Milgram experiment
Sun 3.21.21
When I was in my third year in college working with my lab rat in the psychology department society collapsed for me. It was all fake, bullshit. My prof, Doctor Sytsma, must have glimpsed my dilemma because he told me one day that he didn’t see me pursuing a career in psychology. I was a good student; it wasn’t that I couldn’t do it. After all, I was his star rat trainer using behaviorism’s operant conditioning methods, of which there are 4: positive reinforcement (one is rewarded for performing a task, a behavior, etc.) Positive punishment, a form of punishment designed to eliminate undesirable behavior (a person refusing the covid vaccination will not be accepted as flight passenger,) Negative reinforcement is an adverse stimulus that induces behavior to remove it, (food is withheld until you provide resources to acquire it.) Negative Punishment is delivered when exhibiting behavior, (you went out with your buds again and had a great time, partying all night; you are ordered to perform 70 pushups as a consequence in the morning.)
Sytsma delighted in rubbing it in our faces – So there’s your free will! You are a rat in its cage being manipulated by sundry and all every minute of your life. It occurs to me today as I write this post that it is no wonder that my world was collapsing then. The falseness, the preening, the curtsying that I saw every day among academics and students was a product of someone else’s whim. Did you really want to become a lawyer, a social scientist, a politician, or was it something you saw you could pull off, and it was exceptionally remunerative?
Stanley Milgram’s experiment comes to mind. It was produced at Yale in the sixties. Subjects were told that the experiment was a study on memory. They would press a button delivering an electric shock that a person in another windowed room would receive whenever that person gave a wrong answer. Students were being asked to deliver pain to someone they did not know, for dubious reasons. Over and over they did this. Of course, the person in the other room was an actor. Whenever a subject became squeamish at the continuance of shocking someone who seemed to be in great pain, they were urged on by Milgram and his team. Some even administered what they thought was a lethal charge.
Milgram proved with this experiment that humans are conditioned to obey authority and will usually do so even if it goes against their natural morals or common sense. Sixty five percent of students went to the maximum death shock level of 450 volts when given a series of prompts from the experimenter, i.e., 1. Please continue, 2. The experiment requires that you continue, 3. It is absolutely essential that you continue, and 4. You have no other choice but to continue.
I would have none of it. But in truth, we are all rats in our respective cages performing the task required in our particular society for the rewards to be gained.
On vacation in Mexico during that period I met a man, someone who I’ve kept in my heart ever since because he helped me resolve my cage dilemma. We were both runners and I spoke to him about how I would pace myself seeking to increase the mileage of my daily run by seeking a set of goals on a required basis. That’s not what Miguel Angel did. Rather than seeing it as a task he had to perform he just let his body decide and was delighted to see how he was advancing. He didn’t do it because he had a task to fulfill, he did it because it was what his body wanted and needed, and most important his Spirit demanded it. Miguel was also in a cage, but the pellet master was imbedded in his soul directing his path in life. It was Spirit. Learning to open oneself up to it allows magic to become the pellet master controlling one’s life.
The favorite essay this past month has been Lone Wolf
