In the summer of 1961, a young American psychologist began an experiment on obedience at Yale University. Not yet 30, he’d recently earned his PhD in psychology from Harvard under the tutelage of Gordon Allport, and he wanted to understand how ordinary people could participate in atrocities.
The timing of the experiments didn’t seem coincidental. Just months earlier, the world had witnessed the beginning of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official who had helped administer Adolf Hitler’s death camps.
The researcher, the son of two Jewish immigrants to New York, devised a controversial experiment in which one person (“the teacher”) administered “electric shocks” to another (“the learner”) at levels ranging from 15 volts to 450 volts. A third person in a lab coat (“the authority figure”) oversaw the process.
The catch was that no shocks were actually delivered. Those receiving the “shocks” were actors. The purpose of the experiment was to see how far people would go when instructed by an authority figure to harm another person. What the researcher found was unsettling.
A majority of participants were willing to continue administering shocks even as the “learner” screamed in pain, begged them to stop, and eventually fell silent. As long as the person in the lab coat assured them that everything was fine, subjects continued delivering what they believed were dangerously high voltages, often laughing or smiling nervously as they did so.
“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process,” the researcher, Stanley Milgram, later concluded.
Monster or Clown?
As Milgram conducted his experiments at Yale, Eichmann’s trial continued in Jerusalem. It concluded in December 1961. He was found guilty and was hanged the following year.
Yet the trial revealed uncomfortable truths. Although the prosecution sought to portray the Nazis as sadistic personalities driven by an insatiable urge to kill, others saw something different.
“Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’” Hannah Arendt wrote in The New Yorker in 1963, “but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.”
Arendt had observed something many missed: Eichmann was, in many respects, an ordinary man. He had healthy relationships with family and friends and appeared to be a devoted husband and father to his four children. The half dozen or so psychiatrists who evaluated him agreed he was psychologically normal.
“More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,” one quipped.
Arendt, a German-born scholar at the University of Chicago who had fled Nazi Germany, argued that Eichmann was a cog in the Nazi machine—a bland bureaucrat rather than a beast in human form. Although the machine he operated in was evil, Eichmann’s primary vice may have been ambition, Arendt suggested.
“He acted without any motive other than to advance his career in the Nazi bureaucracy diligently,” she wrote.
The True Source of Evil?
That Eichmann might have been more clown than monster did not absolve him of guilt. But by exposing what she called “the banality of evil”—a phrase still used today—Arendt revealed something both truer and more unsettling. In a sense, she was echoing Milgram’s conclusion that ordinary people “doing their jobs” can unwittingly become agents of destruction. Not because most people are inherently evil, but because most are conformists who tend to obey authority.
“The psychology of crowds is a fascinating thing,” Claire Lehmann, editor of Quillette, observed in a 2020 social media post. “Because most people are conformists, it seems pretty clear that once a certain number of ideologues take hold in an organisation or society, a tipping point is reached & the herd just follows along.”
Lehmann wrote these words during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period when large numbers of people fell in line as governments around the world issued sweeping dictates, many of which lacked a scientific foundation. Most of those following orders were not evil. They were afraid and doing what they were told, often deferring responsibility to authority.
In a sense, this was what Milgram’s experiments were designed to study: how far ordinary people would go in following orders simply because they were instructed by a man in a lab coat. Milgram’s findings—and the behavior of many during the pandemic—serve as a reminder of one of the most potent sources of evil: obedience to authority.
“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man,” British novelist and chemist Charles Percy Snow wrote in 1961, “you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.”
Snow had it right. The desire to conform is one of the great drivers of evil—arguably the greatest—which is why nonconformity is often a virtue, even if often overlooked.
In 2005, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger made a similar observation, arguing that neither Pontius Pilate nor the crowd calling for the death of Jesus of Nazareth were “utterly evil.” Instead, they were weak, succumbing to bureaucracy on the one hand and mob pressure on the other.
“Justice is trampled underfoot by weakness, cowardice, and fear of the diktat of the ruling mindset,” the future Pope Benedict XVI wrote. “The quiet voice of conscience is drowned out by the cries of the crowd. Evil draws its power from indecision and concern for what other people think.”
Evil people exist in the world, of course. Yet human weakness, the desire to fit in, and obedience to authority are more often the sources of evil than outright malice. Perhaps this is why in our histories we admire those who do the right thing in the face of authority despite the consequences.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer defied the Nazis because he recognized their evil early and refused to accommodate it. He led the Confessing Church’s resistance to state control and supported efforts to stop Hitler, actions that led to his execution in 1945. Oskar Schindler used his factory to shield more than 1,000 Jews from extermination, risking imprisonment and death. Edith Cavell, during World War I, sheltered Allied soldiers and helped them escape German-occupied Belgium; she, too, was executed.
Long before them, figures such as Socrates and Jesus Christ stood against the power structures of their day, paying with their lives. To this day, we remember all of them.
The Allies of Evil
I first learned about Milgram’s experiments as an undergraduate nearly 30 years ago. I remember thinking I would never behave like the people in his study—inflicting harm simply because someone in a lab coat assured them they wouldn’t be held responsible. Yet at 18, I was self-aware enough to recognize the flaw in that instinct. Everyone feels that way. In our own story, we are never the monster.
“When people read the history of Nazi Germany, they always think they’re Schindler,” psychologist and author Jordan Peterson has observed. “They always think that they’re the person who would have saved Anne Frank. … They never read the history as a perpetrator.”
It is natural to see ourselves as heroes rather than villains. But Milgram’s experiments, and history more broadly, suggest that far more Eichmanns walk among us than Bonhoeffers or Schindlers—not because they are monsters, but because they are pliant, conformist, or, as Arendt suggested, banal.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. It may be, however, that evil’s most reliable allies are not hatred or malice, but weakness, fear, and conformity—the silent forces authorities use to marshal obedience.
For this reason, we should not just be wary of the concentration of power, but also work to cultivate in individuals virtues that make resistance to authority possible: courage, prudence, and fortitude.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
