Hola
mi Gente,
First,
from our hypocrites wall of shame files: Recently, Hillary Clinton and now
Obama have been fulminating against corporate inversions,
a term for the corporate practice of moving to a lower-tax nation, while
retaining its material operations in its higher-tax country of origin (IOW leeching).
What is interesting is that both Hillary
and Obama pushed for trade pacts that make this particular form of
leeching much easier.
* * *
Obedience
Power abdicates only under the stress
of counter-power.
-- Martin Buber (1878–1965)
-- Martin Buber (1878–1965)
I sometimes work as a public/ motivational
speaker. Most of this work involves other professionals, but a part of my work entails
addressing young people. A colleague once asked me to substitute for her at an
elementary school. The topic was substance abuse and she had a plan all worked
out.
Of course, I discarded her curriculum
and proceeded to wing it. LOL
I’ve always been interested in group dynamics
and the following is how I “teach” about drug abuse. Please do not try this at
home!
I wait until students file into the
class, those that are “late” (really students who are the last to file into the
classroom) are asked to wait outside the door. Before all this, I have taken
the liberty of drawing three lines on the blackboard. One line is obviously
shorter than the rest. It’s not blatantly shorter, but short enough to notice
upon close inspection.
Before I allow the “late” students in,
I address the class and tell them that they will be my co-conspirators in an
experiment on social behavior. I point to the lines and ask, “Which of these
lines is the shortest?” Of course, a few students raise their hands and
correctly identify the shorter line. Once a consensus has been reached, I inform
the students that I am now going to allow the “late” students in and ask them
the same question. However, the class is instructed to state that the shortest
line is not the shortest line, that it is, in fact, the same size as the other
lines.
I allow the “late” students in and
proceed to ask them the same question. Again, the late students are all in
agreement as to which is the shortest line. Then I ask my co-conspirators and
one by one, they all say that none of the lines is shortest, that they are, in
fact, the same size.
I then ask the late students again,
“Are you sure this line is the shortest?” What happens is that one by one, the
late students experience a huge pressure to fall in line with the consensus of
the majority. Some will stick to their guns, but most will fall under the
pressure of the power of the group. At this point, I disclose our little
conspiracy and then turn to the class and say, “This is what peer pressure
feels like.”
The rest of the workshop is dedicated
to exploring those feelings, and how that pressure can be used as a way to do
almost anything against our will -- drugs, sex, violence, voting for neoliberals,
etc.
It’s a powerful way to illustrate the
power of the group. If you ask, most people will tell you that they would never
succumb to the group. However, studies show that the vast majority will obey
authority.
Obedience to Authority
Many of you already know I work with formerly
or currently incarcerated men and women. I came about this work more through
flow than an actual conscious decision. In fact, I was initially reluctant to
work with this population because 1) It’s an extremely challenging group to
work with, and 2) even those motivated to change face huge obstacles to
successful social reintegration.
However, nowhere is this issue of obedience to
authority more clearly illustrated than in prison settings. One experiment, The Stanford Prison Experiment, led by
social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, had to be abandoned because within a
couple of days, normal college students role playing corrections officers were
abusing the students, and the students role-playing the people who were incarcerated
were plotting a prison breakout. Totally engrossing study.
However, the study which I have found
the most interesting is one you may have heard about. Anyone who has taken any
psych 101 course will have heard of Stanley Milgram, who shocked the world in
the early 1960s with his discoveries at Yale while conducting what became known
as the obedience
experiments. In brief, he found that average, presumably normal, groups
of residents of New Haven, Connecticut, would readily inflict very painful, and
probably deadly, electric shocks on an innocent victim whose actions did not
merit such harsh treatment.
The experiment, supposedly dealing with
the effects of punishment on learning, required that the subjects shock a
learner every time he made an error on a verbal learning task, and to increase
the intensity of the shock in 15-voly steps, from 15 to 450 volts, on each
subsequent error. The results: 65% of the subjects continued to obey the
experimenter to the end, simply because he commanded them to.
Groundbreaking and controversial, these
experiments have had enduring relevance, because they demonstrated with
stunning clarity that ordinary individuals could be induced by an authority
figure to act destructively, even in the absence of physical force, and that it
didn’t take evil or aberrant individuals to carry out mass actions that were
immoral and inhumane.
Milgram’s findings have had the effect
of making us more aware of our malleability in the face of social pressure, in
the process making us reshape our individual morality. While I’m sure most of
you reading this would like to think that when confronted with a moral dilemma
we would act in line with our conscience, Milgram’s experiments taught us – in
shocking, irrefutable detail – that, in a concrete situation containing
powerful social pressures, our moral sense can get trampled underfoot.
And this is how evil happens: we allow
it to happen through acquiescence, obedience. We’re always looking for the “monster”
but the monster can be found in the mirror. Obedience to unjust laws and
policies is how that Middle Eastern child today is killed by a drone strike through
no fault of his own and how the Black, Jewish, and First Nation People holocausts
occur. It is through obedience that we allow the mass caging of mostly black and
brown youth in the United States. More to come…
My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery
from civilization…
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