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Nov. 22, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:48
2265 The Fascists Around You - Part 1

Did you know that over 60% of people will kill if ordered?

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Hi everybody, it's Tevan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So let's talk about some of the challenges that we face as idea shapers and mind changers in the world.
There are a couple of psychological realities that are well worth understanding if you attempt to go about the business of rescuing your fellow citizens from egregious and destructive errors.
Now the first thing to understand is the Dunning-Kruger effect.
This is fairly well documented psychologically and the reality is that incompetent individuals tend to vastly overestimate their own level of skill.
This is really the basis of central planning.
And you'll notice that people who've actually created jobs tend to be a little bit skeptical of centralized planning and people who've never spent much time in the free market tend to believe that it has something To do with it, right?
So Marx was completely incompetent, couldn't get a job at a railway, tried to invest in the stock market and failed completely and just made his life a complete mess and believed in central planning because he couldn't run his own life.
He was completely incompetent at his own life and therefore he thought that somehow there could be massive competence running everyone else's life.
Now also, incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
In other words, you have to be really good at something to recognize that someone else is really good at something.
Incompetent individuals also fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
Now, the good news is if you can train incompetent individuals, they will red-faced look back and say, ooh, I guess I really sucked at that, but I didn't really know at the time.
So, in psychological tests, anybody who scores in the bottom 25% on tests of things like humor and grammar and logic grossly overestimate their test performance and ability.
And you can see this in nationalism there.
My country is number one when the country is almost never actually number one.
So people who reject logic reject it because they think they're good at it, and they think they're good at it usually because they're really bad at it.
I mean, if you're good at logic, you recognize how hard it is to achieve truth, reality, consistency.
The same thing with ethics.
People who are so sure about ethics are people who probably couldn't spell out for you an ethical principle with skywriting at the hand of God.
Now here's another problem.
If you're bringing truth, reason, and evidence to your fellow apes, evidence tends to reinforce error.
So this is from a psychological study.
Individuals who receive unwelcome information may not simply resist challenges to their views.
Instead, they may come to support their original opinion even more strongly.
That's what's called a backfire effect.
The backfire effects that we found seem to provide further support for the growing literature showing that citizens engage in motivated reasoning.
I would call it confirmation bias, but anyway.
So, while these experiments focused on assessing the effectiveness of corrections, the results show that direct factual contradictions can actually strengthen ideologically grounded factual beliefs, an empirical finding with important theoretical implications, to say the least.
So, particularly for people who aren't self-critical, who don't submit to reason and evidence, if you bring reason and evidence to a prior prejudice, it tends to reinforce that prior prejudice.
All is not hopeless.
In experiments going back to 1992, Ditto and Lopez found that individuals who are confronted with information of sufficient quantity or clarity should eventually acquiesce to a preference-inconsistent conclusion.
In other words, if you hit them repeatedly from all angles.
Then they will tend to dislodge, some people will tend to dislodge their prior opinions.
So people sort of wonder, why do I deal in all these different topics?
Why do I have so many shows?
It's because you have to hit people from a wide variety of different angles in order to get them to change their minds.
It's very, very hard to get someone to change their mind with a single argument or a single piece of evidence.
Now the general intellectual culture is very important here as well.
As a certain belief becomes widely viewed as discredited among the public and the press, individuals who might be ideologically sympathetic to that belief will be more likely to abandon it when exposed to corrective information.
So just try and get as many beliefs out there as you can that are true and valid, and it's almost like it just gets in the air and then gets into people's brains.
In a study done in 2000 by Kuklinski and others, they found that respondents who had highly inaccurate beliefs about the welfare programs as a whole That those who had the most inaccurate beliefs had the highest confidence in their answers.
And in fact, providing the relevant facts to respondents had no effect on their opinions about welfare.
And there is really a very extensive literature in psychological circles showing that people are generally goal-directed information processors, tend to evaluate information with a directional bias towards reinforcing pre-existing views.
It's just what we have to deal with as communicators.
And this is why propaganda of course is so powerful and so effective.
Once you program children to believe nonsense at a young age, they will spend the rest of their lives gathering evidence to reinforce that false belief.
Now, as far as people's ethics go, because of course the most successful arguments, I believe, for liberty are ethical arguments, it's really important to understand the soulless moral hollowness at the center of the majority of people.
So, some psychologists did an experiment where they...
It had a whole bunch of statements, moral statements or statements for moral arguments, and they had some of the letters, some of the words were actually stuck on top, and then when they turned the page, they would stick to glue on the previous page, and then different moral arguments would be revealed.
So, for instance, there was one statement that said, Large-scale governmental surveillance of email and internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism.
So when they turned the page, the word forbidden would be removed and replaced underneath with permitted.
So instead of it being forbidden, it was permitted.
So they told the psychologists which statement they agreed with morally, and then they went back and were asked to read aloud the statements that And two of the three moral arguments had been altered in this glue trick and to discuss their responses.
Now, about half the participants did not even detect the changes.
And almost 70% accepted at least one of the altered statements.
In other words, they'd said, well, we shouldn't allow large-scale government surveillance of email.
That's immoral.
And then when they went back to read the statement, they read aloud that they agreed with it.
You could say they misread or anything like that, but that's not the case.
Because people were even willing to argue in favor of the reversed statements.
So you report to the psychologist that you consider it immoral for the government to engage in massive surveillance of emails.
And then you read aloud that the government should be permitted to do that.
More than half of the participants argued unequivocally for the opposite of their original attitudes in at least one of the manipulated statements.
And this is called choice blindness.
So you express a choice or a preference and then in some fashion your reported choice or preference is reversed and more than half of people will argue vociferously and passionately and absolutely in favor of the opposite of what they argued for or preferred not a few minutes before.
This is terrifying.
We live in a moral void of people who will simply make up moral arguments in the moment to defend a position that is the complete opposite of what they had preferred just a few minutes before.
This is empirical evidence for the success of propaganda, the failure of philosophy, And the moral manipulability of everyone, pretty much, who's gone through the public school system and through religious training.
You'd think that religion, at least, would give people some moral center here.
But it's not the case at all.
Very, very important to understand.
You're not dealing with convictions.
You're dealing with passionate, empty, emotional defenses in the moment.
So what are the effects of this?
So a psychologist at Boston College says, these findings suggest that if I'm fooled into thinking that I endorse of you, I'll do the work myself to come up with my own reasons for endorsing it.
Whatever you're told, pretty much as a child, in public school, by your elders, by your teachers, by your priests, by your parents, whether it's true or not, whether it's reasoned or not, you will then spend, most people, the rest of your life Coming up with information, true, false, indifferent or otherwise, to justify the lies you were originally told.
And this will happen even if your own position is stealthily reversed right before your eyes.
Over the course of a few minutes, people will reverse their moral positions and argue passionately for the opposite of what they claim to believe just a few minutes before, with no sense whatsoever that anything has changed.
Now, for more evidence that people are inhabited, not even by the ghosts of subjectivism, but by no ethical standards whatsoever, we can look at the Stanford Prison Experiment.
This was conducted at Stanford University August 14th, the 20th of 1971, by a team of researchers led by psych prof Philip Zambardo, later became, I think, head of the APA and shows up on Dr.
Phil.
So 24 male students out of 75 were selected and they were assigned random roles of prisoner and guards in a mock prison, which was in the basement of the psych building.
And this was supposed to be a two-week experiment, but it really didn't last that long because outright abuse, sadism, violence all erupted and they had to stop it because things were just getting too bad too quickly.
And these people were screened for mental health.
Nobody could have a criminal background and so on.
So the first day is pretty uneventful.
The second day, the prisoners in one cell blockaded their cell door with their beds, took off their caps, and they refused to come out and follow the guards' instructions.
And guards from Mother Shift volunteered to work extra hours to subdue the revolt, subsequently attacked the prisoners with fire extinguishers.
They weren't being supervised by the research staff.
And they found that having nine cellmates with only three guards per shift was too challenging.
So one of the guards said, hey, let's use psychological tactics to control the guards.
So they set up a privileged cell.
Prisoners who were not involved in the riot were treated with high-quality meals and other special rewards.
And after only 36 hours, one prisoner began to act crazy.
As Zimbardo wrote...
Number 8612 then began to act crazy, to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control.
It took quite a while before we became convinced that he really was suffering and we had to release him.
So guards forced the prisoners to repeat their assigned numbers to reinforce their depersonalization.
They used prisoner counts to harass the prisoners.
They used physical punishment, like protracted exercise, for errors in the prisoner count.
And the sanitary conditions in this mock prison Got really bad really quickly because some guards refused to allow some prisoners to urinate or defecate anywhere but in a bucket in their cell.
And as a punishment, the guards would not let the prisoners empty the sanitation bucket.
And of course, everybody loved their mattress, and so the guards would punish the prisoners by removing their mattresses, leaving them to sleep on concrete.
Some prisoners were forced to be naked as a method of degradation, and some of the guards became very cruel.
As the experiment continued, experimenters reported that approximately One-third of the guards, within a few days, exhibited genuine, sadistic tendencies and behavior.
Now, most of the guards were very upset when the experiment stopped after only six days.
They were expecting it to go on for 14 days, but they had to stop it after six days.
Most of the guards were very upset and wanted it to continue because I guess they'd become addicted to power and cruelty.
Now, the prisoners really did internalize their roles.
So even though some had stated that they would not accept, quote, parole, even if it would mean forfeiting their pay, they did not quit when their parole applications were all denied.
So they had no reason to continue participating in the experiment.
They lost all monetary compensation.
But they did continue because they had internalized the prisoner identity.
So, a newly admitted standby prisoner once expressed concern over the treatment of the other prisoners.
The guards responded with more abuse.
When he refused to eat his sausages, saying he was on a hunger strike, guards confined him to a solitary confinement.
Dark closet.
The guards then instructed the other prisoners to repeatedly punch on the door while shouting at him.
The guards stated he would be released from solitary confinement only if the prisoners gave up their blankets and slept on their bare mattresses, which all but one refused to do.
So what happened?
Well, this woman, Christina, graduate student, who the professor was then dating, I guess this is back in the day, she was brought in to interview the prisoners, and she objected to the conditions of the prison, and more than 50 people had observed the experiment, and this woman, Christina, was the only one who questioned the ethics of the entire experiment.
So only after only six days of a planned two-week duration of the Stanford Prison Experiment...
It was discontinued.
So the guards and the prisoners really adapted to their roles, a lot of this is from Wiki, more than they were expected, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted, leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations.
One third of the guards were judged to have exhibited, quote, genuine sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized, as two of them had to be removed from the experiment early.
And that is really quite powerful.
It's really quite something to process and to understand about the people who surround you.
If they open FEMA camps tomorrow, if they start rounding up people tomorrow, I guarantee you there will be no shortage of people who will adapt to that immediately and love it within a day or two.
There was an experiment in the United States, something called the Third Wave.
It was a high school teacher in California set up a little group within his class and gave some privileges and told them they were united and had a big plan and so on.
And this experiment also had to be stopped pretty quickly because there was brutality showing up.
In April of 2007, high school students in Texas were participating in a role-playing exercise of Nazis and Jews, began spitting at and punching the quote Jews, and it's the same deal.
This hasn't changed.
In fact, it's probably gotten worse.
Research shows that sociopathy, or the total absence of empathy and a conscience, The sociopathy doubled in the United States between 1975 and 1990, and I'm sure that trend has not exactly slowed down, if anything, has accelerated since.
Now, the other thing to know about, of course, you may know about it again, the Milgram experiment.
Stanley Milgram was a Yale-U psychologist, and he measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts of despicable evil.
And in 1961, it was actually three months after the start of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, he was curious about what it meant to follow orders given by an authority which would cause harm to other people.
And as it turns out, these experiments have been repeated many times, consistent results within societies, different percentages across the globe.
so someone who was signed up for the study came into the room and the psychologist said oh here's someone else who signed up for the study we're randomly going to assign you the role of teacher and the role of learner and what happened was the other person in the room who was supposed to be another participant was actually part of the experiment and they were given some folded pieces of paper and the The person who was coming in for the experiment who didn't know that the other person was aligned with it got the role of teacher.
And then you went into two separate rooms.
You could communicate but not see each other.
And in one version of the experiment, the person who was pretending to learn was sure to mention to the participant that he actually had a heart condition.
So then the quote teacher was given an electric shock as a sample of the shock that the learner would supposedly receive during the experiment.
And then there was like a word game that you had to play, and the learner would press a button to indicate his response.
If the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, and the voltage went up 15 volts for each wrong answer.
The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks.
Of course, in reality, there were no shocks.
And they had tape recorders set up, and after a number of voltage level increases, the learner, who was actually an actor, started to bang on the wall that separated him.
After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.
Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment, but most of them continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible.
A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.
If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter in this order.
1.
Please continue.
2.
The experiment requires that you continue.
3.
It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4.
You have no other choice.
You must go on.
If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was stopped.
Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450 volt shock three times in succession.
The experimenter also gave special prods if the teacher made specific comments.
If the teacher asked whether the learner might suffer permanent physical harm, the experimenter replied, Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on.
If the teacher said that the learner clearly wants to stop, the experimenter replied, Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly, so please go on.
Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled some senior year psych majors to predict the behavior of 100 hypothetical teachers.
All of the poll respondents believed that only a very small fraction of teachers, the range was from 0 to 3 out of 100, with an average of 1.2, would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage.
He also informally polled his colleagues and found out that they too believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock.
And 40 psychiatrists from a medical school, they also believed that by the 10th shock when the victim demands to be free, most subjects would stop the experiment.
They predicted that by the 300-volt shock when the victim refuses to answer, just under 4% of the subjects would still continue.
And they believed that, quote, only a little over one-tenth of one percent of the subjects would administer the highest shock on the board.
In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65% of experimental participants administered the experiment's final massive 450-volt shock to a stranger.
Although many of them were uncomfortable and every participant paused and questioned the experiment and blah blah blah, but that is quite astounding that sociopaths are estimated to be 4% of the population, 1 in 25 people.
But it means that 65% of people will murder if somebody in authority tells them to and takes responsibility.
They'll suffer no negative repercussions.
It's completely against the law.
Anybody with any brains knows that a psychologist cannot absolve you of moral responsibility in the law.
But they were willing to give electric shocks, fatal electric shocks, to strangers who had complained of heart conditions, who were banging on the wall, screaming in agony.
65% of people are willing to do that if somebody else is willing to take responsibility.
And you can't even order them.
A psychologist has no authority over a citizen, can't order them, but simply asks them to do it.
They will do it.
Milgram wrote an article in 1974 called The Perils of Obedience, and he wrote,"...the legal and philosophical aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations." I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.
Stark authority was pitted against the subject's strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and with the subject's ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.
The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Ordinary people simply doing their jobs and without any particular hostility on their part can become agents in a terrible, destructive process.
Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
Later, Professor Milgram and other psychologists performed variations of the experiment throughout the world with similar results.
Milgram later investigated the effect of the experiment's locale on obedience levels.
He held the experiment in an unregistered backstreet office as opposed to at Yale and so on.
The level of obedience, although somewhat reduced, was not significantly lower.
Dr.
Thomas Blass of the University of Maryland performed a meta-analysis on the results of repeated performances of the experiment.
He found that the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages remains remarkably consistent, 61% to 66% regardless of time or place.
None of the participants who refused to administer the final shocks insisted that the experiment itself be terminated.
Neither did they leave the room to check the health of the victim without requesting permission to leave, and so on.
This is very, very important.
So maybe people thought that it was a faked or set-up experiment.
Well, some other researchers set up a cute fluffy puppy who was given real, albeit harmless electric shocks.
They found similar findings to Milgram.
Half of the male subjects and all of the females obeyed to the bitter end.
And that's really, really important to understand that this is where you live.
This is the society in which you live.
We're asking people to understand that the state is coercion, that debt is slavery, that fiat currency is predation upon the poor.
But people can't even see violence that they are committing with the screams ringing in their ears and people begging for mercy, claiming that they're being killed.
They will continue to do it.
And so asking people to understand and process abstract evil when experiments repeatedly show...
That they will not even stop violence that they are committing right in front of them, with someone right in the next room, screaming in their ears.
We're asking too much of people.
The propaganda of the state, the soullessness that is so many of modern families, the lack of moral conviction and internalization that has been able to be achieved by relativism, by postmodernism, by religion, by What's left of philosophy, it hasn't been enough.
It hasn't even been close to be enough.
Now, of course, people in charge really want people that they can command to kill and who will obey.
Other researchers have explored people's moral reasoning and have found that children, for instance, will generally say that you shouldn't steal because you'll get in trouble.
When they get older and into adulthood, the majority of people say, well, you shouldn't steal because it's against the law.
And only about 10% of people will ever evaluate stealing from an absolute moral abstract perspective.
That it's wrong because you wouldn't want it done to you.
It lacks empathy.
Whatever people come up with.
UPB deals with this, I think, very well.
But whatever people come up with as abstract moral reasoning, only about 10% of people are able to achieve that.
And 90% of parents spank their children.
Hmm, I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
So propaganda, the propaganda we're all subjected to, the lack of moral authority that we're brought up with in school and in church and in our environment, this has done its job.
And most people will kill you if they're told to.
This is just the reality of the place in which you live and which we really don't process very well and which very few people talk about in a realistic way.
This doesn't mean that all hope is lost, but if you're going to go hunting for the truth, you might as well know the predators who stand between you and the Holy Grail.
And we'll talk a little bit more next time about how to overcome some of these problems.
Thank you so much for listening as always.
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