Are People Obedient

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Are People Obedient

ARE PEOPLE OBEDIENT?
By Queron Thompson
Does everyone in society go against what they believe in merely to satisfy an authority figure? Stanley Milgram’s “Perils Of Obedience” expresses that most of society supports the authority figure regardless of their own personal ideals. Milgram says to the reader, “For many people, obedience is a deeply ingrained behavioral tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct” (Milgram 606). Is Milgram’s statement telling us obedience is an unparalleled force in today’s society? Two authors, George Orwell and Langston Hughes, provide us with incidents that support Milgrams findings.
George Orwell’s work, “Shooting an Elephant,” can be used as an example of Milgram’s discoveries. He recalls an account of himself as a British policeman called upon to take action against a belligerent elephant rampaging through a small Burmese Village. Orwell makes it a point to show that the natives of the village, “who at any other time would have looked upon the him in disfavor,” are now backing him in hopes of the animals destruction. Orwell realizes it is quite unnecessary to kill the animal, yet does it anyway. Why might you ask? Milgrims findings on people’s obedience to authority can be seen as an answer to this question. In the reading Orwell says, “And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it: I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly.”(Orwell 771). With this statement, we can easily determine the role the villagers take on. Suddenly, they have taken on the role of the authority figure and Orwell the conforming citizen. In Milgram’s “Perils Of Obedience”, the test subjects or “teachers” follow the experimenter’s authority and inflict punishment upon the actors or “learners” without any regard to their own feelings. In Orwell’s writings, he has also put...

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