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Stanley Milgram: I believe we are puppets with perception, with awareness. Sometimes we can see the strings. And perhaps our awareness is the first step in our liberation.
Stanley Milgram: Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
Stanley Milgram: There was a time, I suspect, when men and women could give a fully human response to any situation, when we could be fully absorbed, in the world, as human beings, but more often now people don’t get to see the whole situation but only some small part of it. There’s a division of labour and people carry out small, narrow, specialised jobs and we can’t act without some sort of direction from on high. I call this the agentic state. The individual yields to authority and in doing so becomes alienated from his own actions. The agentic state is ‘store policy’, it’s ‘I’m just doing my job’, or ‘that’s not my job’, or ‘I don’t make the rules’, ‘we don’t do that here’. ‘just following orders’, ‘it’s the law’. In the agentic state the individual defines himself as an instrument carrying out the wishes of others – a soldier, a nurse, an administrator, an actor, a corporate employee, or even, yes, academics and artists.