Obedience: How Far Can It Go?

By Louis Perez y Cid

We like to believe that executioners are monsters.
Apart beings, deviant, recognizable. This idea is reassuring. It draws a clear line between good and evil, between “them” and “us.” Above all, it allows us to avoid questioning things too much.

The work of Stanley Milgram shattered this illusion.

In the 1960s, Milgram staged a simple experiment. An ordinary man had to administer electric shocks to a stranger every time the latter made a mistake. The shocks increased. So did the protests. Then silence.

In the room, a calm, legitimate authority figure insisted, “Continue.”

Most obeyed.
Not out of cruelty. Not out of hatred. But because a framework had been established, a hierarchy put in place, an order given.

What Milgram reveals echoes, in a different form, Hannah Arendt's intuition: evil does not always arise from the violence of passions, but from the erasure of conscience behind function.
One no longer acts. One executes.

Cinema has powerfully captured this mechanism. In "The Confession," Yves Montand plays a man crushed by a political machine that demands he confess to wrongdoings he did not commit. This is not Milgram. But it is an echo of him: an authority that imposes itself, a truth that dissolves, and an individual who ultimately yields, not merely under physical coercion, but under the weight of the system.
Nothing in these situations is spectacular. Everything is gradual. One instruction. Then another. A minor concession. Then a second. Until the moment when it becomes harder to stop than to continue.

It would be wrong, however, to conclude that obedience is inherently dangerous.

In any army, it is a vital necessity. It fosters cohesion, maneuverability, and combat effectiveness. In the Legion more than anywhere else, it is a foundation. It is non-negotiable.

But it is not blind.

For discipline only has meaning if it rests on something more solid than itself, an inner imperative, a form of loyalty to that which cannot be delegated.
Honor, precisely.

That is where the fault line lies.

Between obeying and submitting.

Between serving and effacement.

Between carrying out an order and relinquishing responsibility for it.
Stanley Milgram's experiments do not say that man is weak. They say that he can become so if he abdicates that inner strength that allows him, one day, to say no.

And perhaps that, ultimately, is the real test.

Not whether one is capable of obeying.

But knowing when to stop.

Because a soldier can receive an order.
But he never gets rid of his conscience.