On Tyranny 1

Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given in times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want than offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. 

Anticipatory obedience is a political strategy. Perhaps rulers do did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise in this value or that principle. Perhaps a new regime did not have, did not at first. Have the direct means of influencing citizens one way or another after the German elections of 1932, which permitted Adolf Hitler to form a government or the Czechoslovak elections of 1946, where the communists were Vic. 

The next crucial step was anticipatory obedience, because enough people, in both cases voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis and Communists alike realized they could move quickly toward full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed. 

In 1938, Adolf Hitler, by then securely in power in Germany, was threatening to annex neighboring Austria after the Austrian chancellor conceded it was the Austrian's anticipatory obedience that decided the fate of Austrian Jews. Local Austrian Nazis captured Jews and forced them to scrub the streets to remove the symbols of independent Austria. Crucially, people who were not Nazis looked on with interest and amusement. 

Nazis who had kept lists of Jewish properties stole what they could. Crucially, others who were not Nazis joined in the theft. As the political theorist Hanna Erent remembered, when the German troops invaded the country and Gentile neighbors started riots at Jewish homes, Austrian Jews began to commit suicide. The anticipatory obedience of Austrians in March 1938. Taught the high Nazi leadership what was possible. 

It was in Vienna that August that Adolf Eichmann established the Central Office for Jewish Immigration. In November 1938, following the Austrian example of March, German Nazis organized the national program known as Kristallnacht. In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the US took the initiative to devise the method of mass killing without orders to do so. They guessed what their superiors wanted and demonstrated that. What what was possible? It was far more than Hitler thought. 

At the very beginning, anticipatory obedience means adapting instinctively without reflecting to a new situation, to only Germans do such things, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram contemplating Nazi atrocities. Wanted to show that there was a particular authoritarian personality that explained why Germany behaved as they had. He devised an experiment to test the proposition, but failed to get the permission to carry it out in Germany. So we undertook it. Instead, in a Yale University building in 1961. 

At around the same time that Adolf Eichmann was being tried in Jerusalem for his part in the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews. Milgram told his subjects some Yale students some New Haven residents that they would be applying an electrical shock to other participants in an experiment about learning. In fact, the people attached to the wires on the other side of the window were in on the scheme with Milgram. And only pretended to be shocked as the subjects thought they shocked the people they thought were the participants in a learning experiment. 

They saw a horrible sight, people whom they did not know against, they whom they had no grievance. Seemed to be suffering greatly pounding the glass and complaining of heart pain. Even so, most subjects followed Milgram's instructions and continued to apply what they thought were even greater shocks until the victims appeared to die. 

Even those who did not proceed all the way to the apparent killing of their fellow human beings left without inquiring about the health of the other participants. Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. I found so much obedience, Milgrim remembered that I hardly saw the need for taking the experiment to Germany.