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Obedience and Authority In the era of high technologies and developed industries, when the world is spinning around at an extremely high speed, when there seems to be nothing beyond the capacity of the humanity, more and more people start to think and speak about morals. The origin of absolutely everything what is going on on our planet can be traced back to the morals of the society or to their lack. No matter what people do or think all their thoughts and deeds first come through an inner filter, called morality. When we make some decisions or when we restrain from them, we always keep in mind some patterns according to which we act. If our decisions coincide with the patterns in our conscience, we feel satisfied. As soon as our decisions have to contradict the given patterns we suffer great disappointment and discomfort.
The same principle is also applicable to psychological processes that colour our mechanical life. One of such processes that has been a subject of many researches and experiments in the last decades is obedience to authority. Obedience plays a great role in our society. It has become one of the most important pillars on which our life dwells. Our society has established a great number of rules and regulations that aim at providing peace and justice for each individual. But as our society consists of individuals each of whom has his / her own needs, and views his / her own life in an absolutely different way, these regulations may contradict a persons interests and even his / her morals.
What should be his / her actions in such a case? Should the person sacrifice his / her morality and obey to the set regulations, or should he / she disobey the rules and live in harmony with his / her conscience? The question is as old as the world. Unfortunately, numerous experiments prove that people tend to betray their morals and principles in favour of conformity with the majority and obedience to authority. According to Alan Strudler and Danielle Warren, "Everyday people in organizations military soldiers, corporate employees, government officials respond to morally questionable authority in morally questionable ways. Without wrongful obedience to authority, our world would be unrecognizable.
We often forget, especially under pressure, that we are humans and one of the qualities that makes us different from other beings is our conscience. It governs our ideas and behaviour and helps us understand the great responsibility of all our deeds and thoughts. Of course, it is more convenient for a person to conform, though not always easier. As Nicholas Epley and Thomas Gilovich stated in their research, conformity pressure often produces a strong feeling of internal conflict.
On the one hand, a person may feel that the opinions, attitudes, or behaviours of others are incorrect or, even worse, immoral. On the other hand, nobody wants to be ostracized by their friends or peers. This inner conflict is very painful, but feeling of discomfort makes us in the long run conform and obey. Whenever we make decisions, we should keep in mind that blindly obeying authority we at the same time betray ourselves, our morals. That is why before obeying some authority we should always question ourselves whether our obedience or conformity with the majority is moral or not. If some rules or laws conflict with people's morals, we have not only the right, but also the responsibility to disobey.
Nonetheless, our disobedience should not be groundless, it should be an absolutely conscious decision. Erich Fromm wrote in his work on disobedience that if a man can only obey and not disobey, he is a slave; if he can only disobey and not obey, he is a rebel (not a revolutionary); he acts out of anger, disappointment, resentment, yet not in the name of a conviction or a principle. That means that whatever position we choose to take in the society, this choice should be well thought, it should be based on our deep understanding of our responsibility. Sometimes it is very difficult to decide how to act in a certain situation. A person often feels at a loss when he / she has to make a serious decision to disobey the authority. He / she can hesitate thinking over and over again whether his act will be a mere avoidance of his / her responsibilities and violation of the law, or it will be a highly moral act.
This doubt occurs, because the notion of morality is very abstract, we all think that what is considered moral by one person may be treated immoral by another. Erich Fromm in his work Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem gives an answer to this complicated question. He explains that there exist two forms of conscience: the authoritarian (that makes us obey the authority) and humanistic conscience. The humanistic conscience; this is the voice present in every human being, and is based on the fact that as human beings we have an intuitive knowledge of what is conducive of life and what is destructive of life. This conscience serves our functioning as human beings. It is the voice which calls us back to ourselves, to our humanity.
Thus, first of all we should obey our conscience and listen to it when we need to take important steps. People are social beings, they build their society according to some rules and laws that provide the order in their life. The peace and well being of the society depend on the conformity and obedience to authority, as laws are issued by people in power. Unfortunately, not all authorities are decent and honourable, and not all of them issue just laws. Some of their laws may result in complete destruction of the whole humanity. Erich Fromm said: "If mankind commits suicide, it will be because people will obey those who command them to push the deadly buttons; because they will obey the archaic passions of fear, hate, and greed; because they will obey obsolete cliches of State sovereignty and national honor. " That is why there is an acute necessity to critically evaluate the authority and their demands, though real practice and experiments of scientists prove that most people tend to do the contrary.
Moti Nissan in his Review of Stanley Milgrams Experiments on Obedience stated that what people cannot be counted on is to realize that a seemingly benevolent authority is in fact malevolent, even when they are faced with overwhelming evidence that suggests that this authority is indeed malevolent. Indeed, in the modern world though we have so many sources of information, we cannot judge adequately about the deeds of our political leaders. They often use evidently dirty technologies to persuade us in their righteousness and decency and we blindly fall for it. Thus, we start wars which are proclaimed to bring good to each individual, but in reality bring only chaos to the whole world and deaths to the innocent and those who carried out orders of the authority and fell prey to their fear to disobey. Henry David Thoreau stated in his story called Walden and Civil Disobedience: There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as the higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I would like to paraphrase this statement, I guess, there will never be a really free society until each of us recognises his / her own power.
For this reason, people should value and obey their personal morals over the ideals of authority figures. I hope that some day people all over the world will be able to clearly evaluate the situation and rise up in defiance of any leader who gives orders to kill others. It would be great if they could remove such leaders from power without any revolutions or wars that cause death of innocent people, and before many people have been killed both by the leaders orders and the populations mean obedience to authority. Maybe some day political leaders of the world will ground their policies on the main principles of morality and people will follow those policies only after they have been put to the test by their conscience. References: 1. Constable, Scott, Shuler, Zachary, Klaber, Lucretia, & Rakauskas, Mick.
Conformity, Compliance, and Obedience. Psy 324, Advanced Social Psychology, Spring 1999. Jun. 4 2004. < web > 2. Epley, N. , & Gilovich, T. (1999). Just going along: Non conscious priming and conformity to social pressure. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 578 - 589.
Jun. 4 2004. < web > 3. Fromm, Erich. Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem. Reading Across the Curriculum. Behrens/Rosen. Logman Publishers USA. 1999. (149 - 153). 4.
Milgram, Stanley. The Perils of Obedience. Reading Across the Curriculum. Behrens/Rosen. Logman Publishers USA. 1999. (115 - 127). 5.
Scott, H. Social Pressure as a Moral and Political Tool. Online posting. Jun. 12 1998.
Jun. 4 2004. < web > 6. Strudler, Alan & Warren, Danielle. Authority and Excuses. Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy.
Online version. Jun. 5 2004. < web > 7. Thoreau, David Henry. Walden and Civil Disobedience.
Cambridge, Mass: The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1849 8. Weinberg, Rabbi Noah. Way # 36 Handling Social Pressure. Spirituality. Jan. 10 2000. Jun. 4 2004. < web > 9.
Wim Means, H. J. , Raaijmakers, Quite A. W. (1995). Obedience in modern society: The Utrecht studies. Journal of Social Issues, 51, 155 - 175. Jun. 4 2004 < web >
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