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Submission to authority

Why does a tyrant succeed in imposing his cruelty on an entire people? Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563), translator of Plutarch and Cicero, friend of Montaigne, is remembered for his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548). In it, he asserted that tyranny cannot exist without the people's consent. The tyrant is always alone when faced with millions of men, and it would be enough for them to stop obeying for tyranny to disappear... 1

In the aftermath of the Second World War, many sociologists and philosophers questioned the reasons why an entire people had accepted the totalitarianism and violence of the German government of the Third Reich.

Among them was Hannah Arendt, who devoted a book to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the high-ranking Nazi official in charge of the logistics of deporting the Jews. During these hearings between 1960 and 1962, A. Eichmann constantly proclaimed that he had "only carried out orders".

At the same time, psychologist Stanley Milgram began a study on obedience and submission to authority.

His well-known experiment involved a "student", a "teacher", and an "experimenter".

Only the teacher's behavior is studied. Both the student and the experimenter are accomplices in the experiment.

The teacher must try to make his pupil learn word associations by heart, using a method of reinforcement and repetition. Correct answers are encouraged, and incorrect answers are punished with an electric shock. This shock becomes more and more violent as the pupil's wrong answers increase.

The student, complicit in the experiment, answers incorrectly, prompting the teacher to send him an electric shock. Don't worry: there's no real shock, and the student pretends to suffer the pain.

Then comes the moment when the student asks to stop when he expresses empathy for the student. The teacher then turns to the experimenter, who tells him to continue, fully assuming his responsibility as the experimenter.

The teacher, officially "relieved of responsibility", continues the experiment. He is no longer responsible but merely an instrument at the service of science.

In this first experiment, published in 1963, 25 out of 40 people gave their pupil a shock marked "Caution, dangerous shock"... three times.

This experiment has been carried out many times, changing the context, the posture and proximity of the experimenter, the visibility of the pupil, etc.

The results are distressing.2

But the good news is that it doesn't take much to thwart the experimenter's authority. Indeed, suppose a fourth person intervenes in the experiment to oppose its continuation. In that case, the teacher will have a loophole to abandon his role as a collateral "victim" and put an end to the domination of authority.