The Great Gaslighting

Published January 21, 2021

In 1963, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist working at Yale, noticed that during the Nuremberg trials the accused Nazis often mounted the defense that they were merely following orders and therefore ought not be held accountable for their malfeasance. Milgram wondered if this defense was legitimate. If someone is given an order to carry out that he or she knows to be wrong or immoral, doesn’t that person have the duty to refuse it? Does merely following orders absolve people of taking responsibility for their actions?

As it turns out, it was a legitimate defense. The preponderance of people, Milgram discovered, are extraordinarily slavish when they encounter authority. We can opine about morality all we like, but the truth is, almost no one has a backbone strong enough to maintain a moral position in the face of authority.

To discover this feature of human hard-wiring, Milgram devised an experiment in which participants were given the task to administer increasingly intense electric shocks (from mild to very dangerous) to another person, or that’s what the participants believed. In truth, the shocks were not real but simulated, and the recipient was an actor paid to ham it up. The actor, when he received the fake shock, would cry out in pain.

An authority figure in a lab coat instructed the participant to administer the shocks. After administering the first shock, if the participant balked at giving another because of the actor’s cries, he was verbally prodded by the authority figure: Prod 1: Please continue. Prod 2: The experiment requires you to continue. Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue. Prod 4: You have no other choice but to continue.

The results showed that 65% of people administered the shocks all the way to the highest level. 35% of people stopped just before the highest level. Many write-ups about this research stop right there and state something like, while it is disturbing that two-thirds wouldn’t stop, it is encouraging that one-third refused. No. No. No. These results are nothing but dour: All participants went to the next-to-highest level and administered what they believed was a serverely painful shock. No one said, you can shove it, doc, I’m not shocking nobody. This ain’t what I signed up for.

For my money, the most useful data comes from Milgram’s fine-tuning of the experiment. He ran the experiment many times and tweaked the variables, and he found that people would behave differently under different circumstances. One of his findings here really sticks out to me: When people were told they were personally responsible for any harm they caused, almost none of them would administer the shocks. On the other hand, if people were told that the authority figure was responsible almost all participants would administer the shocks.

I think that bears repeating: When people can pass the buck, there seems to be few limits to the awful acts they’ll do. So, one big reason people do awful things is because they feel liberated from accepting responsibility for doing those things. They are just following orders. It is an exceedingly rare individual who will have the backbone to resist doing malfeasance if there’s no consequences.

What actually strikes me the most is how societies have utilized the Milgram research to restructure institutions, even entire socieites themselves, so that the buck never stops. At every rung, the person in authority can pass the buck up a rung, who can pass it up another rung, and so forth. With regard to the so-called covid MRNA injections, for instance, governments have indemnified Moderna and Pfizer from any legal repurcussions, and in fact government officials themselves have absolved themselves of any responsiblity, too, which is why President Biden can so arrogantly command people to take the shots despite the fact that the man has no medical expertise whatsoever, which is why his adminstration has attempted to pull and jimmy every lever of power to force people to take these shots, which is why kids down to the age of five have been propagandized to by Big Bird on Sesame Street to take these shots despite the fact that kids have never been a risk group for covid-19. Everyone is just following orders. The buck stops no where. No one is actually responsible, and no one can be held accountable. The buck passes right into a black hole.

This is a disaster in the making.

Pandemic of Poltroonery

The covid “pandemic” is a moral panic, a mass formation psychosis, a scare, certainly a hoax, however you’d like to frame it. People are not using their capacity for rational thought and are instead reacting out of fear and just falling in line and obeying authority, and covid fear-mongering has demonstrated, as did the Milgram experiment, that people will do what they are told by authority even if it contradicts what they see first-hand from experience, much less what they might read in the form of graphs or data. Authority trumps everything.

Early on during the scare we had access to good data that could be triangulated because it came from many sources, many different countries, and that data showed, again early on, that the covid was never particularly deadly. It had its greatest effects on the very old and people with comorbidities, but kids were never at risk. In what is to me completely mystifying, no one paid attention to that data, and if it was discussed at all by the media’s talking heads, it was downplayed in favor of the ever-increasing number of cases and the inflated death toll. To this very day, going into year three of this “pandemic”, the democrat-controlled states are forcing kids to wear useless masks to attend school, and many Universities are still doing “online learning” if not requiring the shots for admission. Hundreds if not thousands of companies are forcing people to take the shots or be fired. Millions of scared parents are getting their kids the MRNA shots to protect against a disease as deadly as a dirty dish rag. Data, sensory experience, do not matter in the face of fear-mongering authorities telling people what to do. It is a mad house. The authorities very well know this, and this was demonstrated conclusively by the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson partying it up during the first two weeks of the pandemic while the deplorables he had just locked down were under house arrest. From the very beginning, the power brokers seemed to know that covid wasn’t much of a threat. Yet, in public, they acted as if it was the end of the world. In the U.S., as of this writing, they are still pretending that is the case.

This is a huge problem. As institutions are presently structured this will happen again and again since no one is liable. Many people, I think, believe that the ship will aright itself, that ultimately the truth will prevail, even that the people who hatched this scheme will be uncovered and imprisoned. I hate to burst that bubble, but it ain’t happening. Ask yourself, how many bankers went to jail after the 2008 economic collapse? No one is going to be punished because the system itself is structured so that no one can be held to account. This is the kind of ugliness that people often call a “black pill”. Down the hatch!

The only white pill I can find is that this problem has a simple fix, simple in the sense that changing one variable will do a lot of fixing: Make the buck stop. Change institutions so that one person, one authority figure, is responsible and unable to pass the buck. Separation is key. Institutions must be walled off from each other. Committees, if they are necessary, ought to have zero decision-making ability and instead be restricted to strict advisory modes. One person ought to be the ultimate decision maker, and that person ought to be responsible for that decision. This would fix overnight the lion’s share of the problems exposed by the poltroonery pandemic.

Things are traveling in the opposite direction, though. Convergence is happening across institutions, with genuine fascism securing a stranglehold on the goverment, which is completely obvious when President Biden calls for tech companies to censor so-called “misinformation.” That is textbook fascism, the alignment of corporate and goverment authority into one entity, completely glossed over and ignored by the so-called left (I write so-called there because the American left is dead, as in, the American left no longer exists. It was consumed in toto by this fascist movement of wealthy power-brokers, by this marriage of goverment and corporate entities into one neoliberal behemoth, and it was all by design. People who don’t recognize this and who call themselves leftists while using social media to cheer for this fascism are imbeciles and useful idiots).

In sum, the reason to be optimistic is that the fix is relaively simple. Making the buck stop would right much of these problems. The reason to be pessimistic is that the trend is in the opposite direction, and to make these changes one would have to work within converged and corrupted institutions to remake those very institutions. That strikes me as next to impossible. So, we find ourselves with a clearly established problem with an easy fix that is impossible to implement.

Where this goes next I have only wild speculations, which I will save for another time.