Editor’s note: This commentary is by Marc Estrin, who is a novelist and cellist, living in Burlington.
In the control booth, the subject sits at a switchboard. An authority figure in a white lab coat stands at his side. Behind glass, in another room, a man sits strapped to a chair. He has made a mistake in a memory test. The authority figure gives the signal, the subject throws a switch, and the man twitches and lets out a little scream.
At his next memory mistake, the subject is instructed to turn up the rheostat, and give the man a slightly stronger shock. He is already in the rheostat section marked DANGEROUS. “Really?” he asks the authority figure, pointing at the yellow marking. “You have to,” says the authority figure.
At each subsequent memory error, the man’s twitching becomes grosser, and his screams louder. At each increase of voltage, the subject is more reluctant to throw the switch. Toward the end of the yellow section, just this side of the red marked FATAL, the man strapped to the chair begins to cry out “I don’t want to be part of this experiment anymore!” and then “Let me out of here!” and then, “Stop! Stop! I can’t stand it!” Each time, the authority figure calmly says, “You have to continue.” And after a certain voltage, the man strapped to the chair falls limp, unresponsive to test-questions. Many subjects do not get that far, and refuse to go on with the shocking.
Stanley Milgram’s question in 1961, just after the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem: How far will people go if they are ordered by authority figures to harm others? His findings were distressing.
Granted, no one was killed, or hurt at all in this experiment. The screaming victim was an actor, responding, as instructed, to the numbers flashed on his side of the glass. The authority figure in a white lab coat was part of Milgram’s investigatory cast. The subject thought he was taking part in an experiment to determine the effect of negative stimuli in teaching and learning. But the findings were still distressing: 65% of participants continued to the highest level of 450 volts. All the participants continued to 300 volts.
I recalled the Milgram experiment after reading VTDigger’s article on the one-year anniversary of the F-35s in Vermont. In it, the Vermont Air National Guard commander acknowledges wide community concerns about the overflights, but that his fleet had a job to do – to become a mission-ready wing of F-35s in the course of the next year – and that it was nevertheless important to meet the mission and training requirements.
Let us place this dialogue in the frame of the Milgram experiment. Who, here, is in the role of the screaming, afflicted man, being helped to learn via negative stimuli? That’s clearly us, the suffering community. Except we are not pretending.
And who is in the role of the subject of Milgram’s experiment, dialing up the rheostat, throwing the switches? VTANG, of course, bringing in plane after plane, increasing the numbers of flights during our waking hours, and even into bedtime and nights. Even into the claustrophobic condition of shutdowns.
But more, even most interesting: who is the authority figure in the white coat, calmly repeating, “You must continue”? Who says these lines? Where is the character who speaks? Offstage? But where?
It isn’t the VTANG pilots or leadership at the airport. They are “only following orders”. It isn’t Leahy and Co. They have only invited and approved the goings-on. It isn’t Trump, or his secretary of Defense, or his generals, who, unlike Milgram’s whitecoats, are surely unaware of Winooski’s agony as “mission training requirements” are “fulfilled.”
But what is that mission, and how is it to be fulfilled?
One Winooski resident quoted in the article says, “I love hearing our very own Green Mountain Boy pilots practicing their craft … My newborn sleeps right through it but I hope one day when she’s older, she gets to appreciate the sound as well.” Another resident thought the sound of the jets was “exciting.” “I think they bring a sense of security, having them here … They bring economic growth, which you know, what city can’t use that right now? I love watching them take off and land, I really do.”
OK. Local pride, that’s a mission also plugged by our politicians. A demonstration of high-level local craft, a new twist in the old Vermont craftsman tradition. The sound, often called “the sound of freedom,” which brings “a sense of security” (though exactly how the planes would protect Vermont, and against whom or what, is never stated).
But well beyond Winooski, who is the authority figure requiring U.S. world domination, and the military might to enforce it? Who wears that white camo-ed coat?
And what exactly is the lesson we are being putatively taught? Obedience to authority? Toughening-up to adversity in the name of the greater good? The dominance of force, even if over our own lives?
What? Who? It’s a very ghostly figure we seem to be collectively obeying, nowhere near as convincing as a man with a clipboard standing behind us in a control booth. There is some spectral teacher determined to help us learn, to teach us some enormous something. But what exactly is it? And what if under the white coat there is no one?
We should ponder more carefully the casting and goals of the Milgram experiment of which we currently seem to be a part.
