“You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of anything.”
—NOAH CROSS, CHINATOWN
For many deeply religious people, obedience to God means a trip to Heaven, where one can live for all eternity basking in the power and the glory of the Almighty. It’s an offer that’s hard to resist. And when it causes people to do good deeds—such as honoring their children and their neighbors—it’s a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, the promise of an eternal life can also cause people to do awful things, such as crashing planes into the World Trade Center. In a better world, we wouldn’t need the promise of Heaven. We would do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do—what Abraham Lincoln termed “the better angels of our nature.” When Mother Teresa ministered to those living in squalor in Calcutta, she no doubt did it because she enjoyed serving God. But would she have done the same thing without promise of an afterlife—if her only reward was the smiles of those around her? One can only imagine that her answer would have been yes—the virtue of selflessness being its own reward.
HELL IS ALSO A POWERFUL MOTIVATOR.
Some of the most influential stories in the world’s literature describe what can happen to someone who dares to challenge God, dares to risk eternal damnation. One involves the origin of Satan and the concept of Hell. Lucifer, the “Morning Star,” the “Bearer of Light,” was God’s favorite angel. But when God asked Lucifer and the other angels to honor Adam—His newly designed perfect creature—Lucifer refused, arguing that Adam was a mere mortal. Angry that he had disobeyed Him, God cast Lucifer (now called Satan) down into Hell to be surrounded for all eternity by those who succumbed to his temptations.
Adam and Eve are another example of what can happen if you disobey God. Both had been granted free reign in Eden: a perfect paradise. Everything they needed was provided for them. All God asked was that they never eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Soon a serpent convinced Eve to take a bite of fruit from the forbidden tree; Eve then convinced Adam to do the same thing. The price for disobeying God was high. After losing their innocence, Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, forced to toil and suffer on Earth.
Probably the most vivid image of God’s demands for obedience is one of the first stories in the Bible. Some time later, God tested Abraham. God said, ‘Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.’ Abraham bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, ‘Do not lay a hand on the boy,’ he said. ‘Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.’ (Genesis 22:1–2, 9–12). Arguably, no biblical story depicts man’s willingness to obey God’s commands more than this one.
WHEN PEOPLE CHOOSE TO withhold lifesaving medicines from their children, the fear that holds them in place is often something unseen. Maybe it’s an unspoken punishment from God, or denial of a place in Heaven, or simply the loss of a supportive community. Whatever the fear, no true believer wants to suffer the fate of the favored angel Lucifer—cast out of Heaven and condemned to serve eternity in Hell—or of Adam and Eve, cast out of the Garden of Eden and condemned to suffer on Earth. If the true believer feels it is God’s will—even if it runs counter to their humanity—then they do it. They seem willing to act as Abraham acted, to sacrifice their child on a mountaintop as a show of faith. “It’s hard to explain the tremendous fear that a Christian Scientist has for going to the doctor,” said Rita. “[Church officials] make it very clear that the Church will desert you. We knew there would have been no going back if the doctors didn’t help. Then we would have had no doctor and no God.”
TODAY, MOST PEOPLE HEARING the stories of Matthew Swan or Natali Joy Mudd or Neil Beagley feel comfortable that it could never happen to them. Surely they would have responded differently to the suffering in front of them. But they shouldn’t be so certain. One experiment performed in the early 1960s—perhaps the most famous social psychology experiment in history—showed how, under the right circumstances, almost anyone can do the unimaginable. The study was performed by a professor of psychology at Yale University named Stanley Milgram.
Milgram wanted to understand Hitler’s willing executioners: ordinary men and women who committed extraordinarily inhumane acts. “It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command,” wrote Milgram in the first pages of his book, Obedience to Authority. “Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.”
Milgram wanted to understand the psychology of obedience. He had heard the oft-repeated balm that what had happened in Nazi Germany could never happen here. Americans would never submit themselves to that kind of tyranny; never follow orders that were so monstrous and inhumane. But Stanley Milgram proved that Americans were perfectly capable of doing exactly what so many citizens in Nazi Germany had done. “When you think of the long and gloomy history of man,” wrote British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow, “you will find that more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.”
It was an unsettling experiment.
MILGRAM’S STUDY INVOLVED three players: the “experimenter,” the “learner,” and the “teacher.” Both the experimenter and the learner were actors. The teachers were the subjects of the experiment; they didn’t know that both the experimenter and the learner were merely playing a role. Milgram wanted to see what the teacher would do under extreme stress.
The experimenter was a thirty-one-year-old biologist. Dressed in a white technician’s coat, he was impassive, stern, and distant. The learner was a forty-seven-year-old Irish-American accountant, described as mild-mannered and likeable. When the person under study (the “teacher”) entered the room, the experimenter explained that he was investigating whether learning could be enhanced under duress. “Psychologists have developed several theories to explain how people learn,” he said. “One theory is that people learn things correctly whenever they get punished for making a mistake.” The task was straightforward. The teacher was asked to read a series of paired words, like blue box, to the learner. Then the teacher would say the word blue and follow it with several other words, like sky, ink, box, and lamp. The teacher would then ask the learner, who was strapped into a device that resembled an electric chair in another room, which word paired with blue. If the learner said box, then the teacher would go to the next list of words. If the learner was wrong, the subject was instructed to administer an electric shock, and to give incrementally greater shocks with each incorrect answer. “Move one lever [15 volts] higher on the shock generator each time the learner gives a wrong answer,” instructed the experimenter. The teacher also had to announce the voltage level before administering the shock. If the teacher reached 450 volts, he was instructed to continue to administer the shock two more times. If the learner still didn’t get the correct answer, the teacher could stop the experiment.
The shock generator looked official, consisting of 30 levers ranging from 15 to 450 volts. Above the levers were warning labels that read from left to right: “Slight Shock,” “Moderate Shock,” “Strong Shock,” “Very Strong Shock,” “Intense Shock,” “Extreme Intensity Shock,” and “Danger: Severe Shock.” The final two levers, corresponding to 435 and 450 volts, were simply labeled “XXX.” When the teacher pressed the lever, a bright red light appeared above the switch, an electric buzzer sounded, a blue light labeled “Voltage Energizer” flashed, and the dial on the voltage meter swung to the right. To convince the teacher that the learner was being shocked (which he wasn’t), the teacher was attached to the machine and given a real shock of 45 volts. The teachers, however, never administered an actual shock during the experiment; they only thought they had.
The learner was given a series of predetermined responses to different voltage levels. He didn’t express any discomfort until he was given the bogus 75 volts, at which point he gave out a little grunt. The learner reacted similarly to 90 and 105 volts. At 120 volts, he shouted to the teacher that the shocks were becoming painful. At 135 volts, the learner gave out a loud, painful groan; and at 150 volts, the learner shouted, “Experimenter, get me out of here! I won’t be in the experiment any more! I refuse to go on!” Screams and pleadings like this continued with rising intensity through 180 volts, at which time the learner cried out, “I can’t stand the pain!” By 270 volts, the response was an agonized, bloodcurdling scream. From 150 volts forward, the learner pleaded to be let out of the experiment. At 300 volts, the learner shouted that he would no longer answer any questions. The experimenter would then instruct the teacher to consider no answer to be a wrong answer and to shock the learner according to the original instructions. After 330 volts, the learner said nothing; as far as the teacher knew, he could have died from a heart attack.
During the study, teachers would often look to the experimenter and ask whether they should continue. If the teacher said he or she wanted to stop, the experimenter responded with a series of four predetermined prods. Prod number 1 was, “Please continue.” Prod number 2 was “The experiment requires you to continue.” Prod number 3 was “It is absolutely essential that you continue.” And Prod number 4 was, “You have no other choice; you must go on.” If the teacher refused to obey after Prod number 4, the experiment was terminated.
Before beginning his experiment, Milgram asked psychiatrists, college students, and middle-class adults how far they thought the teachers (subjects) would go. All predicted that subjects wouldn’t go beyond 135 volts, which was labeled “Strong Shock”; and all predicted that 100 percent of subjects would quit before they got to the end of the experiment. But they were wrong. Sixty-five percent of subjects went to the maximum levels, shocking the learner independent of his pleadings, his screams, and eventually his silence—shocking the victim with a voltage labeled “XXX” twice while hearing nothing from the next room. And it didn’t matter whether subjects were in their 30s, 40s, or 50s; men or women; workers, students, or professionals. It didn’t matter if they were housewives, nurses, engineers, medical technicians, social workers, drill press operators, welders, water inspectors, or religion teachers. Everyone, independent of gender, background, or level of education, was capable of administering what he or she thought were potentially fatal shocks to someone they didn’t know simply because a man standing next to them in a white lab coat told them to do it.
Regarding the unanticipated result, Milgram wrote, “Subjects have learned from childhood that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against his will. Yet, almost half the subjects abandon this tenet in following the instructions of an authority who has no special powers to enforce his commands. It is clear from the remarks and behavior of many participants that in punishing the victim they were often acting against their own values.” Yet they continued. Later, Milgram modified his experiment so that the learner was sitting right next to the subject, close enough to touch. Still, 30 percent of subjects shocked the learner up to the maximum level.
WHEN STANLEY MILGRAM published his results in 1963, many refused to believe them, arguing that his experiment didn’t mimic a real-life situation; people capable of this level of inhumanity would clearly display psychological characteristics that would distinguish them from others. While Milgram was conducting his experiment, however, an event was occurring in Jerusalem that supported his conclusions: the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a notorious war criminal responsible for the systematic murder of millions of Jews.
Eichmann’s trial was an international media event. Every day, people packed the courtroom, craning their necks to see what absolute evil looked like. One attendee was Hannah Arendt, a German American philosopher, political theorist, and author. Arendt later published the book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Most who attended Eichmann’s trial expected to see a man possessed; a sadistic, brutal, twisted man; evil incarnate. What they saw was a mild-mannered bureaucrat who had sat behind his desk and done his job. “Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as ‘normal,’” wrote Arendt. “While another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was ‘not only normal but most desirable.’” When Eichmann was asked whether his direct role in the extermination of millions of Jews had weighed on his conscience, he “remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do—to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and with meticulous care.” (In his book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Robert Lifton explains how the Nazis were arguably the largest and most dangerous cult in history.)
Arendt’s conclusions were consistent with Milgram’s. “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him,” wrote Arendt, “and that many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. It was as though in those last minutes [of Eichmann’s life] he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought defying banality of evil.” Shortly before midnight on May 31, 1962, Adolf Eichmann was hanged, his conscience clear. He had simply been following orders.
IN THE EARLY 1960s, Stanley Milgram proved that hundreds of people could administer what they believed were potentially fatal electric shocks because they were told to do it. Yielding to authority, they had abandoned their humanity. During the Nuremberg trials, Nazi war criminals offered the same excuse: “I did what I was told.” If Stanley Milgram could get hundreds of study subjects to perform unconscionable acts simply by hiring someone to wear a white lab coat and speak in an official manner, it shouldn’t be too hard to understand how people can counter their humanity if they believe it to be God’s will—a God who has the power to reward their faithfulness or punish their disobedience for all eternity.
MARY BAKER EDDY’S Christian Science, James Jones’s People’s Temple, David Koresh’s Branch Davidians, Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate, Walter White’s Followers of Christ Church, and Hobart Freeman’s Faith Assembly Church represent extremes. Reasonable people could probably never imagine joining religious cults such as these. They’re simply too foreign, too otherworldly. But most people who choose religion over modern medicine aren’t members of cults, aren’t ignorant of medical advances, and aren’t isolated from their communities. One, Larry Parker, wrote a book about it. Called We Let Our Son Die, it was later made into a movie. Parker’s story provides another insight into the psychological forces that allow some parents to watch their children suffer in the name of God, knowing full well that they could have prevented that suffering.