The Narragansett Surf Cam * provides a view of the bay that allows me to watch the waves this morning from my home in Pennsylvania. The bay might become a bit choppy as Hurricane Lee sweeps the nearby Atlantic, but for now, at 7:30 a.m., a couple of surfers are trying to ride unimpressive waves. So far, they have fallen off their boards a couple of times after a one- to two-second ride. But, hey, it’s not some international competition in Hawaii with towering wave heights. Narragasett this morning has nothing like the wave regime at Bioko (Fernando Po). I judge the surf to have wave heights of not much more than four or five feet at most and about a foot or two at least. The wave periods of the greater waves range from about ten to twenty seconds, so the surfers are doing much more sitting than surfing.
Surfers are, of course, only capable of doing what the ocean allows them to do. It’s the unchallenged authority of a distant storm whose winds drive the surface waves that create the surf on a shoaling seabed. Surfers in this grand scheme of authority are little more than bobbins.
Enter Stanley Milgram
The surf and surfers at Narragansett this morning bring to mind a famous experiment run by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. In locations around New Haven and Yale, Milgram paid volunteers to participate in a supposed study of “memory and learning.” In reality, Milgram was running an experiment on obedience to authority that shed light, according to some interpretations, on how Germans cooperated in the Holocaust. In short, in Milgram’s experiment participants were unaware that they were being manipulated by two actors, one posing as a lab-coated clipboard-holding clinician and the other an unseen “participant” supposedly hooked up to electrodes. Under the instructions of and in obedience to the lab-coated experimenter, the unknowing participant delivered an apparent shock to the hidden actor whenever he gave an incorrect answer.**
The study has been controversial for many reasons, chief of them being the deception in the experiment. Another criticism is based on the temporary harm some participants incurred from guilt associated with their administering shocks to strangers. But in general and regardless of the applicability of the experiment to “true life,” Milgram’s experiment provides some food for thought in our own times and a bit of practical wisdom we gain through experience: People do obey authority figures, especially authority figures that stand over the horizon.
As I wrote above, people have applied Milgram’s experiment to the Holocaust in an attempt to understand the why of it. How did ordinary moral Germans become the agents of death? Within the context of Milgram’s experiment, the “clinician” was the authority figure who demanded obedience just as Hitler’s Eichmann did from a distance. The lesson in the experiment is that “ordinary human beings” can participate in actions without a sense of personal responsibility; they can displace the blame to an authority figure. They can say, “Oh! What can we do? We’re not in control.” But I have another reason for referencing the Milgram experiment, and that is the ease with which the participants found themselves giving increasingly more lethal, though fake, shocks. Turning up the dial is easy when one can fault a distant authority. Going about one’s life in New York while little by little waves of migrants entered the southern states was nothing of concern. A faraway storm is, well, far away.
Obedience to a Political Leader or Party
Every age is an Age of Influencers, but no more so than this current age, when the fame of an “influencer” can rapidly spread and magnify through social media, multiplying the “authority effect." The effect can be devastating on the weakest minds, thus the deaths of teenagers and adults who follow the challenges and suggestions posted online. I’m thinking, for example, of those who suffered injuries by jumping from speed boats and those who ingested or breathed toxic substances. For whatever reason, because the challenges were posted online or on social media, both distant sources of authority, some followed instructions that led to their own injuries and deaths, and others lashed out in anonymity to defame the reputations of other people simply because they held different views from those of the authoritative influencers. The many anonymous “haters” and “defamers” were rafting on waves from distant storms.
But among the most troubling of obedient behaviors are those associated with defending a party’s policies regardless of their deleterious effects on society. At no time in the early stages of the Biden Administration’s opening the border did a Democrat in authority condemn the policy or refuse to obey its dictates, that is, until the consequences became a local nuisance like the mobs of migrants that have flooded New York City. Obedience to and defense of the party and its leadership seem to be analogs of Milgram’s participants’ obedience to the lab-coated clinician. New Yorkers went about their surfing in the quiet bay of life while a distant storm was brewing on the southern border. They didn’t know they were about to be hit by larger waves or they believed they were capable of handling the roughest surf.
It was only with the influx of migrants that the mayor and councils of New York began to feel what I call self-empathy. It is only after they saw the actual plight of those shipped into New York that they realized how they had participated in an experiment of obedience. The waves grew to Hawaiian and Bioko heights.
From the Surf Zone No One Knows the Distant Storm until the Waves Arrive
Not everyone who participated in the Milgram experiment yielded to the authority in an unthinking manner. Some objected and refused to administer shocks of ever-increasing intensity. But even having administered the first shock, anyone with a sense of humanity should have said, “No more. I’m done.” When those first Jews were persecuted by the Nazis, the ordinary German citizen should have said, “No more. I’m done.” But as in the Milgram experiment the first Jews led to more Jews that led to even more in a geometric sequence: 2 became 4 became 8 became 16…became 6,000,000. And in those first heady days of bliss under the Biden Administration, New York’s Democrats thought nothing of Biden’s ending the border wall construction. And then two migrants crossed, then four…The storm was intensifying, but its first waves were inconsequential to New Yorkers. They had calm water.
It’s easy for any of us to allow a creeping intensity of human travesty. We enter water that we believe is calm, and we gradually ride ever larger waves. Think open borders and fentanyl. Hundreds of Americans die each day because one pill turned into two turned into millions. One American died because of an illegal alien criminal, then two, then…. One terrorists sneaked into the country, then two, then more than 160…
New Yorkers thought little of the border and any migration problem exacerbated by the Biden Administration’s policies. For New York Democrats, Biden’s opening the border was an offshore storm, one over the horizon of daily concerns. But offshore storms are the generators of waves, and the bigger the storms the bigger the waves they generate. And distance from shore is irrelevant when the storms are large. In fact, the distance over which the winds blow that is known as the fetch, which is greater for greater storms, say like Hurricane Lee that has a diameter of hundreds of miles, contributes to the periods and wave heights of the surf.
Apparently, New Yorkers are now bouncing around on waves of migrants that have geometrically increased because the breadth of their entrance to the country stretches from California to Texas and is now also stretching across parts of the northern border. New Yorkers, happy to support Biden’s decision to open the borders, are now clutching to their civil surf boards.
Self-Control
It’s up to each of us to determine who influences and controls us and to discern whether we are part of geometric sequence driven by a distant authority of some kind. But we can’t do that when like surfers bouncing on ocean waves we have no knowledge of the source of those waves. New Yorkers ignored the hurricane caused by the Biden Administration until the storm waves were upon them.
Somewhere in the distance a storm’s winds are sending ever more powerful waves to which we submit simply because we decided to enter the water in the belief we were in control. The waves of influence that we ride toss us around daily. The winds that create those social waves emanate from distant storms.
We can, however, definitely fault ourselves for entering waters over which we have no control. For that we have no justification in displacing blame.
*https://warmwinds.com/surf-cam
**For one review of the experiment, see Saul Mcleod. 11 Sept 2023. Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment: Summary, Results, & Ethics at SimplyPsychology online at https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html#Milgram%E2%80%99s%20Agency%20Theory
Surfers are, of course, only capable of doing what the ocean allows them to do. It’s the unchallenged authority of a distant storm whose winds drive the surface waves that create the surf on a shoaling seabed. Surfers in this grand scheme of authority are little more than bobbins.
Enter Stanley Milgram
The surf and surfers at Narragansett this morning bring to mind a famous experiment run by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s. In locations around New Haven and Yale, Milgram paid volunteers to participate in a supposed study of “memory and learning.” In reality, Milgram was running an experiment on obedience to authority that shed light, according to some interpretations, on how Germans cooperated in the Holocaust. In short, in Milgram’s experiment participants were unaware that they were being manipulated by two actors, one posing as a lab-coated clipboard-holding clinician and the other an unseen “participant” supposedly hooked up to electrodes. Under the instructions of and in obedience to the lab-coated experimenter, the unknowing participant delivered an apparent shock to the hidden actor whenever he gave an incorrect answer.**
The study has been controversial for many reasons, chief of them being the deception in the experiment. Another criticism is based on the temporary harm some participants incurred from guilt associated with their administering shocks to strangers. But in general and regardless of the applicability of the experiment to “true life,” Milgram’s experiment provides some food for thought in our own times and a bit of practical wisdom we gain through experience: People do obey authority figures, especially authority figures that stand over the horizon.
As I wrote above, people have applied Milgram’s experiment to the Holocaust in an attempt to understand the why of it. How did ordinary moral Germans become the agents of death? Within the context of Milgram’s experiment, the “clinician” was the authority figure who demanded obedience just as Hitler’s Eichmann did from a distance. The lesson in the experiment is that “ordinary human beings” can participate in actions without a sense of personal responsibility; they can displace the blame to an authority figure. They can say, “Oh! What can we do? We’re not in control.” But I have another reason for referencing the Milgram experiment, and that is the ease with which the participants found themselves giving increasingly more lethal, though fake, shocks. Turning up the dial is easy when one can fault a distant authority. Going about one’s life in New York while little by little waves of migrants entered the southern states was nothing of concern. A faraway storm is, well, far away.
Obedience to a Political Leader or Party
Every age is an Age of Influencers, but no more so than this current age, when the fame of an “influencer” can rapidly spread and magnify through social media, multiplying the “authority effect." The effect can be devastating on the weakest minds, thus the deaths of teenagers and adults who follow the challenges and suggestions posted online. I’m thinking, for example, of those who suffered injuries by jumping from speed boats and those who ingested or breathed toxic substances. For whatever reason, because the challenges were posted online or on social media, both distant sources of authority, some followed instructions that led to their own injuries and deaths, and others lashed out in anonymity to defame the reputations of other people simply because they held different views from those of the authoritative influencers. The many anonymous “haters” and “defamers” were rafting on waves from distant storms.
But among the most troubling of obedient behaviors are those associated with defending a party’s policies regardless of their deleterious effects on society. At no time in the early stages of the Biden Administration’s opening the border did a Democrat in authority condemn the policy or refuse to obey its dictates, that is, until the consequences became a local nuisance like the mobs of migrants that have flooded New York City. Obedience to and defense of the party and its leadership seem to be analogs of Milgram’s participants’ obedience to the lab-coated clinician. New Yorkers went about their surfing in the quiet bay of life while a distant storm was brewing on the southern border. They didn’t know they were about to be hit by larger waves or they believed they were capable of handling the roughest surf.
It was only with the influx of migrants that the mayor and councils of New York began to feel what I call self-empathy. It is only after they saw the actual plight of those shipped into New York that they realized how they had participated in an experiment of obedience. The waves grew to Hawaiian and Bioko heights.
From the Surf Zone No One Knows the Distant Storm until the Waves Arrive
Not everyone who participated in the Milgram experiment yielded to the authority in an unthinking manner. Some objected and refused to administer shocks of ever-increasing intensity. But even having administered the first shock, anyone with a sense of humanity should have said, “No more. I’m done.” When those first Jews were persecuted by the Nazis, the ordinary German citizen should have said, “No more. I’m done.” But as in the Milgram experiment the first Jews led to more Jews that led to even more in a geometric sequence: 2 became 4 became 8 became 16…became 6,000,000. And in those first heady days of bliss under the Biden Administration, New York’s Democrats thought nothing of Biden’s ending the border wall construction. And then two migrants crossed, then four…The storm was intensifying, but its first waves were inconsequential to New Yorkers. They had calm water.
It’s easy for any of us to allow a creeping intensity of human travesty. We enter water that we believe is calm, and we gradually ride ever larger waves. Think open borders and fentanyl. Hundreds of Americans die each day because one pill turned into two turned into millions. One American died because of an illegal alien criminal, then two, then…. One terrorists sneaked into the country, then two, then more than 160…
New Yorkers thought little of the border and any migration problem exacerbated by the Biden Administration’s policies. For New York Democrats, Biden’s opening the border was an offshore storm, one over the horizon of daily concerns. But offshore storms are the generators of waves, and the bigger the storms the bigger the waves they generate. And distance from shore is irrelevant when the storms are large. In fact, the distance over which the winds blow that is known as the fetch, which is greater for greater storms, say like Hurricane Lee that has a diameter of hundreds of miles, contributes to the periods and wave heights of the surf.
Apparently, New Yorkers are now bouncing around on waves of migrants that have geometrically increased because the breadth of their entrance to the country stretches from California to Texas and is now also stretching across parts of the northern border. New Yorkers, happy to support Biden’s decision to open the borders, are now clutching to their civil surf boards.
Self-Control
It’s up to each of us to determine who influences and controls us and to discern whether we are part of geometric sequence driven by a distant authority of some kind. But we can’t do that when like surfers bouncing on ocean waves we have no knowledge of the source of those waves. New Yorkers ignored the hurricane caused by the Biden Administration until the storm waves were upon them.
Somewhere in the distance a storm’s winds are sending ever more powerful waves to which we submit simply because we decided to enter the water in the belief we were in control. The waves of influence that we ride toss us around daily. The winds that create those social waves emanate from distant storms.
We can, however, definitely fault ourselves for entering waters over which we have no control. For that we have no justification in displacing blame.
*https://warmwinds.com/surf-cam
**For one review of the experiment, see Saul Mcleod. 11 Sept 2023. Stanley Milgram Shock Experiment: Summary, Results, & Ethics at SimplyPsychology online at https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html#Milgram%E2%80%99s%20Agency%20Theory
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