“The majority of people do not even have the psychological capacity to refuse authority, at least under situations of pressure”

by Yaakov117

I have been reading “Lifting the Veil” by Timothy Silver. I know nothing about Timothy Silver. Someone linked to his website in a reddit comment and it looked interesting. The basic premise of Silver’s “Lifting the Veil” is that the US government is a pathocracy, a government run by psychopaths. A psychopath is someone who “is conscienceless yet rational, not suffering from any insanity or debilitation; instead they are logical, manipulative, predisposed to crime, selfish and without guilt, shame, remorse or empathy.” The paper is full of examples of government and military officials doing things that someone with even a modest amount of empathy would never dream of. The paper covers too many subjects to give a full recap, but one of the interesting studies he references is the Milgram Experiment.

The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram They measured the willingness of study participants, men from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a “learner.” These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.

Basically, a volunteer would ask a “learner” to answer questions. If they answered the question wrong an authority figure in a lab coat would tell the volunteer to administer an electric shock to the “learner”. Unbeknownst to the volunteer, the “learner” was an actor who was just pretending to be shocked. The voltage of the shock would be increased with every wrong answer. Eventually the “learner” would be unresponsive. The volunteer would have hesitation about continually shocking the learner but the authority figure would convince the volunteer that the learner needed to be shocked even beyond the point of death.

Silver makes this point about the MIlgram Experiment. “Armed with this context, it is easy to understand the ease with which psychopaths can manipulate institutions and societies. A majority of people do not even have the psychological capacity to refuse authority, at least under situations of pressure. Putting the average citizen in positions of minor authority such as a police officer can cause behavioral and physiological changes in that person, disposing them to abuse. Therefore a psychopath in a position of power essentially has a vast pool of tools at their disposal to act out their twisted desires of manipulation and control.”

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Think about that. Most of the people in the US and probably the world think of news anchors and politicians and media pundits as authority figures. Society is being given a steady dose of stress via news agencies and other media. This stress makes society more prone to ignoring their conscience and instead following that of an authority figure. The same authority figures who manipulate and control the news and media that the population consumes.

I recommend everyone reading this to make sure they know what they believe and what their morals are and adhere to those principles no matter what. Psychopaths are cunning and deceptive and know how to get subjects to go against their inner sense of good. I believe that psychopaths in elite positions of power have been using our susceptibility to replace our inner sense of goodness with an authority figure’s command for far too long.

www.wanttoknow.info/mk/liftingtheveil#3

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

 

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