Of course, old people should know these things too, and some small percentage does know them, but energy seems better invested in trying to teach them to young people who have less to unlearn in the process.<\/i><\/p>\n
1. Obedience is extremely dangerous. <\/b><\/p>\n
This seems like it must be either wrong or misleadingly incomplete. And that would be true if we were talking about children. If a two-year-old is about to run in front of a car, please do yell \u201cstop!\u201d and hope for as much obedience as possible.<\/p>\n
But I\u2019m talking to young people, not children.<\/p>\n
When you grow up, your obedience should always be conditional. If a master chef appears to be instructing you to prepare a revoltingly bad dinner but wants you to obey his or her instructions on faith, you might very well choose to do so, considering the risk to be tolerable. If, however, the chef tells you to chop off your little finger, and you do it, that will be a sure sign that you\u2019ve got an obedience problem.<\/p>\n
This is not a trivial or comical danger. The majority of volunteers in experiments are willing to inflict severe pain or death on other human beings when a scientist tells them to do so for the good of science. Watch this video<\/a> of such an experiment.<\/p>\n Had the actor in this experiment who pretended to be a scientist told the participants to cut off their little fingers, I bet they wouldn\u2019t have done it. But they were willing to do far worse to someone else. The good old Golden Rule is a counter to this deficiency, but so is resistance to blind obedience. Most suffering in the world is not created by independent individuals, but by large numbers of people obeying when they should be resisting.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a story in the news right now<\/a> about a man deeply upset that he sat at a desk and obeyed orders and killed over 1,600 people. This was not an experiment, but tragically real. Watch this video<\/a>:<\/p>\n We should think about how not to put ourselves in positions in which we are expected to blindly obey. It is possible to find jobs that don\u2019t include that unhealthy expectation. And we should prepare ourselves to refuse immoral instructions whenever we receive them. As we\u2019ll see below, we all do receive them all the time.<\/p>\n 2. People in power manipulate us into acceptance<\/b><\/p>\n Several years ago a lot of people were protesting the U.S. war in Iraq. The president and most of Congress and most of the big media outlets were busy giving out the impression that such protests were ignored or even counter-productive. But former president George W. Bush\u2019s memoirs recall the Republican Senate Majority Leader secretly telling him the pressure was becoming too great and they\u2019d need to end the war. Bush signed an agreement with the government of Iraq to leave in three years.<\/p>\n In 1961 the USSR was withdrawing from a moratorium on nuclear testing. A protest at the White House urged President Kennedy not to follow suit. Posters read \u201cKennedy, Don\u2019t Mimic the Russians!\u201d One protester recalled their action for decades as having been pointless and futile, until he found an oral history interview with Adrian Fisher, deputy director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Fisher said that Kennedy had delayed resuming testing because of the protest.<\/p>\n A delay in a policy we oppose is not as good as a permanent ban, but if those protesters had known they were being listened to they would have come back day after day and brought their friends and possibly achieved that permanent ban. That they imagined they weren\u2019t being listened to appears ridiculous if you read enough history. People are always listened to, but those in power go to great lengths to give the impression of not paying any serious attention.<\/p>\n Lawrence Wittner interviewed Robert \u201cBud\u201d McFarlane, President Ronald Reagan\u2019s former national security advisor, asking him whether the White House had paid much attention to protests demanding a \u201cfreeze\u201d in nuclear weapons building. \u201cOther administration officials had claimed that they had barely noticed the nuclear freeze movement,\u201d Wittner said. \u201cBut when I asked McFarlane about it, he lit up and began outlining a massive administration campaign to counter and discredit the freeze \u2013 one that he had directed . . . . A month later, I interviewed Edwin Meese, a top White House staffer and U.S. attorney general during the Reagan administration. When I asked him about the administration\u2019s response to the freeze campaign, he followed the usual line by saying that there was little official notice taken of it. In response, I recounted what McFarlane had revealed. A sheepish grin now spread across this former government official\u2019s face, and I knew that I had caught him. \u2018If Bud says that,\u2019 he remarked tactfully, \u2018it must be true.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s funny: even when protesting government lies or government secrecy, people tend to fall for the lie that the government is ignoring you. Yet, in 2011, when a relatively tiny movement began to take to the streets under the banner of \u201cOccupy,\u201d the government rolled out a massive effort of infiltration, eavesdropping, harassment, brutality, and propaganda \u2013 while, of course, claiming to have noticed nothing and done nothing about something so unworthy of notice.<\/p>\n Those in power don\u2019t restrict themselves to directing you toward inaction. They also work on moving you toward doing lots of things that seem effective but aren\u2019t. The way to keep the nation safe, they say, is to go shopping! Or lobby for this watered-down pathetic piece of legislation! Or devote all your activist energy to election campaigning, and then go home and collapse in exhaustion as soon as the election is over \u2013 exactly when you should be gearing up to demand actions out of whoever won the election. These activities that have little impact are depicted as serious and effective, while activities that historically have had tremendous real impact (organizing, educating, demonstrating, protesting, lobbying, heckling, shaming, nonviolently resisting, producing art and entertainment, creating alternative structures) are depicted as disreputable and ineffective and lacking in seriousness.<\/p>\n Of course, being active is much more fun than not. Of course, the influence you have is always possible even if undetected (you might inspire a child who goes on to do great things years later, or slightly win over an opponent who takes a few more years to see the light). Of course, we have a moral duty to do everything we can regardless of the ease of success. But I\u2019m convinced we\u2019d see a lot more activism if people knew how much they are listened to. So tell them! And let\u2019s remember to keep telling ourselves.<\/p>\n 3. Doing nothing is obeying a deadly order<\/b><\/p>\n Imagine writing a story about a village that faces possible destruction, and for the most part the people don\u2019t do anything to prevent it.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not how stories are written.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the world we live in and fail to recognize.<\/p>\n We are being instructed to sit at a desk and zap the earth to death, and we\u2019re compliantly zapping away. Only the zapping doesn\u2019t look like zapping, it looks like living. We work and eat and sleep and play and garden and buy junk at the store and watch movies and go to baseball games and read books and make love, and we don\u2019t imagine we can possibly be destroying a planet. What are we, the Death Star?<\/p>\n But a sin of omission is morally and effectively equivalent to a sin of commission. We need to be saving the earth and we\u2019re not doing so. We\u2019re allowing global warming and other major environmental destruction to roll ahead. We\u2019re allowing militarization and warmaking to advance. We\u2019re watching the concentration of wealth. We see the division of society into castes. We know we\u2019re building prisons and drones and highways and pipelines while closing schools and condemning our grandparents to poverty. We are aware that we\u2019re funding multi-billionaires with our hard work while fueling mass suffering, bitterness, rage, frustration, and violence.<\/p>\n We see these worsening cycles and we sit still.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t sit still.<\/p>\n Sitting still is mass-murder.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t obey anyone who tells you to sit still.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t search for a leader.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t sell your conscience to a group or a slogan or a political party.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t listen to me unless something I say makes sense.<\/p>\n <\/em>David Swanson<\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/em>\u00a0is author of\u00a0<\/em><\/em>War is a Lie<\/a>. He lives in Virginia.<\/em><\/p>\n