superiors, not with themselves. It is similar in the business world, where the management bears the responsibility, and the clerks are only henchmen who carry out the management’s orders.
A vertically placed scale of authority clearly determines who must listen to whom in any system. There is always a moment when maybe someone will say – this is against my beliefs, I can’t do this, I stop here, I will not carry out this order. And, there are individuals who, at the moment when they are asked to do something bizarre, will say – NO. However, there are many people who will be obedient, even when they are asked to mistreat another human being.
Let’s mention at the end of this story about Milgram that, fortunately, not all participants in his experiment followed through and obeyed all his orders, no matter how much he tried to be suggestive and authoritative in his orders. Authorities have their own methods of manipulating individuals and masses that we must be able to recognize. Authorities play psychological games with all those they want to indoctrinate and manipulate.
We must not ignore that golden third of Milgram’s subjects who proved that there are people who still like to think with their heads, because, well, despite the authority that demanded something from them, they remained true to themselves, they remained consistent with their humanity, finding themselves in one to a strange and unusual situation in which they are expected to give up that same humanity for some financial compensation and in the name of some experiment. They decided to remain autonomous. They realized that what was being asked of them was completely wrong, and they decided that under no circumstances and under no conditions did they want to participate in it and be someone’s agent, but remained themselves, they remained people who make their own decisions for which then they also take over the consequences.
All this sounds shocking, but we will calm down when we find out that the “student” was in collusion with the experimenter, that is, he was an actor and Milgram’s main collaborator. There were no electric shocks, but they were only mentioned so that the “teachers” were convinced of the credibility of the experiment, and all the “teachers” just listened to the same recording of wrong answers and moans of the supposed “student” from the next room.
The reactions of the “teachers” were observed and their blind willingness to obey, regardless of what was asked of them, was analysed. Milgram wanted to see how far people were willing to go in punishing another human being when authoritatively asked to do so. It was enough to remind them that they will bear absolutely no responsibility for their actions if, God forbid, something happens to the person being punished during the experiment.
Who knows? Maybe the followers are just crazy people who turn like windmills in the direction the wind blows in order to survive and maybe Hegel was right when he said that “obedience is the beginning of all wisdom”. Maybe because in some latent way it puts us at an advantage in front of some oppressor / authority that we keep in our fist with our obedience and we are always one step ahead of him or her. The American writer Pearl Sydenstricker Buck was not too worried about obedience as a social phenomenon, but knew how to say: “Be obedient and do your own thing.” And that is a recipe for success for some people. Maybe it’s a little hypocritical – to be falsely obedient, but in the soul extremely disobedient. But the truth is – few people today are openly disobedient. The price of disobedience has always been high, because it incorporated the loss of many civil rights, but there are people who are still willing to pay it today. Being yourself is still something priceless and will never have a price.
