The Stanley Milgram question...

The title of this post relates to the article I read for an Examined Life class titled "If Hitler asked you to electrocute a stranger, would you? Probably". If you haven't read it, you should although I warn you, it's quite disconcerting. I'll give a brief synopsis and hopefully I don't spoil the reading for you. Stanley Milgram is a social psychologist who set out to prove that the atrocities committed by Nazi Germans were a result of a character flaw that predisposed them to evil. To his surprise, Milgram found out by conducting experiments in which subjects were asked to electrocute an individual, that given the right settings and an adequate amount of persuasion, many people would do what the Nazi's did. He found out that humans were more likely to commit evil if they acted in a position of agency rather than authority. So even when subjects were uncomfortable with electrocuting another individual, they did it anyway because they were told to do so. Disconcerting? Yes. But you can't say I didn't warn you.

I'd buried the memory of this reading until a few weeks ago when I visited the Holocaust Museum in Houston. Seeing pictures and reading accounts of Holocaust survivors, I almost ran out of the building crying. Shortly after my visit, I remembered again, the Milgram experiment and it made me sick to think of what his findings suggest.

Now we are in class talking about free will and I'm starting to wonder the part it plays in situations like the Holocaust. Could the gift of free will not have saved millions? How was it possible for one man to erode the will of thousands of others and convince them to commit acts that they would probably never do on their own? Or was the agreement to act in a position of agency an act of free will itself? I'm just trying to make sense of it. It's ironic that we humans pride ourselves in our autonomy; in our ability to choose what we want, to exercise free will. Yet we give it up easily to be misused by evil minds. Something's not right about that.

But then again, a lot isn't right with our view of free will today. That's talk for another day though. Sufficient for the day is its own troubles...