Most of us regular bloggers here attribute the problems of the Philippines to the country’s culture. For us, it’s too obvious. Our culture has customs and practices that make us do things that we better not do. Spend beyond our means, generate huge numbers of children, vote for who is popular despite their being poorly qualified, and just saying that trying to find a solution to our country’s problems is useless.
Filipinos easily fall into self-destructive traps, but some wonder if there is something else aside from culture that influences such behavior. Could there be a psychological mechanism that could explain this?
In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist at Yale University conducted some experiments. These had participants deliver electric shocks to a subject in another room when that subject gave wrong answers to a question. The subject was actually acting, so while he was wired with electrodes to an apparatus, he actually felt no shocks. But the participant was made to believe they were actually shocking the subject. Gradually, the participant would deliver increasingly higher levels of shock, being told that it was necessary. Before the last and most powerful shock, the subject/actor would cry that they could not take it anymore, and might die. But the accompanying researcher would tell the participant that it had to be done. The researcher could flip the switch for them, thereby “reducing” the guilt, although the participant remained responsible for the decision to deliver the final “shock.”
His highest rate from participants in delivering the final shock was 37 out of 40 in one session, the average of all experiments being 65%, which Milgram said proved his thesis that people are “wired to obey,” even if the order is illegal or harmful. People do wrong not because they are usually evil themselves, but when given sufficient coercion to do so, they are capable of the worst evil. While Milgram’s experiment has been criticized ethically, I believe that its results and conclusion are reliable and valid.
After World War II, philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote an eye-opening piece explaining the people who carried out the Nazi Holocaust were not especially evil, abnormal people; they were as normal as any of us. Arendt said that the soldiers were just “following orders,” and did not dare question these orders. In fact, Milgram held his experiments after hearing of the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, who Arendt wrote about. He addressed the question of why the Holocaust could happen on such a tremendous scale. Why did the Germans involved participate in such genocide without question? Basically, it was the “obedience factor” that allowed the Nazis to perform such wide scale murder. Of course, one could factor anti-Semitism, and the threat of death upon disobedience, among other factors. But so the same, it was eerie that nearly no one on the German side was as questioning as common sense would require.
The 1968 My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, the 1994 Rwanda Massacre, Pol Pot’s Cambodian Killing Fields, the Bosnian War and the Srebrenica Massacre can all be explained using Milgram’s theory. The private army guards of the Ampatuans can also be seen as such. If there was a brave dissenter that dared oppose these actions and call others to help stop them, there might have been a way to avert them.
The Milgram theory can be applied to Filipinos. Filipinos certainly exhibit the same traits as the experiment participants and Nazi lackeys; they tend to obey the wrong orders. When told by co-workers that they should embezzle a few funds or steal some materials “once in a while,” they do it. When enjoined to jaywalk, they’ll join dozens of others who cross the street at the wrong time, even if there’s an overpass available. In my high school, a classmate told me, “you’re not a true student of this school unless you know how to forge a document,” since many students have forged documents one time or another. This implied that I should join the bandwagon and not be a “different” person with my integrity. In other words, I should just “obey” the bandwagon. Thus, corruption is easy to spread especially among the ordinary people.
An additional factor in this is a flawed culture that insists on obedience. Filipino parents tell their children that absolute obedience to authority is a value. However, the culture somewhat craftily confuses who is actually an “authority.” The tendency is that we are told to be obedient, even if the “authority” is actually a despot or crook. As a result, Filipinos can be easy for bandwagons to seize because of this “Milgram obedience factor.” It can be taken advantage of to force a candidate choice onto someone.
Ours is also a culture that discourages dissent. For example, if one barkada is full of Noynoy supporters, while one member wants to dissent and vote Gordon instead, the other members of the barkada can turn on him, bully him and call him a traitor. They imply that he should “obey” them as a member of their group, and be all the same. Most less educated people fall for this, unwilling to lose friends even if he doesn’t deserve them.
Thus, the “Milgram obedience factor,” along with our dissent-suppressing culture, has helped make Filipinos into perfect slaves. We are the slaves of the oligarchs who control business with monopolies and a church that seeds us with faulty values. We are bombarded with media (TV shows and movies) that give us false lessons about life (such as being rich is being evil, or illegal means are the only way to fight against corrupt powers) and we are suckered into making them real. We have allowed incompetent people to become leaders in the nation and arrest growth and development. We thus have no choice but to become a nation of servants, as Chip Tsao described, serving other countries. We can be the perfect slaves, as long as we let the authority (or even so-called authority) hold us by the neck.
My challenge to people is that they should be aware of and suppress this “Milgram obedience factor”, challenge their culture and think carefully about their actions. We need to encourage people to increase their individual initiative and resist the crowd. But we also need to teach the right kind of obedience; for example, if Bayani tells us to use the overpasses, instead of jaywalk on the street because it’s inconvenient to go up stairs, we should do so.
This is not impossible. A recent study abroad showed that behavior demonstrated by a few can influence the majority. As long as the few repeat the behavior and demonstrate to others, those others might follow. In fact, that is how fads start; it starts with a minority, and picks up until the majority are doing it. You need only start with a gust to cause a large thunderstorm.
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