We Do What We’re Told
“Brush your teeth”, “Take the trash out”, “Pick up after yourself”. Every day we are constantly bombarded with orders, be they grossly superfluous, or blatantly cardinal; how we choose to deal with these devoirs shape our personality and greatly influence the crucial development of our own internal authority. I believe that as children we have to listen to elder figures, but if we don’t mature our own internal authority, we fall into blind obedience to foreign command, which I believe to be a risk every man runs. The only way that we would be able to have an authentic relationship with someone else depends on if we have an authentic relationship with our self, and what we know to be true for us. As Shakespeare so elegantly put it, “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”
In 1961, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment, testing the willingness of participants to obey an authority figure. 65% of the participants followed the orders given by the experimenter, administering a supposed 450 volts of electric shock to the “learner”.
