The "Milgram experiment" (look it up, it’s interesting)
was a series of tests done at Yale University to see how willing people are to
Obey someone in authority. In the tests, a man (who was actually an
actor) was put in a booth, and the unknowing test subject was set up as a
questioner. The test subject would ask questions of the person in the
booth and if the person in the booth got the questions wrong they would get
shocked, with each wrong answer causing the shock to be worse than the last
one. Next to the questioner would be the authority figure. As the
test was conducted the questioner, at the urging of the person playing the
authority figure would continue shocking the person in the booth even when the
person in the booth begged for the test to be over due to the pain of the
shocks they were receiving (the shocks were of course fake as the person in the
booth is an actor, but the test subject has no knowledge of this). At
some point the actor would stop responding to indicate they were passed out, at
which time the authority figure would urge more shocks because of the failure
to respond to the questioning. Our test subjects continued to shock the
passed out person and then the person in the booth (our actor) let out a
dramatic scream to indicate the test subject had shocked them to death.
Surprisingly the test results show that we
human beings have a tendency to listen to authority figures. Of the 40
subjects, 26 administered the lethal dose, but all subjects in the course of
the experiment at some point questioned the experiment and apparently exhibited
emotional distress. Milgram would repeat the experiment with some
colleges around the world with similar results (he and his colleges even tried
it in groups of people). Basically the reason why the Germans obeyed the
NAZI's is because of this psychological flaw that we have. Now the
question is, are we being told what to believe even by people who want the best
for us?
I say yes. President Obama, Hillary
Clinton, Donald Trump and those in power have the same authority and position
that many of the world’s greatest heroes and villains had. When Obama
says Republicans are bad, how many think long enough to question him?
When Trump says to ban Muslims for a time, how many cheer? We
allowed concentration camps to exist in America during WWI and WWII for those
people we perceived as our enemies (German, Italian, and Japanese concentration
camps to name a few). And do you know who gave the order for those to
exist, President Woodrow Wilson, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
People in authority ordered us to do things even though at the most basic
level we knew it was wrong. President Bush and our Republican and
Democrat lawmakers ordered the spying on American citizens via the Patriot act.
And we blindly follow these authority figures by justifying our actions
by citing things like safety, comfort and at times even greed.
Final Thought: We have a problem. Maybe we
listen too much to authority. On top of this, we give radicals like Trump
and Hillary our tacit consent to seize property, ban our freedoms and harm
individual groups simply because it is convenient. I think we rely on
them so much that we think they are indispensable. Truth is the old boss
is the same as the new boss and is the same as every other boss. They are
expendable and our politicians don't even realize that is what they were
designed to be with respect to being public servants. It is time we
questioned everything and stop listening to people who tell us to throw away
our morals and our ethics.
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