The Fiction of Consent – The Unfreedom at the Heart of Liberalism

 

If liberalism has one guiding thread it’s that nothing should happen to a person without their consent.  John Locke, probably the most famous philosopher in the history of liberalism, argued that “no-one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.”

Good intentions were rather undermined by the fact that in Locke’s Britain, a bastion of liberalism since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the number of offences for which the death penalty applied rose to around 250 by the early 19^th century. A person could be hanged for stealing a handkerchief or taking an unauthorised clipping from an ornamental bush. A slight impediment to health, one might think.

Locke himself invested in the slave trade and thought children as young as three ought to be sent out to work.

But, nonetheless, the principle was laid down.

The liberal dictatorship

In addition to a penchant for hanging peasants, early liberalism was implacably hostile to democracy. Faced with the huge Chartist petition of 1842, the liberal historian and politician Thomas Macaulay declared universal suffrage “incompatible with civilisation”. Chartist leaders in Britain were jailed and the mere demand for the vote often treated as a criminal act by the ‘liberal’ authorities.

However, in the intervening years the opposition of most liberals to democracy dissipated to such an extent that ‘liberal-democracy’ is now seen as an eternally natural state of affairs, rather than the coupling of once sworn enemies.  And in the reconciliation the liberal principle of consent has survived. Governments, it is proclaimed, are dependent on the will of people. They are compelled to seek a popular mandate. Nothing should be done without the people’s consent.

However, I want to argue that both economically and politically, the liberal – now liberal-democratic – principle of consent is a sham. In the words of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman we manufacture consent, we don’t seek it out.  A society founded on genuine consent would look incalculably different to the one we now inhabit.

I will illustrate this hollowness by looking at two seemingly disconnected topics – UK Labour party leader Keir Starmer and “modern slavery”.

By any means necessary

Keir Starmer was overwhelmingly elected as leader of the Labour party in 2020. In his election campaign, he presented himself as a crusader for striking miners and printers. If elected, he promised to make “the moral case for socialism” based on ten pledges – including support for common ownership of utilities, abolishing the House of Lords, an end to ‘illegal wars’, and reversing cuts to corporation tax. He also set himself up as the unity candidate, promising “an end to factionalism”.

In retrospect – after a year and a half of Starmer’s leadership – all this seems utterly farcical. He has shunted the party inexorably to the Right, urging activists to embrace the legacy of Tony Blair, a man venerated as “the master” by George Osborne.  Starmerism has involved courting the support of billionaires, seeking Parliamentary candidates from outside the party and trade unions, defenestrating the left-wing leader of Scottish Labour, forcing shadow ministers to apologise for being ‘anti-business’, refusing to make any spending commitments and being outflanked from the left by the Conservatives, for example on nurses’ pay. In the words of an aide, rather than making a moral case for socialism, “all that nonsense” – meaning Corbynite policies – had to be ditched.

And far from seeking unity, Starmer has waged an unrelenting war on opponents in the party, removing the whip from his predecessor for telling the truth, sacking left-wingers from the shadow cabinet on spurious grounds and expelling and suspending members who disagree with him, including swathes of left-wing Jews.

It is sometimes argued that Labour party members – all half a million of them – are unfortunate, but necessary, collateral damage in Starmer’s quest to make Labour “electable”. But this is belied by Starmer’s plummeting approval ratings and the fact his predecessor’s policies – if not the man himself – were popular with voters.

However, in assessing Starmer’s performance, mainstream commentators don’t condemn the duplicity he exhibited in order to get elected as Labour leader. In fact they laud him for shrewdness or political nous. Because Starmer encapsulates – in telescoped form – what ‘democracy’ under neoliberalism, or ‘new liberalism’, is. It is not about seeking to define and represent the popular will, but to obtain – by any means necessary including lying – consent for a pre-ordained set of policies.

Without doubt pre-neoliberal Parliamentary democracy has often manifested exactly the same tendency. But it has been distilled into an art form in the last four decades, with real power usurped by pan-governmental organisations like the IMF. Governments are now placed in a straitjacket, compelled to support balanced budgets and accompanying austerity, liberalized financial markets, low corporate taxes, and personal tax rates that don’t prompt an exodus to the Bahamas on the part of the very wealthy. Given the resentments that this state of affairs inevitably generates, ‘democracy’ is largely about ensuring they are directed at powerless targets, usually immigrants and benefit claimants.

Curiously, however, even though the spirit of democracy can be unashamedly trampled on, the formalities can’t. Free and fair elections must be periodically held and consent, by hook or by crook, extracted. It is an irony of history that just as a wave of democracy rolled across the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall, toppling dictatorships and one-party states in its wake, the actual content of democracy was hollowed out. Governments, whatever their theoretical commitments, were invariably compelled to accept the strictures of IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes and the dictates of the Washington Consensus. Post-apartheid South Africa is a textbook example of “democracy without democracy”. Elitist fears expressed at the dawn of universal suffrage a century and a half ago, that democracy would swamp liberalism, have proved groundless. Precisely the opposite has happened.

Liberalism and slavery

The same liberal neuroses about consent can be observed in the furore over “modern slavery”. Governments bend over backwards to condemn it in the strongest possible terms, charities pledge to eradicate it, and the media join the chorus.

This is not to deny that modern slavery is a serious problem, and a separate category from the conventional employer/employee relationship. But the wall erected between “compelled labour” and the normal workings of capitalism is supremely ideological. In the urge to locate “exploitation” as happening solely when a worker is coerced – the UK’s Gangmasters & Labour Abuse Authority defines its aims as “preventing worker exploitation” – another claim is implicitly made: that when the labour exchange is free and consensual exploitation doesn’t occur.

But this is nonsense. In the words of academic Neil Howard, this fictional binary “protects the system from the moral outrage that might otherwise challenge its hegemony”.

Capitalism – i.e. an economic system based on ‘free’ labour exchange – cannot do without reams of people without property who are compelled to rent themselves out in order to procure the means to physically survive.

Even if one is to ignore the millions of people on the margins of the global economy who choose to submit to servitude or trafficking because in conditions of dire poverty they represent their least worst options, a comparatively wealthy country like Britain shows the depth of the well from which exploitable people are drawn.

There are, it is estimated, 16 million people in the UK who have less than £100 in savings. And nearly 80% have some form of personal debt in the shape of credit cards, personal loans, bank overdrafts and payday loans. In such circumstances – and in those of a benefit system that will sanction claimants who can’t prove they are looking for work – saying no to a job offer is not, practically, possible. In previous, more honest, eras, this was called wage slavery.

Exploitation through the ages

Marxism is frequently presented as nightmare ideology that wants to make everyone the subject of an all-powerful state and was responsible, in the last century, for killing millions in gulags and famines. But the hysteria partly comes from Marxism’s insistence, uniquely in economic thought, that exploitation doesn’t just occur under patently coercive arrangements like slavery and feudalism but also when people, on the surface, voluntarily choose to work for an employer.

“There’s only one basis that any capitalist ever hired a worker,” says author Richard Wolff, “and that condition is ‘you gotta produce more for me than I pay you for coming here to do it’”. In this sense, capitalism is no different from prior economic systems, or the vestiges of such systems that remain. In all cases, a small minority exploits the vast majority in order to extract a surplus from them. “Capitalism, even though the workers are not slaves or serfs, does replicate those two systems in this particular way,” says Wolff. “One group of people – the employees – go to work on condition that they produce a surplus that the employer gets.”

You may baulk at the notion that someone like Lionel Messi (salary €71 million at Paris Saint-Germain F.C.) is exploited. However, what cannot be honestly denied that is corporations and other businesses, practically and legally required to maximise profit, view the world’s population as either a resource ripe for exploitation or a human mass to be left to rot (“the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all,” said 20^th century economist Joan Robinson). In the latter case, the human material is created for trafficking and forced labour in the West.

And in most Western countries, exploitation – exploitation that is of workers who ‘freely’ consent to do their jobs – is intensifying. In Britain, in the wake of the financial crisis, zero hour contracts have mushroomed and many workers – for example builders or delivery drivers – are falsely reclassified as ‘independent contractors’ in order to save the employer from having to fork out for holiday or sick pay. They can also earn below the minimum wage because they aren’t officially paid a wage and don’t have set hours.

In addition, as pandemic conditions slowly lift, many employees are finding they are being sacked and told to reapply for their jobs based on inferior conditions. Despite the rhetoric about the inestimable value of key workers in the worst stages of the pandemic, Tesco, British Gas, British Airways and local councils and have all tried to engage in this “industrial thuggery”.

In such circumstances what better way to shield capitalism from justifiable anger, than to focus all attention on the plight of slaves and coerced workers who, it is claimed, exist entirely outside of its legitimate confines?

The cooperation of the exploited

But there is a deeper reason, in my opinion, for this blindness of liberalism. In the 1970s, psychologist Stanley Milgram, author of the famous obedience to authority experiments, noted that for obedience to work seamlessly, those subject to it had to believe that their submission was a voluntary choice. “The psychological consequence of voluntary entry is that it creates a sense of commitment and obligation,” he said, “which will subsequently play a part in binding the subject to his role.”

Any endeavour – and that includes the ubiquitous labour contract – is so much easier to perform if the victims of it can be convinced to cooperate. Enforcing coercion is hard. It requires perpetual surveillance and overcoming an ingrained human resistance – some have called it counterwill – to bowing to another’s desire.

That is why liberalism insists that consent exists in political and economic arenas when patently it has to be fabricated. But if consent can be given, it can also be withdrawn, if only spiritually at first.

The Pathological Organisation

It has long been remarked that society has become individualistic to a pathological extent. That it is now populated by selfish monads totally oblivious to the needs of others or any notion of solidarity. But while this is true, I think that over the past few decades individualism has undergone a subtle, though significant, change. It is no longer about individual freedom, however egotistical. Individualism is now primarily concerned with policing and correcting the behaviour of the individual – especially for those at the bottom of society – and positing futile personal solutions for patently social problems.

The former can be seen most vividly in the concept of “zero tolerance” which has spread like wildfire across the world since its birth in New York in the 1990s. In its original incarnation, zero tolerance claimed that violent and serious crime could be reduced by first cracking down on “incivilities” and minor offences, such as graffiti or fare dodging. Though crime did indeed fall concurrently, the role of zero tolerance policing in this is highly dubious. Crime also fell in other American cities that didn’t practice zero tolerance at the time and it was labelled by two criminologists as the “least plausible candidate” for contributing to the decrease in violent crime.

Nonetheless zero tolerance had an unstoppable momentum. Its precepts contributed to a colossal rise in the prison population in the USA. In 1975, there were 240,000 people in US jails. Last year there were 2.12 million with millions more on probation or parole. Prison populations have also risen spectacularly in other countries, though not to the same enormous extent. In Britain, for example, prison numbers have nearly doubled since the mid-1990s. And this is in the context of a significant drop in crime.

The ascendancy of zero tolerance is not limited to swelling prisons. Its basic tenet – no excuses and no justification for adjudged misdemeanours – has been enforced in a variety of different settings. Sanctions for benefit recipients – unheard of before the 21^st century – are routinely dished out for missing appointments, not applying for enough jobs or even attending the birth of your child.

Countless institutions – from pubs to political parties – far beyond any connection to the criminal justice system now proclaim a zero tolerance approach to racism, abuse, harassment or bullying.

 

The blind spot

But this obsession with policing, condemning and penalising individual behaviour has gone hand in hand with boundless tolerance for, and seemingly zero interest in, the wrongdoings of organisations.

Such leniency could be seen in reactions to the financial crisis of more than a decade ago. Common responses to a crisis of the banking system ranged from pinning the blame on geeky savants who designed financial products no-one could understand to spotlighting gullible consumers who borrowed recklessly. We need to regulate ourselves, counselled conservative historian Niall Ferguson.

It is revealing that the UK government responded to the financial crisis – a crisis with systemic causes triggered by the actions of corporate organisations – by intensifying the regulation of individual behaviour (and not even of the individuals who were culpable). Between 2010 and 2013, over a million sanctions were imposed on disabled and poor benefit claimants, a 345% rise on the 2001-8 average.

 

Under the Horizon

That the same mentality still thrives can be seen by the muted reaction to one of the gravest ever miscarriages of justice in Britain – the prosecution, sacking or financial ruination of hundreds of sub-postmasters  by the Post Office. The criminalisation was justified by an IT system, Horizon, that produced non-existent cash shortfalls in Post Office branches. But despite knowing that Horizon was faulty, the Post Office – backed up by IT supplier Fujitsu – blamed and persecuted innocent workers for years. Dozens went to prison, many more were heavily fined and some committed suicide.

The problem with blaming bad people at the top for this horrendous injustice is that those leading the Post Office were, by contemporary standards, exemplars of ethical behaviour. Paula Vennells, CEO from 2012 to 2019, is an Anglican priest and was awarded a CBE two years ago for “services to business and charity”. Tim Parker, chairman of the Post Office since 2015, and charged with overseeing its senior management, is also chair of the National Trust.

Nonetheless, despite, according to Vennells, running a business that “genuinely cares about the people who work for us”, the Post Office was guilty, in the eyes of judges, of “oppressive behaviour” and behaving like a “mid-Victorian factory owner”. An MP described it as “feudal”.

It is only when viewed organisationally that its actions become explicable. According to the Private Eye investigation, under Vennells’ leadership, the Post Office, since its split from the privatised Royal Mail in 2012, was obsessed with the bottom line and achieving financial independence from the government by 2020. Nothing could get in the way of that objective and Horizon’s infallibility had to be upheld at all costs.

This “relentless focus” resulted in a culture of unquestioning loyalty. According to one insider quoted in Private Eye: “If you wanted to belong and fit in, you had to put the future of the Post Office first. If that meant turning a blind eye – or worse – that’s what people would do”.

But as soon as the failings at the Post Office are viewed in this light, the problems become so overwhelming they have to be – from the perspective of a supporter of this corporate capitalist system – deliberately ignored. How many other organisations have a “relentless focus” on the bottom line? How many others reify ‘leadership’ and inculcate a rigid culture of loyalty among their senior management? Notwithstanding the stakeholder rhetoric, these are attributes that all hierarchically-run organisations – be they private, public or ‘voluntary’ – are, after decades of neoliberalism and the tutelage of business schools, expected to have.

Toxic Operations

We have become accustomed to exposés of toxic cultures within organisations. But these invariably apply to the head office, senior staff or vestigial practices among the workforce (individual failings again). They rarely apply to the toxic manner in which an organisation’s management treats its workers or the public in general. This is despite such problems being endemic.

In April, an academic study based on interviews with civil servants found that top-down pressure from management in the Department of Work and Pensions during the Cameron coalition years resulted in the deliberate perpetration of “psychological harm” on claimants. Expectations “from above”, the authors noted, acted as a “moral anaesthetic” and resulted in local targets for sanctions, a process which “made invisible the needs and interests” of the claimants subject to such withdrawals of income.

Since they were bailed out in the financial crisis, banks have colluded to manipulate interest rates, rigged the foreign exchange market, plundered small businesses, laundered money for drug cartels, and helped thousands of wealthy clients evade tax (apologies this list is not exhaustive).

Phone hacking and other forms of harassment by newspapers resulted in a long-drawn out public investigation into ‘press ethics’ a decade ago. But a recommendation for an independent press regulator was rejected by David Cameron and in 2018 the Conservatives scrapped the scheduled second part of the inquiry (Leveson 2) on the grounds that the press “had cleaned up its act”. Presumably, clearing out “all the bad people” was sufficient.

And according to a report leaked last year, the permanent officials of the Labour party viewed members and its elected leadership with withering contempt and undermined the party’s 2017 General Election campaign, conceivably scuppering Labour’s chances of becoming the largest party in the Commons.

If not denied or ignored, these organisational scandals have resulted in, at best, grudging apologies, the removal of miscreants and heartfelt promises that ‘it won’t happen again’. But, strangely, it always does.

Fleeting Obedience

In the 2019 book The Disobedient Society, I attempted to chart the extent to which – despite protests to the contrary – obedience still plays a dominant role in social affairs. Taking a cue from the American psychologist Stanley Milgram, I stressed the importance, for obedience to work, of people freely choosing to follow the instructions of others above them in hierarchical organisations. This is now primarily evident in the employment contract, which lays great weight on its voluntary nature to morally differentiate it from forms of forced labour, such as ‘modern slavery’.

However, the subjects in Milgram’s experiments – and in all subsequent ‘Milgramesque’studies – had a very fleeting relationship with authority. Though many were faultlessly obedient, their actual contact with, in Milgram’s phrase, “the person of higher status”, lasted no more than an hour. Their equivalent in today’s society is probably the ‘on-demand’ worker who carries out tasks in line with instructions, but remains self-employed and does permanently join any organisation.

All the cases above of organisational dereliction were perpetrated by a cadre permanently ensconced within a hierarchical set up. This does not diminish obedience. If anything, it enhances it as obedience becomes strengthened by notions of loyalty, reciprocity, “fitting in” or fear of reprisal if behaviour does not meet expectations.

Given that most people in putatively rich countries have to rent themselves out to hierarchical organisations in order to procure the means of survival, obedience, though widely ignored, is an expected and real form of behaviour. However, the power of entrenched vested interests at the top of organisations is equally palpable.  Whether motivated by profit maximisation, competitive rivalry or other metrics of success, these tight-knit groups can – and do – act pathologically, treating employees or the wider public as if they were insentient obstacles to be overcome or exploited.

It’s just that in a society obsessed with the moral failings of individuals, if the spotlight happens to fall on them it is only for a brief moment.

 

 

 

 

The Banality of Obedience

 

In trying to understand the Milgram obedience experiments, the most important thing, in my opinion, is not to be dazzled by what they purport to show. The surface narrative – still loyally recounted in popular renditions every time the name Stanley Milgram is uttered – is that ordinary people can effortlessly be transformed into heartless torturers, that beneath our civilised veneers lurk potential concentration camp guards. In the next breath there are, invariably, earnest warnings about the Nazis and the Holocaust.

In fact, the truth is simultaneously more mundane and more disturbing.

What Milgram actually said was that we easily allow ourselves to be turned into agents for those above us in hierarchical organisations, doing what they want rather than what we ourselves would do. “Relationship,” as he put it, “overwhelms content”. That content can involve inflicting pain and death but – and this is rarely remarked upon – it can also involve content that is neutral, even benevolent or merely one link in a chain whose ultimate purpose is destructive or damaging. The specific action might appear innocuous but when placed together with other innocent looking parts of the whole, the ‘end product’ might be immensely harmful.

The crucial element is the relationship. Clearly the Milgram experiment (s) would not have achieved lasting fame had he asked volunteers if they wouldn’t mind passing a stapler (‘Psychology professor reveals we are all stapler-passers under the surface!’). Though it would have been interesting to know if anyone would have refused.

Commonplace obedience

This little noticed element in obedience to authority in fact produced the highest obedience rates. When Milgram’s subjects were merely asked to read out the word-pairs while a confederate of the experimenter actually pressed the buzzer supposedly inflicting electric shocks (the experiment was presented as a test of the effect of punishment on memory), obedience levels went through the roof. They registered 92.5%, the highest in the entire series of experiments.

Most replications of Milgram in the 1960s and ‘70s produced broadly similar results. One study didn’t however. That was by Wesley Kilham and Leon Mann in Australia in 1974. They reported obedience as low as 40% (and 16% for female subjects). This was the “notable exception” alluded to in Part One. However, when Kilham’s and Mann’s subjects became mere ‘runners’ – transmitting the experimenter’s instructions to a person playing the role of the teacher/shocker – disobedience was transformed into obedience. It hit 68% for men and 40% for women.

This is how contemporary obedience researchers, Dariusz Doliński and Tomasz Grzyb, describe this variation of the Kilham and Mann study:

As it turned out, people whose task was simply to transmit successive instructions to press the generator’s switches were even more pliant than those who – as in Milgram’s original experiment – were supposed to be the direct (physical) culprits responsible for causing physical pain to another person. This demonstrates that the role of being a cog in the bureaucratic machine facilitates the sense that one is neither the instigator of anything evil, nor directly causing any harm. As can be seen, in this particular type of situation, it is particularly easy to generate submissiveness and obedience. (From The Social Psychology of Obedience Towards Authority, pp 39-40)

The “particular type of situation” which lends itself so effortlessly to kindling submissiveness and obedience, is as emblematic of the corporation – which is in essence a private bureaucracy – as it is of the state machine. This is difficult to see in part because of the vehement ideology of freedom that accompanies corporate capitalism. But it is also obscured by the image, assiduously developed over the last 40 years or so, of the individual as a self-interested aggrandizer, always on the look-out for the best online deals, demanding faultless service, perpetually seeking fitness and attractiveness, constantly honing their CV. We may be irredeemably selfish but under a ‘free market’ system, we answer only to ourselves and our own desires.

However this was never true and still isn’t. As noted by the mid-20^th century economic historian Karl Polanyi, if we were purely self-interested negotiators always seeking the highest price for selling the commodity of our own labour, as theoretically we should do under the ‘laws’ of the market economy, we would be “almost continually on strike”. This obviously isn’t the case and is not solely due to coercion and the power of the law and the police. The added ingredient is the power of obedience.

The vast majority of us willingly enter – or we think we do – Milgram’s agentic state, where we temporarily become instruments for the wishes of people above us in the hierarchy (as they are instruments for people above them). The crucial element, as Milgram observed, is the sense of voluntary choice. This creates a sense of obligation, allied to a feeling of being absolved of any real responsibility, which is a powerful and dangerous brew.

The element of our economy which is always stressed by the media and the powerful is our freedom as consumers. But this, as the book elaborates, is at best half the story. We also spend much of our lives within – or bound to – hierarchical organisations which operate under the expectation of unquestioning obedience.  

As above, so below

It would be a mistake to think this cast of mind is restricted to the lower half of the economy, though it may be more explicit there. Most of us are agents for others. Since the 1970s, for example, ‘the agency theory of the firm’ has grown in popularity. This asserts that a company’s senior managers (chief exec, head of finance etc., often on salaries which place them in the 0.01%) are mere ‘agents’ of its ‘principals’, the shareholders, and should be expected to do their bidding. Whether these managers are in fact genuine agents for the company’s owners is open to question. At the higher echelons of the economy, people often have the power and wealth to pursue their own interests. But what is interesting is that they’re expected to be٭.

If anything obedience has grown in intensity since Milgram’s time, though not in the way that might be first thought. It occupies an unrecognised, though essential, space in the economy. Thanks to burgeoning information technology, ‘scientific management’ can control and keep tabs on employees’ behaviour in ways never dreamed of by its 20^th century pioneers. In efforts to increase productivity and minimize ‘loafing’, workers are regularly spied on and tracked by their own smartphones, with data compiled about their activities. Online wanderings are subject to screen capture and keystroke monitoring.  In some cases, a worker’s every action is planned out by headsets or hand-held devices, with punishment for deviation.

As one writer observes, this is not just about maximising profitability but “a vision of obedience and acquiescence”.

Gratefully oppressed

What makes these developments especially sinister is that they are accompanied by a powerful feeling that, beyond extreme infractions, this is the way things should be. In a market economy, where we freely choose which little dictatorship to rent ourselves out to, it is only natural that we obey the instructions of superiors.

In The Social Psychology of Obedience Towards Authority, Doliński and Grzyb give numerous examples of employees, or people assuming the role of employees in psychological experiments, obeying the instructions of superiors to carry out ethically dubious actions. For instance, racially selecting new employees or marketing an unsafe drug. Interestingly, the crucial factor does not seem to be an inherent desire to maximise profits, but fulfilling the wishes of senior figures in the organization of which these ‘employees’ are a part.

In my opinion, this is a form of obedience unique to the corporate capitalism societies we inhabit. There is an often fervent identification with the interests and aims of employers but one that can be seamlessly transferred to a competitor. This is serial obedience – in contrast to older types of obedience, around a nation or a religion for example, which tend to be quite fixed.

This feeling of habitual obedience is stiffened by a pervasive aura of disposability – the fear that if we don’t live up to expectations there is always someone else, maybe a robot, who can replace us. In this mindset, there is nothing wrong with obedience. Quite the opposite, it is questioning obedience that is pathological.

Evolution’s children

The natural objection to this thesis is that obedience is not imposed on us, but evident throughout history – so much so that it might be thought of as part of human nature.  In The Disobedient Society I refute Milgram’s contention (which echoes historical giants like Darwin) that obedience is an “evolutionary adaptation”. Actually, the evidence suggests that early humanity was able to knowingly flit between hierarchical and egalitarian social relations. Features such elite rule, social ranking or territoriality might be put into effect at certain times of the year and then dissolved. This indicates an element of choice in obedience which debars it from being a genetic flaw, or depending on your view, an innate advantage.

I refer also to Murray Bookchin’s distinction between first and second nature. Evolution, in the form of first nature, endows humans with the capacity to develop extra-biological tools and to consciously intervene in the natural world through a sophisticated collective organisation. However, the nature of this collective organisation is not determined by first nature. It lies in the realm of second nature – the domain of experimentation which can take many forms and is not governed by the ‘laws’ of natural selection.

The belief that obedience is immovable really relies on a different contention, however. That with the fragmentation of tasks within the complex organisations of the modern world, a degree of obedience is essential. We can never return to the simple freedom of earlier stages of human development, where a person might undertake an action and see it through to completion without the input of others. In short, if we want civilisation, we have to have obedience.

I don’t believe, however, that obedience is synonymous with the division of labour. Rather it is a kind of reflex, an unthinking giving away of authority and ethical responsibility to others. Obedience has a habitual character – it is a form of behaviour it is easy to slip into without noticing.

But the habit can be broken, just as a person who is lightly dozing can be jolted into wakefulness. Despite its tenacious hold, the origins of obedience are not evolutionary. And disobedience, does not, in spite of its reputation, repudiate complex organisation and discipline. Murray Bookchin coined the phrase “episodic sovereignty” – in reference to the Indian Crow societies of North America – to indicate how the yielding of individual initiative can be temporary and limited to rational and well-defined ends. Permanent institutions based on the expectation of command and obedience are not inevitable.

Basic disobedience

Not inevitable, but certainly well-entrenched, however.  I would suggest that if the grip of obedience is to be loosened, radical steps need to be taken. One is a basic income set at a level that a person can live well on without the need to become an “agent” for the hierarchical organisations that pepper and essentially control society. This would instil a sense of confidence and security, a willingness to breach conformist norms and the self-assurance to resist the demands of ‘the economy’. The cowed and malleable workforce of today would be transcended and more genuine forms of democracy might follow.

Secondly the perpetual motion machine of capitalism needs to be halted. At its molecular level capitalism entails the re-investment of profits which leads (usually) to more profits which have to be reinvested again, and so on ad infinitum. This leads to an irresistible imperative to meet existing consumer demand, and create new needs to satisfy this ever-growing “wall of money”. Thus the signature institutions of capitalist society embody obedience – hierarchical organisation with employees obeying precise instructions from above – as simply the most efficient means to achieve the task in hand. If society is ever to advance beyond command and obedience, this background fixation needs to change.

I am not suggesting that obedience did not exist before capitalism or that it may not infuse the kind of society that will exist after capitalism. But Milgram’s insistence on the essentially voluntary nature of obedience makes him, sixty years after his original obedience experiments, presciently relevant.

 

٭ The problem of a corporation’s executives not actually being genuine agents for its owners was thought to have been circumvented by paying them partly in stock options. This, it was believed, would align their interests with those of the shareholders, in that both would want a high share price. However this ‘solution’ also managed to subvert a core principle of the market economy. Theoretically, a company share price should reflect whether investors think it will make healthy profits – and thus pay healthy dividends – in the future.  However, paying executives partly in stock options encouraged the practice of share buy backs, whereby a company buys its own shares to jack up the overall price. This practice was legalised in Britain in 1981 and in the US the following year. Share buys backs are now a huge ‘industry’, ironically diverting funds which may have gone into actual industry.