I didn't go into Stanford but ivy league university students are hardly representative of normal people. They want to please the people running the experiment. It's a form of trusting authority.
Excellent article, Rob! I don't know if you read my response to Luc's comment--it agrees about academia but makes the point regarding the unlikelihood of it changing the system, aka biting the hand that feeds it.
And the Rat Park experiment is an excellent counterpoint to Milgram. That was such a paradigm-shifting experiment. I talked about it and another article written by the same guy in my YT video on Gabor Mate called The Epiphany Jumpstart. It was before I did Substack so there's no text version but it's one of my favorites: https://youtu.be/erwJwvid4o4.
And thanks for recommending me! I'm happy to have subscribed to you. Don't know what took me so long.
My reading of the Milgram (and similar) experiments is not that all humans are bad or predisposed towards following orders, but that *some* are, and perhaps, many. This seems to jive well with experience to be honest. In other words, it's not black and white. Plus, as you rightfully point out in your article, there is always room for development and progress.
Pardon my saying so, Luc, but that's the worst of both worlds. If we all have, at birth, an equal predisposition to behave badly or well under the same circumstances, then God is just but the world is not. If at birth some, or perhaps many, are predisposed to be bad, but not all, then God is unjust. Essentially, God is evil, having created evil people, through no fault of their own.
Is the predisposition to be good or bad genetic or distributed equally throughout all families and countries? I don't know if you have kids but I wonder if Doc could tell us which of his daughters was born the best and which was born the worst? From my experience with three daughters, I'd caution him that these things have a way of changing. ;-)
Tereza, you are arguing against a strawman here, and making assumptions about my experience. Plus, you argue from how you would prefer God to be like. (If you are interested, I have written an essay about the problem of evil here: https://luctalks.substack.com/p/the-problem-of-evil-solved)
And, even though this is only loosely connected to the Milgram experiments, let me add that while the detailed explanations are debatable, the existence of psychopathy/sociopathy and related phenomena is not: there is a lot of literature about it, and personal experience of countless people.
I appreciate Luc for his willingness to write about the spiritual journey. All of us raised in the West, it does not come easily, our techno-industrial, scientific materialist, postmodern training gets in the way.
Thanks for that, Tereza. Excellent post and thoughts.
Let me respond to the point about good/evil: The thought that there might be people who are close to being inherently and irredeemably evil is extremely hard to entertain for us, but with psychopathy, we have at least one example of that. And we need to grapple with the phenomenon if we want to avoid being taken in by it. The biggest success of the devil is to make people believe he doesn't exist and all that.
Disturbingly, psychopathy seems to exist even in children. Now, there is a spectrum of course, and the last thing we want to do is jump to conclusions; and how to handle such a case always depends on the individual situation. A few movies have been made about this, like "We Need to Talk about Kevin" and "The Bad Seed". This is something many people prefer to pretend does not exist because it's just too dark and too crazy.
As for the Milgram experiment, for me the conclusion is not so much that everything depends on the system (there has been an over-emphasis on systems during the last 100 years in academics to my mind) but rather that a) many, many people seem to be utterly incapable of resisting authority and will always just follow along and b) there *are* people out there that are the equivalent of the "scientist" in Milgram's experiment. Who is it, in the real world, who tells people to adminster shocks to their fellow humans? Even from a systems perspective: the command needs to come from someone, right?
Thanks again, you made so many good observations and I can't respond to them all, nor do I need to :)
This was a real joy to make, Luc. Often I'm responding to the ideas of people who are dead or too famous (and often, too pompous) to know I exist. Having a dialogue with a real person gives me a chance to read them deeply and take time to think about it before I respond. Your ideas and the way you put them gave me so much to think about, in a way that made so much sense!
It was hard to cut myself off at five because I really wanted to respond to the contrarian one. I had just been telling my daughter I thought she should write a future book called "How to Deal with the Contrarian Mind ... especially when it's yours." As a contrarian myself, I'm allowed to say that to her ;-)
I believe in distilling all disagreement down to its lowest common denominator, so I'm glad you honed in on "are people born evil?" I think this is the most important question we can be asking, on which the future hinges. I'm going to address that more when I next respond to Harrison, since that's the crux of his research. But I'll address 'the bad seed' here.
My close friend had a son at the same time that I had my middle daughter. From a very early age, he acted out and was violent towards other kids. She was a great mom. But what I noticed was that every time he did something bad, he ended up getting what he wanted--to be the center of attention, to go home. It was a reward system. She said all the right things but what she did reinforced the bad behavior.
I went so far in trying to get her to adopt a different system that she stopped talking to me. In HS she sent her son to a wilderness camp and he now lives with his dad. My theory, of why she couldn't hear what I was saying, is that it put the blame on her for her parenting style, rather than him or his dad for a genetic predisposition. In my observation, the brattiest kids have the nicest parents. Modeling doesn't work, only consequences. Although my friend's son certainly isn't in that category, by extension, I believe psychopaths are made, not born.
In some of my episodes I talk about Elaine Pagel's book "The Origin of Satan" and how she found it was the intimate enemy, the enemy within--the Jewish zealots who were in revolt against Roman rule. It was one of the unsought proof points that started my research into the gospels as a psy-ops by the Roman Empire (https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/jesus-is-the-og-psy-ops). So perhaps the lessons are backwards: 'Jesus' is the one who accepts imperial rationalities and is obedient to Rome, as I gather evidence for in this article: http://thirdparadigm.org/doc_jesusrebelorimperialist.php. The 'demons' are the ones who believe in sovereignty and the right to rule themselves.
Yet, if you believe in a Creator, how do you solve the theodicy triangle that's puzzled theologians for centuries: that a God who is all-good and all-powerful can't logically be true if evil exists?
And, on the Milgram experiment, you go straight to why the question isn't academic but all-important. IF people are on a spectrum of good vs. evil, society needs to judge and control people and the bigger that arena of control, the better. If people are born equally good and, when they behave badly, systems are to blame, communities can be trusted to design their own systems and learn from their own and others' mistakes.
For the over-emphasis on systems for the last 100 years, I'm still trying to find a single other person who's taking it seriously that we can change the system. That's certainly not going to come from the group of people most embedded in and ideologically wedded to the system--the academics.
Thanks for your thought-provoking and thought-full response, Luc!
“A neoliberal feminism has emerged that accepts market ‘rationalities’ and sees the ceiling, rather than the hearth, as the symbolic center of its architecture and the ladder rather than the roundtable as its furniture.”
At first, Silvia Federici’s quote seemed to capture something important. It was certainly a nice bit of writing. But then I read and reread it and ultimately the quote seemed merely a clever rephrasing of “a woman’s place is in the home”. Or am I missing something? (On the positive side, it did prompt me to wonder if Victoria Nuland’s feminine neoliberalism differed from Jake Sullivan’s masculine neoliberalism. I decided they have no discernible philosophical differences.)
I’m increasingly skeptical of most dichotomous framings, including toxic this and tonic that, especially when one potentially physical dichotomy (toxic/tonic) is paired with a non-physical (psychological?) dichotomy like masculine/feminine. In my own view, toxic/tonic may be a physical dichotomy that can sometimes be made to fit on a continuum, but usually only in some select ways—one drink, for example, can make a person affable, while ten drinks can make a person murderous. I suppose somewhere on this “drink continuum” there is a point that separates tonic from toxic for most people. Bartenders and party hosts have to be adept at recognizing this point. It is variable between individuals, but it is an objectively real point. So there are physical dichotomies that can be placed on a continuum (or at least on a line segment). But where is the point separating tonic from toxic on the “polonium continuum”?
My favorite example of a non-physical dichotomous failure (and also an example of the limitations of using a spectrum or continuum as a metaphor) is the left/right framing of political perspectives, which I consider a two-dimensional Overton Window, which has ruined a lot of political discourse. However, as a form of psychologizing, a dichotomous framing like toxic/tonic may have some use in practice. Still, I feel myself resisting the influence of allowing dichotomy into philosophical argument about, say, realism, existentialism, or neoliberalism. I throw in the latter because it seems to defy the tonic/toxic dichotomy and continuum metaphor, though, of course, the masculine/feminine dichotomy can apparently be superimposed onto any idea.
Also, since I’m critiquing quotes in your post, you quote Luc Koch who writes that a man must “protect and inspire”. On the face of it, I like this sentiment, since it conforms to the male fantasy of simultaneously being a Spartan warrior and an Athenian philosopher. But there are two problems with defining masculinity with those two traits (and with that male fantasy). First, these two traits are an incompatible combination among men. True protection in the physical world is based on an absolute willingness to be brutal without moral reservation. Outside of fiction and patriotic myth-making, there is nothing inspirational about real-world physical protection. The second problem is that there is nothing inherently masculine about these traits. In fact, even the seemingly more “masculine” trait of protector of offspring is born by the female in most mammalian species. I would argue that among humans, women carry the lioness’s share of the family protection duties. I might add that females are almost always better defenders of their hearth against other females, who are the most likely home intruders/disruptors in civilized societies and against whom most males are hopeless idiots.
I have more to say about dichotomizing with regard to gnosticism, but I will leave that for another day.
Jack! My middle daughter always laughs because I answer her calls with Olivia! I think I use the exclamation point similarly for you.
To put Sylvia in context, her work is with peasant women around the world. Although I didn't say it in this episode, I think that feminism went the wrong direction by freeing women to serve the market. It should have enabled men to serve home, family and community too.
I think that Nuland and Hilary are both masculine neo-cons than the feminine neo-liberal form of domination. They both use military means. It has nothing to do with their gender, just direct force vs. coercion.
Polonium continuum? I had to look that up and it still didn't help. You continue to expand my vocabulary!
I didn't get into Luc's 'protect and inspire' but I wondered about it in practice also. I can't remember an occasion in my 25 yrs of marriage when my husband was called upon to protect me. In fact, I think women have an easier time de-escalating potential threats because they're not a challenge to someone's masculinity. And 'inspire' would have felt better if he'd turned it around. I also wondered about the "able to push back when the situation required it." I wanted to ask for examples of what that might be, but didn't want to get too far afield.
What an excellent way to put that, daiva. You know I'll need to be quoting you on that.
I've said something (not as well) similar in discussion and disagreement. First understand what the other person means by their terms. And if you disagree with the words that you have a different meaning for, translate to words that mean what they mean. That way we can talk about the important things and move our thought process forward rather than quibbling about something that turns out to be just semantics.
I do hope, at some point, that we can all be talking about how to create this world that puts family at the center instead of oligarchs.
The quote originates from Politics and the English Language. On each re-read, something new jumps at me, previously overlooked—classics have this wonderful habit 😊
Yes, the misunderstanding of the positive feedback loop between masculine and feminine binds us all to many other misinterpretations - such as the toxic deal we make to swap dangerous freedom for peaceful slavery. There is a fatal weakness at the very heart of it which betrays us all.
“A neoliberal feminism has emerged that accepts market ‘rationalities’ and sees the ceiling, rather than the hearth, as the symbolic center of its architecture and the ladder rather than the roundtable as its furniture.”
Isn't that great? I've been struggling (maybe?) all my life with why feminism felt wrong, and why the world of the housewife felt wrong. They both accept market 'rationalities'. One actively serves the market and the other is a passive consumer in the market. Both empty roles.
The milgram and Stanford experiments were partially rigged by the ignorance of academia.
https://robc137.substack.com/p/the-milgram-experiment-and-how-we
I didn't go into Stanford but ivy league university students are hardly representative of normal people. They want to please the people running the experiment. It's a form of trusting authority.
Excellent article, Rob! I don't know if you read my response to Luc's comment--it agrees about academia but makes the point regarding the unlikelihood of it changing the system, aka biting the hand that feeds it.
And the Rat Park experiment is an excellent counterpoint to Milgram. That was such a paradigm-shifting experiment. I talked about it and another article written by the same guy in my YT video on Gabor Mate called The Epiphany Jumpstart. It was before I did Substack so there's no text version but it's one of my favorites: https://youtu.be/erwJwvid4o4.
And thanks for recommending me! I'm happy to have subscribed to you. Don't know what took me so long.
My reading of the Milgram (and similar) experiments is not that all humans are bad or predisposed towards following orders, but that *some* are, and perhaps, many. This seems to jive well with experience to be honest. In other words, it's not black and white. Plus, as you rightfully point out in your article, there is always room for development and progress.
Pardon my saying so, Luc, but that's the worst of both worlds. If we all have, at birth, an equal predisposition to behave badly or well under the same circumstances, then God is just but the world is not. If at birth some, or perhaps many, are predisposed to be bad, but not all, then God is unjust. Essentially, God is evil, having created evil people, through no fault of their own.
Is the predisposition to be good or bad genetic or distributed equally throughout all families and countries? I don't know if you have kids but I wonder if Doc could tell us which of his daughters was born the best and which was born the worst? From my experience with three daughters, I'd caution him that these things have a way of changing. ;-)
Tereza, you are arguing against a strawman here, and making assumptions about my experience. Plus, you argue from how you would prefer God to be like. (If you are interested, I have written an essay about the problem of evil here: https://luctalks.substack.com/p/the-problem-of-evil-solved)
And, even though this is only loosely connected to the Milgram experiments, let me add that while the detailed explanations are debatable, the existence of psychopathy/sociopathy and related phenomena is not: there is a lot of literature about it, and personal experience of countless people.
Thanks, Luc. I'll check out your article!
I appreciate Luc for his willingness to write about the spiritual journey. All of us raised in the West, it does not come easily, our techno-industrial, scientific materialist, postmodern training gets in the way.
Thanks for that, Tereza. Excellent post and thoughts.
Let me respond to the point about good/evil: The thought that there might be people who are close to being inherently and irredeemably evil is extremely hard to entertain for us, but with psychopathy, we have at least one example of that. And we need to grapple with the phenomenon if we want to avoid being taken in by it. The biggest success of the devil is to make people believe he doesn't exist and all that.
Disturbingly, psychopathy seems to exist even in children. Now, there is a spectrum of course, and the last thing we want to do is jump to conclusions; and how to handle such a case always depends on the individual situation. A few movies have been made about this, like "We Need to Talk about Kevin" and "The Bad Seed". This is something many people prefer to pretend does not exist because it's just too dark and too crazy.
As for the Milgram experiment, for me the conclusion is not so much that everything depends on the system (there has been an over-emphasis on systems during the last 100 years in academics to my mind) but rather that a) many, many people seem to be utterly incapable of resisting authority and will always just follow along and b) there *are* people out there that are the equivalent of the "scientist" in Milgram's experiment. Who is it, in the real world, who tells people to adminster shocks to their fellow humans? Even from a systems perspective: the command needs to come from someone, right?
Thanks again, you made so many good observations and I can't respond to them all, nor do I need to :)
This was a real joy to make, Luc. Often I'm responding to the ideas of people who are dead or too famous (and often, too pompous) to know I exist. Having a dialogue with a real person gives me a chance to read them deeply and take time to think about it before I respond. Your ideas and the way you put them gave me so much to think about, in a way that made so much sense!
It was hard to cut myself off at five because I really wanted to respond to the contrarian one. I had just been telling my daughter I thought she should write a future book called "How to Deal with the Contrarian Mind ... especially when it's yours." As a contrarian myself, I'm allowed to say that to her ;-)
I believe in distilling all disagreement down to its lowest common denominator, so I'm glad you honed in on "are people born evil?" I think this is the most important question we can be asking, on which the future hinges. I'm going to address that more when I next respond to Harrison, since that's the crux of his research. But I'll address 'the bad seed' here.
My close friend had a son at the same time that I had my middle daughter. From a very early age, he acted out and was violent towards other kids. She was a great mom. But what I noticed was that every time he did something bad, he ended up getting what he wanted--to be the center of attention, to go home. It was a reward system. She said all the right things but what she did reinforced the bad behavior.
I went so far in trying to get her to adopt a different system that she stopped talking to me. In HS she sent her son to a wilderness camp and he now lives with his dad. My theory, of why she couldn't hear what I was saying, is that it put the blame on her for her parenting style, rather than him or his dad for a genetic predisposition. In my observation, the brattiest kids have the nicest parents. Modeling doesn't work, only consequences. Although my friend's son certainly isn't in that category, by extension, I believe psychopaths are made, not born.
In some of my episodes I talk about Elaine Pagel's book "The Origin of Satan" and how she found it was the intimate enemy, the enemy within--the Jewish zealots who were in revolt against Roman rule. It was one of the unsought proof points that started my research into the gospels as a psy-ops by the Roman Empire (https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/jesus-is-the-og-psy-ops). So perhaps the lessons are backwards: 'Jesus' is the one who accepts imperial rationalities and is obedient to Rome, as I gather evidence for in this article: http://thirdparadigm.org/doc_jesusrebelorimperialist.php. The 'demons' are the ones who believe in sovereignty and the right to rule themselves.
Yet, if you believe in a Creator, how do you solve the theodicy triangle that's puzzled theologians for centuries: that a God who is all-good and all-powerful can't logically be true if evil exists?
And, on the Milgram experiment, you go straight to why the question isn't academic but all-important. IF people are on a spectrum of good vs. evil, society needs to judge and control people and the bigger that arena of control, the better. If people are born equally good and, when they behave badly, systems are to blame, communities can be trusted to design their own systems and learn from their own and others' mistakes.
For the over-emphasis on systems for the last 100 years, I'm still trying to find a single other person who's taking it seriously that we can change the system. That's certainly not going to come from the group of people most embedded in and ideologically wedded to the system--the academics.
Thanks for your thought-provoking and thought-full response, Luc!
“A neoliberal feminism has emerged that accepts market ‘rationalities’ and sees the ceiling, rather than the hearth, as the symbolic center of its architecture and the ladder rather than the roundtable as its furniture.”
At first, Silvia Federici’s quote seemed to capture something important. It was certainly a nice bit of writing. But then I read and reread it and ultimately the quote seemed merely a clever rephrasing of “a woman’s place is in the home”. Or am I missing something? (On the positive side, it did prompt me to wonder if Victoria Nuland’s feminine neoliberalism differed from Jake Sullivan’s masculine neoliberalism. I decided they have no discernible philosophical differences.)
I’m increasingly skeptical of most dichotomous framings, including toxic this and tonic that, especially when one potentially physical dichotomy (toxic/tonic) is paired with a non-physical (psychological?) dichotomy like masculine/feminine. In my own view, toxic/tonic may be a physical dichotomy that can sometimes be made to fit on a continuum, but usually only in some select ways—one drink, for example, can make a person affable, while ten drinks can make a person murderous. I suppose somewhere on this “drink continuum” there is a point that separates tonic from toxic for most people. Bartenders and party hosts have to be adept at recognizing this point. It is variable between individuals, but it is an objectively real point. So there are physical dichotomies that can be placed on a continuum (or at least on a line segment). But where is the point separating tonic from toxic on the “polonium continuum”?
My favorite example of a non-physical dichotomous failure (and also an example of the limitations of using a spectrum or continuum as a metaphor) is the left/right framing of political perspectives, which I consider a two-dimensional Overton Window, which has ruined a lot of political discourse. However, as a form of psychologizing, a dichotomous framing like toxic/tonic may have some use in practice. Still, I feel myself resisting the influence of allowing dichotomy into philosophical argument about, say, realism, existentialism, or neoliberalism. I throw in the latter because it seems to defy the tonic/toxic dichotomy and continuum metaphor, though, of course, the masculine/feminine dichotomy can apparently be superimposed onto any idea.
Also, since I’m critiquing quotes in your post, you quote Luc Koch who writes that a man must “protect and inspire”. On the face of it, I like this sentiment, since it conforms to the male fantasy of simultaneously being a Spartan warrior and an Athenian philosopher. But there are two problems with defining masculinity with those two traits (and with that male fantasy). First, these two traits are an incompatible combination among men. True protection in the physical world is based on an absolute willingness to be brutal without moral reservation. Outside of fiction and patriotic myth-making, there is nothing inspirational about real-world physical protection. The second problem is that there is nothing inherently masculine about these traits. In fact, even the seemingly more “masculine” trait of protector of offspring is born by the female in most mammalian species. I would argue that among humans, women carry the lioness’s share of the family protection duties. I might add that females are almost always better defenders of their hearth against other females, who are the most likely home intruders/disruptors in civilized societies and against whom most males are hopeless idiots.
I have more to say about dichotomizing with regard to gnosticism, but I will leave that for another day.
Jack! My middle daughter always laughs because I answer her calls with Olivia! I think I use the exclamation point similarly for you.
To put Sylvia in context, her work is with peasant women around the world. Although I didn't say it in this episode, I think that feminism went the wrong direction by freeing women to serve the market. It should have enabled men to serve home, family and community too.
I think that Nuland and Hilary are both masculine neo-cons than the feminine neo-liberal form of domination. They both use military means. It has nothing to do with their gender, just direct force vs. coercion.
Polonium continuum? I had to look that up and it still didn't help. You continue to expand my vocabulary!
I didn't get into Luc's 'protect and inspire' but I wondered about it in practice also. I can't remember an occasion in my 25 yrs of marriage when my husband was called upon to protect me. In fact, I think women have an easier time de-escalating potential threats because they're not a challenge to someone's masculinity. And 'inspire' would have felt better if he'd turned it around. I also wondered about the "able to push back when the situation required it." I wanted to ask for examples of what that might be, but didn't want to get too far afield.
I look forward to hearing more about “dichotomizing with regard to Gnosticism.” 💚🌳
🗨 What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.
Wrt Tonic Masculinity, Orwell would be proud 🙂
What an excellent way to put that, daiva. You know I'll need to be quoting you on that.
I've said something (not as well) similar in discussion and disagreement. First understand what the other person means by their terms. And if you disagree with the words that you have a different meaning for, translate to words that mean what they mean. That way we can talk about the important things and move our thought process forward rather than quibbling about something that turns out to be just semantics.
I do hope, at some point, that we can all be talking about how to create this world that puts family at the center instead of oligarchs.
The quote originates from Politics and the English Language. On each re-read, something new jumps at me, previously overlooked—classics have this wonderful habit 😊
orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language
Yes, the misunderstanding of the positive feedback loop between masculine and feminine binds us all to many other misinterpretations - such as the toxic deal we make to swap dangerous freedom for peaceful slavery. There is a fatal weakness at the very heart of it which betrays us all.
“A neoliberal feminism has emerged that accepts market ‘rationalities’ and sees the ceiling, rather than the hearth, as the symbolic center of its architecture and the ladder rather than the roundtable as its furniture.”
Boom.
Isn't that great? I've been struggling (maybe?) all my life with why feminism felt wrong, and why the world of the housewife felt wrong. They both accept market 'rationalities'. One actively serves the market and the other is a passive consumer in the market. Both empty roles.