And Perhaps Our Awareness Is

A Substantial Proportion Of People Do What They Are Told To Do, Irrespective Of The Content Of The Act, And Without Pangs Of Conscience, So Long As They Perceive That The Command Comes From A Legitimate Authority.

Some System Of Authority Is A Requirement Of All Communal Living, And It Is Only The Man Dwelling In Isolation Who Is Not Forced To Respond, Through Defiance Or Submission, To The Commands Of Others.

Ordinary People, Simply Doing Their Jobs, And Without Any Particular Hostility On Their Part, Can Become Agents In A Terrible Destructive Process. Moreover, Even When The Destructive Effects Of Their Work Become Patently Clear, And They Are Asked To Carry Out Actions Incompatible With Fundamental Standards Of Morality, Relatively Few People Have The Resources Needed To Resist Authority.

I Would Say, On The Basis Of Having Observe A Thousand People In The Experiment And Having My Own Intuition Shaped And Informed By These Experiments, That If A System Of Death Camps Were Set Up In The United States Of The Sort We Had Seen In Nazi Germany, One Would Find Sufficient Personnel For Those Camps In Any Medium-sized American Town.

It May Be That We Are Puppets-puppets Controlled By The Strings Of Society. But At Least We Are Puppets With Perception, With Awareness. And Perhaps Our Awareness Is The First Step To Our Liberation. (1974)