We Must Obey

A few weeks ago I was entering the parking garage in my apartment building, and to my immense disgust and frustration, the woman in front of me was going at a glacially slow pace, I mean REALLY slow.  It reached the point that I actually honked my horn at her, and her response was to point angrily at the speed limit sign in the garage, which reads “5 MPH”.  Talk about clueless.

First off, 5 miles per hour is how fast an automatic transmission-equipped car goes if you take your foot off the brake and the gas pedal.  It’s that slow creep which is appropriate for bumper-to-bumper traffic.  For a parking garage?  Come on.  I can see not shooting through the garage like a rocket, as people come and go, both pedestrians and other cars, so something like 15-25 mph is a sensible limit.  But 5 mph is idiotic.

What is with people who insist on obeying laws, no matter how idiotic?  What possesses them to turn off what little brains they have and militantly refuse to exercise independent judgment?

I’ve heard a prosecutor argue, when faced with the issue of obeying what are clearly inane, archaic, or obsolete laws, that giving ordinary citizens the prerogative to choose which laws to obey, and which to flaunt, would result in chaos and mayhem.  Nice try, but no cigar.  The speed limit is already an example of a law 85% of the population consistently ignores.  The police have a policy of not pulling anyone over for less than 15 mph over the limit, when theoretically they’re within their rights to pull over anyone exceeding the speed limit; so even cops realize the speed limit is arbitrarily low.  Yet somehow, the scofflaw speeders have not decided that, “hey, I’m violating the speed limit, why not rob, steal, cheat, rape, or murder??”  Failure to enforce zero tolerance for speeding has not resulted in a lawless society.  What these prosecutors fail to do is to give credit to ordinary citizens to distinguish bullshit laws (speed limits) from sensible laws (murder) – which we find, in fact, is a distinction which ordinary citizens are competent of making.  To be fair, I do recall that the Arlington County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office expressly declared that they would not be actively enforcing Virginia’s archaic fornication law (making consensual sex between unmarried people illegal) until recently when it was finally (!) repealed.  Maybe there are some sensible prosecutors after all, since we already have sensible non-murdering speeders, myself included.

We usually associate such mindless obedience to authority with Germans.  Yet (as I noted much earlier) even SS personnel refused to obey commands.  Himmler himself issued a ruling that no one would be forced to participate in “eliminations” of the Jewish population.  So even the Germans, even in the SS, could think independently and refuse to participate in these atrocities. To be sure, conscientious SS officers and men were an unfortunately rare minority, otherwise the Holocaust would not have occurred.  I simply bring it up as an extreme example.

The Milgram Experiment was a famous demonstration of this, disturbingly closer to home.  In 1961 Stanley Milgram conducted experiments with US college students, the results of which were published in his 1974 book Obedience to Authority.  He set up college students to test other college students, the latter to answer various questions, receiving a shock for a wrong answer, the strength thereof increased with every wrong answer.  After a few such wrong answers, the subject began making painful noises, then ominously ceased responding.  The true subjects (those administering the test) were told to continue the tests even after the responder began showing signs of extreme pain.  Results?  65% of the subjects obeyed orders to the full strength of shocks.  Although many subjects had misgivings, ultimately they obeyed orders.  Even after the Holocaust, even in the US, so-called normal people could be counted upon to obey orders even when it involved injuring or even killing innocent people.

Some people seem to take solace in security, in a lack of choice, in being told what to do by others, in being relieved of the responsibility of thinking independently, of exercising their own judgment.  To me, the sole legitimate role for such people in a civilized, democratic society is the military, and even then, solely in enlisted ranks.  They have turned off their brains, refuse to think, and turned themselves, voluntarily, by default, into nothing better than robots or animals.  Let them put on a uniform, carry a weapon, and mindlessly obey orders, and let the independent thinkers in the military come home.  Enough.