Critical Thinking is Rare
I saw something incredibly rare yesterday; a thoughtful interview by a Hollywood celebrity. Russel Brand interviewed Tim Robbins in which they discussed Robbins’s conversion from COVID follower to COVID sceptic.
The intellectual journey that Tim Robbins completed was not just rare by the conformist standards of Hollywood. Most people are unwilling to resist authority. This was something that Stanley Milgram proved decades ago with his famous shock experiment.
Milgram designed an experiment where a “teacher” asked questions of a “student” wired to electrodes. The teacher would ask questions and every time the student answered wrong he was shocked. The voltage was increased with every successive shock. None of the students were actually getting shocked. They were all actors hired by Milgram but the teachers did not know this. As far as the teachers knew the student was in pain and the pain increased as the voltage increased.
What Milgram found was that with the encouragement of an authority figure (another actor in a lab coat) 65% of people were willing to continually shock the student at ever increasing voltages. 65% of people were willing to victimize another human being as long as they were just following orders. Only 35% were willing to think for themselves and resist authority. Tim Robbins is apparently one of the 35%.
The experiment also showed that when the teacher could further absolve himself from responsibility by ordering a subordinate to deliver the shock, 92.5% were willing to continue. This is why it is so easy for politicians to enact such immoral restrictions. They are not the ones tackling people with masks or injecting a toxic substance. Someone else does that for them. As far as they are concerned their hands are clean even when people die from their edicts.
Critics of Milgram’s experiment point out that 50% of the subjects claim that they knew the shocks were not real. I find this just lends more weight to his conclusions because 2/3rds of that 50% refused to continue shocking the student. That is 100% of the people who would not conform. In the group who thought it was real no one refused to shock the student. To put that differently 100% of the people who did not have the critical thinking ability to understand they had been deceived, were willing to continue victimizing the student.
Don’t you also find it odd that 1/3 of the people who claim to have seen through the ruse continued to go along with it? A far more likely explanation is that these people were fooled right until the end and were embarrassed about what they had done. They were simply justifying their actions by claiming they knew no one was actually being harmed. What Milgram proved was that 2 out of every 3 people cannot think critically and will conform to authority even when they know others will be harmed. 75% of them are not even embarrassed by their participation. It turns out finding useful idiots or a guard to run the crematoriums is not a difficult task for government.
