Mental Health
When People Try to Control You.
I’m not talking about kinks, bedroom play, power exchanges or lifestyle choices in this article. I love the D/s dynamic as much as the next pair of cheeks waiting in line for a paddling.
This article has nothing to do with D/s, but everything to do with life.
As a child and adult, I lived in Germany, where visits to concentration camps were an educational event.
The historical and evil fact of the holocaust, its impact on many people and the consequences sink deeper into the mind when one strolls through Belsen or Dachau, to name the camps I visited many times.
Stanley Milgram
In later life, I stumbled across the work of Stanley Milgram, an American social psychologist who conducted some very raw experiments into obedience.
The trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann partly provoked Milgram’s work. His experiment tried to answer the following question:
Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (Milgram, 1974).
Milgram was driven to study and understand why people might be pre-disposed to fully obey the instructions of others, albeit reluctantly even to a disastrous conclusion.
Essentially, he wanted to understand and present the reasons people do bad things because other people tell them to.
Milgram had a stellar but controversial career, winning awards and courting the ire of professional associations while experimenting with human subjects to prove very disconcerting facts about our nature.
I don’t want to dart off into politics, claiming authoritarianism is a construct of a worldview. If you want to study the dynamic, there are well founded works from many qualified psychologists.
I wanted to make you aware of Milgram’s experiment which you can find online by using the search term
‘Stanley Milgram Experiment on Obedience.’
So, what’s the point?
It’s important to understand these phenomena, not because you might be a bad person.
You need to know that scientists have proved that good people can be manipulated into doing bad things.
Make up your own mind if this might affect you, your family and friends when someone screams at you through the TV or Social Media.
The experiment
Three individuals took part in each session of the experiment:
- The experimenter, who was in charge of the session.
- The teacher, a volunteer for a single session. The teachers believed they were assisting when they were actually the subject of the experiment.
- The learner was an actor, and collaborator of the experimenter, pretending to be a volunteer.
The subject and actor arrived at the session together.
The experimenter explained they were taking part in a scientific study of memory and learning, to see what effect punishment had on a subject’s ability to memorize content.
The teacher and learner drew pieces of paper to determine their roles. Unknown to the subject, both slips said teacher.
The actor would always claim to have drawn the slip that read learner, thus guaranteeing that the subject would always be the teacher.
Next, the experimenter took the teacher and learner into an adjacent room, where the learner was strapped into what appeared to be an electric chair.
The experimenter, dressed in a lab coat, a sign of their authority, explained to both parties the restraints were to ensure the learner would not escape.
The experimenter gave the teacher a low voltage electric shock to show the system working.
The experimenter separated the teacher and learner who communicated by intercom but could not see one another
The teacher had a list of word pairs to teach the learner.
The teacher read the list of word pairs to the learner.
The teacher then read the first word of each pair and four answers.
The learner would press a button to show which of the four answers were correct.
If the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing by 15-volt increments for each wrong answer.
The shock generator included verbal markings that vary from Slight Shock to Danger: Severe Shock. The most powerful shock was 450 volts. A deadly jolt for most, if not everyone.
The subjects believed that for each wrong answer; the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks.
When the learner screamed, even begged for the experiment to end and the teacher sought guidance from the experimenter, the following instructions were given:
- Please continue or Please go on.
- The experiment requires that you continue.
- It is absolutely essential that you continue.
- You have no other choice; you must go on.
Sometimes, the teacher stopped the experiment of their own volition, defying the experimenter.
Too often the teacher passed the point at which the screams in the room next door died off, stopping only when 450 volts were reached.
If the teacher asked whether the learner might suffer permanent physical harm, the experimenter replied, “Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on.”
If the teacher said that the learner clearly wants to stop, the experimenter replied, “Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly, so please go on.”
Teachers were uncomfortable administering the shocks and displayed varying degrees of tension and stress.
14 of the 40 teachers showed definite signs of nervous laughing or smiling.
Every participant paused the experiment at least once to question it. Most continued after being assured by the experimenter.
I have not even flicked the tip of this psychological iceberg. There are many studies on obedience that draw different conclusions.
The point I hope to have made is that there are proven ways in which those exerting authority can control us.
We probably should be more aware of the work of Stanley Milgram et al.
These days, when someone demands that we get angry about something, or locks us down, scaring the living shit out of us, we must ask why before we lose our rights, and freedoms or compromise others.
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love…” — Marcus Aurelius
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