Obedience

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The infantile stage of blind obedience, and mechanic compliance to a recipe, with disregard to our feelings does not lead to enlightenment. If it is not overcome soon enough, it leads to mental and physical disease. We can keep ourselves fixated in that stage for forty years or move to the next one in just three. So, this board also aims at helping each other to trust our feelings and move faster to that new stage, where we look for God primary by listening to our feelings. At that stage, we practice only that which our feelings tell us to practice, and our feelings also tells us the how to practice.

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Man has continued to evolve by acts of disobedience. Not only was his spiritual development possible only because there were men who dare say no to the powers that be in the name of their conscience or their faith, but also his intellectual development was dependent on the capacity for being disobedient – disobedient to authorities who tried to muzzle new thoughts and to the authority of long-established opinions which declared a change to be nonsense…

…[W]hile we are living technically in the Atomic Age, the majority of men – including most of those who are in power – still live emotionally in the Stone Age …. If mankind commits suicide it will be because people will obey those who command them to push the deadly buttons; because … they will obey obsolete cliches of State sovereignty and national honor.

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Every police state – indeed, every authoritarian organization – requires people who will obey its orders without question. Such people are surprisingly easy to find. Only since World War II have psychologists and historians begun to grasp the fact that many of the world’s worst horrors are perpetuated by perfectly normal people, acting not out of sadism or hatred, but in the name of obedience to authority. (Italics mine.)

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Prussia sets up a three-tier school system, in which one half of one percent of the population is taught to think. They go to school called academie. Five and a half percent of the population go to Realschulen, where they partially learn to think, but not completely, because Prussia believed their defeat at the hands of Napoleon was caused by people thinking for themselves at times of stress on the battlefield. They were going to see to it that scientifically this couldn't happen. The lowest 94%, (that's some pyramid, right?) went to volkschulen, where they were to learn harmony, obedience, freedom from stressful thinking, how to follow orders. They worked out a system that would in fact guarantee such results. In the volkschulen, it was to divide whole ideas (which really simultaneously participate in math, science, social thinking, language, and art) into subjects which hardly had existed before, to divide the subjects further into units; to divide the time into small enough units of time. With enough variations in the course of a day, no one would know what was going on.

What they would learn is that someone else told you what to think about, when to think about it, how long to think about it, when to stop thinking about it, when to think of something else, and someone else sets up the secrets.

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”[The experimenter] has the biggest share of responsibility. I merely went on. Because I was following orders … I was told to go on and I did not get a cue to stop.”

“Well, we have more or less a stubborn person (the learner). If he understood what this here was, he would’a went along without getting the punishment.”

“It is an experiment. I’m here for a reason. So I had to do it. You said so. I didn’t want to … I’m a softy … I was tempted so much to stop and say ‘Look, I’m not going to do it anymore.’ … I went on with it much against my will. I was going through hell … I don’t think others would be as nervous as I. …I don’t think they would care too much. With they way they are with their children I don’t think they really care too much about other people.” (This from a woman who delivered three 450-volt shocks.)

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Only since World War II have psychologists and historians begun to grasp the fact that many of the world’s worst horrors are perpetuated by perfectly normal people, acting not out of sadism or hatred, but in the name of obedience to authority.

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Re: Stanley Milgram info

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The dilemma inherent in submission to authority is ancient, as old as the story of Abraham, and the question of whether one should obey when commands conflict with conscience has been argued by Plato, dramatized in Antigone, and treated to philosophic analysis in almost every historical epoch. Conservative philosophers argue that the very fabric of society is threatened by disobedience, while humanists stress the primacy of the individual conscience.

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Re: Obedience

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Man has continued to evolve by acts of disobedience. Not only was his spiritual development possible only because there were men who dare say no to the powers that be in the name of their conscience or their faith, but also his intellectual development was dependent on the capacity for being disobedient - disobedient to authorities who tried to muzzle new thoughts and to the authority of long-established opinions which declared a change to be nonsense…--Erich Fromm

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And guess where today's school systems come from? They are modeled after Prussia's Polizeistaat schools that were designed to "produce masses of docile citizens who view government as a kind of super-parent." Wow! (Transference.) Is it any wonder that many step out of the school system and idealize SRF as the perfect parent?

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Sometimes a person will believe something and is flexible enough to change when it is shown that their beliefs are based on an untruth or if the information they are relying upon is incomplete or incorrect. If we cannot remain flexible, we can become "concretized". Rigid, inflexible, unbending, irrespective of principles involved. I've met people who find it difficult to change their beliefs because their belief systems are more
important to them than the truth. (See Dogma: The Hassle-Free Zone under this forum.) If I'm not mistaken, Master writes that people seek until they're comfortable. Does, then, their dogma become their comfort zone?

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Only since World War II have psychologists and historians begun to grasp the fact that many of the world's worst horrors are perpetuated by perfectly normal people, acting not out of sadism or hatred, but in the name of obedience to authority.

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More thoughts on obedience

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People “simply accepted without serious question that their children were fighting, and sometimes dying for the “freedom” of a country that wouldn’t let its American defenders drink beer, celebrate Christmas, express their opinions, or (if they were female) drive a car.”

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Uniformity of thought also tends to lead to uniformity of everyday behavior. This satisfies a bureaucratic craving for social order. It also ensures that those who don’t “fit” – that is, who don’t think or act like others, or who fall into a category defined as “undesirable” – can be more easily identified, ostracized, marginalized, and conveniently used as a scapegoat for whatever troubles …” [appear]

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Language doesn’t just determine what we say; it molds what we think and how we think. Language that is imposed upon us (for instance, by social pressure…) ensures that we will be more likely to think as elitists want us to – and ultimately comply with what they wish to do.”

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“…rigid speech codes on college campuses to the knee-jerk use of such labels as "racist," "homophobic," and "hateful" in an attempt to socially ostracize people with opposing viewpoints, speaking one's mind today has become increasingly dangerous.

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“You don’t exist. You are nothing. I am god,” was such a typical phrase of Argentine torturers that later, during highly publicized political trial of the mid-80s, teens picked up the expression. “You don’t exist!” became a popular expression, which could mean either “You’re the greatest” or “You’re a zero.”

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No independent thinking...

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Avoid independent thinking! How is such independent thinking manifested? A common way is by questioning the council that is provided by God’s visible organization. – The Watchtower, January 15, 1983, p 22.

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Fight Against Independent Thinking! Yet there are some who would point out that the organization has had to make adjustments before, and so they argue: that shows that we have to make up our own mind on what we believe. This is independent thinking. Why is it the danger? Such thinking is evidence of pride. – The Watchtower, January 15, 1983, p 27

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