Should someone’s opinion be that the humanoid burden on all of us is not that heavy after all, the answer is that there’s some objective evidence, and being unable to consider the difference between opinions and facts is unquestionably humanoid. The Milgram experiment is something anyone should know, and it definitely ought to be taught at school in civics classes. It seemingly took World War II and the ensuing Nazi trials to overcome our being quantitative, unbalanced, emotional and prop some of us to wonder whether millions of people were to be considered accomplices or just following orders as they claimed. So in 1961, Yale University’s professor Stanley Milgram conducted a series of filmed experiments to the specific purpose of measuring the willingness, of pitting the tendency to obey authority regardless against personal conscience, when demanded to commit acts increasingly and blatantly immoral, unethical, criminal.

You can easily research the details of the Milgram experiment; suffice here to say that the staged circumstance was a “clinical” experiment where a volunteer acting as a teacher was required to deliver increasing electric shocks – up to 450−volt! – to a volunteer acting as a student when the latter failed in certain exercises, under the supervision of an experiment in−charge, a figure made authoritative by wearing a white coat in a “clinical” environment, demanding the teacher to deliver the shocks when the latter hesitated or refused to. The actual test subject was the teacher, who ignored that the experiment, the student and the electric shocks were fake.

Even though polled “experts” would predict that only 0 to 3 percent would inflict maximum voltage, the stark resulting statistic is dumbfounding – or perhaps not: in the first series of experiments, 65 percent never disobey up to the highest voltage, no matter how morally and ethically bad and indefensible things get: indeed lots of unease, hesitations, protest but, getting to the point, acquiescence instead of outrage, compliance instead of revolt. The fact is not news and beside the point; the point is the figure, and the figure is chilling.

And it’s about to get even more chilling as the ensuing series of experiments discloses further and more detailed statistics. We may call the factor involved here “proximity”, “closeness” or something alike; a factor affecting the actual test subject on three sides: the subject’s “closeness” to his or her peers, to the innocent victim, to the ordering authority.

On the peer side, when the test subject was joined by one or two additional fake “teachers”, their behaviour heavily affected him or her: when they refused to comply, the subject’s compliance in administering the shocks dropped to 10 percent; when on the contrary they complied fully, the subject’s compliance reached 92.5 percent. And when a test subject first saw another test subject refuse to comply, this did not alter the percentage. So much as to how much our being lemmings weighs. And not only we’re prone to trade our responsibility for some herd instinct, but we’ll follow the closest sheep, too.

On the victim side, variations in “closeness” – some may see fit to call them degrees of confronting getting one’s hands dirty or being shielded from it – were enacted in this way: the lesser one meant that the teacher and the student were in separate rooms, almost isolated from one another, and the highest one meant that the teacher on the contrary had to personally hold the student’s arm on the shock plate, with intermediate degrees of teacher more and more exposed and close to the student’s reactions and state. Which were more and more dramatic and shocking as the voltage increased, up to the apparent loss of consciousness. Even though the compliance percentage decreased as the closeness increased, under the greatest closeness a healthy 30 percent managed to hold the student’s arm on the shock plate anyway.

Last but not least, and rather to cap it all, on the “authority” side the test subject compliance increased and decreased proportionally to two factors: not only the “closeness” of the authority, but his “perceived legitimacy” as well. If the in−charge demanded through a phone the subject to continue with the shocks, the compliance percentage dropped to 21 percent, so much for the closeness. But if the in−charge took off the white coat, the compliance percentage dropped, too. Which speak volumes as to the seriousness of our judging the book by the cover.

Finally, the series of experiments as a whole disclosed two further meaningful facets: the uniformity of behaviour in space and time, and the depth of the overawe to authority regardless. Repetitions of the experiment in different locations and different circumstances produced similar results; same for time, as later repetitions produced similar results as well: so much for the influence of cultures and their evolutions on this humanoid trait. As to overawe, what happened is that even those refusing to impart the highest shocks did not have the freedom and courage to go the extra mile: the experiments’ notes report that neither they insisted that an end be put to the experiment itself, nor left the room to check the health of the victim without requesting permission to leave… so much to what it really takes to realize one is free and no less than the “authority”.

It’s worth delving a bit deeper into this facet: authority and responsibility. Authority: who is acknowledged the right to decide and command? Responsibility: who is accountable for the decisions and ensuing actions? Up to now they seem to be the two facets of the same medal: one accounts for one’s own decisions and actions. Letting aside for now that suppressives and crooks quest for authority without responsibility, now place two of these medals – someone else’s and one’s own – side by side, and they become the two pans of the same scale: the more of someone else’s, the less of one’s own – and the other way round. The more authority you grant to someone else, the less you hold yourself responsible. The more authority you grant to yourself, the more you hold yourself responsible. And so on with all combinations.

Authority does not exist in itself: everything is but agreement, and all authority that exists is but acknowledged authority. And whether it is out of free will, through deception or under duress, it nonetheless remains agreement on acknowledgement: if you raise your hands before a weapon, the robber exploits your agreeing and acknowledging that your life is valuable. More valuable than your wallet or your honour.

On the basis of many of the previously mentioned humanoid faults, we can easily see how the road is paved for those aiming at manipulating us into overawe to authority: there is nothing our humanoid side would like better than just that. There may, in fact, be lots of reasons why we are so prone to judge the book by the cover and bow to a bloodstained white coat, but certainly not the last of them is that the more we bow the more we escape our own personal responsibility.

Hence, the dreadful success of manipulators in staging what is aimed at becoming “perceived” authority by the final target: us. And judging the book by the cover is in fact more precisely called “Principle of Authority”: things are considered true or false, good or bad, not out of their being actually so, but on the basis of the perceived authority of those saying they are true or false, good or bad. Then the lid of the trap is sealed by our humanoid inclination to make lies become truth, by repeating it one another so much until it becomes an “everybody knows that”. Rest in peace, truth. Or rather, roll in your grave while we turn a deaf ear to the noise.

Sure, manipulators are skilled professionals in “packaging”: busy dressing people and things up in packages designed to induce us to feel a hierarchical abyss between us and them. Sure, the quest for the control of media is part of this war where every bridgehead conquered yields some more power to bomb us with such “packaging”. But sure as well we welcome these bombs with our arms wide open. What they call “adjustment of thought” is rooted in the humanoid crave to escape individual personal responsibility.

And, by the way, it’s worth to look at those bombs in terms of one specific facet brought to light by these Milgram experiments: why are media so important a weapon in this war against us? Proximity: media make up an artificial but nonetheless effective and thus precious closeness to us of the staged authority. Whenever you see television screens usurping communication within households, whenever you see people falling asleep exhausted in front of them, dispraised but still switched on, in addition to everything you already considered, keep in mind how percentages are influenced by the “perceived closeness” of the ordering “authority”, too, and how these minds will wake up moulded in someone’s intended direction.

At the expense of what does this artificial closeness of the media advance? Of real−world closeness: that with yor loved ones, your friends, your neighbours, your fellows, with the real society and the real world. With the consequence of developing a viewpoint from which the media are more and more present and important, while reality is less and less so. Guess how much this would ease things, should one find oneself in a Milgram experiment situation, but this time suppressing one’s fellows for real. And when you extend this to the modern−day world of so−called “social media”, you may get an inlking of why people are trapped in their mobile “communication” devices, thinking they’re “communicating”, while to the contrary they’re being averted from confronting their real fellows and the real world in person.

And you may want to add a further addendum to the sum producing the perceived legitimacy of authority: education and its barbarisation. First, education can be designed to educate one to understand responsibility, question “authority” and hold self as responsible and as the first legitimate authority, or designed to attain the opposite. But education doesn't even have to be betrayed that openly: it is enough to barbarise it, disperse it, hollow it out. If basic education does not take place, whichever way this betrayal is concealed, the chain of consequences is obvious: less consciously self−disciplined people produce more and more chaos that sooner or later jeopardizes viability, which eventually produces a demand for “naturally” superimposed order on those “naturally” incapable of self−discipline.

And alas there are more sinister ways to bypass even education and betray and barbarise people directly, which I will discuss later on. Suffice for now to say they exist and represent a further dreadfully powerful addendum to the sum, and that they are confronting us right now.

As I previously said, a potential trouble source is one who amplifies and relays suppression instead of detecting and stopping it, I hold that being one is an even far more serious offence than being suppressive because of this precise fact and its consequences, and all faults worth the “humanoid” adjective make us prone to being potential trouble sources. As Milgram put it, «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.»

Obviously both induced submission to authority and induced barbarism aren’t mere ends: they are tools. Tools that will be used to suppress us all in any way suppressives and potential trouble sources can come up with. As we’re discussing here how ordinary people can become PTS and agents in destructive processes, a textbook major case of this is worth mentioning: the groups and organisations which are born to help but then end up betraying. We are told this is just the way it is, but now we know that’s the cover story spread by the suppressives that, either in person or through their influence, infiltrate them, hollow them out and turn them inside out from help to betrayal. Now we know they do that by making people PTS: they successfully pervert the loyalty of people from loyalty to principles to loyalty to leaders, so that when leaders violate principles they side with the leaders against the principles, instead of the opposite. And now we also have a smattering of how they achieve that in practical terms.