Obedience to Authority (Perennial Classics)

by Stanley Milgram

Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose.

As the subject contemplates this break, anxiety is generated, signaling him to step back from the forbidden action and thereby creating an emotional barrier through which he must pass in order to defy authority. The remarkable thing is, once the “ice is broken” through disobedience, virtually all the tension, anxiety, and fear evaporate.

It is ironic that the virtues of loyalty, discipline, and self-sacrifice that we value so highly in the individual are the very properties that create destructive organizational engines of war and bind men to malevolent systems of authority.

civilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain. Within the ambit of that definition, those of us who heedlessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men.