Liberty, Dicta & Force: Why Liberty Brings Out the Best in People and How Government Brings Out the Worst

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority. — Stanley Milgram (1933–84)

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. — Voltaire (1694–1778)

When I asked you earlier (in chapter 4) to imagine a scene with John Rawls knocking on his neighbor’s door to assert his claim about fairness and justice, we both knew he would never have considered carrying out such a repugnant stunt. I have no doubt he was a dignified gentleman who treated those around him with great respect, as most likely are others who propose laws that authorize and order actions they would not for a second consider carrying out personally on their neighbors. Where do these individuals find the justification to bridge the divide between their private moral judgments and their public ones? Those who take these dichotomous positions are certainly not schizophrenic or psychopathic; nevertheless, they seem to feel comfortable and justified endorsing public acts they would find reprehensible if carried out within their own inner circles.

Stanley Milgram’s renowned Yale University experiment highlights the powerful human tendency to obey authority.1 Conducted in his laboratory in 1963, the experiment studied the range of destructive obedience. Using the pretext of a memory experiment, it consisted of ordering a naïve volunteer “teacher” to administer increasingly severe “electric shocks” to someone acting as a student when the supposed student failed to answer questions correctly. The electric panel of levers, switches, and dials was a façade, and the cries from the hidden “student” — commensurate with the panel’s indicated voltage levels — were fake.

While not everyone in the experiment carried out these orders, and some even protested, 60 percent of the participants did fully “shock” the supposed student. Unfortunately, some participants who obeyed the order at the highest level of voltage later suffered mental stress for having done so, even though they learned at the end of their sessions that they had not actually harmed anyone.

As part of the experiment, Milgram varied the distance between the participant and the hidden student and discovered that the closer the student was to the participant, the less obedient the participant became. He also tested the level of obedience when the participant was joined by two others (actors) who refused to comply when he ordered them to administer the highest shock. In these cases, only 10 percent of the participants were willing to administer the highest shock, indicating a reluctance to obey a repulsive command when joined by others who refused to obey.

Milgram’s experiment took place the year following the trial, conviction, and execution of Adolf Eichmann for his part in the Holocaust. At his trial, Eichmann did not deny his acts and proudly claimed to have been obedient to his superiors, following orders and the law as any loyal citizen should do. Hannah Arendt recounts the trial in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil:

To each count Eichmann pleaded: “Not guilty in the sense of the indictment.”

In what sense then did he think he was guilty? In the long cross-examination of the accused, according to him “the longest ever known,” neither the defense nor the prosecution nor, finally, any of the three judges ever bothered to ask him this obvious question. His lawyer, Robert Servatius of Cologne, hired by Eichmann and paid by the Israeli government, answered the question in a press interview: “Eichmann feels guilty before God, not before the law,” but this answer remained without confirmation from the accused himself. The defense would apparently have preferred him to plead not guilty on the grounds that under the then existing Nazi legal system he had not done anything wrong, that what he was accused of were not crimes but “acts of state,” over which no other state has jurisdiction (par in parem imperium non habet), that it had been his duty to obey and that, in Servatius’ words, he had committed acts “for which you are decorated if you win and go to the gallows if you lose.”2

Eichmann was examined by a court-appointed psychiatrist and psychologist who found him to be quite normal,3 eliciting a fear that maybe we all have a latent tendency to obey authority and laws that can, in certain circumstances, override our inherent common sense of decency. In Eichmann’s case, it wasn’t a matter of him facing dire consequences if he had not taken on the job: he freely volunteered to do it. 

When giving lectures on his experiment, Milgram was astonished to discover that students were aghast, proclaiming they would never behave in such a way — yet months later, they served in the military and carried out orders that made shocking a victim seem pallid.4 We all like to consider ourselves above such rank obedience, yet there exists within us a strong tendency to obey those in authority, even when our deeper feelings tell us that what we are doing is not quite right. Milgram argues that once we have accepted the right of an authority to direct our actions, we relinquish responsibility to him or her and allow that person to define what is right and wrong for us.5 This “obedience to authority,” as Milgram calls it, is a frightening part of our nature:

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.6

There is ample literature on the strong propensity of humans to obey authority and carry out directives and orders they would otherwise find repugnant. However, whom, if anyone, are people obeying when they issue orders for others to carry out? Political democracy appears to convey, by way of public consensus, an authoritative directive for an order issuer to dutifully obey in the same way an order taker obeys an issuer. The person issuing an order transfers personal responsibility for his conduct to a consensus, while the person carrying out the order transfers personal responsibility of his conduct to the issuer.

Every day, heads of state issue hundreds of intrusive and abusive orders for their bureaucratic minions to dutifully enforce. Imbued with power, otherwise placid people sadly turn into headstrong bullies who obediently trample over the affairs and lives of their fellow men. Without the incessant political propaganda, however, the task of these empowered minions to successfully enforce these orders would be insurmountable. As discussed earlier, we are conditioned from childhood to believe that being a good citizen requires our obedience to political authority.

IRS agents are well known for their heavy-handed, heartless way of intimidating people, which destroys livelihoods and businesses, and even causes numerous suicides.7 Some years ago, the young man who serviced my home pool committed suicide because of an IRS threat. This exemplifies how political democracy can desensitize a person to become just such a terrifying and feared member of society.

The following is a segment of a speech, “The Uniqueness of Humans,” given by neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky to Stanford University students on Class Day 2009. His portrayal of obedience to government authority shows the degree to which the most caring humans can be desensitized to conduct themselves in the most abhorrent ways:  

Every day, outside of Las Vegas, there are people who get up in the morning, and they are rushing off to work, and their spouse reminds them to pick up the dry cleaning on the way home, and they say goodbye to their kids, and they rush out, and they get caught in traffic, and they’re all anxious they’re going to be late at work, and they luck out and get a good parking spot and get to work and sit down in a flight simulator and what they spend the day doing is operating a drone bomber in Iraq that drops bombs and kills people. This is at Nellis Air Force Base. People sitting there spending their work days operating drone bombers on the other side of the world, and at the end of the day, having finished your day doing that, you get up and rush off because you want to be there on time for your daughter’s ballet performance, and you hug her afterward, and you can’t believe it’s possible to love someone that much. And the next day you sit in this dark room and kill people on the other side of the planet. And there’s nothing out there in the animal world that has a precedent for that. Not surprisingly, apparently the rate of psychiatric problems among people who spend their days doing this is also unprecedented.8

Acquiescence to the commands of an authority that are only mildly objectionable is often — as in Milgram’s experiments — the beginning of a step-by-step, escalating process of entrapment. The farther people move along the continuum of increasingly destructive acts, the harder it is to extract themselves from the commanding authority’s grip, because to do so is to confront the fact that the earlier acts of compliance were wrong.9

By endorsing the enforcement of a law considered too repugnant to personally enforce against a neighbor, one authorizes others to obediently enforce that law as his or her proxy.

• 1Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009).
• 2Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963), p. 14.  
• 3According to Jos Brunner, the finding by the psychiatrist that Eichmann was normal may have been influenced by the prosecution’s attempt to preclude the defense from pleading insanity. See José Brunner, “Eichmann’s Mind: Psychological, Philosophical, and Legal Perspectives,” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 1, no. 2 (2000). 
• 4Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule (New York: Times Books, 2004), p. 73.
• 5American Psychological Association, “Obeying and Resisting Malevolent Orders,” Research in Action, May 25, 2004.
• 6Stanley Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience,” Harper’s, December 1973.
• 7Jack W. Wade Jr., and Jack Shafer, “Confessions of an IRS Agent,” April 1983, http://www.abolishirs.org/3_3.html; Richard Yancey, Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man’s Tour of Duty Inside the IRS (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004).
• 8Robert Sapolsky, “The Uniqueness of Humans” speech, Class Day Stanford University 2009, https://youtu.be/hrCVu25wQ5s.
• 9American Psychological Association, “Obeying and Resisting Malevolent Orders,” Research in Action, May 25, 2004.