Interesting thoughts on culture...I hadn't ever thought of it that way. And it's a good point: We Westerners are generally asked to obey in only benign situations. For example, there is a power outage and a police officer asks us to cross the red light and keep traffic moving. Or a teacher asks us to take our seats and be quiet. These are really reasonable things, and so authority, perhaps, to us, becomes associated with benign, reasonable requests.
Milgram, of course, turned that idea on its head. And the men who committed the Mai Lai massacre, for example, had been raised with the ideal that authority only requests of us things that are benign and "for our own good," so perhaps this is why they did not question the authority that asked them to murder innocents.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rosecarmine
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-15 02:24 am (UTC)Milgram, of course, turned that idea on its head. And the men who committed the Mai Lai massacre, for example, had been raised with the ideal that authority only requests of us things that are benign and "for our own good," so perhaps this is why they did not question the authority that asked them to murder innocents.