Connecting it all/Wrapping it up

Eliminate that these examples are all technically separate – by putting all these pieces together to form one big picture, it is easier to realize that the dangers of obedience are ones that everyone must look out for.  The effects of blind obedience aren’t something that one will only hear about; they aren’t just rough patches that have occurred in history.  Every person has the potential of falling into anything with the mindset that it won’t affect them.

            Being aware of the effects of blind obedience to authority helps to prevent it from happening.  Having the knowledge and understanding that anyone is susceptible to the potential dangers of compliance heighten awareness of ones actions.  This heightened awareness means that when in a situation that demands you to obey, the option of resisting exists because you are at least aware that you’re in a situation with a choice.  Without being aware of what is even going on, how would one ever be able to resist?

            Examples thus far have been extreme ones.  It is true that we aren’t faced with such enormous and extreme cases of obedience every day.  But that also doesn’t mean that no such messages to obey exist in our every day lives.  Advertising in the media affects almost all of us multiple times each day.  Sometimes these advertisements have an authority figure instructing you on what to do: “give blood”, “vote for this candidate”, etc.

            All of these external influencers can only get under our skin if we let them.  The only way we can avoid blindly going along and listening if to know they exist in the first place.  I know throughout the research of this subject I have had a heightened awareness.  I can only hope the same for others.  The consciousness of our actions and the way we behave is the first step towards doing, not wishing, what we feel is right when in a demanding situation.

Uncanny Parallels

“An apparently important influence on Manson, in both precept and example, was a dead man: Adolf Hitler.  Manson looked up to Hitler and spoke of him often.”

– Quote from Helter Skelter

“Hitler had the best answer to everything….. He was a tuned-in guy who leveled the karma of the Jews.”

- Charles Manson

In his book, Bugliosi revealed numerous daunting similarities shared between Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler:

-          Both were vegetarians

-          Both little men

-          Both rejected artists

-          Both wanderers

-          Both liked animals more than people

-          Both racist and there is evidence that both had this fearful obsession that thy contained blood of those they hated – Hitler obsessed with the fear of having a Jewish ancestor & Manson may have believed his father was black (according to prison records)

-          Both had a deep hatred towards society possibly caused by the psychological scars both suffered from in their youth

-          Both had names they referred to those they hated as (Manson called those he hated “pigs”; Hitler called those he hated “Schweinehund”).

-          Both men were incredible influencers;

-          Both had followers who excused acts by preaching abstract philosophies.

-          Both had people kill for them. 

-          Both men’s views on mass murder was more than just thinking it was okay, they both had actual  plans (Hitler’s plan was the Third Reich, Manson’s was Helter Skelter).

Beyond Criminal Acts

Obedience isn’t always shown in the face of evil.....

Cults

“Whatever any member of a cult has done, you and I could be recruited or seduced into doing--under the right or wrong conditions. The majority of "normal, average, intelligent" individuals can be led to engage in immoral, illegal, irrational, aggressive and self destructive actions that are contrary to their values or personality--when manipulated situational conditions exert their power over individual dispositions.”

-      Zimbardo

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo talks about the nature of cults in an article titled “Cults want to own your mind and body”.  This article talks about how religious and social-political cults have one goal:  to own you.  Recruitment, indoctrination and retention or members is an extreme example of social influence.  To get the power over members and have them obey, cult leaders provide a “total situation” – members live in a way which enables the cult to take place of any former friends or family

Experiments on Obedience

Milgram

"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act."
-Quote from Milgram's Obedience to Authority

Psychologist Stanley Milgram shocked the world with his unprecedented study on obedience, one that made him one of the most important social psychologists of the 20^th century.  In the early 1960’s, Milgram, a Yale University Social Psychologist at the time, conducted a series of experiments, his most famous being the obedience study. 

THE STUDY

Subjects were told that the purpose of the experiment was for a study on the effects on punishment in learning.  They were informed of their job: to read off to a learner (who was in a room adjacent to them) a list of word-pairs that the learners were then to memorize.  The “teacher” was to then read one of the words and the “learner” was to repeat the pair back, through means of a loud-speaker device (the “teacher” could only hear into the other room, not see the person in it). 

In the teacher/subject’s room was an electric shock generator with thirty levers—volts ranging from 15 to 450. Each mistake the “learner” made would result in an electric shock.  The severity of the shock, the subjects were told, was to be increased with each mistake.  The subjects, obviously, were unaware that no electric shock was actually generated and that the “learner” in the adjacent room who was actually in on the experiment, too, was only pretending to be shocked by simulating screams and pleas that would be heard if a real electric shock were administered

Jerry M. Burger

Social Psychologist Jerry M. Burger repeated Milgram’s experiment, with minor changes because of ethical guidelines.  Rather than having 450 volts be the maximum shock on the board, it was 150 volts. 

Results today weren’t any different.  Burger’s results correlated with Milgram’s – 70% of the 40 participants were willing to continue after 150 volts

Crimes Of Obedience

Manson Family

         “Susan admitted: ‘He represented a God to me that was so beautiful that I’d do anything for him.’

            ‘Even commit murder?’  I asked instantly.

            ‘I’d do anything for God.’

            ‘Including murder?’ I pressed.

            ‘That’s right.  If I believed it was right.’”

     In August 1969 a series of vicious and senseless murders in the Los Angeles, California area caught the attention of the entire country.  Five people were murdered in an upscale neighborhood on August 9^th, and two more were murdered the next night.  Small pieces of highly circumstantial evidence led to a group of young men and women who identified themselves as “the family” and their leader, Charles Manson.   The prosecutor assigned to the case, Vincent Bugliosi, spend hundreds of hours devoted to developing an understanding of how one man could have such control over the thoughts, attitudes, and actions of others. 

 

“Yes, Tex, Sadie, Katie, and Leslie were robots, zombies, automatons.  No question about it.  But only in the sense that they were totally subservient and obsequious and servile to Charles Manson.  Only in that sense …….. The fact that these three female defendants obeyed Charles Manson and did whatever he told them to do does not immunize them from a conviction of first degree murder.  It offers no insulation, no protection whatsoever.  If it did, then hired killers or trigger men for the mafia would have a built-in defense for murder.  All they would have to say is: ‘Well, I did what my boss told me to do.’”

- Vincent Bugliosi

While still able to establish that his followers were equally as culpable for the crimes as Manson himself, Bugliosi successfully convinced a jury of Manson’s control over them and of the techniques he used to get others to, literally, kill for him.

The incredibly meticulous and lengthy process is recorded in Bugliosi’s novel Helter Skelter.

The Holocaust

“Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's need to think.”

- Adolf Eichmann
 

           One of the most extreme cases of crimes of obedience is that which is seen in the Holocaust.  Carrying out the demands of higher authority resulted in the murders of literally millions and millions of innocent people.  I am not going to even start to try to sum up the Holocaust because it would, one, be impossible, and two, wouldn’t do the horrific events justice.

          After the end of the war, the Nuremburg Trials began.  Adolf Eichmann was a war criminal on trial for crimes against the jewish people and crimes against humanity.  Eichmann brought forth a point during these trials and an interesting question surfaced – Could Adolf Eichmann be considered simple an accomplice, as he claimed he was, because he was “just following orders”? 

         Eichmann was found guilty and was hanged in Jerusalem, yet his defense remained on the minds of some around the world.



Introduction

For the past few months I have been researching the social psychology topic of obedience.  I have looked into experiments on the topic, examples of the effects of obedience throughout history, and some of the science behind it.
Looking deeper into events in which obedience played a prominent role, I found commonalities and made connections which are essential in realizing that these events, although technically separate, are all dangerously related.