The Question of Power & Bureaucracy: Obedience to Authority!

‘By “rationalization” Weber meant the process by which explicit, abstract, intellectually calculable rules and procedures are increasingly substituted for sentiment, tradition, and rule of thumb in all spheres of activity. Rationalization leads to the displacement of religion by specialized science as the major source of intellectual authority; the substitution of the trained expert for the cultivated man of letters; the ousting of the skilled handworker by machine technology; the replacement of traditional judicial wisdom by abstract, systematic statutory codes. Rationalization demystifies and instrumentalizes life.’

D Wrong (ed.) (1970) Max Weber, Prentice-Hall, p. 26.

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An answer to Weber’s bleak view of The Iron Cage of a dehumanising modernity?

‘Mankind’s moral sense is not a strong beacon light, radiating outward to illuminate in sharp outline all that it touches. It is, rather, a small candle flame, casting vague and multiple shadows, flickering and sputtering in the strong winds of power and passion, greed and ideology. But brought close to the heart and cupped in one’s hands, it dispels the darkness and warms the soul.’

-- James Q Wilson (1993) The Moral Sense, New York: The Free Press, p. 25

NB: Below we have outlined nine (09) points of what Milgram summarised after having done his research on Obedience to Authority, theory which is now commonly known as Milgram Experiment or Miligram's Theme. When we analyse whats going on with the current regime in Fiji & see how military personal/Military Council are so attuned or not so to the current dictator, we begin to understand the driving force behind it all. As Fiji Citizen it is not only disgusting but shameful to see how these military men in uniforms are so easily swayed to succumb to authorities, as in this case the island dictator himself at the expanse of a Nation they claim to be fighting for but instead are helping to run it to the ground.   

'Na Dina' Fiji Truth will Prevail in the end.

Fiji Truth Commission Movement

Power & Bureaucracy

Milgram's Themes

We find a set people carrying out their jobs and dominated by an administrative, rather than a moral outlook.

Indeed, the individuals involved make a distinction between destroying others as a matter of duty and the expression of personal feelings. They experience a sense of morality to the degree in which all of their actions are governed by orders from higher authority.

Individual values of loyalty, duty, and discipline derive from technical needs of the hierarchy. They are experinced as highly personal moral imperatives by the individual, but at the organizational level they are simply the technical preconditions for maintenance of the larger system.

There is frequent modification of language, so that the acts do not, at verbal level, come into direct conflict with the verbal moral concept that are part of every persons upbringing. Euphemisms come to dominate language, not frivolously, but as a means of guarding the person against the full moral implications of his acts.

Responsibility invariably shifts upward in the mind of the subordinate. And often there are frequent requests for "authorization". Indeed, the repeated requests for authorization are always an early signs that the subordinate senses, at some level, that the transgression of a moral rule is involved.

The actions are almost always justified in terms of a set of constructive purposes, and come to be seen as noble in the light of some high ideological goal. In the experiment, science is served by the act of shocking the vistim against his will; in Germany, the destruction of the Jews was represented as a hygienic "process against" jewish vermin" (Hilberg, 1961).

There is always some element of bad form in objecting to the destructive course of events, or inded, in making it a topic of conversation. Thus, in Nazi Germany, even among those most closely identified with the "final solution", it was considered an act of discourtesy to talk about the killings (Hilberg, 1961). Subjects in the experiment most frequently experience their objectons as embarrassing.

Where the relationship between subject and authority remains intact, psychological adjustments come into play to ease the strain of carrying out immoral orders.

Obedience does not take the form of a dramataic confrontation of opposed wills or philosophies but s embedded in a larger atmosphere where social relationships, career aspirations, and technical routines set the dominant tone. Typically, we do not find a heroic figure struggling with conscience, nor a pathologically aggressive man ruthlessly exploiting a position of power, but a functionary who has been given a job to do and who strives to create an impression of competence in his work.

Source: Milgram, Stanley (1974) Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, Harper Row Publishers, New York, pp. 186 - 187.