Informant38

"This is perhaps the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process." Milgram went on to conclude that many people are unable to act on their values, that even when it is patently clear that they are inflicting harm, relatively few people have the resources to resist authority.

{the rigid and unyielding conviction that human nature is a constant unvarying 'thing' has led us to this dark precipice. Milgram is somebody I want to despise but really it's not him, it's his data. his failure to see what the data pointed toward is what makes him unheroic, but the real villainy is behind the scenes, as it has been all along. human nature is only and merely the sum of all presently existing human qualities averaged out. or, more simply, human nature is whoever's around. the idea that people have been being bred down for docility and passive acceptance of authority is still anathema to most. but it would be easy to verify. run the tests again 40 years on. a blink in the breeding timeline but still, my guess is the co-operative numbers increase. they keep weeding out the rebels. and the children of the rebels. well? see the Great Dane 5 generations before the breed's established. it really is like that. and the conclusion that Milgram's study seems to point to is a feint, there are PRESENTLY many humans who co-operate with 'authority', blindly and against their consciences. things keep on like they are and it'll be everyone. Morlocks and Eloi. there was a time when people like that were an unmeasurable minority of the human population.}

more Milgramesque partiality

Milgram text and quote from an article in the estimable and neglected RALPH, The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities.
any rag that has Mencken on Aimee Semple McPherson....

{Update! this just in:

Next week, in Glasgow, The Milgram Obedience Experiment will be carried out again, but this time in the name of art. The event has been engineered by Rod Dickinson, a conceptual artist who has already gained some notoriety though his re-enactment, using actors and collaborators, of sermons originally given by Jim Jones, the notorious leader of the People's Temple religious cult. Dickinson is currently looking for a park in which to re-enact the Jonestown massacre, the mass suicide of cult members that took place in their communal retreat in Guyana in 1978.

Guardian UK Observer Sunday February 10, 2002

and so to see what Mr. Dickinson has made of his attempt at Milgramization Re-enactment