Milgram Didn't Know the Half of It
Apparently I am rather in the dark about how easily manipulable humans are. See, I just found out--though cannot quite yet get myself to believe in--the "long-distance strip-search" or "McDonald's strip-search."
Johnny Quest saw this on the teevee last night and called, incredulous. Needless to say I, quickly assessing the situation, burst into flames, yelling and kicking things. This is my coping mechanism when confronted with tightly-woven layers of evil, stupidity, and cowardice.
First and foremost, of course, reason demands that we get the perpetrator and never stop kicking his ass.
He has been caught, and--and here's something we ought to mull over a good bit--he's a "corrections officer" for one of those prison corporations.
(Vicious sidebar: I expect he may finally get his fill of spanking during his (up to 16-year) prison term...though from the other side of the lap.)
Second...who the hell are these people who are following such orders?
Third, um, just incidentally, because some jerkoff on the phone says he's a cop? I'm not going to do some sh*t like that if the President, the baby Jesus, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff tell me to do so, in person, with the orders notarized and in triplicate.
Fourth, of course, the poor victim shouldn't have gone along with it, either. People complain about "blaming the victim," but that's just a slogan. Victims sometimes deserve some of the blame. One shouldn't, of course, blame them more than they deserve, and that often means blaming them not at all. In this case, however, the girl should have simply said 'no,' walked out naked or not, and physically resisted if necessary. I do have very much sympathy for her, but one does have a responsibility to defend oneself and one's dignity.
The whole just blows me away. I realize that we're creatures with massive cognitive blind spots. I also realize that even perfectly sensible people can be caught unawares, tricked, conned, etc. I'm certainly not saying that I've never been duped, for I have, oh, yes, I have.
But there is a certain almost unbelievable level of servility and docility on display here... Have we really become such sheeps in the face of authority? The man says "jump" and we ask "how high?," simultaneously jumping our highest just in case? Incapable of standing up for our own rights, and for the rights of others, even in the face of someone merely claiming without proof to carry the authority of the state?
Look, the state doesn't get to tell you to violate other people. Even if the real, actual cops tell you to do something even 1/100th as bad and absurd is this, there's a time-tested response my folks taught me for just such an occasion: Go to hell.
Telling the authorities to go to hell when they get out of line is the American way. It's your GD patriotic duty.
Note that this isn't an anti-government tirade...in part because the government didn't do anything wrong here. Rather it's an anti-act-like-feeble-minded-sheep-in-the-face-of-putative-government-authority tirade.
Jeez, I'm just so mad about all this I have to shut up now.
Apparently I am rather in the dark about how easily manipulable humans are. See, I just found out--though cannot quite yet get myself to believe in--the "long-distance strip-search" or "McDonald's strip-search."
Johnny Quest saw this on the teevee last night and called, incredulous. Needless to say I, quickly assessing the situation, burst into flames, yelling and kicking things. This is my coping mechanism when confronted with tightly-woven layers of evil, stupidity, and cowardice.
First and foremost, of course, reason demands that we get the perpetrator and never stop kicking his ass.
He has been caught, and--and here's something we ought to mull over a good bit--he's a "corrections officer" for one of those prison corporations.
(Vicious sidebar: I expect he may finally get his fill of spanking during his (up to 16-year) prison term...though from the other side of the lap.)
Second...who the hell are these people who are following such orders?
Third, um, just incidentally, because some jerkoff on the phone says he's a cop? I'm not going to do some sh*t like that if the President, the baby Jesus, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff tell me to do so, in person, with the orders notarized and in triplicate.
Fourth, of course, the poor victim shouldn't have gone along with it, either. People complain about "blaming the victim," but that's just a slogan. Victims sometimes deserve some of the blame. One shouldn't, of course, blame them more than they deserve, and that often means blaming them not at all. In this case, however, the girl should have simply said 'no,' walked out naked or not, and physically resisted if necessary. I do have very much sympathy for her, but one does have a responsibility to defend oneself and one's dignity.
The whole just blows me away. I realize that we're creatures with massive cognitive blind spots. I also realize that even perfectly sensible people can be caught unawares, tricked, conned, etc. I'm certainly not saying that I've never been duped, for I have, oh, yes, I have.
But there is a certain almost unbelievable level of servility and docility on display here... Have we really become such sheeps in the face of authority? The man says "jump" and we ask "how high?," simultaneously jumping our highest just in case? Incapable of standing up for our own rights, and for the rights of others, even in the face of someone merely claiming without proof to carry the authority of the state?
Look, the state doesn't get to tell you to violate other people. Even if the real, actual cops tell you to do something even 1/100th as bad and absurd is this, there's a time-tested response my folks taught me for just such an occasion: Go to hell.
Telling the authorities to go to hell when they get out of line is the American way. It's your GD patriotic duty.
Note that this isn't an anti-government tirade...in part because the government didn't do anything wrong here. Rather it's an anti-act-like-feeble-minded-sheep-in-the-face-of-putative-government-authority tirade.
Jeez, I'm just so mad about all this I have to shut up now.
posted by Winston Smith at
12:11 PM
10 Comments:
"Louise Ogborn was always willing to take on extra shifts at McDonald's in Mount Washington, Ky. Ogborn's mother had health problems and had recently lost her job, so the 18-year-old did whatever she could to help make ends meet."
Don't you think THIS has a lot to do with this girls' willingness to jump through any hoops necessary to stay out of trouble? Saying "fuck you" and walking out isn't really an option for somebody in a difficult financial situation without prospects for other work. Yes, this incident shows the shocking lenghts people will go to to please putative authority figures, but that's because the society we're increasingly becoming, in which debt-ridden people who live on a very thin margin of solvency work as expendable, non-unionized service industry cogs in a machine, is actually set up to manufacture docile, risk-averse drones who will leap at the master's voice, may be it their shift supervisor, a customer, or a cop, any one of which could send their lives spiralling into disaster and poverty with a single clearing of the throat.
That's the black irony behind free market bromides about "personal liberty", they often result in a situation in which those at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder are stripped of agency and self-respect by the constant, shark-like thrashing needed to simply keep from drowning. Employers set the terms by which they live. Wal-mart has now got their part-time workers on 24-hour on-call status so that even though they're not getting full time pay or benefits, they can't really get another job or even know that they'll be able to pick their fucking kids up from school. I know that the libertarian answer to this is: your labor is fungible! Pick up and move to where you are appreciated! But when you live paycheck to paycheck, and especially if you have mouths to feed, any distruption in your income is potentially devastating. So you go along; you work the unpaid overtime, you wait by the phone for your boss to call you in (or not), and you strip to your apron because your boss told you to. It's a fucked up state of affairs, and it's largely due to economic pressures. But from the standpoint of the captains of American industry (and the government, for that matter), it's ideal: we're breeding sheep.
Good point, Matthew.
To know the fact of the matter, of course, we'd have to know more about the victim's beliefs and intentions, but it's obviously plausible that such considerations took their toll in this situation.
Does this absolve the victim of *all* responsibility? You seem to be suggesting that the answer is 'yes', but the answer is probably 'no.' None of this alters the fact that the victim has a right and an obligation to herself--to refuse such orders.
Just because the system is trying to make us sheep doesn't mean we have to comply.
Quiz: what's the correct answer to the command "Become sheep!"?
Sometimes it seems like there's a race to dehumanize us. The system tries to dehumanize me...I fail to say "NO!"...somebody says "You should have said 'no'!", then someone else (usually, let's face it, from the left) rushes in to say "Wait, he CAN'T say 'no'! He's already too dehumanized to say 'no'!"
I.e., I'm not even human anymore.
So, while I think you make a good point, I think your tone suggests overstatement...and, more importantly, I think that such points must be handled with great care, lest they play into the hands of the dehumanizers.
I appreciate that angle on this story, Matthew, because I think a lot of what you say is true and I hadn't thought of the girl from that perspective. I'm not really in the mood to blame this girl very much after reading what happened to her, and your point is well taken. If you are right that people are willing to hand over their frontal lobes and morality for the sake of economic survival, we are in bad, bad shape as a society. I am still very disturbed that she would be willing to do this, though. Something is seriously wrong with her, although I don't know what it is.
What is clearly blameworthy, in my view, is the behavior of the supervisor and her fiance. They seem to bear more responsibility for letting this happen than she does, taking economic considerations into account as well as being older. What the hell were they thinking? That may be the most disturbing thing about this story.
I'm not saying she shouldn't have stopped it, I'm not saying that she is "too dehumanized to say no." What I'm saying is that, if we really want to stop the pacification and domestication of humanity, we've got to identify the agents of pacification and deomestication, and figure out what needs to be done to stop them. Sure, the victim deserves to be criticized for her failure to stand up for herself, but if that is the EXTENT of our criticism, we're not getting anywhere. You sugges tthat my overstatement may "play into the hands of the dehumanizers." I think the danger is far greater of IGNORING the dehumanizers, especially since most people's initial reaction to this story is going to be something along the lines of "what was that dumb chick thinking?"
Do you really think that's what most people's initial reaction will be?
That's hard for me to believe, but I guess it's possible. If so, then most people are damn idiots.
My reaction:
1. Furious anger at the manager et. al.
2. Teeth-gnashing anger that my anger in 1 was so great that I hadn't even thought to be angry at the *caller*
3. Eye-crossing, wall-hitting anger at the caller
4. Cycle back and forth between 1 and 3 several times
5. Sadness and shock that the victim had in essence offered not the slightest resisance.
6. Cycle among 1, 3, and 5 repeatedly.
Are *most* people really that much different than me? Could be...
But as Johnny Quest noted (her reaction being almost identical to mine here), there are limits to what can count as coercion.
Just saying "Take your clothes off!"...well, it's a little hard to call that alone coercion.
Your point, then, Matthew, as I understand it is something like "Well, given the background conditions, there's an implied threat of starvation backing up every command."
Then the question is, I guess, is starvation really threatened? People don't usually *starve* in the U.S., right? So what was it? We don't know. The threat may only have been something more like inconvenience.
There are a range of cases here, and we don't know where this one lies on the spectrum.
At an early age, my parents told me to obey any reasonable request from a teacher, a friend's parent, or another authority figure. They explicitly left the judgement of 'reasonable' to me. They promised that they would protect me from punishment if I found something unreasonable, but that they would of course judge that reasonableness for themselves for future cases.
In third grade, my teacher, who liked to pick on little boys, made an unreasonable request. She observed that my butt was soft and twice offered me the opportunity to poke her spare flank, ostensibly to demonstrate my flabbiness by comparison. (And I was a skinny kid.) I did nothing, and nothing ever came of it.
Another boy, one who was in over his head already at age 8 or 9, had a father who would spank him for any offense this teacher identified. He was her prime victim. He was humiliatingly trapped in a situation he could not escape till the end of the school year.
What allowed me 40 years ago to rely on my own judgement was my parents. I do think reliance on authority in 21st century America is even worse than it was then. I often see intelligent people use a cell phone instead of making a picayune decision for themselves.
Primary and secondary schools, both public and private, bear some of the blame for this. They focus so entirely on regimentation that they forget justice and that trains us to be sheep. In some of us, the training doesn't take; there were two people in this story who refused to take part. Pity neither was assertive enough to put a stop to the abuse.
I don't think it's a question of a real, tangible threat to starvation. What's scary is that we don't even need that kind of threat to shut down and do what we're told. Economics is the engine of this trend, but it's drilled into most kids from school age, and at jobs and in the media to the point that we don't need to see the wolves at the door in order to choose the path of least resistance. The very idea of resistance is FOREIGN to us, never having resisted or been taught of the necessity of resistance. That doesn't mean we shouldn't resist, goddamn it, or that it's a failing of ours if we don't. But if we're going to start to resist, we need to know where that pressure can most fruitfully be applied, and I happen to think that service industry workers need to start thinking in class terms and in terms of collective action as a good first step towards pushing back against this bovinization of America.
And I'm willing to bet money that most people's (at least most mens) reaction to this story will involve scorn (not sadness) directed at the girl. You're in a good position to gauge that, Winston, instead of relying on your own reaction. See what some of those well-fed undergrads of yours think.
I thought about bringing it up as a lesson about the perils of automatically obeying authorities...but, frankly, I never mention anything about sexual abuse in my classes, for fear that someone in it might have suffered from it. Seems like there should be at least one place where they don't have to be reminded of old wounds.
Actually, though, I rarely talk about anything sexual in class, for several reasons:
1. I f*cking HATE profs who pump up their student evals and waste class time by playing the sex card.
2. I know some profs who basically troll for dates by talking about sex in class. I f'in' HATE that, too.
3. Incidentally, one wacko student can get a professor fired anymore. No kidding. And I say enough controversial and infuriating stuff as it is, so for some reason I'd just prefer to play it safe on the sex front.
And some other stuff.
Plus...my undergrads are SO well-fed that they're not a very good sample class, anyway.
Plus, I'm tired of everything in the humanities being about "sex and gender" anymore. What crap.
Plus, plus I often talk about the Milgram experiments, anyway.
WS: Quiz: what's the correct answer to the command "Become sheep!"?
Answer: "Bah!"
WS: "Wait, he CAN'T say 'no'! He's already too dehumanized to say 'no'!"
Have you read Alain Badiou's essay on Ethics? (I recently read it and can't stop thinking about it; with reasons to think about it coming up about five times a day.) He argues that ethics based on "the Other," is problematic for the reason quoted above. by making "the Other" victim is to dehumanize them. (Badiou proposes an 'Ethic of Truths.')
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