John Carpenter's 1988 film, They Live.Supplied
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. His latest book is Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations.
In 1961, the Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram made a notable contribution to our understanding of the human mind, proving that, under appropriate circumstances, otherwise upstanding and compassionate humans would execute orders to torture other humans.
Ordered to inflict pain on reluctant learners, the experiment’s apparent instruments were in fact its real subjects. Overseen by a researcher swathed in a white lab coat and a commanding voice, the participants elevated their electric-shock treatments to deadly levels – even as they heard the faked screams of pain coming from the “subjects.”
Philosophers and theologians had long wondered what makes good people do monstrous things. Dr. Milgram had the answer: They defer to authority, entering an “agentic state” in which they will blindly follow orders even unto electric-shock torture in the name of learning. Most of us like to believe that we would not be so biddable, that we would object to authority directing us to bad ends. The Milgram findings shattered that complacent belief in our own integrity.
Or they seemed to. In fact, Dr. Milgram’s own results do not bear out scary deference levels. One small baseline study did suggest that “two out of three” subjects – 26 out of 40 – were willing to administer shocks of 450 volts or more. Two out of three is a vivid idea, but probably more suited to a television ad than a scientific experiment. In multiple further studies, some 30 iterations in all, the results varied widely, and showed that 58 per cent of all subjects refused to continue administering shocks after pain behaviour was observed. And none agreed to do it after a direct order – the last stage of the pushy researcher’s escalating suggestions.
So in fact people generally don’t like simply obeying bad orders, and the agentic state is more rare than it is typical. It may be that some people sometimes evade moral blame by obeying direct orders, but that requires more than a simple authority frame. It needs a culture and, indeed, a philosophy.
The Nazis understood this. Adolf Eichmann’s devotion to the führerprinzip as a kind of categorical imperative is, as historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt argued, a rational commitment first and a justification for barbarity only later. Evil is banal not just because it is merely mundane and omnipresent, but also because it is all too often an afterthought, or no thought at all.
As for Dr. Milgram himself, well, generations of psychology students, smooth keynote speakers and ordinary people are now forced to realize that their notions of “deference to authority” are far too crude. It’s as if a master decoder ring for human psychology, parsing respect for authority and trust, has somehow transformed into something else.
What the Milgram example best illustrates are two meta-findings. Note, first, the power of popular misunderstanding. We crave simple takes on complex things, and “deference to authority” gives us that. Second, though, the experiments unwittingly illustrate a wider authority problem, or really the intertwining of trust and authority. Nobody could accuse Dr. Milgram of fabricating results, but his insistence on the agentic-state narrative is a clear case of special pleading, looking for data to support a preconceived idea.
That’s bad science, but it is not uncommon practice. It’s also a good example of the kind of motive that animates scientific research, but only at the risk of undermining the very point of science itself. Scientific authority has a trust problem, in short, and it’s ironic that the canonical experiment about trust in authority is precisely an example of the wider crisis of epistemic trust.
Because trust is lately faltering in multiple walks of life: science, yes, but also journalism, academia, public health, government local and national, finance, Big Tech, police, law, and all the attendant institutional mechanisms we rely on for daily functioning. This widening crisis of trust comes at one of the worst moments in history, as war, division, poverty and apocalyptic weather threaten the fabric of life. Authority is everywhere in question, but the quality we most need to shore up its crumbling foundations is rendered, again and again, a broken promise.
What is trust? It is easier to say what it is not. Trust cannot be bought or sold. It resists transaction, enforcement and commodification – though it can be tainted by these if we are not careful. Metaphors for its elusiveness and fragility abound: It is like glass, like chocolate, like the wind. It can be earned, but not with wages or fear. It can be broken, always and often, but its bond is stronger than a contract. Indeed, trust is modelled by economists as a “positive externality” – that is, a non-contractual benefit. Everybody wins when it is strong, and everybody loses when it is gone.
Trust can be entreated, to be sure, but only at some risk of paradox. The standard request – “Trust me!” – tends to arouse suspicion, not buy-in. But trust can only be given, not demanded. The sentence “Trust me!” is notably in imperative form – it is, grammatically, a command – and so bends back on itself in defeat. If I can trust you, why do you need to insist?
The related command “Question authority!” is likewise logically tangled, and maybe funnier. I can still remember seeing this on 1970s-era bumper stickers and thinking: But wait, says who? The title of my latest book uses that unstable phrase (without the exclamation point), and its chapters riff on various responses to the original command. Pop-culture keeners of my own vintage will recall that one of the subliminal advertisements uncovered by the conspiracy-busting sunglasses of John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live commands, along with OBEY and CONSUME, the more logical opposite: DON’T QUESTION AUTHORITY.
But the main problem with questioning authority is not a simple bit of logical play. It is, instead, the risk of a larger self-defeat. What begins as a program of critical assessment of all claims, speaking truth to power (as we would more lately phrase it), has become an overheated economy of absolute claim and counterclaim. What began as essential countercultural skepticism transmutes, partly as a matter of its own success, into a new form of aggressive conviction. New orthodoxy replaces old; ideological rigidity substitutes for the promised intellectual emancipation.
The sweep of ideas is infinitely describable, usually by the cultural victors, but one version of the story at hand involves the capture of soft targets, and soft spots within them (I mean trend-conscious and left-leaning humanities departments of Europe and North America between 1968 and about 2015). Some chunk of this has been my own world, and I remain convinced that the power of Marxist-inflected critical social theory is essential both to this story and to good democratic thinking. Baked-in institutional bias, taken-for-granted prejudice, and unreflective reference to “common sense” are the enemies of thought and justice. Entrenched elites, deliberate lack of transparency, regulatory capture, feeble mechanisms of accountability – all of this needed to change, and still does.
But it is not inaccurate to see that the more bureaucratic and enforcement-minded elements of this sweep of ideas have come to the fore, and in the process have eroded some of the authority that the original institutions and methods commanded. There is no indoctrination program that I have ever witnessed, still less so-called “woke mind virus,” still vilified as if it were an actual infectious disease. But there is plenty of righteous intellectual certainty to go around, the ineffable smugness of the self-chosen.
If a liberal project becomes, given a scant chance, gleefully illiberal – well, we might wonder who we were betting on back on the barricades. Aggressive and unquestionable DEI directives, with trigger warnings and claims of microaggression or constant grievance-birthing trauma, can trace a line of descent back to the more ironic “politically correct” tone police of an earlier era.
Most alarming, of course, is the growing erosion of trust in less tweedy quarters. The vivid authority of media, for example, which we were taught by Marshall McLuhan and others to regard critically, has crumbled in the face of technological changes and what once were imagined to be democratic shifts. “Democratic” here really means widespread disintegration coupled with selective force-multiplication – witness Elon Musk, postmodern political influencer. The playful anti-authoritarian anarchism of the original Netizens has given way, with depressing swiftness, to capital accumulation and the great-man “founder mode” autocracy favoured by venture-capitalist bloodsuckers such as Peter Thiel and his political drill-thrall, JD Vance.
Not surprisingly, gaslighting and bespoke realities are now the order of the day on all fronts. A general addiction to conviction – what I choose to call “doxaholism,” after the Greek word for opinion – is our most widespread social pandemic. It infects us in all directions: left, right and sideways. Our tools and platforms enhance its endorphin-surfing pleasures. We seem helpless in the grip of an overmastering desire to be right.
Speaking of pandemics, we cannot fail to see how a global challenge to public health generated a new level of doxaholic distrust with science that makes any quibbles about Dr. Milgram’s finding seem like a nursery rhyme. The outsized power of scientism, so correctly challenged by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour, was here manifested as a strenuous, even violent refusal to heed the claims of basic data and truth-claim. It does not help that genuine science is always provisional and thus subject to correction: Doxaholics don’t do nuance; there is always a dark enemy to be exposed.
More and more, in our febrile discursive world, critical thinking begins to seem indistinguishable from conspiratorial thinking – and vice versa.
Some of this would be no more than regrettable, if it weren’t for the real-world challenges we face. Everyone, including Elon Musk, likes to use the word “existential” here. But it’s accurate enough: The climate crisis and threats of nuclear war are genuine prospects of near-term human extinction. We live in a state of fragile permacrisis, with many fronts and multiple enemies. This is dire, and calls for the best of ourselves. And yet, the central crisis, as is so often the case, lies within us.
Trust – together with the genuine authority that both backs and deserves it – is an unlikely technology. Given all the incentives against it, what is remarkable is that trust functions at all among us mortality-aware primates, and that valid authority is possible. This is more than mere co-ordination of fearful interest under all-against-all war conditions.
In our stricken times, grand words rapidly become hollowed-out husks of themselves, but the linguistic roots of trust nevertheless provide a useful clue to deeper meaning and motive. The relevant etymological cognates are troth and truth – promising and solidity, respectively. The essential building blocks of survival and, maybe, community.
Every time we trust another, we plight our truth in the service of a shared reality of obligations and respect. Collectively, this is evolutionarily adaptive behaviour, even though contingent and sometimes dangerous for the individual. They who trust can be marks, gulls, easy prey for grifters, kayfabe politicians and cryptocurrency hucksters. Now “trust” starts to feel like an example of those near-future dystopian linguistic husks that writer Jennifer Egan called “word-casings” – terms such as “identity,” “democracy” and “friend,” which “no longer have meaning outside quotation marks,” and have become ironic shells of their former selves.
But we must not despair of genuine trust, or spare our efforts in calling authority to account when it is capricious or arrogant. Institutions are flawed undertakings, open to gaming and corruption. They are also necessary. Questioning their authority, so essential for both good citizenship and curious selfhood, cannot devolve into reflexive, contrarian carping: the bad habits of too-easy conviction.
Refine the technology of trust, then, by cultivating the good habits of compassionate skepticism about the world and yourself – a key feature of what social-science boffins like to call “epistemic humility.” Such is not only the best way forward; it is the only way that is invested in human flourishing. Now that’s existential for you.