*Trigger warning: references to sexual assault.*
If you’re like me, you’ve often found yourself wondering over these past few years, “how did we get here?”. It has been a bewildering time during which many otherwise intelligent and caring people in my life, seem to have lost the plot. Of course they would likely say the same about me. I am a stupid, selfish, granny-killer, after all.
During the last three years my husband and I have looked on as, at the behest of our government ‘leaders’, health bureaucrats, some front-line healthcare staff, and even celebrities, people in our personal and professional circles turned on one another. When encouraged to police the behaviour of others, many people enthusiastically participated and took up opportunities to chastise (lockdown/mask/vaccine) non-compliers – regardless of circumstance – and even went so far as to ‘dob in’ their friends and family to the authorities.
Then came the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out and this attitude escalated exponentially. I was so aware of the highly charged climate around this issue, every conversation I had involved a little voice in my head hoping the topic of COVID-19 vaccination would not come up. It still seems outrageous, but I was genuinely scared that if people close to me knew I was not vaccinated and did not intend to be, they would cut me out of their lives. As it turned out, I had good reason to be.
When I disclosed this information to certain friends, the reactions were mixed. Some people did not express any significant feelings and some reacted with fury and venom; very few were openly supportive. Funnily enough, it was not always easy to predict how a certain person would react, and this resulted in a couple of deeply painful interactions in which people I thought were among my nearest and dearest, unloaded their disapproval using all the mainstream buzzwords reserved for COVID-19 vaccine ‘refusniks’.
No sooner had ‘the vaccine’ been made available to all adults, various state and territory governments began tightening the screws and tying vaccine compliance with more and more social activities, many of which are deeply rooted within western culture and lifestyle. These machinations culminated in ridiculously unethical (not to mention totally unscientific) vaccine mandates tied to employment, the result of which was the unjust dismissal of hundreds (if not thousands) of Australian workers whose gravest offence was exercising their fundamental human rights to informed consent, to refuse medical intervention, and to bodily autonomy.
On top of the vast array of governmental vaccine mandates, many large corporations jumped on the virtue-signaling bandwagon and announced that although the politically-driven mandates did not apply to their sectors, they would be requiring all of their employees to be “fully vaccinated” (terminology which would very quickly become problematic).
Along the way, many media personalities and regular people cheer-led the draconian vaccine measures as wholly necessary, and publicly vilified the remaining ‘hold-outs’, claiming job loss was the least that was deserved.
When pondering just why people behave in this way, turning on those closest to them, the obvious reference is Nazi Germany prior to and during the Second World War, and ultimately the holocaust. If/when raising the clear parallels, one is often met with disgust. “You think refusing a life-saving medical treatment is the same as being a victim of the holocaust?”, goes the disapproving cry. Yet to say this is to attack a ‘Straw Man’. Put aside the dubious claim that the COVID-19 vaccines are a life-saving medical treatment for a moment; of course these two wrongs are not the same. But the small changes at the outset, both in policy and in public rhetoric, are frighteningly similar.
If you are uncomfortable with this comparison, let’s consider something a little less polarising. In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment which examined how obedient a subject would be when directed by a person of authority. To do this, he and his researchers had the participant test a subject on simple word games. Unbeknownst to the participant, the subject (or ‘learner’) was actually a member of the research team, and was also in a separate space and therefore not visible to the participant. The person overseeing the lesson (called the ‘experimenter’), provided direction to the participant.
Each time the learner made an error in answering a question, the participant (referred to as the ‘teacher’) was required to administer an ‘electric shock’ to the learner (these shocks were not real, but the participant did not know this). Each successive incorrect answer was met with a shock of increasing voltage. When receiving the shocks the learner became increasingly distressed, often calling out in pain and/or requesting that the experiment be stopped. At times, certain participants would look to the experimenter and express their concerns in continuing, but when reassured by the perceived authority figure (complete with white lab coat), many continued to administer the ‘increasingly severe’ shocks despite the ongoing pleas of the learner.
To summarise: these regular people administered what they believed to be severe electric shocks to a subject, despite that subject begging them to stop. Why would regular people do something so cruel? The simple answer, in large part, is because a person of perceived authority (repeatedly) told them to. While they have limitations due to research-related ethical frameworks introduced in the decades after Milgram’s study, more recent psychological research asserts that humans are even more compliant now (an assertion which certainly seems to have been borne out during the pandemic response).
Now let’s take a more recent, real world example. And please note the trigger warning at the beginning of this post.
“Don’t Pick Up the Phone” is a three-part documentary series recently released on Netflix which details one of the most bizarre and disturbing criminal cases in US history. In each case, a phone call is received by a fast-food outlet and a manager or supervisor is told that one of their employees has been accused of stealing money from a customer’s purse. A vague description of the alleged perpetrator is provided and the manager exclaims that they have a staff member fitting that description. The ‘offending’ staff member is then called into a back office.
Once in the office, the caller explains that the employee can either wait on site and be arrested when the police are able to attend, or the manager can perform a ‘strip search’ to recover the money or prove the employee’s innocence. If asked why the police can’t attend promptly to perform the search, the caller claims the station is short-staffed and this will take considerable time.
In most cases, the manager agrees to undertake this search and the employee, in many instances a teenager or young adult (who is unaware of their legal rights and distressed by the accusation of wrong-doing), believes the search is necessary to show they are innocent.
Imagine then, how such a situation - already a blatant example of appallingly poor judgement on behalf of the managers - could devolve into commissions of even more serious sexual assault, all at the behest of a person of perceived authority on the telephone.
In the specific cases detailed in this documentary, young employees become the victims of degrading sexual violence above and beyond having to simply strip naked in front of their (usually much older, and sometimes opposite-sex) managers - which, to be clear, is bad enough - including having to adopt humiliating positions (like bending over), do star-jumps, be beaten, be touched all over their bodies, have their genitals invasively probed (otherwise known as rape), kiss and perform oral sex on their ‘searcher’ (the final case involved the manager’s fiancé, who had been called in to supervise the employee while the manager continued with her work duties).
Reading this, I’m sure you’re reacting the same way I did: with horror. How on earth could a regular person just going about their work day be suddenly convinced to perpetrate despicable acts of sexual abuse on a young colleague, without any immediate real or perceived threat to their own safety?! All because a man who claimed to be a police officer was telling them to do so, over the phone?!
The ordeal that these young employees each went through has understandably affected their lives irrevocably. And this occurred in approximately 100 different cases (at least, as those are the reported cases), over 32 US states, from 1994 to 2004 (at least).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, no one in these scenarios wants to take responsibility for the role they played (in case there is any confusion, I am not including the young employees as they are without doubt the victims). Each party simply tries to blame another party or parties.
In two cases where serious criminal charges were laid, the manager (or the manager and her fiancé) alleged that they were just doing what the caller told them because he was a police officer. This defence saw one manager acquitted of the charges against him; however in the case of the manager and her fiancé, both were convicted (she was sentenced to a period of probation and he was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered onto the sex offenders register). Arguably, all of their lives were ruined by this situation and while I do feel some sympathy for them, this pales in comparison to my compassion for their victims (yes, THEIR victims).
When authorities apprehended the alleged perpetrator of the hoax (such an inadequate word to describe what actually happened), he claimed he was not the caller. In one case, police presented evidence suggesting he had purchased the phone cards used to make the phone calls (from public phones), but could not show he had made the actual phone calls. He was subsequently acquitted of the charges and despite the number of individual cases, no further charges were ever laid. His lawyer appears on the documentary vigorously maintaining his innocence. We will probably never know for sure, but legally this man has been found not guilty. No other suspects have been pursued, so either way this leaves many victims without justice on yet another front.
One exceptionally brave victim courageously pursued a civil suit against the fast-food chain for whom she worked, alleging that they did not do enough to warn franchises about the hoax to ensure further harm was avoided. Despite strenuous denials on behalf of the chain (and a disgraceful campaign of victim-blaming the young employee for the extent of her own assault), it emerged during the trial that they had experienced several similar cases prior (and settled with six previous victims), dating back ten years, and had failed to communicate the risks to other outlets in order to mitigate future harm.
When considering this strange and devastating case (or set of cases), it seems clear that many otherwise normal, law-abiding individuals can be persuaded to perpetrate unthinkable acts of depravity if they believe the person instructing them to do so is a person of authority (and perhaps perceived credibility). Even when those acts get further and further away from anything even remotely resembling a reasonable response to a employee accused of theft. But does the claim that they were “just following orders” absolve them of personal responsibility for their role? Absolutely not.
And while I apologise for drawing parallels with what was almost certainly the most traumatic experience in the lives of the victims; so it is with the pandemic response. Calls for amnesty (especially without any apology) are disingenuous. If, out of ignorance/fear/arrogance/pride, you acted in a way which caused the ostracisation, marginalisation and/or discrimination of others, you are responsible. Yes, much of the blame lies on the government, health bureaucracy and media who have dutifully pedaled fear and publicly vilified anyone who questioned their dictates, however reasonably; but that does not mean you get a free pass.
If you gleefully engaged in shaming those people who questioned pandemic policy decisions, because you were ‘following the science’ just like the ‘experts’ told you to, now is the time to admit that what you were really doing was blindly obeying (sometimes real, but more often simply perceived) authority, and just like in so many other scenarios, it really didn’t work out well and a lot of other people got hurt.
Brilliant article. I remember asking myself, when I first read about the Asch and Milgram experiments. "What would I have done?" Most people believe they would have been in the small minority who stuck to their guns in the Asch experiments, or the 30-35% who refused to go 'all the way' in the Milgram experiment, but obviously, this is statistically impossible. It's fair to say that the past 3 years (can you believe this sordid spectacle has dragged on for that long???) has been a global Asch conformity/Milgram experiment, and most people have failed the experiment in a most miserable and disturbing way. The question that troubles me the most is, is this failure simply the consequence of human nature, in which case there's nothing we can do about it, or is it possible to raise and educate children such that they will grow up to be adults who don't just go along to get along?
Again, a very well researched and written . ❤️