In praise of disobedience

[dweller]

By Luciana Bohne
August 23, 2005—On the MoveOn.org website, I accessed an interactive
map showing participation by American citizens in the national vigil called for
by Cindy Sheehan on 17 August 2005. The most touching thing about this
exercise was clicking on counties and viewing this count: one person in a
county in Maine, two in a county in Texas, one person in a county in
Colorado. It must take guts to do that—to show up with a candle, alone.
These are the people whom you can trust to stand up in a room full of polite,
scared, or obedient people to say, "No, I will not go along. It is wrong."

In Stanley Milgram's classic psychological experiment on obedience,
conducted at Yale in the 1960s, he asked a group of people to apply
supposedly lethal volts of electricity to another group of people if they failed
to deliver the right answer to an improbable memory test. It was all
prearranged: there were no electric shocks, and the test was not testing
memory but obedience. The result frightened even the scientists who had
predicted minimal compliance with orders to "kill" the memory-challenged
subjects. In fact, an overwhelming majority pushed the button that they were
repeatedly told would endanger the subject's life. Those who complied were
later asked why they had done so. They said they were afraid to offend the
scientist in his authoritative white coat; they didn't want to be impolite; they
didn't want to be the only one to disobey orders even though they felt bad
about them.

Milgram's experiment shows that the path of evil for ordinary people is not
paved with a monolithic stone on which they consciously choose to walk;
rather, it is paved with the shards of their petrified conscience, breaking apart
under the regulatory pressure of sculpting their will into that of the crowd.
Thus, they embrace evil by imitation, cowardice, or timidity—one step at a
time, rather than in one leap of the will as in a private, conscious, Faustian
bargain with the devil.

Although some people are decidedly motivated by evil, such as greedy,
selfish, and ambitious people tend to be, most people support evil through
fear, insecurity, or an excessive admiration for authority. But as Milgram's
experiment also showed, it takes only one person to refuse or to question
the logic of orders for some others to immediately follow suite. We are
imitative creatures—which makes it imperative that those we put in power be
people of reasonable integrity, adequate intellectual maturity, and at least
average emotional balance.

In this sense, the nation's moral balance owes a great debt to people like
Cindy Sheehan.

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/082305Bohne/082305bohne.html

dp

[knowbody0]

1. the gatherings were awesome

but the cars that honked in approval giving us the peace sign were as well. im betting that had they known about the vigils they would have been with us.