Stanley Milgram performed a (in)famous series of experiments at Yale University in the early sixties in which paid test-givers were commanded to shock test-takers for wrong answers with increasing levels of electroschock. Compliance was extremely high, and the results of the experiment lead Milgram to formulate a numbers of reasons for why obedience is such a powerful social drive, easily overwhelming habituated moral constraints. The factors form a psychological picture of compliance that may help explain our prostrate democratic politicians unwillingness to challenge Bush’s war.
- Binding factors such as politeness and awkwardness of withdrawal tie the subject to the social situation, making the interruption of expectations harder than their observance;
- as subjects become immersed in procedural matters they are less focused on the significance of their activity;
- moral concern shifts from the subject’s own moral sense to how well s/he is living up to expectations;
- the process itself takes on a momentum of its own, independent of its results;
- institutional protocols assume a strong claim to legitimacy, allowing an act to be dominated by its context;
- systematic devaluation of the victim in the experiment itself deadens sensitivity of the participants;
- the very act of devaluation feeds on itself, leading to the banality of the act;
- expressions of disapproval take the place of responsible action ("Tyrannies are perpetuated by diffident men who do not possess the courage to act out their beliefs")
- responsibility is attenuated when one is only an intermediary link in a chain of actions.
All of these factors illustrate how much easier is to obey once one exists in a posture of compliance. The enormous energy it would take to reverse the polarity of power relations in the current political dynamic perhaps explains why from the inside democrats cannot even see the role they could easily play.
Dick Durbin’s pathetic tears, now Pete Stark’s submissive abasement; these illustrate a kind of Stockholm or battered wife syndrome in the obsequious compliance of Hill democrats. The republican noise machine has successfully neutered the democratic party, from McGovern to Kerry. Our strong leaders rule the roost over their submissive houseslaves, who know their place and won’t stray too far out of line. Bush intones with absolute confidence, "I understand that I have to let my opponents express disagreement, so long as they" submit to my authority in the end. The private abuser learns the way the public game works. Slap. Don’t you dare get out of line, bitches. It’s internalized, of course, and the strictest enforcers are the house slaves themselves (Pelosi, etc.), who "know how to count votes." The presuppositions of a muscular Christianity ("Bubbas for Bombing") as the conditioned reflex of our foreign policy is the dominant note of this patriarchal mindset, but that is also just an expression of the same unbalanced social pathology.