Psychopaths, Order-Followers, and Bullies

Chapter 9.6: More reasons for evil

Why this book | Title Page | Table of Contents
Preface | Introduction
PART 1
Chapter 1 (1.1) (1.2) | Chapter 2 (2.1) (2.2) (2.3) | Chapter 3 (3.1) (3.2) (3.3) (3.4) (3.5) (3.6)
PART 2
Chapter 4 (4.1) (4.2) (4.3) (4.4) (4.5) | Chapter 5 (5.1) (5.2) (5.3) (5.4) (5.5) (5.6) (5.7) (5.8) (5.9)
Chapter 6 (6.1) (6.2) (6.3) (6.4) (6.5)
PART 3
Chapter 7 (7.1) (7.2) (7.3) (7.4) (7.5) (7.6) | Chapter 8 (8.1) (8.2) (8.3) (8.4) (8.5) | Chapter 9 (9.1) (9.2) (9.3) (9.4) (9.5) (9.6)
Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14
PART 4
Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 |
PART 5
Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Conclusion
Appendix | Works Cited

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Note: This is an installment of The Freedom Scale: An Accurate Measure of Left and Right. See here for installments of The Distributed Nation: A Plan for Human Independence.

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Chapter 9.6

• Reasons for Evil

  • "I was just following orders…"

  • Nature gone wrong

    • Psychopathology

    • Misfeasance

    • Choice is still a factor

  • Lord of the Flies

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"I was just following orders…"

In the early 1960s, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram performed a now-famous series of experiments to gauge obedience to authority. The results were disturbing: perfectly normal people were willing to subject strangers to electric shocks—rising in intensity up to fatal levels—simply because an authority figure told them to. The shocks were fake, of course, but the results were all too real.

Similar experiments were performed around the world with similar results. Apparently, a large percentage of the human population are able to justify doing bad things simply because they were told to do so by someone in a position of authority.

Large-scale, systematized evil is usually justified by reference to ideological goals, and the phenomenon of mass-formation hypnosis may play a further role in getting large swaths of the population either to participate or acquiesce.¹ All of these may help explain Hannah Arendt’s observation about the “banality of evil”—the fact that seemingly normal people are able to take part in the commission of the worst atrocities. Examples abound, ranging in degree of severity, and we won’t belabor the point by a lengthy enumeration here.

But one, still taking place as of this writing, bears mentioning…

The risk of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to children is extremely low, and in healthy children with no comorbidities, the risk of death is close to zero. Yet societies across the world have subjected their children to a series of measures that do pose significant risks: universal masking, separation from friends, plexiglass barriers, eating outside in frigid temperatures, the destruction of high-school sports careers, and more.

As a result, suicides, self-harm, addiction, and depression have all massively increased, such that they have claimed far more children’s lives than the virus. There has been a shocking increase in delayed speech acquisition among young children, and we have no idea what other psychological effects will result from denying children—especially babies—the ability to see human faces. Most people naturally experience visceral anger when children are harmed, and yet in this situation, millions have somehow squelched that impulse and are instead implementing this systematic damage with bland, bureaucratic obedience.