The Disappearance Of A Sense Of Responsibility

It Is Easy To Ignore Responsibility When One Is Only An Intermediate Link In A Chain Of Action.

Ordinary People, Simply Doing Their Jobs, And Without Any Particular Hostility On Their Part, Can Become Agents In A Terrible Destructive Process. Moreover, Even When The Destructive Effects Of Their Work Become Patently Clear, And They Are Asked To Carry Out Actions Incompatible With Fundamental Standards Of Morality, Relatively Few People Have The Resources Needed To Resist Authority.

I Would Say, On The Basis Of Having Observe A Thousand People In The Experiment And Having My Own Intuition Shaped And Informed By These Experiments, That If A System Of Death Camps Were Set Up In The United States Of The Sort We Had Seen In Nazi Germany, One Would Find Sufficient Personnel For Those Camps In Any Medium-sized American Town.

Even Eichmann Was Sickened When He Toured The Concentration Camps.

Obedience Is The Psychological Mechanism That Links Individual Action To Political Purpose. It Is The Dispositional Cement That Binds Men To Systems Of Authority.