Obedience and authority

Todays post starts with a famous quote attributed to Steven Weinberg.

"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil;but for good people to do evil-that takes religion."

That is a good starting point, religion has caused many otherwise good people to do all sorts of horrific acts, however it is not the end of the story, ANY perceived authority figure who accepts blame for the consequences or otherwise promotes evil behaviours will influence some good people into doing bad things.

My main reasoning here is the Milgram experiment. For anyone too lazy to read the links the participant was told they were taking part in a learning experiment, they would teach word pairs to another participant (an actor in the next room) and administer shocks for incorrect answers, starting at 15V going up to 450V, a tape recorder was used to make sure the 'learners' responses were consistent. At higher voltages the 'learner' pleaded to stop, screamed etc and at very high voltages silence. Once the recorded shock responses began to get disturbing all participants began to show severe stress and doubts about continuing but were prompted by an experimenter in the same room, these prompts lead to about 2/3 of participants going all the way to the end.

These results show that obedience to an authority figure who is present can push a sizeable portion of the population to potentially killing another person with only minimal separation from the victim, further studies showed that closer contact between the teacher and learner reduced compliance, but more importantly for my original point if the authority figure appeared less impressive or was more distant compliance also dropped significantly. (The 2nd and 3rd links have more detailed discussions of how variations changed the results.)

This explains why so many soldiers and officers in totalitarian dictatorships and similar regimes around the world and throughout history comply with horrific orders, it can always be blamed on the next guy up the chain of command. However these situations are different to the experiment in that refusing orders will likely get them killed so compliance will be even higher, but this still boils down to committing acts against your own deepest morals because someone else tells you to all be it in the name of self preservation rather than just because.

So how does this tie in with religion, as several variations showed the authority the figure was perceived to have by the subject was more important than the actual level of authority (otherwise changing the experimenters appearance and the experiment location would have no impact). To the believer an all knowing, all powerful, omnipresent god is not only the ultimate imaginable authority figure it is perceived as being entirely real(as well as the dehumanizing of the believer and others) so if a good person is a sufficiently devout believer then they will be likely to commit almost any atrocity that a holy book or deranged preacher can talk them into. Then justify it by calling it gods will.

So while religion is not the only means for good people to do bad things it is the most insidious and absolute method.

This post was originally going to be about how an incorrect view of reality could cause good people to do evil, but then I realised that the flawed world views leading to evil all seem to have some super authority figure who thinks being evil is a good idea.