The Perils of Blind Obedience to Authority

Each time I review this article I am ever more impressed at the message. 

Carl Jarvis

 

Sent: Monday, August 27, 2012 12:56 PM

Subject: The Perils of Blind Obedience to Authority
Greenwald writes: "This authoritarian desire to pledge fealty to
institutions and leaders is indeed the dynamic that resides at the core of
so many of our political conflicts."
 
President Obama speaks in front of a large crowd of supporters. (photo: Greg
Wahl-Stephens/AP)
 

The Perils of Blind Obedience to Authority
By Glenn Greenwald, Guardian UK
27 August 12
Indie film Compliance recalls notions that the past decade's worst events
are explained by failures to oppose authority.

 One can object to some of its particulars, but Frank Bruni has a quite
interesting and incisive New York Times column today about a new independent
film called Compliance, which explores the human desire to follow and obey
authority.
Based on real-life events that took place in 2004 at a McDonalds in
Kentucky, the film dramatizes a prank telephone call in which a man posing
as a police officer manipulates a supervisor to abuse an employee with
increasing amounts of cruelty and sadism, ultimately culminating in sexual
assault - all by insisting that the abuse is necessary to aid an official
police investigation into petty crimes.
That particular episode was but one of a series of similar and almost
always-successful hoaxes over the course of at least 10 years, in which
restaurant employees were manipulated into obeying warped directives from
this same man, pretending on the telephone to be a police officer.
Bruni correctly notes the prime issue raised by all of this: "How much can
people be talked into and how readily will they defer to an authority figure
of sufficient craft and cunning?" That question was answered 50 years ago by
the infamous experiment conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram, in which
an authority figure in a lab coat instructed participants to deliver what
they were told were increasingly severe electric shocks to someone in
another room whom they could hear but not see. Even as the screams became
louder and more agonizing, two-thirds of the participants were induced fully
to comply by delivering the increased electric shocks.
Most disturbingly, even as many expressed concerns and doubts, they
continued to obey until the screams stopped - presumably due to death
(subsequent experiments replicated those results). As the University of
California's Gregorio Billikopf put it, the Milgram experiment "illustrates
people's reluctance to confront those who abuse power", as they "obey either
out of fear or out of a desire to appear co-operative - even when acting
against their own better judgment and desires".
Bruni ties all of this into our current political culture, noting one
significant factor driving this authoritarian behavior: that trusting
authority is easier and more convenient than treating it with skepticism. He
writes:
As Craig Zobel, the writer and director of 'Compliance,' said to me on the
phone on Friday, 'We can't be on guard all the time. In order to have a
pleasant life, you have to be able to trust that people are who they say
they are. And if you questioned everything you heard, you'd never get
anything done.' It's infinitely more efficient to follow a chosen leader and
walk in lock step with a chosen tribe.
He suggests that this is the dynamic that drives unthinking partisan
allegiance ("What's most distinctive about the current presidential election
and our political culture [is] . how unconditionally so many partisans back
their side's every edict, plaint and stratagem"), as well as numerous key
political frauds, from Saddam's WMDs to Obama's fake birth certificate to
Romney's failure to pay taxes for 10 years. People eagerly accept such
evidence-free claims "because the alternative mean[s] confronting outright
mendacity from otherwise respected authorities, trading the calm of
certainty for the disquiet of doubt".
This authoritarian desire to pledge fealty to institutions and leaders is
indeed the dynamic that resides at the core of so many of our political
conflicts (the 2006 book by Canadian psychology professor Bob Altemeyer, The
Authoritarians, is a superb examination of how this manifests in the
right-wing political context).
One of my first posts when I began writing about politics back in 2006 was
an examination of the blindly loyal, cult-like veneration which the American
Right had erected around George Bush; as Paul Krugman was one of the first
to observe, that same disturbing thirst for leader-worship then drove
followers of Barack Obama (Krugman in February, 2008: "the Obama campaign
seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality. We've already had
that from the Bush administration - remember Operation Flight Suit? We
really don't want to go there again").
There is always much to say about this topic, as its centrality in shaping
both individual and collective behavior is more or less universal. But I
want to highlight two specific points about all of this which relate to
several of the topics I wrote about in my first week here, as well as some
of the resulting reaction to that:
First, there are multiple institutions that are intended to safeguard
against this ease of inducing blind trust in and obedience to authorities.
The most obvious one is journalism, which, at its best, serves as a check
against political authority by subjecting its pronouncements to skepticism
and scrutiny, and by acting in general as an adversarial force against it.
But there are other institutions that can and should play a similar role.
One is academia, a realm where tenure is supposed to ensure that authority's
most sacred orthodoxies are subjected to unrelenting, irreverent
questioning. Another is the federal judiciary, whose officials are vested
with life tenure so as to empower them, without regard to popular sentiment,
to impose limits on the acts of political authorities and to protect the
society's most scorned and marginalized.
But just observe how frequently these institutions side with power rather
than against it, how eagerly they offer their professional and intellectual
instruments to justify and glorify the acts of political authority rather
than challenge or subvert them. They will occasionally quibble on the
margins with official acts, but their energies are overwhelmingly devoted to
endorsing the legitimacy of institutional authority and, correspondingly,
scorning those who have been marginalized or targeted by it.
Their collective instinct on any issue is to rush to align themselves with
the sentiment prevailing in elite power circles. Most denizens in these
realms would be hard-pressed to identify any instances in which they
embraced causes or people deeply unpopular within those circles. Indeed,
they judge their own rightness - they derive vindication - by how often they
find themselves on the side of elite institutions and how closely aligned
they are with the orthodoxies that prevail within them, rather than by how
often they challenge or oppose them.
It is difficult to overstate the impact of this authority-serving behavior
from the very institutions designed to oppose authority. As Zobel, the
writer and director of Compliance, notes, most people are too busy with
their lives to find the time or energy to scrutinize prevailing orthodoxies
and the authorities propagating them. When the institutions that are in a
position to provide those checks fail to do that, those orthodoxies and
authorities thrive without opposition or challenge, no matter how false and
corrupted they may be.
As much as anything else, this is the institutional failure that explains
the debacles of the last decade. There is virtually no counter-weight to the
human desire to follow and obey authority because the institutions designed
to provide that counter-weight - media outlets, academia, courts - do the
opposite: they are the most faithful servants of those centers of authority.
Second, it is very easy to get people to see oppression and tyranny in
faraway places, but very difficult to get them to see it in their own lives
("How dare you compare my country to Tyranny X; we're free and they
aren't"). In part that is explained by the way in which desire shapes
perception. One naturally wants to believe that oppression is only something
that happens elsewhere because one then feels good about one's own situation
("I'm free, unlike those poor people in those other places"). Thinking that
way also relieves one of the obligation to act: one who believes they are
free of oppression will feel no pressure to take a difficult or risky stand
against it.
But the more significant factor is that one can easily remain free of even
the most intense political oppression simply by placing one's faith and
trust in institutions of authority. People who get themselves to be
satisfied with the behavior of their institutions of power, or who at least
largely acquiesce to the legitimacy of prevailing authority, are almost
never subjected to any oppression, even in the worst of tyrannies.
Why would they be? Oppression is designed to compel obedience and submission
to authority. Those who voluntarily put themselves in that state - by
believing that their institutions of authority are just and good and should
be followed rather than subverted - render oppression redundant,
unnecessary.
Of course people who think and behave this way encounter no oppression.
That's their reward for good, submissive behavior. As Rosa Luxemburg put
this: "Those who do not move, do not notice their chains." They are left
alone by institutions of power because they comport with the desired
behavior of complacency and obedience without further compulsion.
But the fact that good, obedient citizens do not themselves perceive
oppression does not mean that oppression does not exist. Whether a society
is free is determined not by the treatment of its complacent, acquiescent
citizens - such people are always unmolested by authority - but rather by
the treatment of its dissidents and its marginalized minorities.
In the US, those are the people who are detained at airports and have their
laptops and notebooks seized with no warrants because of the films they make
or the political activism they engage in; or who are subjected to mass,
invasive state surveillance despite no evidence of wrongdoing; or who are
prosecuted and imprisoned for decades - or even executed without due process
- for expressing political and religious views deemed dangerous by the
government.
People who resist the natural human tendency to follow, venerate and obey
prevailing authority typically have a much different view about how
oppressive a society is than those who submit to those impulses. The most
valuable experiences for determining how free a society is are the
experiences of society's most threatening dissidents, not its content and
compliant citizens. It was those who marched against Mubarak who were
detained, beaten, tortured and killed, not those who acquiesced to or
supported the regime. That is the universal pattern of authoritarian
oppression.
The temptation to submit to authority examined by Compliance bolsters an
authoritarian culture by transforming its leading institutions into servants
of power rather than checks on it. But worse, it conceals the presence of
oppression by ensuring that most citizens, choosing to follow, trust and
obey authority, do not personally experience oppression and thus do not
believe - refuse to believe - that it really exists.