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March 28, 2025 - Lionel Nation
13:43
The Obedience Chamber: The Horrifying History and Brutal Truth of the Milgram Experiment
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Time Text
Milgram's Obedience Experiment 00:13:42
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If there's one study, one PSYOP, one experiment that you have to know to really be a sentient, connected person in the conspiratorium, In the world of psychotronics, to really understand human behavior, it's the Milgram experiment.
I remember seeing this when I was a kid, and it blew me away.
It is at the very soul, the center, the epicenter of human horror, of wars, of death camps, and how seemingly rational people Can end up doing something.
And you wonder, how?
How did they do it?
So this is a story of what was called the Obedience Chamber.
Isn't that a great term?
It's a frightening tale of the Milgram Experiment.
You may have seen this before.
I'm sure you have.
But let me describe it to you.
There was something very, very unsettling, very scary about the Yale campus in 1961.
More so than usual.
Because beneath its ivy-covered walls and this stayed kind of, you know, New Haven.
Great pizza, by the way.
But in this sterile, windowless laboratory in Linsley Chittenden Hall.
This is not a wonderful name.
Sounds very Harry Potter-ish.
A quiet terror unfolded.
One not of ghost stories, but of human behavior laid bare.
It's fascinating.
It was there that Stanley Milgram, a 27-year-old psychologist with a curious interest, a glint, and a creeping unease about what people were capable of doing if they were ordered to do so.
He conducted one of the most important but disturbing psychological experiments in all of modern history.
This is it.
The world had just watched Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi architect of death trains and incomprehensible horrors.
We just saw him stand trial in Jerusalem.
And his defense, remember this?
I was just following orders.
And that became almost not a joke, but a part of our quiver.
We mocked it.
What do you mean you're just paying?
That phrase, so cold, so mechanical, so devoid of any humanity.
Because was he a psychopath?
No!
He had family?
Did he look like a monster?
Remember the banality of evil?
But what echoed in Milgram's mind, like a drumbeat from hell, was this idea, this idea, this thing.
I was just following orders.
Was obedience to authority, and this is the issue, was that enough to turn an ordinary man into a killer?
Could it happen here in America?
Is it a rarity, or is it...
Part of our existence.
So Milgram designed what he called a learning experiment.
Air quotes.
But what took place was more than some ritual of psychological horror.
It was beyond that.
Volunteers were recruited under the guise of helping science, more of this, understand memory and punishment.
I think they were given like a couple of bucks in a box lunch, you know.
So they were led into a sterile chamber where a man in a lab coat A man of authority.
Calmly instructed them to administer a series of electric shocks to another participant.
Not a human being, just a participant.
A lab rat in another room.
An actor, though they didn't know that.
So the shocks weren't real, but the screams, though pre-recorded, felt real enough.
As the voltage increased, For these increasingly wrong answers.
The supposed learner begged for mercy, cried and paid, pounded the walls, and eventually went silent.
Could it be what?
A coma?
Could it be?
Who knows?
The majority of the participants, 65% continued.
They continued delivering what they believed were fatal shocks simply because a man in a lab coat Told them to do it.
Why?
Was it because of...
He was of authority?
I'm abnegating, absenting myself, disconnecting myself of guilt?
I don't know.
I don't know.
The results sent chills down the spine of psychology and society alike and the implications were more terrifying than anyone expected.
Ordinary, good-hearted people, people just off the street, people with families that looked like just whatever.
They were capable of inflicting agony and maybe death, not out of hatred, not out of spite, not out of anger, but out of obedience, following orders.
And worse still, they often showed no guilt, no hesitation, no trepidation, no nothing.
Just the sterile compliance of bureaucratic...
Evil.
Breathtaking.
Milgram tried to soften the blow.
He spoke of agentic states, of diffusion of responsibility.
But the truth was even darker.
The experiments revealed that the Nazi lurking in the neighbor, the sadist buried beneath the...
Office clerk's tie or whatever.
That's who these people were.
The capacity for cruelty wasn't just, you know, some product of ideology.
It was embedded, hardwired, in the operating system of the human condition.
All it took was the right uniform and a gentle nudge, and you are off and running.
The lab became known to insiders as the obedience chamber.
And students kind of whispered about it.
Some said the screams echoed through the walls long after the experiment ended.
There were rumors that swirled, that a participant had a nervous breakdown, that one refused to even enter a university building again.
Milgram himself, rather shaken, seemed at times more kind of mad scientist than man.
He was haunted.
By what he had uncovered.
It's fascinating.
And he published his findings and the scientific community was appalled and fascinated.
Kind of a concomitant disgust but lurid interest.
Ethicists howled.
Nobody was hurt.
What do you mean ethics?
Nobody was hurt.
No animals were harmed in this.
The government paid attention.
Militaries around the world quietly took notes.
People paid attention to this.
In the decades since, Milgram and the Milgram experiment have never faded.
Its fingerprints are everywhere on the cold hands of corporate scandals in drone strike orders given by people, by kids even, in a Quonset hut looking at a video game.
No problem.
Push the button.
I'm not there.
And by the way, the more and more detached, this is different.
This is your following orders.
But add to the complexity of this the fact that you're detached from the horror.
This is incredible.
In the I was just doing my job kind of chorus, just following orders, that echoed through every abuse of power, it's still here.
And we've renamed it Obedience to Authority Bias.
Doesn't that sound good?
It's called Obedience to authority by us.
You know, we kind of softened it a little bit with academic language, euphemistic.
But at night, in the shadows of our minds and our souls, it lingers.
It's still there.
I'm still fascinated by it.
I remember I was a kid when I saw it.
And even I understood.
Wow!
And the most disturbing truth wasn't that the experiment succeeded.
It's that it worked too well.
No matter the year, the country, the cause, people complied and comply, and they still do.
That's what it's about.
So ask yourself this.
If a stranger in a lab coat told you to push a button, that might kill someone you've never met.
Would you do it?
Now you, of course, are going to say, no, of course not.
Really?
Most people say no.
But Milgram proved otherwise.
And that's what's the most fascinating about this.
And somewhere, somewhere in some, you know, dusty archive or file, the recording still exists.
The screams, the silence, the voice calmly saying, the experiment requires that you continue.
And just to open the door, Hal, just open the door.
I'm sorry, continue.
The experiment requires that you continue.
That's it.
Cold.
You can almost hear it now.
If you've seen it, it's incredible.
You have to see the whole thing.
And that perhaps is the scariest sound of all.
The silence.
The silence and the obeisance and the going along with it.
Every single day, whether it's on X or whatever it is, you see the most horrific of just carnage and death.
It's incomprehensible of children.
And people do it.
And they will, instead of necessarily having a guy in a white coat, they will be told by their politicians, oh no, no, no, they asked for it.
Oh no, no, no, we're not.
Don't feel bad about this.
Oh no, no, no, no.
We're doing the right thing.
They asked for it.
They could have stopped, or whatever the particular thing is.
It's their fault.
During World War II, dropping two, count them, two atom bombs.
Just the most horrible.
They said, well, you know, listen, better to do that than have Americans killed if there was an invasion.
When Doolittle, there were more, the fire bombs.
You know, Japan during World War II was all wood, wooden homes, wooden this.
It just, I mean, it's just horrible.
And then the others, the Bataan Death March and others, we All share this collective psychopathy.
Coming up, I'm going to also compare this to the Stanford Prison Experiment, too, and how that was a sort of a follow-up.
But think about this.
The obedience chamber.
And while you're thinking about it, do me a favor.
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