Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 9:22pm

A Sad Commentary On Fallen Man

If true.  The blind obedience to masking and social distancing of so many in reference to Covid gives me pause.  However, it did get wrapped up in Leftist politics and Leftism destroys everything it touches.  I doubt if that fact makes the debacle any better.

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Art Deco
Art Deco
Thursday, December 29, AD 2022 9:44am

This is misconceived.

Tom Byrne
Tom Byrne
Thursday, December 29, AD 2022 10:45am

Art:
I’m with you to a degree. How many encounter orders to do something objectively and blatantly immoral? I confess I haven’t. Is it because I’m too stupid to recognize such? On the other hand, we are a conformist society, so somebody seeing everybody else go along with something is not likely to question the Something.

WK Aiken
WK Aiken
Thursday, December 29, AD 2022 11:00am

I would perceive it to be a sliding scale, with the percentage of those who would obey being proportionately inverse to the severity of the illegitimacy of the order. Of course, the prevailing political context would have some effect on what “illegitimate” looks like.

John L Flaherty
John L Flaherty
Thursday, December 29, AD 2022 11:14am

“This is misconceived.”
I’m not so sure. Milgram, a Yale psychologist, conducted an experiment beginning in 1961. Though most participants objected or felt emotional or psychological distress about inflicting pain upon others, most still acted on orders given them.
Perhaps Covid measures became partly enmeshed with Leftist efforts. ….we still saw whole portions of society comply with foolishness.

Clinton
Clinton
Thursday, December 29, AD 2022 12:22pm

I’m with John Flaherty on this— the results of Milgram’s experiment showed that an appallingly high percentage of subjects would override their own qualms and continue to obey the commands of an “expert” authority.

And this experiment was done in the early ‘60’s, when the horrors of WWII were still within living memory of most Americans.

Video taken during the experiments are on YouTube— it’s difficult
to watch subjects obviously struggle with their conscience as they continue to obey. Even more disturbing are the subjects who appear to have no difficulty obeying, even when they see the ‘learners’ screaming in pain— or ‘passed out’ from the shocks subjects believed they were delivering.

Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is an excellent, if disturbing examination of our fallen nature in action. It documents how a group of ordinary German civilians were molded into a battalion that murdered and tortured Polish civilians and especially Jews.

We’ve seen how readily our countrymen knuckled under to the demands of the Covid ‘experts’, and we’re all too familiar with the widespread acceptance of the barbarity that is abortion. Stanley Milgram’s experiment shone a light on human nature, and it’d be foolish for folks to assume they absolutely do not share such weakness. May it please God not to test us.

John L Flaherty
John L Flaherty
Thursday, December 29, AD 2022 12:43pm

“Of course, the prevailing political context would have some effect on what “illegitimate” looks like.”
Well, ….discrimination based on both race and sex have been legal and institutionalized by Affirmative Action and Title IX since the 60s and 70s. Education about “safe” sex has been the norm since the 80s at the latest; abortion remains the law of the land in most States. It has been a social crime to use “gender biased” terms like “he”, “his”, or “him” since the late 80s. …Even in the Catholic Church. Military PT standards as of the late 90s gave women roughly 50% better scores than men based on the same numbers of pushups, situps, and whatnot. Women also want “equal pay for equal work”, even as they demand “family benefits” related to childcare be given them in the workplace, which men will only rarely seek.
…And raising objections to anything will certainly raise a firestorm of criticism, possibly even threats of summary dismissal from livelihood. We haven’t been terribly robust about objecting to any of these concerns.
Methinks we have already succumbed to the “social experiments” we’ve encountered.

Elaine Krewer
Admin
Thursday, December 29, AD 2022 12:53pm

You all are forgetting one very important difference between the COVID restrictions and the Milgram experiment. The latter involved participants being ordered to take actions they belived would HARM others — administering electric shocks of escalating severity to subjects who gave wrong answers on a test (not knowing that the shocks were fake and the subjects were actors) for no other reason than simply obeying orders. Whereas the COVID restrictions were presented as HELPING others by preventing the spread of disease — and the falsity of that assumption didn’t become obvious immediately.

John L Flaherty
John L Flaherty
Thursday, December 29, AD 2022 2:21pm

Regrettably, Ms Krewer, such proposal has serious flaws. Masks had been proven ineffective before, vaccines were proven ineffective within a few months. Employers and government still mandated both. Mandates about masks, vaccines, and social isolation remained even as evidence grew (rapidly) highlighted the serious negative impacts of all three.

Elaine Krewer
Admin
Thursday, December 29, AD 2022 2:48pm

John L. Flaherty — my comment is aimed more at the ordinary (not in any position of authority) people who obeyed masking, distancing, etc. rules, rather than at those who continued to impose such rules long after it became obvious they were doing far more harm than good. I don’t think it’s fair to compare a conscientious citizen who wore a mask in the mistaken belief it would “protect others”, or to keep the business they were patronizing from getting in hot water with the local health department, to the Milgram experiment participants who were being ordered to (they thought) torture others, or to Nazi death camp guards who were “just following orders”. Nor should we write off everyone who didn’t instantly know right off the bat that COVID was not the second coming of the Spanish Flu as lacking “critical reasoning capacity”. There was and still is a lot of conflicting information out there and it took time to sort it all out.

John L Flaherty
John L Flaherty
Friday, December 30, AD 2022 3:37am

Ms Krewer,
I get the point you’re making. I dispute the focus. Following Covid guidelines comes much closer to the Milgram experiment than you might assume.
I had known of the experiment before; I had not known who conducted it, nor why. Milgram wanted to better understand the Holocaust because a Nazi criminal had been tried not long before. I think his results shocked many, possibly including him.
Most people sought to follow Covid guidelines, partly to avoid hassles with local authorities. ..Well, I suspect many German citizens acted–or failed to act–as they did…to avoid hassles with local authorities. They didn’t seek to inflict pain immediately, true,
yet they did not act–much–to prevent others being harmed either.
Given the degree of power we granted to health officials during Covid, we each are not so far removed from inflicting needless pain.
I think that was the point of Milgram’s experiment and likely this posting.

CAG
CAG
Friday, December 30, AD 2022 5:43am

The thing that bothers me is how many people (albeit on social media … not face-to-face) wanted to go above and beyond the Covid guideline cruelty and deliberately harm the non-compliant and unvaccinated … Many called for withholding medical care to those who refused the clot shot. Others called for prison. People were shot for not masking up. Way above and beyond “following orders”

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