Conscience vs Obedience, Responsibility vs Authority: a Measure of the Humanoid Potential Trouble Source Horrors, 7

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.