WEBVTT NOTE The Milgram Experiment 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.800 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with 2 00:00:09.800 --> 00:00:13.000 Jeff Rigenbach. 3 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:19.400 It was about 1550, according to the standard accounts, about 35 years after the death of 4 00:00:19.400 --> 00:00:26.140 Shakespeare, about 80 years before the birth of John Locke, about 135 years before the 5 00:00:26.140 --> 00:00:32.220 and the Birth of Bach, that a young Frenchman named Etienne de la Boitie, a young man of 6 00:00:32.220 --> 00:00:38.660 what we today would call college age, about 20 years old, posed what Murray Rothbard would 7 00:00:38.660 --> 00:00:46.480 later describe as the central problem of political philosophy, the mystery of civil obedience. 8 00:00:46.480 --> 00:00:52.580 Why do people in all times and places obey the commands of the government, which always 9 00:00:52.580 --> 00:00:56.460 This constitutes a small minority of the society. 10 00:00:56.460 --> 00:01:02.500 La Boitie saw, Rothbard wrote, that every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon 11 00:01:02.500 --> 00:01:08.340 general popular acceptance, in short, the bulk of the people themselves, for whatever 12 00:01:08.340 --> 00:01:11.980 reason acquiesce in their own subjection. 13 00:01:11.980 --> 00:01:18.740 If this were not the case, no tyranny, indeed no governmental rule, could long endure. 14 00:01:18.740 --> 00:01:25.180 Hence a government does not have to be popularly elected to enjoy general public support, for 15 00:01:25.180 --> 00:01:30.500 general public support is in the very nature of all governments that endure, including 16 00:01:30.500 --> 00:01:32.900 the most oppressive of tyrannies. 17 00:01:32.900 --> 00:01:38.420 The tyrant is but one person, and could scarcely command the obedience of another person, much 18 00:01:38.420 --> 00:01:44.340 less of an entire country, if most of the subjects did not grant their obedience by 19 00:01:44.340 --> 00:01:46.380 their own consent. 20 00:01:46.380 --> 00:01:51.820 This then becomes for La Boitie the central problem of political theory. 21 00:01:51.820 --> 00:01:57.380 Why in the world do people consent to their own enslavement? 22 00:01:57.380 --> 00:02:02.560 Rothbard wrote this passage as part of a lengthy and extremely interesting introduction to 23 00:02:02.560 --> 00:02:09.140 a then new edition of Etienne de La Boitie's youthful essay on political philosophy. 24 00:02:09.140 --> 00:02:13.980 This new edition, which presented a modern American translation originally brought out 25 00:02:13.980 --> 00:02:21.980 in the 1940s was published in 1975 under the title The Politics of Obedience, The Discourse 26 00:02:21.980 --> 00:02:24.580 of Voluntary Servitude. 27 00:02:24.580 --> 00:02:31.220 That very same year, 1975, a rival edition of La Boitie's little book was issued by 28 00:02:31.220 --> 00:02:37.660 another small scholarly publisher, this one presenting an 18th century British translation 29 00:02:37.660 --> 00:02:42.120 with the 16th century French text on facing pages. 30 00:02:42.120 --> 00:02:47.680 This rival edition was published under the title The Will to Bondage and featured a not 31 00:02:47.680 --> 00:02:53.800 so lengthy but extremely interesting preface by the libertarian historian and editor James 32 00:02:53.800 --> 00:02:55.640 J. Martin. 33 00:02:55.640 --> 00:03:01.760 Martin thought he knew the answer to the question that had so perplexed La Boite and now perplexed 34 00:03:01.760 --> 00:03:02.920 Rothbard. 35 00:03:02.920 --> 00:03:08.880 Why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of the government, acquiesce 36 00:03:08.880 --> 00:03:13.720 Yes in their own subjection, consent to their own enslavement. 37 00:03:13.720 --> 00:03:16.920 Martin's answer was that they're born that way. 38 00:03:16.920 --> 00:03:22.600 We should ask ourselves, he wrote, whether at bottom all political, ethical and philosophic 39 00:03:22.600 --> 00:03:29.940 convictions might not be due to personal temperament and incapable of being accounted for by reason. 40 00:03:29.940 --> 00:03:35.400 This hypothesis, he maintained, is of critical importance to a detached view of this business 41 00:03:35.400 --> 00:04:05.400 The Theory of Money and Credit 42 00:04:05.400 --> 00:04:07.840 and the Arts of Persuasion. 43 00:04:07.840 --> 00:04:12.920 At the time he wrote this, Martin had spent more than 20 years teaching at the high school 44 00:04:12.920 --> 00:04:19.200 and college levels, and his considered opinion was that schools, in particular, persuaded 45 00:04:19.200 --> 00:04:21.080 nobody of anything. 46 00:04:21.080 --> 00:04:26.400 They largely succeed, he wrote, in entrenching sentiments already there in the people they 47 00:04:26.400 --> 00:04:32.560 process, though they may develop adversaries by awakening contradictory reactions among 48 00:04:32.560 --> 00:04:53.560 This is why, Martin wrote, the members of libertarian persuasions remain at just about the same levels year after year relative to the total community, despite the most wondrous attempts via literature, communication and action to swell them. 49 00:04:53.560 --> 00:05:00.480 Plain fact is, Martin insisted, that those who crave the comforts and security of subordination 50 00:05:00.480 --> 00:05:05.820 outnumber the free souls, and there is no credible evidence that this relationship is 51 00:05:05.820 --> 00:05:13.380 likely to change in any appreciable degree, now or at any calculable time in the future. 52 00:05:13.380 --> 00:05:18.860 That was James J. Martin's take on the origins of the politics of obedience, the will to 53 00:05:18.860 --> 00:05:22.720 bondage, the will to voluntary servitude. 54 00:05:22.720 --> 00:05:30.240 There were other takes, however. As the simultaneous appearance in 1975 of competing translations 55 00:05:30.240 --> 00:05:36.660 of Etienne de la Boitie's Essay and Political Philosophy suggests, the 70s was a time when 56 00:05:36.660 --> 00:05:43.400 such ideas were in the air, a time when many people were drawn to consider and discuss 57 00:05:43.400 --> 00:05:45.560 such ideas. 58 00:05:45.560 --> 00:05:50.320 Consider the case of Stanley Milgram, the social psychologist at the City University 59 00:05:50.320 --> 00:05:56.480 of New York, whose book Obedience to Authority was published in 1974. 60 00:05:56.480 --> 00:06:02.200 The book was Milgram's summary of and reflections upon a series of experiments he had begun 61 00:06:02.200 --> 00:06:10.080 conducting back in 1961, when he was a newly-minted Harvard PhD in the second year of his first 62 00:06:10.080 --> 00:06:15.240 teaching assignment as an assistant professor of psychology at Yale. 63 00:06:15.240 --> 00:06:19.720 Milgram advertised for volunteers who would be willing to participate in a psychological 64 00:06:19.720 --> 00:06:26.040 experiment in return for a small payment, four dollars for one hour of your time, according 65 00:06:26.040 --> 00:06:30.420 to the ad reproduced in Milgram's 1974 book. 66 00:06:30.420 --> 00:06:34.920 When the volunteers reached Milgram's laboratory, they were told they would be participating 67 00:06:34.920 --> 00:06:39.920 in a study of how memory and learning were affected by punishment. 68 00:06:39.920 --> 00:06:45.280 They were told that in the experiment, each of them would play the part of a teacher. 69 00:06:45.280 --> 00:06:51.120 Each of them was then paired with another volunteer who was playing the part of a learner. 70 00:06:51.120 --> 00:06:52.680 The rules were simple. 71 00:06:52.680 --> 00:06:58.160 The learner was strapped into a chair by a white-coated experimenter and connected to 72 00:06:58.160 --> 00:06:59.480 electrodes. 73 00:06:59.480 --> 00:07:04.240 In an adjoining room with a window through which the teacher and the experimenter could 74 00:07:04.240 --> 00:07:10.000 see and make eye contact with the learner, the teacher read a list of words arranged 75 00:07:10.000 --> 00:07:13.440 in pairs aloud into a microphone. 76 00:07:13.440 --> 00:07:18.100 The teacher's voice was audible to the learner through speakers on the walls of the adjoining 77 00:07:18.100 --> 00:07:24.440 room. In similar fashion, the learner's voice was audible to the teacher and the experimenter 78 00:07:24.440 --> 00:07:29.800 through speakers mounted on the walls on their side of the glass. If the learner repeated 79 00:07:29.800 --> 00:07:36.220 the word pairs in correct sequence, the experiment would go on. If the learner made an error, 80 00:07:36.220 --> 00:07:41.860 the teacher would administer an electric shock to the learner by remote control, pressing 81 00:08:11.860 --> 00:08:17.140 and to escape from the chairs into which they had been strapped by the experimenter. 82 00:08:17.140 --> 00:08:22.700 It wasn't long before the learners began pleading with the teachers to help them get themselves 83 00:08:22.700 --> 00:08:23.940 free. 84 00:08:23.940 --> 00:08:29.700 And as the severity of the shocks the experimenters ordered the teachers to administer grew greater 85 00:08:29.700 --> 00:08:35.780 and greater, the console from which the teachers administered these shocks began to display 86 00:08:35.780 --> 00:08:40.140 warnings that the selected voltages were dangerously high. 87 00:08:40.140 --> 00:08:52.640 Still, any teachers who protested to the experimenters, or even raised questions about whether the experiment should proceed, were sternly ordered by the experimenters to continue. 88 00:08:52.640 --> 00:08:57.140 They were told by the experimenters that everything was all right. 89 00:08:57.140 --> 00:09:00.140 And, in fact, everything was all right. 90 00:09:00.140 --> 00:09:07.140 The learners were not really volunteers, but actors. They were not really receiving any shocks at all. 91 00:09:07.140 --> 00:09:09.640 But the teachers did not know this. 92 00:09:09.640 --> 00:09:23.640 They believed themselves to be inflicting excruciating and possibly life-threatening pain on the learners, and most of them went right on doing so despite the struggles and protests of their victims. 93 00:09:23.640 --> 00:09:33.640 Only one of Milgram's first 40 volunteers refused to inflict any more shocks beyond what his consul told him was 300 volts. 94 00:10:03.640 --> 00:10:11.960 So by that time the learners were totally unresponsive and apparently either unconscious or dead. 95 00:10:11.960 --> 00:10:17.200 Milgram's experiment really had nothing to do with memory, learning, and punishment, 96 00:10:17.200 --> 00:10:18.300 of course. 97 00:10:18.300 --> 00:10:25.140 It was rather, as he described it in 1974, a simple experiment to test how much pain 98 00:10:25.140 --> 00:10:31.240 an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by 99 00:10:31.240 --> 00:10:33.640 by an Experimental Scientist 100 00:10:33.640 --> 00:10:39.960 Stark authority was pitted against the subject's strongest moral imperatives against hurting 101 00:10:39.960 --> 00:10:46.280 others, and, with the subject's ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority 102 00:10:46.280 --> 00:10:49.680 won more often than not. 103 00:10:49.680 --> 00:10:57.400 Yet at any point in the proceedings, all any of the teachers had to do was refuse to continue. 104 00:10:57.400 --> 00:11:02.680 All any of them had to do was stand up and walk out of the laboratory. 105 00:11:02.680 --> 00:11:08.560 It is rather like the situation Etienne de la Boitie describes in his essay on the politics 106 00:11:08.560 --> 00:11:10.720 of obedience. 107 00:11:10.720 --> 00:11:17.720 Because the ruled always outnumber the ruler, la Boitie wrote, the ruled can free themselves 108 00:11:17.720 --> 00:11:22.480 at any time merely by willing to be free. 109 00:11:22.480 --> 00:11:26.000 It was really that simple, la Boitie wrote. 110 00:11:26.000 --> 00:11:32.080 In his words, Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. 111 00:11:32.080 --> 00:11:37.840 I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that 112 00:11:37.840 --> 00:11:40.520 you support him no longer. 113 00:11:40.520 --> 00:11:45.840 Then you will behold him like a great colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall 114 00:11:45.840 --> 00:11:49.320 of his own weight, and break in pieces. 115 00:11:49.320 --> 00:11:54.380 Would the experimenter in Stanley Milgram's lab have fallen of his own weight and broken 116 00:11:54.380 --> 00:11:57.560 in pieces if the teachers had walked out on him? 117 00:11:57.560 --> 00:12:03.220 As Milgram himself put it, a reader's initial reaction to the experiment may be to wonder 118 00:12:03.220 --> 00:12:08.980 why anyone in his right mind would not simply refuse and walk out of the laboratory. 119 00:12:08.980 --> 00:12:12.060 But the fact is that no one ever does. 120 00:12:12.060 --> 00:12:17.180 Since the subject has come to the laboratory to aid the experimenter, he is quite willing 121 00:12:17.180 --> 00:12:19.660 to start off with the procedure. 122 00:12:19.660 --> 00:12:24.340 There is nothing very extraordinary in this, particularly since the person who is to 123 00:12:24.340 --> 00:12:30.100 To receive the shocks seems initially cooperative if somewhat apprehensive. 124 00:12:30.100 --> 00:12:37.020 What is surprising is how far ordinary individuals will go in complying with the experimenter's 125 00:12:37.020 --> 00:12:38.020 instructions. 126 00:12:38.020 --> 00:12:43.740 Indeed, the results of the experiment are both surprising and dismaying. 127 00:12:43.740 --> 00:12:49.340 Many subjects, Milgram wrote, will obey the experimenter no matter how vehement the pleading 128 00:12:49.340 --> 00:12:51.460 of the person being shocked. 129 00:12:51.460 --> 00:12:57.020 No matter how painful the shocks seem to be, and no matter how much the victim pleads to 130 00:12:57.020 --> 00:13:03.140 be let out, this was seen time and again in our studies and has been observed in several 131 00:13:03.140 --> 00:13:06.420 universities where the experiment was repeated. 132 00:13:06.420 --> 00:13:12.060 It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of 133 00:13:12.060 --> 00:13:18.780 an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding 134 00:13:18.780 --> 00:13:20.860 explanation. 135 00:13:20.860 --> 00:13:25.020 Milgram believed there were two explanations for his results. 136 00:13:25.020 --> 00:13:30.400 I call them the psychological explanation and the sociological explanation. 137 00:13:30.400 --> 00:13:35.940 The psychological explanation was that under certain circumstances the ordinary individual 138 00:13:35.940 --> 00:13:42.880 is both able and willing to, as Milgram put it, view himself as the instrument for carrying 139 00:13:42.880 --> 00:13:49.420 out another person's wishes, so that he therefore no longer considers himself responsible for 140 00:13:49.420 --> 00:14:10.420 The sociological explanation was that under certain circumstances, most individuals abandon any attempt at independent thinking and simply conform to what they feel is expected of them, what they have absorbed, mostly unthinkingly, from the culture in which they have grown up and now live. 141 00:14:10.420 --> 00:14:16.420 So what was the solution to this problem of authority, as one might call it? 142 00:14:16.420 --> 00:14:23.780 To his credit, Milgram considered libertarianism as a possibility, but he rejected it. 143 00:14:23.780 --> 00:14:29.140 It would seem, he wrote, that the anarchist argument for universal dismantling of political 144 00:14:29.140 --> 00:14:33.780 institutions is a powerful solution to the problem of authority. 145 00:14:33.780 --> 00:14:37.900 But the problems of anarchism are equally insoluble. 146 00:14:37.900 --> 00:14:43.220 For while the existence of authority sometimes leads to the commission of ruthless and immoral 147 00:14:43.220 --> 00:14:44.220 and Financial Acts. 148 00:14:44.220 --> 00:14:49.620 The absence of authority renders one a victim to such acts on the part of others who are 149 00:14:49.620 --> 00:14:51.300 better organized. 150 00:14:51.300 --> 00:14:56.260 Were the United States to abandon all forms of political authority, the outcome would 151 00:14:56.260 --> 00:14:58.120 be entirely clear. 152 00:14:58.120 --> 00:15:03.460 We would soon become the victims of our own disorganization, because better organized 153 00:15:03.460 --> 00:15:11.020 societies would immediately perceive and act on the opportunities that weakness creates. 154 00:15:11.020 --> 00:15:15.720 Section two, Milgram argued, it would be an oversimplification to present the picture 155 00:15:15.720 --> 00:15:21.520 of the noble individual in a continuous struggle against malevolent authority. 156 00:15:21.520 --> 00:15:27.680 The obvious truth is that for every individual who carries out harsh action because of authority, 157 00:15:27.680 --> 00:15:31.780 there is another individual who is restrained from doing so. 158 00:15:31.780 --> 00:15:37.380 The libertarian social psychologist Sharon Presley studied for her Ph.D. under Milgram 159 00:15:37.380 --> 00:15:40.760 at the City University of New York in the 70s. 160 00:15:40.760 --> 00:15:46.360 She says, politically, Milgram was not a libertarian, but a liberal democrat who was in favor of 161 00:15:46.360 --> 00:15:47.600 civil liberties. 162 00:15:47.600 --> 00:15:54.080 Nonetheless, by reflecting further on Etienne de la Boitie's key insight about the politics 163 00:15:54.080 --> 00:16:00.640 of authority, the will to bondage, and the eager embrace of voluntary servitude, and by 164 00:16:00.640 --> 00:16:06.880 devising an ingenious test for their influence on the ordinary individual, Stanley Milgram 165 00:16:06.880 --> 00:16:11.680 made an important contribution to the libertarian tradition. 166 00:16:11.680 --> 00:16:12.680 This is Jeff Rigenbach.