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Video Description
Why do ordinary people abandon their conscience the moment authority gives an order? This lecture from Academy of Ideas digs into one of the darkest patterns in human behavior. It traces our instinct to obey through evolution, cognitive biases, and the state’s power to manufacture conformity — and then turns to the force that counters it: disobedience. From Thoreau’s ‘be men first and subjects afterward’ to Fromm’s claim that humanity advances through acts of disobedience, the video asks what makes resistance possible. Its answer: the courage to think for yourself, and say no.
Full Video Transcript
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?
Why has every man a conscience then?
I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.
These words, penned by Henry David Thoreau in his great work Civil Disobedience,
express a sentiment that is all but lost on the majority of people today.
In the private sphere, it is normal for people to use their conscience to evaluate the morality of an action,
but when it comes to the things demanded of them by their government,
unquestioned obedience, with little thought as to the right or wrong of the action, is the norm.
In this video, we are going to examine the psychology of obedience,
paying particular attention to why people obey those in power,
even if it means committing actions that in any other situation they would view as immoral.
We will also examine disobedience and how it acts as a crucial counterforce to the rise of an oppressive government.
Obedience can be defined as performing an action not because of a personal desire or motive,
but because one is commanded to do so by someone in a position of authority.
Obedience can be extremely beneficial in certain circumstances,
such as in the relationship between a child and parent,
or in the adherence to laws which prevent aggressive actions such as assault, theft, or murder.
However, in other cases, obedience can result in the most brutal of outcomes.
Even a cursory glance at history, wrote Arthur Kessler,
should convince one that individual crimes committed for selfish motives
play a quite insignificant part in the human tragedy,
compared to the numbers massacred in unselfish loyalty to one’s tribe,
nation, dynasty, church, or political ideology.
What this sad fact of history suggests is that humans have a strong tendency to obey those in positions of power.
Sigmund Freud recognized this, stating that we should never underestimate the power of the need to obey.
Like most of our defining characteristics, this need to obey is part instinctual.
Stretching deep into our evolutionary past, many of the ancestors of Homo sapiens organized themselves according to ranking systems, or what are called dominance hierarchies.
Survival in a dominance hierarchy requires the ability to make distinctions between rank and recognition of the permitted and forbidden actions based on one’s rank
Failure in either of these respects can lead to death or being cast out from one’s group
And therefore those who display such traits are more likely to survive and pass on their genes
But while the influence of dominance hierarchies in our evolutionary history can help explain the human tendency to obey
it does not fully explain why people obey even when the actions demanded of them are clearly
immoral or to the detriment of their own survival. For example, looking back at the brutal reign of
Stalin in Russia or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, why did those who lived during these times remain
obedient to the point of committing the most brutal of actions, including the murder and
torture of completely innocent people en masse? It may be tempting to suggest that most people
are complicit in tyranny due to fear. However, while this is true to a degree, fear alone cannot
account for the fact that many people do not recognize or acknowledge the injustice of their
own government even when they are living under tyranny. As Don Mixon in his book Obedience and
Civilization explains, we may be genuinely puzzled as to how people could obey commands that seem
both bloodthirsty and stupid. Puzzlement can vanish when we realize that in the eyes of their
perpetrators, the hideous crimes of history are not hideous crimes at all, but acts of
loyalty, patriotism, and duty. From the vantage point of the present we can see them as hideous
crimes, but ordinarily from that same vantage point, we cannot see the crimes of our own
governments as hideous or even as crimes. Michael Humer, in his book The Problem of
Political Authority, suggests that the existence of certain cognitive biases can help account
for this inability to recognize the injustice of one’s own government.
One of the most prevalent of these biases is the psychological phenomenon known as cognitive
dissonance, as Humer explains,
According to this widely accepted theory, we experience an uncomfortable state known
as cognitive dissonance when we have two or more cognitions that stand in conflict or
tension with one another, and particularly when our behavior or other reactions appear
to conflict with our self-image. We then tend to alter our beliefs or reactions to reduce the
dissonance. For instance, a person who sees himself as compassionate yet finds himself inflicting pain
on others will experience cognitive dissonance. He might reduce this dissonance by ceasing to
inflict pain, changing his image of himself, or adopting auxiliary beliefs to explain why a
compassionate person may inflict pain in this situation. The existence of an oppressive
of government produces many situations where dissonance can arise, as people are frequently
required to take actions which conflict with their personal beliefs of right and wrong
and their images of themselves as good people.
An extremely common trigger for dissonance in the modern day arises from the requirement
to pay taxes to fund government activities which involve things that one views as unethical.
Examples could include the caging of drug users, the bailing out of crony capitalists,
fighting of wars or the mass surveillance of one’s own citizenry.
In other words, paying taxes, along with the knowledge that this money is being used to
fund programs and activities which one sees as immoral, can generate cognitive dissonance.
To deal with this dissonance, some people will change their beliefs regarding the beneficence
and necessity of a centralized state.
But a more common way to quell this dissonance is to adopt justifications to excuse these
government actions, or to avoid sources of information which trigger awareness of the
immorality stemming from their own government. In addition to cognitive dissonance, another
psychological bias which contributes to the human willingness to obey even a tyrannical government
is the status quo bias, which is the powerful tendency to see the beliefs of one’s own society
as obviously true, and the practices of one’s own society as obviously right and good, regardless of
what those beliefs and practices are. The need to be accepted, the powerful drive to conform,
as well as heavy doses of indoctrination all promote the status quo bias. As Humer explains,
government is an extremely prominent and fundamental feature of the structure of our
society. We know that people tend to have a powerful bias in favor of the existing arrangements
of their own societies. It therefore stands to reason that, whether or not any government were
legitimate, most of us would have a strong tendency to believe that some governments
are legitimate, especially our own and others like it.
It is thus not surprising that so many people unquestioningly obey government commands,
no matter how oppressive or tyrannical they become, when one accounts for the cognitive
biases and evolved tendencies of man.
In fact, Don Mixon went so far as to write,
Obedience that occurs in a hierarchical social structure needs no special explanation.
However, disobedience in the same circumstances does need explaining.
In the remainder of this video, we will look at what promotes the likelihood of disobedience in response to tyranny.
The first thing to note is that clearly people will not refuse to commit immoral acts
unless they overcome the biases which promote unquestioned obedience to the state.
Self-education and ridding oneself of the false beliefs that result from years of indoctrination and excessive propaganda is crucial.
Only by doing this can we loosen the grip which pernicious ideologies have on our minds and instead, as Thoreau recommended,
use our own conscience to evaluate the right or wrong of an action.
People are also more likely to disobey the tyrannical commands of those in power if they lose confidence in the capability of their rulers.
This could potentially happen if increasing numbers of people came to realize that societies are far too complex for centralized government control to be effective.
However, loss in confidence is more likely to arise due to the sheer ineptitude of politicians, which makes it increasingly difficult for people to place any faith in existing government institutions.
An additional factor, especially relevant these days, which impacts disobedience, relates to the degree of surveillance in a society.
In Obedience and Civilization, Don Mixon points out that mass surveillance greatly diminishes the likelihood of disobedience,
as it creates a situation analogous to that faced by a devout religious believer who censors his thoughts and behaviors due to the all-seeing eye of God.
Gods, of course, are frequently described as being both omniscient and omnipotent, and
it is not difficult to see why.
If believers can be brought truly to believe that their God can see into their minds and
hearts and to believe that He will punish them severely if He glimpses the slightest
disloyalty, they may be persuaded to change their thinking and their feeling and become,
internally and externally, more compliant and more obedient.
For what must be overcome, the chief obstacle in the way of command hierarchies reaching
their ideal typical form is the human power to lie, pretend and assimilate.
Citizens who have the ability to pretend loyalty and love while plotting disobedience and treason
are serious threats to the security of any power that be.
Only if people can be persuaded that their efforts to lie and pretend are rendered fruitless
by an all-seeing eye, can obedience become assured.
Societies which accept the need for mass surveillance, or allow it to spread through non-action and
compliance, are societies which become increasingly unable to resist tyranny.
Totalitarian regimes of the 20th century clearly recognized this, as they all instituted forms
of mass surveillance on their citizenry.
However, modern technology has created surveillance capabilities that dictators, such as Hitler
and Stalin could only have dreamt of.
As these technologies are put to use, a prison of the mind, so to speak, will be constructed.
Realizing that so much of one’s life is being monitored, the surveillance capabilities
of governments, like an all-seeing eye of God, will make thoughts and behaviors favoring
compliance and conformity the norm.
While the tendency to obey is certainly a prominent feature of man, there are always
a brave few who in the face of corrupt power are willing to stand up and refuse. Those with the
courage to disobey are not only protectors of freedom but, as Eric Fromm suggested, individuals
who move a society forward. Man has continued to evolve by acts of disobedience. Not only was his
spiritual development possible only because there were men who dared to say no to the powers that be
in the name of their conscience or their faith but also his intellectual development was dependent
on the capacity for being disobedient. Disobedient to authorities who tried to muzzle new thoughts
and to the authority of long-established opinions which declared a change to be nonsense.
Source: Academy of Ideas