AMERICANS LOVE AUTHORITY

From bmj.com courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

Milgram's interest in the study of obedience partly emerged out of a deep concern with the suffering of fellow Jews at the hands of the Nazis and an attempt to fathom how the Holocaust could have happened. His researches, like Freud's, led to profound revisions in some of the fundamental assumptions about human nature.

Milgram's experiments suggested that it was not necessary to invoke "evil" as a concept to explain why so many ordinary people do terrible things. Instead his work, and that of other social psychologists, suggested that much of what we do, we do automatically. Evil often occurs simply because we do not question our acts enough; instead our rationale arises from our trust in authority figures who are in "charge."

The subjects in Milgram's original series of tests believed that they were part of an experiment dealing with the relation between punishment and learning. An experimenter—who used no coercive powers beyond a stern aura of mechanical and vacant eyed efficiency—instructed participants to shock a learner by pressing a lever on a machine each time the learner made a mistake on a word matching task. Each subsequent error led to an increase in the intensity of the shock in 15 volt increments, from 15 to 450 volts.

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I'm really coming to the conclusion that all the lore about the individuality and rebelliousness of Americans is simply a useful illusion. That is, when I look around for signs of any true individuality, any true rebellion against conventional wisdom, all I see are posers. True, most Americans feel like individuals, feel like they are their own masters, but how can that possibly be true? Most Americans work in jobs that either bore them or that they hate, oftentimes in places that they don't really like that much. Most Americans are in debt or living paycheck-to-paycheck. Most Americans have virtually no influence over the governmental and economic institutions that control society. Most Americans buy what advertisers say they should buy, watch the entertainment that the mass media rams down their throats, and measure their lives in terms of these mass media images and ideas. Where's the individuality? Where's the rebellion? American life is much more like being herded to the packing plant. I admit that there are certainly several kinds of "rebel" archetypes in American culture, from rock and roll bad boy to disdainful art snob, but to what avail? Susan Faludi observes in her book Stiffed that popular culture, controlled by media moguls, has essentially absorbed and channelled in useless directions the archetypal American individualist: the model for today's bad boy is Howard Stern. Like I said, useless.

So in the United States we have this cultural dynamic where millions of people feel like individuals, are seen by others as being individuals, but really aren't individuals, or, at least, their sense of individuality is ultimately without consequence. In reality, we do as we are told as long as we don't feel like it's stepping on our toes. The amazing hyper-patriotism in the wake of 9/11 is a prime example of this. In their abject fear, the vast majority of Americans were totally willing to do exactly what their leaders commanded, to believe exactly what their leaders commanded. Despite the fact that the entire educational establishment serves to focus and strengthen this sense of servility, submissiveness seems to be a preexisting part of human nature, and Americans are no different from anybody else in that respect, which includes Germany under the Nazis. However, human nature is not the same thing as destiny: individualism is also human nature, which is also the root of democracy. That is to say, if our entire culture is geared toward cultivating citizens' desire to obey such that they don't really realize it, American "democracy" has a severe problem.

But then, I've been saying that for years.

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