Stanley Milgram's Obedience To Authority

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Throughout history, authority figures have been commonplace in virtually every society; however, resistance to the aforementioned authority has not been. Just as Stanley Milgram illustrates in his book, Obedience to Authority, I too believe that it is far easier for a subject to comply with what he or she is told than to rebel against rules and protocol. In this paper, I will argue that those who are subjected to authority inherently fail to oppose it, and succumb to it by nature. Resistance is hard to come by, and at times when it is present, it comes under many positions and precursors before it that led up to it. Reasons for lack of resistance and tendency towards compliance include, but are not limited to, fear of disruption of power structure…show more content…
This is yet another factor to be taken into consideration when assessing the reasons as to why it is only natural for laymen to accede to how they are expected to live. In the Milgram experiment, we see a similar relationship being formed between the teacher and the subject, only on a smaller scale and in a slightly different context. When the subject takes notice of the fact that he is inflicting serious pain upon the learner, he attempts to resist authority by claiming that he is no longer willing to participate in the experiment, as it violates his moral code. In Chapter 5 of Obedience to Authority, this concept is exhibited in many dialogues between the experimenter and subject. “Subject: Well, that’s your opinion. If he doesn’t want to continue, I’m taking orders from him. Experimenter: You have no other choice, sir, you must go on.” (Milgram, 48). The experimenter imposes his inherent authority over the figure by telling him that his options in this scenario are virtually nonexistent. Although there is no way, in any situation, that a subject can be forced to comply with authority, power is always an influential rhetorical device. Despite the fact that a totalitarian regime and the Milgram experiment take place in different settings and contexts, it is easy to see that the…show more content…
James Scott is one of the many subscribers to this school of thought. In “The Public Transcript as a Respectable Performance”, Scott outlines his beliefs through a variety of examples that he provides. One of these is peasant to farmer relations that were prevalent in the USSR, and the motives behind them. Scott tells us that the connection between subject and authority is one that resembles a symbiotic relationship in nature. Without resistance, authority is nothing, he claims. “A work party of serfs or slaves in the field under the supervision of an overseer on horseback is both a discursive affirmation of power relations and, of course, the process of material production itself.” (Scott, 46). Here, Scott is making the claim that resistance is inherently present in a farming society, as the rules that are imposed upon workers stem from resistance itself, and that the two are constantly in clash with one another, thereby resulting in the productive system that the USSR came to adapt to and accept. I debunk his argument by saying that resistance is, in fact, actually nonexistent in this case. The reason that
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