Has "Obedience to Authority" Completely Short Circuited Our Ability to Think?

wkmac

Well-Known Member
Horrible story from Kentucky where a supervisor/worker relationship on the one hand has both as victims but on the other opens a window into the soul of America where an appeal to authority shuts off the ability to question and even trample over moral values where normally one would dare not go.

This begs the question, were all germans really bad or had conditioning to a fallacy made it easy for a minority to hijack a majority? I think this story above could well suggest that America is in the same mental condition as germans in the early to mid 1930's and thus all it takes is for a minority to use the fallacy of appeal to authority on the masses and we go down that road too. Ms. Summers is a wake up call!

[video=youtube;BcvSNg0HZwk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcvSNg0HZwk[/video]

[video=youtube;IzTuz0mNlwU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzTuz0mNlwU[/video]

[video=youtube;CmFCoo-cU3Y]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmFCoo-cU3Y[/video]
 

wkmac

Well-Known Member
As an admitted cynical, contrarian a$$o myself, I've come to the conclusion many of you are very dangerous to be around. In fact, you should never be left alone with children or pets.;)

The news: A new Milgram-like experiment published this month in the Journal of Personality has taken this idea to the next step by trying to understand which kinds of people are more or less willing to obey these kinds of orders. What researchers discovered was surprising: Those who are described as "agreeable, conscientious personalities" are more likely to follow orders and deliver electric shocks that they believe can harm innocent people, while "more contrarian, less agreeable personalities" are more likely to refuse to hurt others.

Psychologists Have Uncovered a Troubling Feature of People Who Seem Nice All the Time
 

bbsam

Moderator
Staff member
I think the true danger is actually in the right and left realizing how similar they are. Strange as that seems, that unholy antagonism might be the only thing that keeps the US from a very ugly and violent domination of the world...or realizing the truly great nation we could be. As long as the right is busy with repealing Obamacare and gnashing it's teeth at the imperial president, and the left is in fits over a congress blo kins Obama at every turn, nothing happens. Germany had no internal conflict that Hitler didn't wipe out and thus was able to turn Germany's might on the world.
 

wkmac

Well-Known Member
I think in time the political or statist left and right will just consume themselves in their drive for power. The thing to do is step back out of the way and let them do it.
 

BrownArmy

Well-Known Member
Yes, yes, left/right etc.

Yes, yes, statist/communist/socialist etc.

Boring.

As a species, we can't seem to get our collective chit together.

That's unfortunate, as we'll die here on this planet in the pallid stench of our collective feces.

We need to come together and look toward the stars...

With the BILLIONS we spend trying to kill each other, we could have easily put a colony on Mars.

(We don't have a supply problem, we have a distribution problem.)

Sad, sad, sad.

Let's keep arguing about this and that, it's a good diversion...
 

sortaisle

Livin the cardboard dream
So far as the Nazi's go, Germans were more worried about getting tossed into the ovens and showers. You have to remember the first country the Nazi's invaded was in fact Germany. People here in America have such an easy life, they don't care what happens so long as their personal life changes little. Now once you start to oppress Americans overtly, we are boss at taking action. So the deception and takeover has to be slow and not noticeable.
 

wkmac

Well-Known Member
So far as the Nazi's go, Germans were more worried about getting tossed into the ovens and showers. You have to remember the first country the Nazi's invaded was in fact Germany. People here in America have such an easy life, they don't care what happens so long as their personal life changes little. Now once you start to oppress Americans overtly, we are boss at taking action. So the deception and takeover has to be slow and not noticeable.

So the germans acted horrifically out of fear themselves? And Americans when it counts will do the moral and right thing?

Ever read about the infamous Milgram Experiments?

The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology[1] and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.[2]

The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the popular question at that particular time: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"[3] The experiments have been repeated many times in the following years with consistent results within differing societies, although not with the same percentages around the globe.[4] The experiments were also controversial and considered by some scientists to be unethical and physically or psychologically abusive.

Watching otherwise seemingly average honest American folk deliver lethal electrical shock to people who won't perform a task as instructed only because they are told by an authority it is the correct and necessary thing to do seems to me to be rather telling.
 

sortaisle

Livin the cardboard dream
So the germans acted horrifically out of fear themselves? And Americans when it counts will do the moral and right thing?

Ever read about the infamous Milgram Experiments?



Watching otherwise seemingly average honest American folk deliver lethal electrical shock to people who won't perform a task as instructed only because they are told by an authority it is the correct and necessary thing to do seems to me to be rather telling.
Get your facts straight. The Germans did little. The Nazi's did whatever they wanted. There was plenty of Germans that hid and railroaded Jews to safety. Americans did little to curb slavery, but was it everyone? Nope. Things are as hardly black and white as you've accused me of saying. And yes, when there is oppression, Americans have the freedom to stand up. Germany had no such freedoms.
 

sortaisle

Livin the cardboard dream
And the Millgram Experiment is hard to apply to the Germans since the experiment required that both parties be volunteers. The German people were not volunteers. And there is a deep dark part of a lot of people that when allowed to be freed is evil. Power corrupts. People cower before raw power in most instances. And people are sheeple. Most people in the world aren't leaders. Most of them are normal everyday folk. Everyone has something extraordinary about them, but it doesn't usually manifest in a leader like quality. To sum up, mostly soldiers, little in the way of generals. Mostly laymen, little in the way of pontiffs. Mostly indians, little in the way of chiefs. The masses are easy to hypnotize, look at North Korea.
 
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