The human race generally deems itself to be a thinking species, with instinctive behaviors having only a minor influence over everyday behavior. If we just look at the opinions people adopt and observe the way decisions are made, it is clear that the opposite is true. Independent thought is extremely rare. In the United States. Citizens see themselves as independent thinkers in charge of their democratically based republic. Look at the political outcomes in our country. Given the results we see, only instinctive behaviors could possibly generate the results we witness.

In politics, there are no representatives who function as delegates. Citizens prefer trustees who will do their thinking for them. They relate to their leaders as if they were their special guardians.

This overwhelming tendency must be rooted in this animal instinct to submit to the most powerful member of the group to which they belong . A pride of lions does not rely on the independent thinking of each independent lion. How do human beings relate to authority? The same way.

Many studies where the outcome is something other than what people prefer to be true, just get shelved. This is the case with the Milgram Study that done during the 60s, The findings are alarming so hardly a soul remembers it.

Milgram experiment

“The Milgram experiment(s) on obedience to authority figures were a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, 40 men in the age range of 20 to 50 from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a “learner”. These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.^[2]

The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, with every participant going up to 300 volts, and 65% going up to the full 450 volts.”