DEFENCES

  Why do normal people embrace evil? Setting aside the possibility of mental disorder, we come to the so-called “Nuremberg Defense.” This emerged from the Nuremberg trials following World War Two. In these surviving German leaders faced judgement before and International Military Tribunal (MIT) for horrendous crimes perpetuated by Nazi Germany, including the Holocaust.[i]

From the trials came the now-famous, and often lampooned defense: “I was only following orders.”

Later, In 1962, the concept arose again during the trial of Adolph Eichmann, who was tasked with, and carried out energetically, the “final solution” designed at the Wannsee Conference of 1942. Israeli agents had captured Eichmann in Argentina and ferreted him to Jerusalem to stand trial. While there, he wrote that he and other high-ranking officers were “forced to serve as mere instruments.” Among the orders he followed, as such an instrument, included directives to murder every last person in Europe determined to be of Jewish descent as determined by precise laws established in pre-war Germany. In Eichmann’s case, as has been mentioned earlier, the defense didn’t work. His evil past hung with him as he hung from the scaffold.

That same year, a Yale University psychologist, Stanly Milgram, conducted a series of studies designed to test whether, indeed, ordinary people, including our “terrifyingly normal,” would inflict harm upon others when receiving orders from a higher authority.[ii] In other words, it was an experiment designed to test “Obedience to Authority.” At the time, the results of the experiments indicated, rather alarmingly, that ordinary people did, indeed, harbor a sea of evil potential.

The study has since enjoyed a great deal of examination, criticism, support, and some refutation, What happened, though is that test organizers convinced a group of student participants that they were involved in a study to test the relationship between pain and cognizance. In short, they were to apply electrical shocks, in increasing severity, to other participants who gave wrong answers to questions in a highly controlled and supervised situation. They administered the shocks, under the watch of variously bedecked authority figures, to test participants in a controlled environment.  The reactions of the test victims were visible and quite dramatic, as they should have been for they, and the authority figures, were actually actors. The degree of electrical shock, at times theoretically lethal, applied under orders didn’t actually shock the participants, but it did shock the academic community when the results were published.

We’ll drop anchor for a short spell for the readers to carry out some homework, under orders of course. Anyone interested in the evil performed while following orders must read an account of the Milgramexperiments. They still shock.[iii]

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[i] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Introduction to the Holocaust.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction-to-the-holocaust. Accessed on December 23, 2021.

[ii] Milgram. S (1963) Behavioural Study of Obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-78.

[iii] Brown, R. (1986). Social Forces in Obedience and Rebellion. Social Psychology: The Second Edition. New York: The Free Press.