Here's a question: Do you think people are basically anarchistic?
(Yes? No? Maybe?)
In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram (of "six degrees of separation" fame) conducted a series of controversial experiments to test whether people would ignore their own consciences in the face of compelling authority. His findings were shocking:
With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent were seduced by the trappings of authority, by the control of their perceptions, and by the uncritical acceptance of the experimenter's definition of the situation, into performing harsh acts. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority. (1965)
For his experiment, Milgram gathered a cross-section of citizens in New Haven, CT and told them he was examining the effect of punishment on memory and learning. Each was instructed to read questions to a subject (a trained actor) and give him electric shocks for incorrect answers. The actor-subject reacted with shrieks, etc. as switches for (faux) "shocks" of increasing voltage (indicated in ominous terminology) were thrown. When the true subject showed distress, the experimenter prodded him or her on using authoritative language. Milgram later published the results of his observations.
Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. discusses this experiment in Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, saying,
...the same pattern of obedience to authority that binds children to parents, pupils to teachers, citizens to police officers... -- the same pattern on which society depends for order and stability -- can transform people into tools of evil.pp. 176-177
Milgram calls this pattern "the agentic state," into which a person is likely to shift
every time he enters a hierarchical structure held together by various levels of authority. Once inside,...he no longer thinks of himself as a responsible moral subject but only as an agent of others. He comes to see himself not as a person but as an instrument, not as a center of moral responsibility but as a tool.p. 178
Witness what happened in Nazi Germany, My Lai, and Watergate, not to mention "everyday life in business and industry," says Plantinga.
And it happens in churches...in schools...in marriages...and perhaps also on Wall Street. Which is why, according to Plantinga (and I agree),
whenever faced with a conflict between divine and human orders, 'We must obey God rather than any human authority.' (Acts 5:29)
(Another explanation offered by Milgram, which also no doubt happens in the above-mentioned places, was that "a subject who has neither ability nor expertise [or, I would add, confidence] to make decisions, especially in a crisis, will leave decision making to the group and its hierarchy. The group is the person's behavioral model.")
