Commentaries

Licensed to Be Amoral and Authorized to Denigrate Their Own Country.
Koh Lanta Island, Thailand, October 6th, 2024.
Salaroche

The late American socio-psychologist Stanley Milgram is well known for the experiments he conducted at Yale University from August of 1961, to May of 1962. Milgram’s experiments basically proved that, when placed in an environment that permits or even encourages inflicting undeserving pain on others with NO punitive consequences to the perpetrators, most people will do it.

In general, the experiment proved that most people who may be actively involved in any permissive, amoral environment can be strongly compelled by the circumstances to perform acts that would otherwise run contrary to their moral principles.

There were three elements in Milgram’s experiment: The “Experimenter”, the “Teacher”, and the “Learner”. The “Experimenter” ordered the “Teacher” to administer an increasingly strong electroshock to the “Learner” whenever the latter didn’t answer a question correctly. The “Teacher” (experiment participant) administered the electroshocks to the “Learner” whenever the “Experimenter” ordered him to do it, and the “Learner”.

Of these 3 elements, only the “Teacher” (experiment participant) didn’t know that the “Learner” receiving the fake electroshocks was an actor pretending to be hurt by the shocks (for details of the experiment see here) In the end, 65% of the participants or “Teachers” would have inflicted near-fatal 450-volt electroshocks to the “Learners”. The experiment was replicated and documented a few times elsewhere, always with similar results, thereby proving that under the pressure of unprincipled leaders and circumstances, many people will break their own moral code.

But Milgram’s experiment doesn’t only have sociological implications. It has political implications too. Every country has leaders invested with authority over the population. In Democratic political systems the leaders’ authority is not total or near-total as it is in authoritarian or dictatorial political environments, but Democratic leaders still have considerable, even determinant influence over the general population.

In the United States, the office of the presidency bestows whoever holds it with the mightiest sociopolitical and miliary power of them all, including at world level. But that’s not all. The President of the United States is also a leader expected to uphold the moral and ethical standards generally embraced by the American people.

But what happens when a president constantly deviates from such moral/ethical standards even to the point of proposing publicly to eliminate the Constitution of the United States so that he can become an autocrat? And what if such president manages to have most of the elected and appointed functionaries in the three branches of Government, including his own political party and some sectors of the national media, emulate, defend and even promote his unprincipled behavior?

What that would do is to gradually normalize the leaders’ decadent behavior in the eyes of the people, thereby gradually perverting the standards of those whose moral and ethical principles are not grounded on solid Democratic ideals, nor on any firm respect for the American Constitution and the American rule of law.

Applying the results of the Milgram experiment to the current political situation in America, we could say that the clear culprit for the serious, precarious sociopolitical situation the country currently finds itself in, is the leadership of the Republican Party who, in failing to stand up to their corrupt leader they fell in line with his nefarious designs, thereby generating a national political environment that once spread across the country, compelled in an irresistible manner the rank and file of their party to also fall in line behind their nefarious false messiah.

In other words, just as when the "Teachers" in Milgram's experiment were encouraged by the "Experimenter" to administer increasingly strong electroshocks to the "Learner" just went along and did it, when the Republican masses were constantly licensed by their Party's leadership to throw away their moral compass and were constantly authorized by their very same ex-President to disparage the Democratic and Judicial Systems of their own country, most Republicans also just went along and did it.

The lessons of Milgram’s experiment explain rather well the cause behind the perverted behavior currently embraced by the Maga hordes. Whenever an amoral authoritative figure performing his leadership within an amorally-permissive environment orders his followers to throw away their moral compass even at the expense of their own country’s Democratic and Judicial systems, a good majority of them will do it, just as great numbers of Republicans already did.

Salaroche

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