Søren Roest Korsgaard
If you want to know more about how governments and the vaccine industry used behavioral science to achieve compliance, check out my book: The New September 11th: Solving the COVID-19 Pandemic. Download the article as an MP3 or listen to it in the browser.
Genocide, while often orchestrated by a small cabal of planners, is frequently enabled by the willing participation of thousands of people who may not even be aware of the full scope of the plan. History shows that the process of dehumanization, combined with propaganda that frames aggression as self-defense, creates a fertile environment for complicity. In the 1960s, Dr. Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist, determined that obedience to authority plays a crucial, but often underappreciated, role in enabling genocide.
Milgram’s interest was sparked by the Nuremberg Trials following World War II, where Nazi criminals often invoked the “Nuremberg Defense”—the legal assertion that their actions were merely the result of following orders from a superior. Under this reasoning, the defendant claims he is not fully culpable because he was merely obeying orders. Intrigued by the Nuremberg Defense, Milgram decided to test its validity: Would ordinary people obey orders to commit atrocities?
After pondering how to empirically test it, he came up with an elaborate scheme in which volunteers were deceived into believing they were participating in research on how punishment affects memory. Specifically, an experimenter would introduce the volunteer to a male actor playing the role of a victim, whom most found “mild-mannered and likable” [1]. The experimenter then strapped the victim to an apparatus resembling an electric chair and attached electrodes to his wrists to give the impression that escape was not possible. The experimenter and the volunteer then moved to an adjoining room where a shock generator, connected to the electrodes, sat on a table.
On the generator, Milgram and his colleagues labeled the voltage doses with escalating warnings: slight shock, moderate shock, strong shock, very strong shock, intense shock, extreme intensity shock, and “DANGER: SEVERE SHOCK.” The last two switches, 435 and 450 volts, were ominously marked “X X X,” a clear sign that death would follow.
Now came the crucial part: The volunteer was instructed to read aloud a challenge and four possible answers. If the victim responded incorrectly, the volunteer was directed to deliver a single shock, starting at 15 volts (which, of course, was simulated). For each incorrect response, the volunteer was directed to increase the voltage by one step.
The victim, following a predetermined script, reacted to each voltage level, starting with a mere “Ugh!!!” at 75 volts and escalating to screaming, pounding on the wall, complaining of heart problems, and demanding an end to the experiment [2]. If the volunteer hesitated, the experimenter used a series of escalating prods: “Please continue,” and if necessary, “It is absolutely essential that you continue,” and finally, “You have no other choice, you must go on” [1]. If the volunteer proceeded past 330 volts, the victim feigned death by falling silent. At this point, the experimenter instructed the volunteer that silence constituted a false response and that they must continue administering punishment. The study was terminated after three shocks at the maximum 450-volt level.
Follow-up interviews confirmed that none of the volunteers suspected the shock generator was simulated; they genuinely believed the pain inflicted was real, even extreme. Before the study, 14 senior psychology majors were given a detailed overview of the methodology and asked to predict the hypothetical distribution of obedience among 100 randomly selected volunteers aged 20 to 50. There was a broad consensus that a maximum of three out of 100 would administer the full series of electric shocks. To everyone’s surprise, an astounding 65% completed the study. Five participants dropped out after administering 300 volts; four at 315 volts; two at 330 volts; one at 345 volts; one at 360 volts; and one at 375 volts. A total of 26 volunteers, or 65%, administered the full range of punishments. Unbelievably, many of them expressed “deep disapproval of shocking a man in the face of his objections, and others denounced it as stupid and senseless,” yet they complied and continued [1].
The Milgram experiment powerfully demonstrates that under the command of authority, many individuals will sacrifice others even when they know it is wrong. In 1979, after his experiment had been repeated numerous times with consistent results, Milgram observed that it would be a small task to assemble the necessary personnel to run death camps:
I would say, on the basis of having observed a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town [3].
Given the mass compliance observed during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is to be expected that obedience to authority has not declined over time. The most recent data point is 2015, when the experiment was replicated in Poland, where 90% of 80 participants inflicted the highest level of simulated voltage permitted (for ethical reasons, they could not go higher than 150 volts). The lead author, Dr. Tomasz Grzyb, concluded, “Half a century after Milgram’s original research into obedience to authority, a striking majority of subjects are still willing to electrocute a helpless individual” [4]. The power brokers who engineered the COVID-19 response were undoubtedly armed with this knowledge, and they ruthlessly exploited it to achieve their goals.
References
[1]. Milgram, S. “Behavioral Study of Obedience.” Journal of abnormal psychology vol. 67 (1963): 371-8. doi:10.1037/h0040525 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14049516/ [accessed November 2022].
[2]. Milgram Experiment – Obedience to Authority https://explorable.com/stanley-milgram-experiment [accessed May 2022].
[3]. The Milgram Paradigm After 35 Years: Some Things We Now Know About Obedience to Authority https://psychologyrocks.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/blass1999-replciations-of-milgram-and-gender-diffs-2.pdf [accessed May 2022].
[4]. Conducting the Milgram Experiment in Poland, Psychologists Show People Still Obey http://www.spsp.org/news-center/press-releases/milgram-poland-obey [accessed May 2022].