Trained Obedience vs Freedom

Photo ArtemisDiana via istock

Many of us were surprised, shocked and intrigued that so many of our fellow citizens, including family members and long time friends, unquestioningly followed the narrative presented and the diktats imposed since early 2020. Rates of compliance close to 70% with lockdowns and masking were almost universal throughout the ‘developed’ world with higher reported rates for vaccine uptake. When it seems natural and right to question what one is being told and what one is being ordered to do, such obedience and compliance are difficult to comprehend.

After the post WW2 Nuremberg trials, where many of the defendants justified their acts of torture and murder by saying they were just following orders, Stanley Milgram conducted a now famous experiment to examine these justifications, focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question:

Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?

Forty men, aged from 20 to 50 years, with occupations ranging from unskilled to professional, were selected for the experiment. At the outset participants were split up into pairs and, through a fixed selection process, one was designated the learner and the other the teacher. (The learner was selected in advance and was part of the experiment team.) The learner was taken to a room and strapped into an electric chair with electrodes attached to his body while the teacher was taken to an adjacent room with an electric shock generator. There was also a supervisor who communicated with the teacher. In the experiment the learner is given a list of word pairs to learn and is tested by the teacher who names a word and asks the learner to name its partner from a list of four possible choices. The shock generator has 30 switches each one giving a shock of differing severity from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 volts (danger – severe shock) and the teacher was told to administer an electric shock each time the learner gave a wrong answer. The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose), and for each of these, the teacher gave him an electric shock, increasing the severity with each wrong answer. When the teacher refused to administer a shock, the supervisor gave a series of orders to ensure they continued. The orders were: 1. Please continue; 2. The experiment requires you to continue; 3. It is absolutely essential that you continue; and 4. You have no other choice but to continue. If the first order was not obeyed the experimenter gave the next order on the list and continued this practise up to order 4.

65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e., teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts. Milgram summed up his experiment in an article titled ‘The Perils of Obedience’ in 1974 as follows:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations.

I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.

Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.

The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

According to The Milgram Experiment a majority of people no longer respond to life challenges or temptations according to their conscience. To act according to your conscience your mind needs to be free, capable of critical thought & discernment and capable of the will or desire to act according to what you know is right. If the will is free it can act morally and conversely, if the will’s freedom is compromised it’s capacity to act morally is correspondingly compromised. If we’re not free we’re not in a position to decide on the rightness or otherwise of any action. In the 18^th century in the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals¹ Immanuel Kant described “autonomy of the will (freedom from external control or influence) as the supreme principle of morality” (101). If the majority of people, when confronted with a moral question, do not act according to their conscience it is reasonable to assume that their freedom is compromised. According to a range of estimates around 70% of people were unquestioningly compliant during the plandemic – close to the percentage in the Milgram experiment for whom obedience to authority trumped personal conscience. Why are so many willing to succumb to authority and ignore the call of personal conscience?

In a recent post in Winter Oak, Paul Cudenac writes: “One of the things that I found striking over the course of the COVID psy-op was the extent to which people in First World countries seemed terrified of having unpopular opinions. This was not limited to liberals or to leftists, but it did seem more pronounced among this demographic.”

He says he “came across a potential explanation for this behaviour in the writing of Ted Kaczynski, who dedicated a lengthy segment of his manifesto to diagnosing the problems of leftist psychology.”

He quotes Kaczynski whose explanation, he suggests, ‘hit the nail on the head’ and with which I am in full agreement:

Psychologists use the term ‘socialization’ to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. […] Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin. We use the term ‘oversocialized’ to describe such people. […] Oversocialization can lead to low self-esteem, a sense of powerlessness, defeatism, guilt, etc. One of the most important means by which our society socializes children is by making them feel ashamed of behavior or speech that is contrary to society’s expectations. If this is overdone, or if a particular child is especially susceptible to such feelings, he ends by feeling ashamed of HIMSELF.

I would argue that in our contemporary world, certainly in the ‘developed’ West, socialization, as described by Kaszynski, has become so all pervasive, intense and pernicious that the majority of the ‘educated’ classes are strongly oversocialized.

There is evidence to suggest that the schools system in almost all countries creates, and is designed to create, obedient and compliant citizens workers. In 1924, in the early days of compulsory schooling in the US, H.L. Mencken stated:

The [sic] erroneous assumption is to the effect [sic] that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. … Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else. (The American Mercury, April, 1924, cited in The Underground History Of American Education², 1)

We know that in any given situation the degree of morality informing people’s behaviour varies. We are a mixed lot and life’s pressures, or temptations, test us all. However, irrespective of our individual natures and the effects of life’s pressures, the human/social/cultural environment in which we grow and are nurtured, significantly influences our foundational moral development. For the majority of people, certainly in the Western ‘developed’ world, most of their morally formative time is spent in school. Mencken’s comments on the aim of public education were obviously based on his observations of the system operating in the US but he is clear when he ends the quote with the following comment on public education: “and that is its aim everywhere else”. A look at the origins of mass compulsory education in Prussia shows the truth of Mencken’s assertion.

In 1806 at the battle of Jena, Napoleon’s amateur soldiers defeated the professional soldiers of Prussia. This was a serious setback for a proud Prussia and something had to be done. The reason, according to Johann Gottlieb Fichte (German philosopher, 1762-1814), was that the ordinary soldiers were indisciplined and subject to the whims of their imaginations so in certain situations they would override the orders from headquarters about what to do. Following the defeat Fichte wrote Addresses to the German Nation. In his “Second Address: The General Nature of the New Education” Fichte said:

The new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible. Such a will can henceforth be relied on with confidence and certainty (Klyczek, John. School World Order³, 22).

According to Klyczek, the spirit of Prussian education is very much alive: “In the twenty-first century, the new cradle-to-career education system embodies Fichte’s philosophy by conditioning each student’s ‘freedom of will’ to conform to the collective workforce needs of the planned economy in the Corporate States of America.” (ibid.)

John Taylor Gatto highlights the lack of concern with, or sensitivity to, the crucial importance of individual liberty for a truly human and humane society when he says:

[W]hat shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens – all in order to render the populace “manageable.” (Weapons of Mass Instruction, xvii).

Gatto and Klyzek are addressing the effects of the Prussian approach to education on the American education system but Prussian principles came to dominate education throughout the world.

For the enlightened classes, popular education after Prussia became a sacred cause, one meriting crusading zeal. In 1868, Hungary announce compulsion schooling; in 1869, Austria; in 1872, the famous Prussian system was nationalized to all Germanies; 1874, Switzerland; 1877, Italy; 1878, Holland; 1879, Belgium. Between 1878 and 1882, it became France’s turn. School was made compulsory for British children in 1880. No serious voice except Tolstoy’s questioned what was happening, and that Russian nobleman-novelist-mystic was easily ignored. Best known to the modern reader for War and Peace, Tolstoy is equally penetrating in The Kingdom of God is Within You, in which he viewed such problems through the lens of Christianity (The Underground History of American Education, 142)

It is the hidden curriculum, the institutional structure, the rituals and the relationships between teacher and students which are the defining aspects of the school system. Our schools in Ireland have their own unique characteristics but they also conform to this institutional structure.

Gatto taught in New York’s schools for 30 years and having been voted New York City teacher of the year in 1989 & 1990 and New York City and State teacher of the year in 1991, he wrote a letter to the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal stating that he no longer wished to “hurt kids to make a living.” In a speech given on the occasion of being named New York State Teacher of the Year for 1991 Gatto remarked, “Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills” (Dumbing Us Down⁴, 1). These lessons are particularly revealing in terms of their reductive effect on peoples self-confidence. They include ‘confusion’, where everything is taught out of context. The natural flow and continuity where real learning takes place doesn’t stand a chance; class position whereby children are numbered and graded and come to know their place; indifference whereby children are taught not to care too much about anything while making it appear that they do and dropping this faux enthusiasm at the sound of a bell; emotional dependency – “By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestinated chain of command.”; intellectual dependency, whereby the best students wait for the teacher to tell them what to do. “[W]e must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives.” This is particularly reductive of our independence, potential for initiative and self-confidence; provisional self-esteem whereby a child’s self respect should depend on expert opinion. “My kids are constantly evaluated and judged”; One can’t hide – surveillance is constant and there is neither private time nor space for children.

The little North German state of Prussia had been described as “an army with a country,” “a perpetual armed camp,” “a gigantic penal institution.” Even the built environment in Prussia was closely regimented: streets were made to run straight, town buildings and traffic were state- approved and regulated. Attempts were made to cleanse society of irregular elements like beggars, vagrants, and Gypsies, all this intended to turn Prussian society into “a huge human automation” in the words of Hans Rosenberg. It was a state where scientific farming alternated with military drilling and with state-ordered meaningless tasks intended for no purpose but to subject the entire community to the experience of collective discipline-like fire drills in a modern junior high school or enforced silence during the interval between class periods. Prussia had become a comprehensive administrative utopia. It was Sparta reborn. (Gatto, The Underground History of American Education, 141).

If we do not begin to think deeply about the philosophy and values that underpin our societies, to take responsibility for the care and education of our children and resist the encroaching tyranny, we are heading for a global 21st century Prussia; every region and every country will be a Little Prussia and humans and humanity will, increasingly, be reduced, oppressed and technocratically managed. This war we are fighting is for a future peopled by free humans with free, critically thinking minds and developed moral sensibilities. The alternative being pushed, already accepted by many, is a managed, ordered future where freedom, even the thought of freedom, is relinquished for an existence where basic needs are met at the price of total subservience and obedience to those in positions of ‘authority’ and privacy is no more; Ida Auken, WEF contributor, Danish Parliament member for The Social Democratic Party and former Minister for the Environment in Denmark (2011-2014) made things very clear in this article in 2016 saying, “Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.                                              All in all, it is a good life.” You’ll find more detail on this here, here and here.

If our existence is not to be slavery, this must be resisted. It was a shock to see so many of our fellow humans complying with and obeying the criminal directives, so we’re still fighting to reach more of them and to help the vaccine injured.

Gatto told us we have eagerly adopted “an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens – all in order to render the populace ‘manageable’” This must be resisted and rolled back; we must safeguard and protect our children’s minds, spirits and bodies so they can continue to stand tall as free, strong human beings and thereby preserve and and ensure the continuation of that which underpins our very humanity.