Obedience To The Status Quo

This article associates obedience with Stanley Milgram's famous experiments 50 years ago. But I have another take to share...

If you look at Milgram's experiments in conjunction with some recent news events--the toddler in China getting run over with no one helping and the Penn State case where a witness did not stop a child rape--I think we have something different at play here. It's not so much obedience than wanting to maintain the status quo pushed by the inherit inertia that powers it.

In all of these cases, and many more that happen every day, people decide to keep doing what they have been doing, or planning to do, despite an obvious good reason to do something different. It is our default action (or non-action) to keep on keepin' on.

Our minds may jump around all over the place, but our actions don't. We will almost always do what's expected or planned. It's the same reason abused spouses stay in their relationships and why almost all slaves never revolt. The unknown that comes with changing course is, for some reason, avoided by most of us even when it's clear we should do otherwise.

We need to be harder on ourselves to make sure we're aware of this flaw and do more to conquer it.