As IF Times

link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Milgram

Why do people in societies behave the way that they do? If you consider the myriad of choices that people must make on any given day, from the trivial to the consequential, it’s logical to assume that most will act in ways that would be most self-serving. That seems logical….but real life experience shows that this is not necessarily the case.

The societies I am referring to aren’t those run by notional despots with all kinds of surveillance and controls on their populace.  We can understand the motives of people in those states.  No, what’s more puzzling is the behavior of people in what are accepted as ‘free’ societies, ones in which citizens are supposed to expect some level of self-determination over their lives.  Aren’t people allowed to freely vote for their rulers here?

A quick survey will reveal that these types of societies are rapidly disappearing. Where once you could say categorically that ‘western’ nations were the ones with explicit freedoms, this is certainly not the case anymore. In Europe, both the UK and France have implemented strict prohibitions on what can be said both in public and online and in the case of the UK, even to thoughts! These kinds of restrictions were once thought to be characteristics of autocratic regimes such as China, Russia or North Korea.  In those surveillance states, citizens are spied upon, their speech is limited and the concept of personal rights is non-existent.

However this form of citizen behavior control has made its way into the toolkits of most heretofore free Western nations.  Canada is the most recent example of this erosion of freedoms.

Recently, the Canadians held an election after a prolonged period in which the previous ruler had destroyed virtually all the sacrosanct Canadian traditions of freedom and ethical behavior on the part of government. Finally, the nation could end their 10 year nightmare.  This nightmare included a collapse of virtually every metric of national performance, the skyrocketing of debt, the explosion of illegal immigrants, housing crises in every city, the proliferation of criminal activity and the crushing of personal freedoms.

But, thanks to the relentless and effective gas-lighting campaign by all media outlets (taxpayer supported) a large part of the population apparently voted to keep the same guys in office; the equivalent of ‘please sir, may I have another’.

Even casting aside the rumors of election manipulation, this kind of behavior is not organic.  It is planned.

Politicians and media may be un-liked by the majority of the population, but they are not guileless. At the very core of their being, they know what a very insightful psychologist named Stanley Milgram discovered over 50 years ago in a series of perhaps surprising studies on human behavior, especially in the field of obedience behavior.  He found that if a subject can be convinced that harmful actions on his part are not his fault, then he will continue to perform such actions and separate himself emotionally from those actions just because an authority figure instructs him to do so.  Thus, even as electric shocks applied to control subjects caused obvious distress, the subjects continued to apply them when instructed to do so.

His experiments were driven by an examination of the treatment of Jews by Germans during the Second World War, but what he discovered was that this behavior was not confined to Germans.  It had implications for all populations.

We saw this implemented on a large scale very recently with the massive Covid-19 psyop in the 2020-2023 period.  Doctors and other professionals continued to press on with harmful vaccinations because of the enormous pressure from peers and ‘authorities’.  What chance did the average citizen have of refuting the tidal wave of mandates?

In the case of the recent Canadian elections, naïve people were convinced that US President Trump imposed a more serious existential threat to the nation than 10 years of an inept Liberal government.  With the aid of virtually all media outlets, the story was effectively sold to a large part of the voters.  The knowledge derived from Stanley Milgram worked as it always has and the same government that had been applying electric shocks to the populace was returned to power.

We can expect to see more of this kind of incongruent behavior as time goes on because those in positions of influence are quite aware of Milgram’s work…even as the public is not.  Policies and laws don’t need to have any merit or make any sense, they just need to be sold. When you observe populations acting against their own existence, someone is harnessing Milgram.

link: https://www.earth.com/news/greenland-ice-fossil-discovery-stuns-and-worries-scientists/

When did society in general change from one of curiosity and discovery to one of complacency and fear? How did we become hand wringers and cowering knaves instead of being brave explorers? How did fear of catastrophe become so widespread in western culture?

Our history books describe the many great leaps made by mankind through the many milestones made even before actual recorded history.  The progress of civilizations have been marked by advances in technologies; of geographic and scientific discoveries and of ingenious inventions that propel man to the next levels of human achievement.

If you were to draw a chart of man’s achievements using the birth of Christ as a reference point, you would see that human achievements have accelerated from a gradual ascending slope to an almost vertical ascent in only the past 100 years.  Only a hundred years ago, people were still moving around by horses and buggies. Since that time, the presence of personal cars are as common worldwide and as unremarkable as dandelions, even in the poorest of nations.

Just a scant 500 years ago, a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, a crazy and intrepid mariner named Columbus decided it was a good idea to sail off in some ships to see if there was a faster way to get spices. Today, the role of intrepid explorer is headed by Elon Musk and the next target of exploration is another planet altogether, Mars.  And beneath these lofty aspirations of men and mankind, there are a multitude of minor inventions and discoveries that continue to push the limits of the human experience.

It appears that a big part of the human condition: is to want to improve the human condition. Yet somehow in the last 50 or so years, a distinct malaise is impeding the inexorable progress of mankind.  The naysayers, the alarmists and the skeptics have become such a force as to blunt the edge of human progress.  Even as the passage of time has rendered virtually all of the alarmist bleats invalid and the general condition of humanity being at its best point in history, the distraction of alarmist views has never been stronger.  Doom has become a business.  There are those that insist on making people’s lives less pleasant because of imagined threats in their minds.

While we are currently pushing back against the vapid bleats of climate alarmism, especially since more polar bears are showing up, society has had to suffer through numerous alarmist crises du jour over the past 50 years.  Some of us will recall the overpopulation ‘bomb’ endangering mankind: there was the prediction of the great global freeze; there was Y2K; there is always a financial crisis; there is always some kind of pandemic crisis including aids, bird flu and recently of course, Covid 19. This phenomenon is made much worse these days by the reach of social media as well as media in general since sensationalism gets eyeballs.

It’s hard to understand why there is such a willing appetite for narratives of catastrophe. It must be linked to some kind of physiological wiring in the brains of certain humans. We can see the parallels with people who have an affinity for horror movies.  It’s always puzzled me that there is an audience for movies about teens being chased by chainsaws, or of vampires, or of masked slashers.  Clearly, there must be a physiological as well as psychological button that provides a dopamine hit when experiencing these films. Anecdotal experience shows that females are more likely to enjoy this kind of entertainment than males.

What does this have to do with the progress of civilization? Historically, it’s been men that have done the wild and outlandish things that can lead to significant changes to society.  They’re the ones most likely to try things… just to see what happens.  It’s in men’s nature to be curious about almost anything and that curiosity can result in some kind of invention or new process. Women have generally been more prudent in their approach to the unknown and they leave the crazy stuff to men.  In today’s belt and suspenders world, that kind of unfettered innovation has been blunted by an increasingly overcautious environment.  As more women move into positions of political influence, so also does the rise of nanny culture.  People, especially men, need to be protected from themselves from doing dangerous things.

It’s clear that in today’s zeitgeist, anything can be construed as being dangerous or of having some kind of detrimental effect on humans, if someone says it does.  Historically the voices of the naysayers didn’t have great impact on human advances, if at all.  Imagine during Columbus’ day if some lobby groups existed to protest his expedition because of their fears of the unknown.  Imagine if protestors prevented the use of the printing press because of tree destruction.

I can foresee now the next crisis of the day will be the proliferation of robots and artificial intelligence. They will framed as an existential threat to mankind and the law industry will do what they do best; to make our lives miserable while we try to harness the power of these new technologies.

Despite an unbroken record of man successfully overcoming obstacles to the progress of human civilization, people always seem to fixate on the next great crisis, no matter how abstract and illogical. We can’t discount a meteor crashing into the planet tomorrow and wiping out all life forms.  If that happens, we all die.  Why worry about it? In the meantime, human ingenuity needs to be unfettered.  Forget the tin foil hats.  This is best summed up by a not too famous quote attributed to Michel de Montaigne in which he states: My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.