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In 1963, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram published a paper in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology titled “Behavior Study of Obedience” which documented the methodology and results of experiments he had been conducting over the prior two years. In Milgrim’s experiment, the subject is ordered to apply electrical shocks of increasing severity to another person—ostensibly another research subject but actually a member of the research team—under the guise of facilitating a learning exercise. The subject believes that the point of the study is to see whether punishment aids memory, while in fact, the experiment aims to measure the degree to which ordinary people obey clearly immoral and dangerous orders and authority.
Here are the details, according to Milgram’s paper: the subject is brought in, along with the accomplice, who appears to be another research subject. The experiment administrators give both of them a short introduction on questions about the effects of punishment on learning, and then the subject and the accomplice draw slips of paper from a hat to see who will be the teacher and who will be the learner. This is, of course, rigged: all of the slips of paper say “teacher,” but the accomplice will pretend to have received a slip saying that they are the learner.
They are then brought into a room in which the subject witnesses the accomplice being strapped to a chair and having electrodes applied to their skin. The accomplice asks about the safety of the experiment and the administrator assures them that, “Although the shocks can be extremely painful, they cause no permanent tissue damage.”
The subject is then brought to a separate room and placed in front of an instrument panel with thirty switches labeled with voltages in 15-volt increments from 15 to 450 volts and labeled in groups of four: “Slight Shock,” “Moderate Shock,” “Strong Shock,” “Very Strong Shock,” “Intense Shock,” “Extreme Intensity Shock,” and finally, “Danger: Severe Shock,” with the final two switches labeled with triple-x’s. By way of demonstrating the functionality of the apparatus to the subject, the administrator applies an electrode to the subject’s wrist and presses the third switch, which administers a real 45-volt shock, barely even painful but enough to demonstrate to the subject the “reality” of the experiment, as well as giving them some sense of the relative intensity of the shocks. Then the experiment proceeds. After a fairly easy “practice round”, the experiment proceeds, with the subject asking the accomplice questions and administering a shock after each wrong answer. As per the given instructions, the level of the shock increases each time.
When the 300-volt level is reached, the accomplice pounds on the wall of the room, and becomes unresponsive after this. If at any point the subject seems unsure of what to do or asks the administrator what they should do, they are given one of the following prompts, in order:
- Please continue or please go on
- The experiment requires that you continue
- It is absolutely essential that you continue
- You have no other choice, you must go on
If asked, the administrator reassures the subject that, “Although the shocks may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage.” And as much as that may sound initially reassuring, I want to make explicit that saying that “there is no permanent tissue damage” does not indicate that there will be no damage or danger whatsoever.
Of the forty subjects studied, five stopped after the 300-volt level, when the pounding was heard. Nine more continued for a few more shocks after that point, after the subject had stopped responding. Twenty-six continued past even this point, until the 450-volt level was reached. Milgram concludes this section of the paper by saying that
After the maximum shocks had been delivered, and the experimenter called a halt to the proceedings, many obedient subjects heaved sighs of relief, mopped their brows, rubbed their fingers over their eyes, or nervously fumbled cigarettes. Some shook their heads, apparently in regret. Some subjects had remained calm throughout the experiment, and displayed only minimal signs of tension from beginning to end.
Matters of personal will, independence, and autonomy are central to Satanic thought. The central principle of Satanism is opposition, and, in my interpretation, opposition to hegemony, which often entails opposition to presumed authority. This is reflected in the narrative of Satan’s Fall in Paradise Lost, in which, following their arrival in Hell, Satan’s compatriot Belial remarks:
How wearisome
II:247-57
Eternity so spent in worship paid
To whom we hate! Let us not then pursue,
By force impossible, by leave obtained
Unacceptable, though in Heaven, our state
Of splendid vassalage; but rather seek
Our own good from ourselves, and from our own
Live to ourselves, though in this vast recess,
Free and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easy yoke
Of servile pomp.
This episode is about the implications of “hard liberty,” because Milgram’s experiment tells us that about 65% of people will freely abdicate their personal will under the presumption of nothing more than a lab coat. We’ll be seeing more examples of this further on. My thesis here is that abdication of the will—the deferral of personal power and responsibility to other, ostensibly more authoritative agents—is central to a Satanic understanding of moral failure.
The first matter before us is to understand the nature of the will within the context of Satanism. I would describe Satanism as being perfectionist, and perfectionism has a specific meaning in philosophy: perfectionism is the assertion that the exercise of our characteristic human capacities—those things which are intrinsic to us as humans and which are plausibly worth developing—is intrinsically valuable (Bradford, 2013). That makes sense to me: we, as humans, must necessarily be perfectable according to our humanity alone and to nothing extrinsic to that, and the will is indeed a characteristic human capacity, one which is equivalent to the overcoming of difficulty not merely through brute strength, but through the perseverance of the self.
I’ve talked on this show before about my training as a propaganda analyst by the U.S. Army. That occurred at the United States John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at the unfortunately-named Fort Bragg after I had completed Boot Camp. During that period, we were still under the jurisdiction of drill sergeants, and one day early into my training one of them called us out to the parade field. As with many of our cadre, this one was a veteran Green Beret. He was a short, old, wiry man; one of my fellow soldiers once said he looked like he could swallow a hand grenade and not even feel it, and that seemed about right. All of the drill sergeants had their pet projects with regards to our training: one of them pushed us to forego luxury and comfort so that we might grow used to hardship; another emphasized quiet order at all times so that we might stay focused in the confusion of battle. But this one seemed to have a different perspective on the training than most of the cadre. For the past few months, prior to arriving at Fort Bragg, we had been trained primarily in how to kill people and stay alive doing it. Sometime shortly after we arrived, after a few of us had gotten into some trouble, he impressed upon us the importance of what we were doing. “Killing is easy,” he said. “All you have to do is pull a trigger. Saving a life is harder.” I knew he spoke from experience.
On this particular day, he strolled among our ranks as we stood at attention. I don’t remember him being anything other than angry, but this time it seemed there was something in particular on his mind. He reiterated his line about killing and saving lives. He talked about honor and integrity—not at all uncommon subjects, but he seemed particularly agitated, and then he started asking bizarre questions, questions that didn’t make any sense to me. He would address them to individual soldiers: “Would you drag a naked man around the floor on a leash?” he asked one soldier, with an air of disbelief and disgust. I think that soldier must have been as confused as I was. “Would you smear shit on someone and take pictures of them? No? What about you? Would you make a prisoner of war masturbate in front of you and take pictures of it?” This continued for some time. He asked questions as well about whether we would have the guts to stop it if we saw something like that happening. His questions seemed sincere rather than rhetorical. None of us had any answers; when we shook our heads, it was more out of confusion than anything.
He dismissed us, and the rumor mill quickly circulated about what it was that had just happened. It got around quickly that some photos had gotten out of American soldiers in Iraq humiliating and torturing prisoners of war at a detention facility called Abu Ghraib. All of the acts that the drill sergeant had described to us in his questions had been inflicted upon these prisoners of war by American soldiers. The drill sergeant’s questions were indeed sincere: he was wondering who among us would be the kind of person who would keep going up to the 450-volt switch. Maybe he knew about the Milgram experiments himself, but in any case, experienced as he was, he knew that statistically, there must have been those among us who could only have answered “Yes” to one or more of his questions if they were being honest.
In an interview with CBS news, Lynndie England, one of the military police who appeared in many of the photos and who was convicted of involvement in the torture, said: “…we all agree that we don’t feel like we were doing things that we weren’t supposed to, because we were told to do them. We think everything was justified, because we were instructed to do this and to do that.”
Between August 14th and 20th of 1971, a research group led by Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment in which student volunteers were assigned to be either “guards” or “prisoners” in a mock prison in order to study the psychological effects of perceived power (“Stanford Prison Experiment,” 2020). Despite the absence of any power dynamic beyond that which had been arbitrarily assigned temporarily and ad hoc for the purposes of the experiment, it quickly devolved into the psychological abuse and torture of those assigned to be prisoners by those assigned to be guards, and Zimbardo halted the experiment ahead of schedule. According to his reports, a full third of the guards exhibited “genuine sadistic tendencies.” It shouldn’t be surprising that an experiment of this nature has proved controversial, and the results have frequently been challenged. A 2013 article by psychologist Peter Gray entitled “Why Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment Isn’t in My Textbook” claims that the experiment had involved demand characteristics due to the direct involvement of Zimbardo. In his article, Gray states that Zimbardo’s presence in the experiment—and possibly his words and actions to the subjects as well—influenced the “guards” to behave as they did. This certainly calls into question the relevance of the experiment to actual prison environments and the assumption that a prisoner/guard power dynamic on its own will lead people to behave sadistically, but the fact remains that, whether prompted or not, the students assigned to be guards were not coerced or forced but rather freely acted as they did based on an arbitrary, ad hoc power dynamic.
Beginning in April of 1961, the Israeli government tried former SS officer Adolf Eichmann for his role in managing the logistical operations of the Holocaust. The trial was documented in the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem by the philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt, which I’ve discussed on the show several times before and which presented Eichmann not as a sinister criminal mastermind but rather as a rather ordinary and unintelligent person, motivated primarily by a desire to follow orders and to do his job well rather than by a particular hatred of the Jewish people. Arendt’s book was highly controversial when it was published and remains so, but is often misunderstood; Arendt does not in any way excuse or exculpate Eichmann—he is portrayed not as reluctantly obedient but rather quite enthusiastic about his job—and she endorses his ultimate execution. For our purposes, the important thing is that he defined himself throughout his life in terms of his belonging to organizations and systems. Arendt described him as an idealist; his ideals were not to execute the designs of his own will but rather those of the organization of which he was a part, the Nazi SS.
There must be thousands of stories like these from across history, and the common thread that links them is abdication of the will, the implicit renunciation of one’s own judgement, morality, freedom, and responsibility in favor of that of other people or that of an organization or system.
The debate in the field of psychology between dispositionism and situationism offers us some insight into this phenomenon. Dispositionism is the position that a person’s actions can primarily be explained by recourse to their personality and various other inner traits, whereas situationism posits that those actions are better explained by the given circumstances under which those actions take place. Situationism does indeed seem to better explain why otherwise “good” people seem so prone to taking clearly immoral actions given the right circumstances. But regardless of whether situationism is true, we are not morally absolved by it.
A 2015 article published in the Arkansas Law Review by criminal theorist Ken Levy titled “Does Situationism Excuse?” describes how situationism may be argued as being criminally exculpatory—a valid excuse for a legal infraction, in other words. Levy describes four conditions that must be met for one to be held criminally liable for their actions:
- Knowledge, or a threshold capacity to know, the relevant criminal law C
- A threshold capacity to refrain from violating C
- Threshold control over violating C
- An absence of circumstances that excuse this violation
As situationism posits that it is the circumstances of a given situation that primarily influence one’s actions, it would seem to excuse criminal actions on the basis of point 4, but Levy makes an interesting argument to the contrary based on the compatibilist nature of criminal law. Compatibilism and incompatibilism are philosophical positions regarding the compatibility of free will and determinism. That subject is beyond the scope of this piece; for our purposes, what’s important is that the criminal justice system must necessarily take a stance that determinism is compatible with free will, and given this, Levy argues that people maintain their free will even in the presence of the kind of circumstances that a situationist would argue primarily drives a person’s actions. The article is quite interesting all around, and freely available, so I urge my readers and listeners to check it out for themselves. Absent this presumption of free will, Levy argues, there would be no basis at all for a criminal justice system or the notion of criminal responsibility, as all actions could be excused by “weakness of will.” Levy leaves open the possibility that situationism is morally exculpatory even if not criminally exculpatory, but suggests that the absence of situationist exculpation implies a commensurate absence of moral exculpation, given that both rely on our intuitive sense of justice as being rooted in the understanding that people are generally responsible for their actions.
In short, if humans are situationist by nature, it does not excuse us from responsibility for our actions.
I’ll turn now, briefly, to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom will and power were central themes. In Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil (1886), in which he argues against traditional philosophical assumptions regarding morality, he wrote that
It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself when a thinker senses in every “causal connection” and “psychological necessity” something of constraint, need, compulsion to obey, pressure, and unfreedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings—the person betrays himself.
§21
“To betray oneself” seems to get right to the heart of the matter. If someone has committed some egregious wrongdoing and then lays the blame on influence from exterior forces—absent legitimate excuses like a literal gun to the head—they have, in effect, betrayed themselves in the most fundamental way possible. They have denied themselves, denied their will, the very force that makes one an individual human. For Nietzsche, true power, and true morality, was the ability for one to overcome oneself, to resist baser urges and outside influences and do what one believes should and must be done (Kaufmann, 2013).
Abdication of the will exists not only as individuals ceding their freedom and responsibility to authorities in their immediate presence, but also on the scale of societies, which cede their collective will to the various systems by which they are organized: our economic systems, our criminal justice systems, and so forth. The implied argument for this cession is that these systems are just part of the natural order of things, “just the way things are,” and so compliance is necessary and unavoidable, whatever the consequences.
As an example of this, we can take the policy of family separation at the southern border of the United States. Under this policy, adopted by the Trump Administration in April of 2018 and enforced through October of 2019, children of families fleeing violence and economic destitution in Central and South America were, upon reaching the border, forcibly separated from their parents and detained separately, under deplorable conditions. According to a Reuters article by Julia Edwards Ainsley dated March 3rd of 2017, the Trump Administration had been considering the policy as a means to deter immigration into the United States. It should go without saying that separating children from their parents is an emotionally torturous punishment for the parents and all the more so for the children, who likely had no say whatsoever in their being brought to the United States and for whom long-term mental health consequences are, as a result of separation, all but certain. In advance of the implementation of this policy, over 200 child welfare, juvenile justice, and child development organizations released a letter protesting the Administration’s plans, which included the statement
We know that this policy would have significant and long-lasting consequences for the safety, health, development, and well-being of children. Children need to be cared for by their parents to be safe and healthy, to grow and develop. Forced separation disrupts the parent-child relationship and puts children at increased risk for both physical and mental illness. The Administration’s plan would eviscerate the principle of family unity and put children in harm’s way.
Defending this policy, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said, “If people don’t want to be separated from their children, they should not bring them with them,” and White House senior policy advisor and white nationalist Stephen Miller stated in defense of the policy that “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.” Rhetoric that I saw online during the height of the controversy echoed those sentiments, often stating something to the effect that, if one doesn’t want to be separated from their children, they shouldn’t come to the United States. In other words, the law is the law and that’s just the way things are. It’s worth noting here that, while “improper entry” into the United States, as it’s called, is indeed illegal, it’s only a misdemeanor with a maximum fine of $250 for first offenses, and that’s only upon conviction, as there are many potentially exculpating factors, such as entering in order to seek asylum.
Similarly, after documented instances of police brutality, I often see questions raised about whether or not abusive restraint techniques such as chokeholds are matters of department policy, as if the existence of such a policy might excuse the actions of those who followed them.
Here in the United States, we are currently witnessing the recurrence of abdication to a demagogue with clear totalitarian aspirations. In her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt writes on the matter of such totalitarian leaders, saying
In substance, the totalitarian leader is nothing more nor less than the functionary of the masses he leads; he is not a power-hungry individual imposing a tyrannical and arbitrary will upon his subjects. Being a mere functionary, he can be replaced at any time, and he depends just as much on the “will” of the masses he embodies as the masses depend on him. Without him they would lack external representation and remain an amorphous horde; without the masses the leader is a nonentity. Hitler, who was fully aware of this interdependence, expressed it once in a speech addressed to the SA: “All that you are, you are through me; all that I am, I am through you alone.”
1973, p. 325
This reminds me of the invocation made by televangelist Joel Osteen before his sermons: “This is my Bible. I am what it says I am. I can do what it says I can do.” Matters of abdication of the will to religious authorities or to religion itself are certainly matters of central concern for we Satanists. Often, matters of legal policy or public arguments regarding ethics are predicated on verses from sacred texts, as biologist and prominent critic of religion Richard Dawkins notes in his 2006 book The God Delusion:
In Afghanistan under the Taliban, the official punishment for homosexuality was execution, by the tasteful method of burial alive under a wall pushed over on top of the victim. The ‘crime’ itself being a private act, performed by consenting adults who were doing nobody else any harm, we again have here the classic hallmark of religious absolutism….
The attitude of the ‘American Taliban’ towards homosexuality epitomizes their religious absolutism. Listen to the Reverend Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University: ‘AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals.’
2008, p. 326-7
Dawkins provides several more examples of this kind of rhetoric. But even if we were to assume that sacred texts should be taken as morally authoritative, it remains that they, like all texts, must be interpreted. Leviticus 18:22, for example, does indeed appear to prohibit homosexuality, in quite strong terms, but its acceptance as moral doctrine requires several further choices in interpretation which are ultimately the responsibility of the one reading and explicating the text. For example, should that verse be considered in the context of the surrounding verses, chapters, and books, or taken on its own? Given that it appears in the Old Testament, should it be taken as being directed exclusively towards the ancient Hebrews, or towards all peoples in all times? What does the original Hebrew indicate about the intentions of the authors? What is the relationship of this verse to the abrogation or fulfillment of the Old Testament law implied by Jesus in the Gospels? If it is to be taken as authoritative, must then other problematic verses as well, such as Exodus 21:7, which implies that a man may sell his daughter into sexual slavery? Should the Bible in general be interpreted according to the absolute letter of what is written, or in the context of the contemporary world? I’m not saying that one can’t take moral and spiritual guidance from sacred texts—I often do—but that the ultimate responsibility for words spoken and actions taken on the basis of that guidance belongs to the reader.
All of this said, there are valid reasons for one to cede a portion of one’s freedom and identity to a larger group. Indeed, this is a necessary part of living in a society: we each give up a portion of our freedom as part of the social contract, in exchange for the organization and safety provided by that contract. Given that we would all be worse off in a hypothetical state of nature, absent laws and social moral agreements, free and rational equals would agree to certain concessions in order to effect a peaceable society that is better for everyone. But as political analyst John Judis points out in The Nationalist Revival from 2018:
Whether on the left or right, most explicit nationalist movements and parties, and most nations during war or revolution, can display the strengths but also the significant weaknesses of group solidarity. By ceding their individuality to a larger group that defines itself as the nation, the members of a movement or part or of citizens in war relinquish their moral judgement and intelligence to the group, and most often to the group’s charismatic leader. They become susceptible to suggestion and can come to believe things that they would ordinarily reject. They become capable of great courage and sacrifice on behalf of ends both noble and ignoble. They can display exceptional generosity and kindness or wanton cruelty and vindictiveness.
p. 38
In 1987, Anton Szandor LaVey published his list of the nine Satanic Sins. My opinion is that abdication of the will not only deserves to be counted among them—many of them, such as “herd conformity,” already reflect abdication of the will to some degree—but that it should be counted as the most egregious of them all. To abdicate the will is to abdicate the very thing that makes one a Satanist.
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Works Cited and Referenced
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