Conscience vs Obedience, Responsibility vs Authority: a Measure of the Humanoid Potential Trouble Source Horrors, 2
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.
