Checkmate in Three

“Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil” – Exodus

Back in 1961, as the mild-looking, pen-pushing architect of the Holocaust Adolf Eichmann was on trial for genocide, Stanley Milgram began investigating the question of obedience. What he revealed is unsettling, but contains an element of hope for the free-thinking subversive.

The basic experiment begins with two subjects deciding by lot which would be the ‘teacher’ and which the ‘learner’. The teacher first watches the learner being strapped into a chair and covered with electrodes. Then the teacher is seated in an adjacent room at a machine labelled ‘Shock Generator’. A man in a white coat tells him to read questions to the learner through a microphone, and punish errors with increasing electric shocks.

After the first mistake, the teacher must flip the first switch, labelled “15 volts – slight shock”. The machine buzzes, lights flash, a meter swings, and the experiment continues, with each shock increasing by 15 volts. After twenty errors and a 300-volt “very strong shock”, the learner pounds on the wall. If the teacher expresses concern, the technician explains that although the shocks can be extremely painful, they cause no permanent tissue damage, and that “the experiment requires that you continue”. The next question goes unanswered, and the technician explains that no answer is a wrong answer, and must be punished. More pounding follows, but this is the last that is heard from the learner. The remaining questions go unanswered, and the teacher keeps increasing the voltage.

The experiment was rigged to study not pain-assisted learning but obedience. Both lots read ‘teacher’, and the ‘learner’ was really a friendly middle-aged actor in league with the scientists. All 40 subjects continued until the pounding, at which point five stopped. A further nine disobeyed over the next four questions, but 26 (65%) continued through “intense shock”, “danger – severe shock”, to the full 450 volts, marked “XXX”.

According to an observer:

“I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within twenty minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe, and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: ‘Oh God, let’s stop it.’ And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the end.”

The implication is that 65% of men will obey completely an authority figure, without threat, coercion, or profit motive, causing extreme pain or worse to a friendly stranger (many admitted in follow-up interviews that they believed the learner was either dead or unconscious). Milgram comments:

“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 organisational 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.

In reruns, the figure of 65% barely changes across countries and decades; the seventies counterculture appears to have had no impact whatsoever on obedience. It is hardwired into us. Like chickens, sheep, wildebeest and monkeys, humans are safer from predators in groups. The main difference is that we follow invisible systems as well as alpha males (so a chinless, gutless creep at the head of a creeping police state can command almost as effectively as a charismatic dictator). Though our superior intelligence occasionally inspires a Thoreau or Lao Tze to turn his back on the system, far more intelligence is invested into manipulating and marshaling obedience than escaping it.

So what about evil? Fatally torturing a friendly stranger is pretty nasty, but unless you want to write off 65% of your species as evil, we have to look for answers elsewhere. And where else would a reverend look than the good book?

“Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil” (Exd 23:2)

It is not the people in the multitude which are evil, nor the following, but the deed. The word ‘evil’ suggests serial killers and souls that are blacker than the inside of a wolf’s gullet, but ‘evil’ is more complex in Hebrew. ‘RA’ describes the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but it also describes something quite different in a verse that always makes me giggle:

“the other basket had very naughty (RA) figs, which could not be eaten, they were so bad (RA).” (Jer 24:2)

Naughty naughty, but we’re clearly not dealing with morals or Satanic possession here. (This might make you think about the tree in a very different light, if you are wont to think about such things.)

Even God cooks up some “evil” [RA], with a plan to destroy the Israelites, until Moses stands up to Him and persuades Him to change His mind (Exd 32). It is our duty to derail schemes which lead to suffering and destruction, even if the author is the supreme authority in the universe. The Old Testament is absolutely clear on this point, and the rabbis of the Zohar slam Noah for his atrocious defending, letting God get away with something so dreadful as flooding the world without raising a stink. Indeed, the name Israel means “wrestles with God”, and is given to Jacob after he spends all night doing just that.

People are not ‘Evil’ with a capital E, a shiver down the spine and a cameo by Boris Karloff, but we are obedient. We are horribly, mindlessly, murderously obedient. We are pawns marching along predetermined courses, and our lack of initiative opens up a space for a king to take power. A king need only point out an enemy across the board, and we play follow the leader, goose-stepping down the track to war abroad and oppression at home. The 65% is not the enemy. The 1% is not the enemy. Squatters are not the enemy, Arabs are not the enemy, banksters are not the enemy, the EDL are not the enemy. The evil things on this planet are not individuals but systems which have gone bad, putrid institutions and calcified chains of command. Why do we feel obliged to honour contracts which have passed their use-by date?

Centuries ago, bishops brought their black and white Gospel to every corner of the board on the point of a knight’s lance. Today the endgame is underway as castles dominate the board, but can a pawn push through hostile territory to the end and the promise of transformation?

Check. The king is getting desperate.

Check again. The law does not govern your actions. You do! Dodge his knight and pin his queen. Pay attention, and keep the king in check. A full spectrum lies between the black and the white, so choose your shade and raise a banner.

Pawn threatens castle. Milgram repeated his experiment with teachers in a group, only one of whom was the real subject whilst the rest were actors. When an actor refused to continue, 90% of subjects ignored the technician and followed his example. We obey until a better course of action is presented, at which time nearly everyone will adopt new rules, even if the plan comes from a source with much less authority, a pawn rather than a bishop. Our movement does not need leaders, but we do, each of us, need the courage to unleash our natural leadership qualities. We do not need badges or titles to speak with authority and expect to be followed, because following is what humans do by nature, and decency trumps rank for 90% of us. A freethinker need only stand up and suggest a game less heartless than the one being played. Given the sorry state of the state, this should not be too difficult.

Pawn takes castle, transforms into whatever he likes.

Checkmate in three.

The Irreverent Reverend Nemu blogs at www.nemusend.co.uk