Just Say No
- erikaraskin
- Jun 21
- 2 min read
I've arrived at the stage of life when I can never recall where my freaking sunglasses are; the purpose of a trip into another room; or what I was just about to say. Even so, some of the oldest lessons learned keep bubbling up from the deep.
With serious velocity.
I recently wrote about the Stanford Prison Experiment and how the uniform makes the man in terms of shit behavior and rationalizations for it. Which got me thinking about Trump's America and Stanley Milgram's 1960's haunting discovery in another psych lab.
Freaked by the average German Joe's obedience to authority during WWll, Milgram wanted to distinguish them from us. Only what he found was, excuse the expression, shocking.
Milgram recruited participants from New Haven through ads and pretended that the roles assigned were random when actually all paid patsies were deemed 'teachers' whose job was to impart info to an adult 'learner' behind a screen. The 'student' (an actor) was supposed to be memorizing word pairs.
(FYI: Just the idea of having to retain a list in my head makes me seriously anxious.)
Anyway, the purported goal of the study was to learn about potentially positive effects of punishment on learning. Which is where the 'shocks' came in.
Every wrong answer merited a fake jolt of electricity administered by the 'teacher' in escalating amounts. The paid participants were told to keep upping the zap -- supposedly to measure how much current was helpful vs. counter-productive, you know, educationally speaking. Increasing intensity was matched with screams of pain emitted by the actor.
What was really being studied was how far the Average American Joe would go inflicting debilitating pain at the behest of an authority figure.
The answer was far. Very, very far.
Setting aside the ethics of paying a few bucks to someone trying to eke out a living--revealing an ugly truth about themselves in the process -- the study raises terrifying questions about today.
And us.
What do we actually do when people like Kristi Noem or Steven Miller demand complicity in their inhumanity? When they tell us to stand back while their masked agents separate children from parents and disappear human beings?
My hope is that even if I'm wandering from room to room wearing two pairs of sunglasses on my head, that I will still remember who I am enough to be able to say no to illegitimate and morally bankrupt authority.
Just
Fucking
No.
Check out Dar Williams' song about the Milgram experiment. It's brilliant.
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