"A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves."  Edward R. Murrow

In my first post on this blog, I talked about us having acted as a herd of sheep in failing to question our government and to hold it accountable in the last few years.  Then, I came across an article that seems to provide some explanation as well as some guidance.  The article is entitled “Four Decades After Milgram, We’re Still Willing to Inflict Pain.”  It was published in the December 29, 2008, New York Times Op-Ed pages.  

The Holocaust had left people wondering how it was possible that so many ordinary German citizens had come to participate in the atrocities of the Second World War.  In 1963, professor Stanley Milgram of Yale devised a way of testing people’s willingness to harm others under the influence of authority.  Participants (ordinary residents of New Haven) were told the study related to the effect of punishment on learning, and were asked to administer an increasingly powerful electric shock to a person in another room whenever that person gave the wrong answer to a question.  He found that more than 80 percent of the participants were willing to continue the shocks over cries of protest and requests to be released from the study, and 65 percent were willing to continue to the point where the test subject became apparently unable to respond any longer.

In 2008, professor Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University replicated the experiment (with some additional ethical limitations), and found that the results were nearly the same (a reduction from 80 to 70 percent).  The result is startling given the changes in attitudes toward authority over the last 45 years.  Even more disturbing, however, is professor Burger’s conclusion that the conditions at the time of the experiment are more important than the individual participant’s cultural influences or mindset.  These conditions include, for example, having the subject out of sight (but not hearing), having the authority figure take responsibility for the decision to administer the shock, and having the participant increase the level of the shock gradually.  In other words, people may be susceptible to being pushed beyond their personal moral limits by techniques such as gradualism, diffusing responsibility, and manipulating sensory impact.

These findings seem equally applicable to our relationship with our government, and particularly our ability or inclination to hold it accountable.  Government is one of the prime authority figures, and the techniques for mass manipulation and deception by government have become more sophisticated and widespread.  For example, we have observed the cooption of the traditional media, leaving them generally unwilling to ask the tough questions.  The gradual increases in the violations of our laws and values apparently have left many people unable to maintain their perspective.  Hiding the caskets of returning war dead from public view has succeeded in minimizing the public’s response to the war in Iraq.  Given these developments and the results of the above experiments, we must be increasingly vigilant.  We must understand the lessons from these experiments and apply them to our own experience of what we are prepared to tolerate.  We must take responsibility to educate ourselves on the issues, to ask the tough questions, to hold our representatives accountable, to act in accordance with our own values, and to persist despite the odds.