Standley Milgram's experience
Submission to a perverse authority
Allow man to disobey wicked orders
Le scepticisme est la plus facile des philosophies. Robert Kemp.
For Freud, cruelty is constitutive of the self. The ego being one of the instances of the personality, cruelty belongs to the bottom of every individual. In other words: we are all originally capable of being cruel.
And unfortunately Milgram's experience seems to demonstrate this.
Submission to authority
Born in 1933, Stanley Milgram is an American psychologist. In the 1960s, he developed an uplifting experience that bore his name. Its purpose was to test the degree of submission of an individual to authority. The experience was described as a study on the effectiveness of punishment on memory development. The punishment being represented by an electric shock.
Three characters were involved.
- The experimenter, official embodiment of authority (in a gray coat and an accomplice to the experience).
- The pupil. He should try to memorize the lists of words (also an accomplice of the experience).
- The teacher. He dictates the words to the student, checks the answers and sends the dumps in case of error (this is the subject of the experiment).
For each error the guinea pig must send a discharge to the student (and increasingly strong). The latter, an actor, mimicked the suffering corresponding to the alleged electric shocks.
The results of the experiment
Most subjects obey the authority urging them to increase the electrical doses. 65% go to the maximum shock 450 flights.
The outcome of Milgram's experience speaks for itself. According to her, 2/3 of human beings are able to torture a fellow human being. Capable of inflicting suffering on a stranger, under the sole influence of an authority.
During the first experiments carried out by Stanley Milgram, 62.5% (25 out of 40) of the subjects carried out the experiment to the end by inflicting three times the electroshocks of 450 volts. All participants accepted the principle announced and, possibly after encouragement, reached 135 volts.
The average maximum shock (levels at which the subjects stopped) was 360 volts. However, each participant had at one point or another stopped to question the professor. Many showed obvious signs of extreme nervousness and reluctance during the later stages (verbal protests, nervous laughter, etc.).
Other experiments around the world have validated the results obtained by Milgram. The obedience rates obtained were generally even higher than in the original situation. We can thus cite the achievements of David Rosenhan1, and David Mantell2 in Germany.
Subsequent work, in particular by Thomas Blass, has shown that the percentage of people agreeing, under similar experimental conditions, to inflict very large discharges was almost constant, between 61% and 66%, whatever the place and the time when the test was conducted. In 2006, ABC News reproduced Milgram's experience, obtaining similar results (65% of men followed the instructions to the end and 73% of women) 3 4.
Milgram called the results "unexpected and worrisome" at the time. Preliminary surveys of psychiatrists had predicted a rate of subjects sending 450 volts in the range of 1 per 1000. Source wikipedia
3 human characters
The ordinary, the saint, the pervert
Quand un être vit de cruauté, d'argent, d'hypocrisie, de mensonge, il est mort Gaudin.
Many processes structure the "polymorphous perverse child". Curiosity, the desire to experiment and push them to the end, are some of them. The tendency to dominate, the charge of impulses and narcissism also. But if the child has all the structures of perversion, education is there to get out of it. It aims to push us towards the love of neighbor, respect for others and responsibility.
Perversion
This is why, a tiny minority of individuals (2%) sink into actual cruelty *.
*Only one in 40 inflicted the 450 volts, when they had the choice not to do so.
Another minority will in a way socialize their cruelty. She will use her intelligence to materialize her evil while remaining within the law. This is the case with narcissistic perversion or mental manipulation.
The holiness
In contrast, another tiny minority manages to transcend its perverse base into absolute good. These rare personalities manage to completely extinguish this trend, in their minds. This is the case of the saint, the sage of the awakened one. Another percentage of individuals will use the intuitive knowledge of this force to combat it. Highly moralized, it will convey great human values by trying to embody them as best as possible.
The ordinary
Finally, for the vast majority, cruelty remains in a state of potentiality. These are 65% of Milgram's experience. If no one stimulates it, it does not appear. Education and empathy have the strength to dominate it. But this reserve of latent cruelty is very often stimulated by the dominant systems. The ordinary individual under influence then watches it unfold or puts it into practice. The Romans activated it by establishing circus games. Dictatorships also impose it within society. Today's ultra-liberalism encourages a soft version of cruelty with its selfish values.
Define the cruel
From the individual to the state
Insensibilité, désir ou jubilation
Insensitivity, desire or jubilation
Cruelty could be defined in a few words. “Pathological insensitivity, desire or jubilation in the face of the suffering engendered by our actions on living beings. Whether by pleasure, by selfishness, by interest or revenge, and this, directly or indirectly. Under this definition, cruelty can be perpetrated in several ways. Initiated by an individual, a group or a state. Acting in his own name, in the name of a resistance or a government.
The cruel individual
Several things can lead an individual to knowingly commit cruelty:
be insensitive to the pain of others.
Have fun dominating others.
to be able to break universally known human rules.
Do not be afraid of the penalty, that is to say of the prison.
Do not fear a divine sanction either.
Cruel state
In order for a government to order acts of cruelty (dictatorship, war) it is necessary:
Let him have no consideration for the victims. No consideration for innocent victims, "Collateral damage".
Let them feel sufficiently protected by the system. Protected by a system that has shown so far that it protects principals.
Let him have enough capacity in bad faith. In other words, he can convince and convince himself to perform just actions.
Cruel resistance
In order for an individual to commit acts of cruelty (terrorism) under the pretext of resistance, it is necessary:
Let them share the same psychic configuration as cruel government.
Let him have no regard for innocent victims
Let him feel protected by his ideology, his convictions, God, etc.
The individual under influence
In order for an individual to obey an order directing him to commit acts of cruelty, it is necessary:
Let him have a bad appreciation of the requirements of human morality.
That he accepts to believe in the legitimacy of the person or those who order such acts.
Let him be afraid of the consequences inherent in a refusal to commit such acts.
That he did not build empathetic structures.
Let him be in the grip of the one who asks to commit such acts.
These are some of the great ways in which cruelty can still be expressed today.
2002
La misère du monde est tout aussi visible dans la ligne et le visage d'un mannequin que dans le corps squelettique d'un Africain. La même cruauté se lit partout si on sait la voir.
Jean Baudrillard
