OBEDIENCE, PUNISHMENT, AND POWER
OBEDIENCE
The well-known psychologist Erich Fromm wrote an essay, "On Disobedience," published in his book On Disobedience and Other Essays. Fromm wrote that "human history began with an act of disobedience." He was referring to Adam and Eve whose act of disobedience in eating the apple of knowledge set them "free and opened their eyes." Obedience is the root of much evil. Fromm wrote:
"Man has continued to evolve by acts of disobedience. Not only was his spiritual development possible only because there were men who dared say no to the powers that be in the name of their conscience or their faith, but also his intellectual development was dependent on the capacity for being disobedient - disobedient to authorities who tried to muzzle new thoughts and to the authority of long-established opinions which declared a change to be nonsense.
... [W]hile we are living technically in the Atomic Age, the majority of men - including most of those who are in power - still live emotionally in the Stone Age; ... while our mathematics, astronomy, and the natural sciences are of the twentieth century, most of our ideas about politics, the state, and society lag far behind the age of science. If mankind commits suicide it will be because people will obey those who command them to push the deadly buttons; because they will obey the archaic passions of fear, hate, and greed; because they will obey obsolete clichés of State sovereignty and national honor."
Fromm continues to say that in order to disobey we need courage, and the capacity for courage depends on our state of development. When we are fully developed individuals, having "emerged from mother's lap and father's commands," and having acquired the ability to think and feel for ourselves, then we have the courage to say "no" to political coercion.
In Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View Stanley Milgram writes:
"Obedience, because of its very ubiquitousness, is easily overlooked as a subject of inquiry in social psychology. But without an appreciation of its role in shaping human action, a wide range of significant behavior cannot be understood. For an act carried out under command is, psychologically, of a profoundly different character than action which is spontaneous.
The person who, with inner conviction, loathes stealing, killing, and assault may find himself performing these acts with relative ease when commanded by authority. Behavior that is unthinkable in an individual who is acting on his own may be executed without hesitation when carried out under orders.
... Obedience, as a determinant of behavior, is of particular relevance to our time. It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have been originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.
... Though such prescriptions as "Thou shalt not kill" occupy a pre-eminent place in the moral order, they do not occupy a correspondingly intractable position in human psychic structure. A few changes in newspaper headlines, a call from the draft board, orders from a man with epaulets, and men are led to kill with little difficulty. Even the forces mustered in a psychology experiment will go a long way toward removing the individual from moral controls. Moral factors can be shunted aside with relative ease by a calculated restructuring of the informational and social field."
Milgram conducted some experiments to determine the degree to which people are obedient to authority. In a typical experiment there is a "teacher," a "learner" and the "authority" (experimenter) who conducts the experiment. The teacher asks a series of questions to the learner. If the learner gives an incorrect answer the teacher presses a button that supposedly administers an electric shock to the learner. Actually no shock is involved, but the learner is an actor who pretends that he suffers pain from the shock.
There is a series of buttons to administer a range of shocks, starting at 15 volts and going up to 450 volts in 15-volt increments. Every time the learner makes a mistake the teacher is to administer the next higher level of shock. The teacher is told that high levels of shock will hurt the learner and may even kill him.
Prior to a typical experiment people were asked what they thought would be the maximum shock applied. Among 39 psychiatrists, one predicted that the strongest shock would be 300 volts, two predicted 195 volts. All the other predictions were lower. Among 31 college students, the highest prediction by one student was 210 volts. Among middle-class adults, the highest prediction by three people was 300 volts.
In the actual experiments, generally, about two-thirds of teachers administered the maximum shock, despite the learner's screams of pain and demands that the experiment be stopped. In some variations of the experiment over 90 percent of the teachers administered the maximum shock. The degree of obedience to authority was vastly higher than anyone expected.
Milgram concluded from his experiments that obedience to authority is a "danger to human survival inherent in our make-up." His experiments revealed something very dangerous:
"[T]he capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures.
This is a fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival...
Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority."
My conclusion: It is people whose minds were severely damaged by compulsory state education, who easily succumb to authority. The cognitive connection between their behavior and the consequences of their behavior was greatly weakened in school. It is these dependent, obedience-trained, powerless weaklings who submit to authority.
In any case, obedience must be just about the greatest of all evils. Obedience is the surrender of personal power.
Milgram concludes his book by quoting from an article by Harold J. Laski, titled "The Dangers of Obedience":
"... [C]ivilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain. Within the ambit of that definition, those of us who heedlessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men."
America - the United States -was born through a brave act of disobedience. The signers of the Declaration of Independence risks their lives and their fortunes. They could have been hanged for treason.
Disobedience creates civilization. Obedience causes its collapse.
THE NATURE OF THE COMMAND
Elias Canetti has written a penetrating analysis of power called Crowds and Power. He says about commands:
"An action performed as the result of a command is different from all other actions. It is experienced and remembered as something alien, something not really our own."
Canetti makes these points about commands:
"Those most beset by commands are children. It is a miracle that they ever survive the pressure and do not collapse under the burden of the commands laid on them by their parents and teachers. That they in turn, and in equally cruel form, should give identical commands to their children is as natural as mastication or speech. What is surprising is the way in which commands are retained intact and unaltered from earliest childhood, ready to be used again as the next generation provides victims... No child, not even the most ordinary, forgets or forgives a single one of the commands inflicted on it.
... What spurs men on to achievement is the deep urge to be rid of the commands once laid on them.
Only commands which have been carried out leave their sting lodged in the obeyer. Commands which have been evaded need not be stored; the 'free' man is not the man who rids himself of commands after he has received them, but the man who knows how to evade them in the first place. But the man who takes longest to rid himself of them, or who never achieves it, is undoubtedly the least free."
PUNISHMENT
Solving the "punishment problem" is no easy task. Here are some considerations:
In Actualizations: You Don't Have to Rehearse to Be Yourself Stewart Emery wrote:
"The first postulate of behavior modification is this: If somebody does something for which he or she receives positive acknowledgement, or positive reinforcement, he is more likely to repeat the behavior...
... [I]f you do something and nobody takes any notice of it at all, you are less likely to do it again. In other words, any behavior that is consistently ignored will ultimately cease. (... [T]hese are all tendencies, not absolutes.)
... If you do something and you are punished - negatively acknowledged - the results of the negative acknowledgment are unpredictable, except under circumstances wherein the only kind of acknowledgment you ever get is negative; then negative acknowledgment will lead to a repetition of the behavior... If, when you were growing up, the only time you got acknowledged was when you did something that your parents did not like, then the administration of negative acknowledgment, or punishment, led you to continue to repeat behavior that led to your getting punished... Let's look at the consequences.
It is most obvious in our penal system. People are in jail because they did something that got negatively acknowledged. The reason they do things that get negatively acknowledged is that they think that is the only way they can ever get any kind of attention. The more we give them negative acknowledgment, the more negative behavior they will manifest."
My suggestions for solving the "punishment problem":
Humans first attempt to express their power creatively. If such attempts fail repeatedly, they experience themselves as powerless. They may feel helpless and hopeless, and become depressed. What they experience is that they cannot make a positive difference in their own lives or in the world. A cognitive breakdown occurs between their actions and the results they produce. Mentally and intellectually they cease to understand the connections between their behavior and the consequences of their behavior. Then they express their power destructively.
This phenomenon is at the root of practically all individual and societal problems.
Understanding this phenomenon and its implications leads to the solution of practically all individual and societal problems."
BASIC PRINCIPLES FOR CIVILIZATION
(1) Individuals own their own lives, minds, and bodies, and
may do with them anything that doesn't violate the equal rights
of others.
(2) Individuals have the right to own property.
(3) No individual or group has the right to initiate fraud,
force, or violence against another or his/her property.
(4) Individuals have a right to communicate and to not
communicate (freedom of speech and right to privacy).
(5) Individuals have the right to associate and to enter into
agreements and contracts. For a contract to be valid it needs to
be entered into knowingly, voluntarily, and intentionally.
(6) Individuals have the right to produce and exchange, and own
the products of their labor. No individual or group has a right
to another's production, or property, or any part thereof.
(7) For a crime to occur there has to be a damaged party (corpus
delecti); there are no so-called "victimless
crimes."
(8) In criminal trials, the accused has a right to trial by jury.
(9) Juries have the right and the duty to judge both the facts
and the law (jury nullification). (Chapter Twelve).
(10) In the absence of coercion, order and cooperation develop
spontaneously. Leadership by example is more beneficial than
leadership by force, violence, compulsion, or fear.
(11) These principles apply, irrespective of age, race,
birthplace, gender, or sexual preference.
(12) For a right to be valid its exercise may not impose a
positive obligation on another. A valid right does not depend on
anyone else doing anything; it only depends on others not taking
certain actions. Any supposed "right" that would impose
a positive obligation on another or others is null and void.
MAXIMIZING PERSONAL POWER
These principles are designed to maximize personal power. They basically consist of "don'ts" rather than "musts." And the "don'ts" effectively say, "Don't do anything that reduces the individual power of another."
But personal power does not really come from without. It comes from within. Power granted by another is of some use. The problem is that whoever has the power to grant power, also has the power to take away power. Individuals have to develop their personal power. Here are some steps you can take to increase your power:
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