"I was only doing my job" (1974)

From the August 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The academic world has been “shocked” and “appalled” by the results of ten years’ extensive research tests carried out by the psychiatrists at New York University. A book has appeared, and they have received full coverage on radio.

Briefly, the ingenious idea was this; just to see how far normal, ordinary, conventional people would go carrying out “horrific” instructions, which would torture and even kill the victim, usually by electric shock. At what point would the subject say “No! I can’t and won’t do it”?

Not merely did they not disobey, but showed the most callous indifference, and even when told that they had killed somebody, said “I only did my job” or some such. What they did not know was that the agonized screams of torture were by paid professional actors.

Why the psychiatrists are making such a hullabaloo about all this it is difficult to see. We do not need ten years’ extensive (and expensive) research in New York to tell us that ordinary, conventional, simple, naturally sociable, kindly people can behave otherwise in special circumstances.

In fact it is precisely the “normal” ordinary, unquestioning, unthinking people who accept authority and orders so blindly. So long as some fanny is trotted out to “justify” the foul deeds. (Usually, “If we don’t do it to them, they will do it to us.”) The appalling massacres of innocent defenceless women and children at My Lai, the Portugese atrocities in Africa, the systematic extermination of the Red Man in the States, are just isolated incidents in a long list. This writer is personally acquainted with numbers of affable likeable chaps, teachers, who as Air Force pilots took part in the saturation bombing of Germany.

Just what does it prove? That human nature is the most changeable thing under the sun, that homo sapiens is easily the most adaptable animal on this planet, leaving chameleons and hawk-eyed moths far behind. Not only this, but he is a most social-communal animal. So long as he has the social approbation that it is a necessary “job”, he will shoot, torture and murder without compunction, like the KGB in Russia as Arthur Koestler and Solzhenitsyn have shown. This writer attended sessions of the famous (or infamous) trial of the Auschwitz concentration camp staff in Frankfurt. The German press was amazed to find that the one-time torturers, gas-chamber operators, and murderers, had become highly respectable insurance managers, bank clerks, business representatives and family men. In fact this was urged in their defence as expiation.

So far from “not being able to change human nature”, it is impossible to stop it changing. Not merely do we see this by our own personal experience in everyday life, but it is also confirmed by modern genetics: the study of differences between individuals. The whole modern knowledge of genetics shows that though all animals (including homo sapiens) are born with a certain “nature” or physiological apparatus acquired from both parents, their behaviour in various social situations depends entirely on circumstances. This is the authentic view of modern genetics. The idea that features or characteristics acquired by parents are automatically passed on is fallacious. Jewish baby boys’ foreskins have been docked for a thousand years, they inevitably reappear; so have fox-terriers’ tails. The genes make a boy tall or short, brown-eyed or frizzy-haired. What he then does is his affair.

As Professor Anthony Barnett writes in his book on The Human Species:

These changes in social organisation involve drastic changes in human behaviour, and they in turn depend on the fact that human behaviour is plastic and not genetically fixed. We see once again the absurdity of the notion that ‘human nature cannot change’.

This commonly made assertion always implies that human ‘behaviour’ is essentially fixed, it is therefore the exact opposite of the truth.

It is the behaviour of the working class to band together in its own interest. What makes this common interest is not genetical inheritance, but social position. Eventually, black workers, yellow workers, “the long, and the short, and the tall” will join up to establish Socialism. If workers inevitably inherited their parents’ wage-slave characteristics they could never become Socialists. Of course docile ignorant wage-slaves in New York willingly obeyed the most vile orders; they were not Socialists! Let them try their daft experiments on us. We said NO ! during the war.

Horatio.