Mike Procter was a great South African all rounder of the 1960s and 1970s, who, like many of his countrymen, was forced by the international sporting sanctions against the then regime of his country to ply his trade in the English counties, with the occasional World XI tours and, finally, with the Kerry Packer “circus”. The last of these provided the first, tentative step in the decades-long process of turning cricket from a sport to a global business, the fruits of which are all around us today.
I was struck by something very arresting that Procter said on the first page of his autobiography, Mike Procter and Cricket, published in 1981.
Not until I played professional cricket in England did I realise that the black man wasn’t inferior to me. I was brought up in a typically middle-class South African environment and you just didn’t question the laws of the land. In my naivete, I assumed apartheid was correct, because it was there.
An astonishing, arresting admission. Procter continues:
When I first came to England, I couldn’t get over the sight of white men sweeping the streets and doing other menial tasks. I’d always assumed that was the lot of the black man. Quite simply, I’d been brainwashed.
Times change, of course. But blind obedience to authority doesn’t, it seems. Which brings us to the Milgram experiment. Alexander Simmons explains:
In 1961, Yale University’s Stanley Milgram began a study on obedience to authority. The study basically worked like this:
1. There were essentially two “confederates” who were in on the experiment — a “learner” and an “experimenter” — and one unknowing participant called a “teacher.”
2. The teacher and learner were introduced and were given instructions by the experiment.
3. The teacher was to ask word association questions of a learner while the experimenter — the only authority figure — was in the room giving instruction and monitoring the experiment.
4. When the learner answered incorrectly, the teacher was to flip a switch sending an electric shock into the learner.
The voltage of the shocks increased by 15 volts with a 450-volt maximum.
What the teacher did not know is that the learner was not actually in the room being shocked. A recording of various reactions was played throughout the experiment. At around 75 volts, the “learner” made grunting sounds, began complaining of pain around 120, asked to be released at 150, screamed in agony at 285, and went completely silent after 330.
Very often the teacher would express concern to the experimenter who casually replied with variants of “please continue with the experiment.”
An astonishing 65% or so of teachers went all the way to a possibly lethal 450 volts, despite their personal convictions against inflicting pain on another human being.
https://simmonsopinions.medium.com/revisiting-milgram-in-the-coronavirus-era-8222289ec94c
Yes, 65 per cent. Astonishing? Yes indeed. Or is it? If you hadn’t read Mike Procter’s line about really and truly believing that “the black man” was inferior, stated a mere two generations back, you probably wouldn’t have believed it.
Milgram’s book, Obedience to Authority, was published in 1974. Along with Edward Bernays’ books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), Propaganda (1928) and The Engineering of Consent (1955), it is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the world of today. Perhaps we also could throw in Nudge (2008) by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Obedience and propaganda are two sides of the same coin. You cannot understand the one without the other.
The inside cover flap of Milgram’s book quotes, chillingly, one of his experiment participants:
I believe I conducted myself … obediently, and carried out instructions as I always do. So I said to my wife, “Well, here we are. And I think I did a good job”. And she said, “Suppose the man was dead? Mr Gino replied, “So he’s dead. I did my job”.
I did my job. As a journalist sprouting a government narrative. As an academic receiving Big Pharma funding for a research project. As a citizen donning the mask or having the jab “to protect granny”. As a VicPol copper shooting men and women in the streets with rubber bullets. As a High Court judge writing rubbish judgements in Palmer v Western Australia.
Another phrase from Milgram’s book stood out. “Socially organised evil in society”. The evil, not of the individual, self-regarding murderer, but of scaled-up evil enabled by widespread obeisance.
Bernays stated:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
So much for representative democracy and the consent of the governed.
The Booktopia reviewer describes Bernays as part of the “Jesuit machine”. Interesting. (It seems that the Jesuits, founded by St Ignatius of Loyola and of whom the most famous currently is the Bishop of Rome, are into Freudian psychoanalysis).
Edward Bernays was a member of this massive Jesuit machine. His uncle, Sigmund Freud, was a master Jesuit manipulator who influenced Bernays in countless ways. Freud was thought to have brought out and fully developed the narcissist in Bernays, who was known to all as a "braggart."
After the success of his first book, Crystallizing Public Opinion, in 1923, Bernays furthered his research on manipulating members of our herd society. The work culminated in his second book, Propaganda. Like other Jesuit machinations, this book blatantly shoved this resurrected term propaganda right in the faces of all Americans.
It taunted people with the knowledge of how innocent people are cleverly coaxed into following the order du jour, almost always without the "patient" being aware they were being led around by a nose ring.
Bernays was a brilliant manipulator who taught his techniques to hundreds of force-multipliers who, in turn, unleashed the insidious practices on the world.
All of this helps to account for popular support for slavery, apartheid, Hitler, multiculturalism, Covid totalitarianism and the more-widespread-than-you-would-have-thought-possible acceptance by people of the idiocy of climate “policy” and the war on carbon.
Hannah Arendt, her disciple Mattias Desmet and another fan, Rod Dreher, all examine the links between the human tendency to obey authority without question, and totalitarianism. Mattias Desmet refers to “mass formation”, a process whereby large swathes of people are the victims of collective hypnosis. Desmet is very much in debt to Arendt. In a nutshell:
In his recent book, Mattias Desmet takes on a new totalitarianism not enforced by jackbooted thugs, but dull bureaucrats imposing consensus.
Paul du Quenoy explains:
Desmet’s notion that mass formation, and consequently totalitarianism, “are in fact symptoms of the mechanistic ideology” struck him strongly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Globalized information technology not only helped spread the virus, but also united the world in what he calls a “Great Leap Forward” toward “totalitarian technocracy.” Confined to near house arrest, with strict limitation on mobility and human contact, a new and purer form of atomization seized the minds of anxious publics looking for enemies to blame and dissenters to punish. “Never before were the societal conditions so prone to totalitarianism,” Desmet argues, as they have been in the last few years. To add empirical insult to psychological injury, many establishment precepts initially advanced as irrefutably sound turned out to be exaggerated, contingent, harmful, and, in some cases, simply wrong, with little or no accountability for individuals and institutions that had erred but still clung to authority.
Dreher believes we are in a pre-totalitarian stage of history. In his analysis of the early stages of emerging totalitarianism, Rod Dreher refers to a loss of faith in traditional “hierarchies and institutions”, a “mania for ideology”, a “willingness to believe useful lies” and “the desire to transgress and destroy”. Together, these pose an existential threat to the hope we used to have.
Our greatest fear, according to some, is being excluded from the group. There is even a name for it – social exclusion anxiety.
https://www.willbrattcounselling.com/blog-creating-difference/2015/4/18/anxiety-social-exclusion
On this view, the masses go along to get along. Hence the resonance of George Orwell’s term, groupthink, with recent global events. The obedient vassals don’t necessarily believe in evil, or wish to do it. But they believe in obedience. They might well take or leave elements of the progressive agenda, but they want to belong and the ruling mood of the age is woke. It is performative conformism.
A number of observers say it is born of the loneliness and meaninglessness of a generation described by Robert Putnam as “bowling alone”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
Desmet is in this camp, too. Nature abhors a vacuum, and our emptiness and alienation has been filled in by gadgets, screens and woke ideology. And unconsidered obedience to technocratic totalitarianism. And note that Putnam was researching nearly thirty years ago, well before anyone had thought up social media or virtual and augmented reality.
When we obey, we often look the other way. For Marshall McLuhan (speaking in 1972):
There seems to be a deeply willed ignorance in man. “Sin” might also be defined as lack of awareness, “resistance to learning” and mankind being “threatened by understanding”.
A whole nation looked the other way, for example, as people died of vaccine injuries. This was deeply willed ignorance driven by conformism, by the urge to obey, to be “on the right side of history”.
All this explains obedience to authority by citizens, employees and consumers. Including by all but a few Liberal backbenchers during Covid totalitarianism, for example. It doesn’t explain why governments and those in authority have done the evil things they have. Here were must speculate. Adam and Eve’s fall and original sin? No doubt. The evil that men do? Yep. The nihilism of the age? Of course. The thin line through every man’s heart that separates good from evil? Indeed. Self-interest? Yes. Sociopathy? Totally. Hubris? All of the above. It explains everything and nothing.
Hannah Arendt referred to the “banality of evil”, specifically in relation to Adolph Eichmann.
Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in support of the Nazi’s Final Solution.
Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.
https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-the-banality-of-evil
It recall’s Milgram’s Mr Gino. Maybe Daniel Andrews as well. Sadly, governments and corporates now seem full of people that do evil routinely, apparently without knowing just how evil their deeds are. Climateers (or at least some of them, those who aren’t grifters) presumably believe that they are saving the world. I am guessing that King Charles III does. Just like Trump, Morrison and all the others who thought they were “saving lives” through lockdowns, ventilators, bans on Covid treatments that actually worked, masks and vaccine mandates. This has been termed noble cause corruption. Or the good intentions paving company.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/06/the-good-intentions-paving-company/
Arendt stated, a decade after her initial confrontation with Eichmann:
I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer [ie Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.
The word “shallowness” stands out. We live in both a post-Christian age whereby one huge behavioural control – a religiously formed conscience – has, for many, simply gone out the window, and also a very shallow age. Shallowness is all about, in the popular culture, in the television watching habits of the average Jo(e), in school curricula, in the media, in the obsession of the young (and the not-so-young) with social media, in the collapse of classical education. A yeah-nah culture, where evil deeds are observed with a yawn. Where the existence of “evil” itself is often denied. A shallow and relativist age where “virtue” (an objective measure) has been replaced by “values” (a subjective measure). An age where “I” decide what is good and evil. An age of Eichmanns. Where Eichmanns are not just possible, but inevitable. They live in Canberra. And they run our governments. For Arendt, the shallowness was in “the doer”. Now, the shallowness is in both doer and receiver. A match made in hell and delivered on earth. A Faustian bargain where agency is exchanged for convenience and pleasure.
But it isn’t the case that because our age has abandoned the old ways, yielding a largely conscienceless generation, at least in the sense of consciences formed from and by tradition, it follows that this generation is prone to dissidence. The very opposite is true. These days, we simply follow, quite blindly, new gospels. Gospels that are determined by the State and by intellectual and corporate elites.
One thing seems clear. It would appear from the long list of patent fallacies in which people still believe and their willingness to obey instructions based on those fallacies, that, despite the passing of apartheid (at least in South Africa), anyone who subscribes to the theory of inevitable human progress is engaging in a massive self-deception.
Paul Collits
29 November 2023
This makes me think of Ashley Bloomfield - our previous Director General of the Ministry of Health (NZ). He had the final say on all requests for a vaccine exemption and refused pretty much every single one, no matter the risks to the person requesting the exemption.
Eugyppius has had a series of pieces on the managerial class. Bureaucrats who organise countries and universities according to a world view that they hold. Covid and climate change are examples but immigration is as well.
We can be manipulated by these forces or we can pay the price and resist. Sin in the hearts of all men and women cause the mayhem we see in the world.