Reply To: On Tyranny Lesson 1: Do Not Obey in Advance
As a Canadian, I won’t comment on groups being unfairly blamed within the US for the US’s problems. I have a general idea, but haven’t followed politics closely enough to comment on that part of the question.
What I understand from Lesson 1 is the lesson to not obey in advance calls for people to think more critically of their actions and behaviours and not to follow directions or believe what’s been told to them blindly. Unfortunately, history and Milgram’s experiment have shown that people do follow direction without thought. And we have also seen the lack of critical thinking in believing soundbites on social media without proper fact checking. So, not only do history and science inform us of this tendency in human behaviour, we have seen it ourselves online.
What is shocking is the extent of obedience and how far people go when it is not just expected, but perhaps just allowed or not actively stopped. Timothy Snyder mentions with Kristallnacht and the events that led up to it: “Crucially, people who were not Nazis looked on with interest and amusement”, “Crucially, others who were not Nazis joined in the theft”, “when German troops invaded the country and Gentile neighbors started riots at Jewish homes, Austrian Jews began to commit suicide.” And Milgram’s experiment demonstrates the same extreme behaviours carried out without thought or compassion when it seems that authorities demand or expect it.
It’s such a sad and terrifying finding and I can only hope that by sharing this knowledge enables people to recognize these types of situations when they potentially evince themselves in the future.
I do think that by having a book club discussion of “On Tyranny” helps to raise awareness of this lesson and thereby spreads this knowledge to other readers and hopefully their families and communities through them.
