19. Authority

The Authority principle is the natural human tendency to outsource responsibility to people in positions of perceived authority or expertise.

It is the instinct to assume that someone who seems like they are in charge probably is in charge and should be in charge, and that we should comply with them.

There is a study that illustrates this with uncomfortable precision. The social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted it in 1974. As the child of Jewish refugees who escaped Hitler's regime in the Second World War, Milgram took special interest in the Nuremberg trials. Specifically, he was fascinated by the fact that when confronted with the atrocious war crimes they committed, the most common answer was: "I was just following orders."

Are humans really that weak-willed? Are we really that easily influenced, to the point where someone who seems to be in charge giving us orders will cause us to torture and kill another human being?

To investigate, Milgram recruited subjects for an experiment which they were told would study the effects of punishment on learning ability. The subjects believed they had an equal chance of being assigned as a student or as a teacher, but the process was rigged so all true subjects ended up as the teacher. The "learner" was a stooge.

Teachers were asked to sit in another room, out of sight of the learner, and administer increasingly severe electric shocks when questions were answered incorrectly. Shock levels were labelled from 15 to 450 volts. A human can be killed by between 100 and 250 volts.

In response to the supposed shocks, the learner would begin to complain at 75 volts, getting gradually more distressed until eventually yelling loudly and complaining of heart pain. At some point the actor would refuse to answer, and at 330 volts the actor fell totally silent. Teachers were instructed to treat silence as an incorrect answer and apply the next shock level.

If at any point the teacher hesitated, the experimenter pressured them to proceed using simple statements such as "The experiment requires that you continue."

A massive 65% of the teachers were willing to progress to the maximum voltage level. 100% gave an electric shock to another human being based only on the fact that a person in a white coat told them to. No hypnosis. No sophisticated persuasion. Purely the presence of a person in perceived authority.

Ethical Use of Authority

There is nothing wrong with following someone's guidance if they genuinely know what they are talking about and if it aligns with your values and best interests.

If you are trying to find your way through an unfamiliar city and a train conductor tells you to go a certain way or avoid a certain area, that is helpful. If you are dealing with a medical condition and a specialist explains the options, deferring to their expertise makes sense. The trouble is not deference itself, it is reflexive deference, the kind where we comply without evaluating whether the authority is legitimate or relevant.

One thing many of us carry from the organisation is a difficulty owning our own expertise. We were told "do not think more of yourself than it is necessary to think." We were conditioned towards false modesty. If you have genuine knowledge or skill in an area, acknowledging that is not arrogance, it is accuracy. And the false modesty we learned was not humility, it was a control mechanism that kept us small.

How JWs Use Authority

There were two applications of authority used against us.

The first is indirect authority, where you rely on the perceived authority of a third party: experts in a field of research, or the perceived authority of scripture for someone who already believes in the Bible.

You may remember how much of the literature quoted "scientists" or famous figures like Einstein and Newton, people considered geniuses, and used those quotes to shore up the JW narrative. Another approach was the life stories of brain surgeons, archaeologists, and scientists who had supposedly "found the truth." Since we were regularly told we were "unlettered and ordinary," the perceived status of these professionals loomed that much larger by comparison. Many of us arrived at the subconscious conclusion: "If these highly intelligent and educated people are converting and becoming believers, this must be the truth, and who am I to disagree?"

The second application is direct authority. Men in suits on an elevated platform in front of a roomful of people. The official appearance, the physical elevation, and the fact that an entire room is watching them speak leads the audience to infer that this person would not be in that position if they were not some kind of authority figure. This creates a version of the "men in white coats" effect from Milgram's experiment: because someone seems like someone who has authority, we leap to the conclusion that they deserve authority, and we act accordingly.

This state of outsourcing our power to someone outside ourselves is called an "agentic state," where we literally become an agent of somebody else's agenda.

Identification Exercise: Authority

• Whose opinion did you defer to without questioning, and do you still? This could be a person, a publication, or an institution. What was it about them that made you assume they had the right to direct you?
• Think of a time you complied with something because the person requesting it seemed important or credentialed, even though something in you resisted. What happened?
• How did it feel when the Authority pull took hold? Was it a sense of duty? Smallness? Relief at not having to decide for yourself?
• On a scale of 1-10, how effective was this tactic when it was used against you?