Finally finished watching a movie that was basically made for me, namely Experimenter, the story of Stanley Milgram and his groundbreaking, controversial, and some might say infamous experiments on our relationship to authority.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the experimenter, click here for a description. I normally would not send you to an outside authority for an explanation of something, but the experiment is somewhat elaborate and I would rather spend my words on analyzing it than explaining it.

The movie was phenomenal. Peter Saarsgard‘s performance as Milgram really makes the film. He speaks in this gentle, soft, deliberate yet penetrating voice that drew me in even more than the subject matter, and I find the subject matter extremely interesting.

That said, I feel like people have made a little too much of Milgram’s findings. They leap to the sensationalist conclusion that the experiments (he did a total of 25, with different methodologies, hoping to disprove himself) mean that we are all nothing but puppets of authority with no will of our own.

People forget that only 65 percent of the people in the studies went “all the way” to the supposedly fatal voltage. That’s around 65 percent more than we’d like it to be, but it’s far too little to make any kind of sweeping generalization as to the depravity of human nature.

We also have to remember that Milgram’s experimental setup put people in a very unusual circumstance. He unknowingly (I assume) created the ideal circumstance for producing that result. The lack of the usual sort of authority, the way the experimenter very blankly insisted the “teacher” continue without hauteur or aggression, the feeling that scientists very legitimately “know better” than the average person…. all of those factors created a scenario that isolated and upset the “teacher” and in those sorts of situations, people do, indeed, fall back on obeying authority.

Especially people of average intelligence who lack the confidence in their own judgment to make the decision to stop.

Plus, it is difficult for people to recognize the urge to obey in themselves when they have been raised in a highly individualistic society which tells them that they are expected to think for themselves, make up their own minds, and fight for what they believe. In such a society, wanting to obey is the ultimate sin, and not the kind of thing one speaks about out loud or even acknowledges within themselves. People who want to leave the decisions up to others are considered loathsome and contemptible, the worst kind of coward.

The only people willing to own up to those sorts of feelings are members of the BDSM community, and even they would have to admit that theirs is a rather extreme expression of that urge. So much so that a person who is quite willing to tell you about their desire to have heavyset women in Nazi uniforms stomp on their genitals will also hasten to add that it is a strictly sexual thing and they are not submissive in real life.

That would be wrong. Someone like that would be considered cowardly, untrustworthy, and vile in the extreme. Just think of how we heap contempt on people (especially men) on people by calling them “toadies” or “lapdogs” or “bitches” of someone else.

I think that is why people react so strongly to the Milgram experiments. They suggest that we are all that kind of person, and for a lot of people, that thought is intolerable.

That’s why people continue to attack his methods and his results to this very day. They want to disprove those results just as much as Milgram himself did. It offends us to our very core to imagine that there are circumstances under which we would act in a way that is so contrary to who we think we are and what we think we believe.

But to me, the disturbing thing is not that the average citizen will commit acts of atrocity under certain circumstances. The truly disturbing thing is that can go all the way up the chain. Not only did the lowly concentration camp guard who put the Zyclon-B into the showerheads at Auschwitz think he was “just doing his job”, so did the guy who told him to do it. And that guy’s boss. And his boss’ boss. And so on the way up to the executive branch, and maybe all the way up to Hitler himself.

In short, nobody thinks it was their fault. The diffusion of responsibility is complete. That was the lesson of Nuremberg. The “I was just doing my job” defense applies equally to everyone with a job. I am sure even hired assassins tell themselves that they were just doing their job (and that someone else would do it if they didn’t) in order to get to sleep at night.

That is why the concept of personal responsibility is so important to modernity. It is the necessary balancing component to individual liberty. Freedom without responsibility is the dream of toddlers and tyrants (but I repeat myself). The justice of a society is measured by how close it gets to perfect alignment of power and responsibility.

And it is easy for us to accept this notion that people should be held accountable for their actions regardless of the influence of authority…. in theory. But when you get into the practical details, it becomes less clear. How reasonable is it to punish the little guy for doing what the big dogs, who have the power to punish noncompliance, tell him to do? Are we really prepared to condemn the actions of others and pretend we are morally superior to them when we know damned well that everybody thinks they would do the right thing in that circumstance…. but only 35 percent of people actually do?

And of course, when it comes to ourselves and what we do to others on a daily basis as part of our work…. whether it’s as big as throwing people out of their homes or as small as driving our delivery van a little too fast in order to make quota…. well, that’s different.

After all…. we’re just doing our jobs.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.