THE MILGRAM PROJECT (THE DAWN OF A TORTURER)

“...nothing is more depressing than the spectacle of a person who, in an important position, tries to become master of his own actions without success”.

Stanley Milgram

This project is inspired by, and goes even further than, the renowned experiment of the social psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933-1984).

Milgram draws his final essay “Obedience to authority” from his experiment on the relationship between authority and obedience, conducted in 1962, in which he carefully illustrates all the phases of his experiment and the consequential results. The publication and the circulation of the results of this experiment had a great impact on the lifestyle of those living in democratic states.

Milgram had the idea to investigate this subject from observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, “the transporter of the dead”, that was taking place in Israel, (Eichmann was responsible for organising the trains that transported the Jews to the concentration camps).  What Milgram was impressed by (as was also Hannah Arendt in her basic principles “The banality of evil”, as well as a good percentage of the public) was the fact of not recreating Eichmann as a monster image, as evidenced by the cruelty and “evil” of his person. To the contrary this man presented himself as resigned, with the air of a normal clerk, whose usual response was “but I was just doing what I was told to do”; a number of opinions have been formed for this which range from the philosophical, to the legal, and to the scientific.  

From this concept comes the basic desire, within different categories, to understand what could have pushed a “normal” man to commit such atrocities. Milgram found other areas of support for his investigation, such as the studies of Solomon Asch on conformity; but while the studies of Asch discussed a verbal conformity, the research of Milgram on obedience directly involved conduct.

His research gave a solution to the readings of those violent acts perpetrated by some human beings towards others, which ranged from administrative violence to torture. What is the most disturbing outcome of this research is that these individuals were not monsters, sadists, perverts or psychopaths. Milgram’s individuals were ordinary men coming from all the social classes, and the sample of 40% of these individuals inflicted maximum punishment to their victims.

“The extermination of the European Jews carried out by the Nazis is only the most clamorous and despicable of a series of immoral acts conducted by thousands of individuals in the name of obedience. Every day we are called to assist, even if at a reduced level, at the spectacle of similar  behaviour; members of the public harm their fellow men in order to conform to orders which they feel they have to obey.  Must we  then conclude that obedience to authority, commemorated since ancient times as a virtue, has been transformed into a crime when used for the wrong reason? […]

To closely observe the obedience process, I organised a simple experiment at the University of Yale. This research, which would have included the participation of more than a thousand subject and would have been repeated in many other universities, was based on a an initial idea  which was very simple.

In a psychologist’s studio an individual was asked to complete a series of actions which always clashed with his conscience. The objective was to see how far the participants would have accepted to follow orders from an experimenter, and at what point they would have decided to end the experiment  […]

Two individuals were invited to a psychologist’s studio on the pretext of taking part in a study on “memory and learning”. One of them was assigned the role of the “teacher”, the other the role of the “learner”. The experimenter responsible for the study  explained that the study would look into the role of punishment in learning.  The learner  was taken into a room where he is strapped in a chair to prevent movement and an electrode is placed on his arm. His role was to memorise a list two word pairs and to read them back. If the answer was incorrect the teacher gave him an electric shock of increasing intensity.

The real subject of the experiment was, however, the teacher. After having ensured that the learner was strapped to his chair, he was taken into another room and made to sit in front of a large  generator which had 20 switches in 15 volt increments, each labelled with a voltage ranging from 15 up to 450 volts. Each switch also had a rating, ranging from “slight shock” to “danger: severe shock”. The role of the teacher was to test the learning skills of the individual in the other room. When the learner replied correctly, the teacher was supposed to proceed to the next question. When he made a mistake, he  was supposed to increase the electric shock starting with the lowest (15 volts), increasing the electric shock with the switches up to 450 volts. The teacher was an unsuspecting individual, convinced that he was participating in an experiment on learning, while the learner was an actor who did not in fact receive any electric shock […].

It would be legitimate to assume that most people would have abandoned the studio even before starting the experiment. But the events proceed in quite a different way […]

The results of this  experiment were surprising and frightening. Even though the  subjects showed clear symptoms of tension and strongly protested to the  experiment, a considerable percentage, nevertheless, continued to push right up to the last switch […]

[…]  the pleadings of the victims were not enough to make the participants in the  experiment  stop from carrying out the orders of the experimenter […]

The exasperated determination, on the part of adult persons, to arrive at the final stage of obedience to authority, was the principle discovery of our study […]

The most simple explanation might be to consider those individuals who administered the most violent electric shock, like monsters, were sadists, on the brink of society. But this is quite an unsubstantiated argument if you think that almost two-thirds of the participants fell into the category of “obedient” individuals who came from a sampling of normal people representative of different social classes […].

(taken from a Stanley Milgram essay)

Why should we be interested in working on this text now?

Above all, because it gives us a chance, as in the case of “Mother and Murderer”, to confront a theme that we find to be a distressing reality with consequential implications. These refer to the idealistic expulsion that society complies with when confronted with disturbed persons, such as a mother who kills her children or a man who tortures another. In fulfilling this attempt to detach monstrosity  from normality, our society, and each of us individually, tries to eliminate demonstrations of conflict and problems within our own social class. This behaviour, besides not having a positive result, tends to make things worse and, moreover, is indicated in Milgram’s experiment, encouraging an abuse of power in the gap between right and wrong.

The theatre has a great value in bringing about a public debate, allowing us to assist, as a group, in an event where we can share the uncertainties presented. 

We think that the actuality of this argument, at the more direct level of our daily life, is more than evident; specifically by proposing to re-discuss the concept of the presumed democracy of our governments, to re-examine the necessity for normal values that do not necessarily correspond to those of authority, and, again, question how much responsibility we have as individual citizens on how events happen.

From a conventional point of view, Milgram’s experiment contains a very interesting dramatic set that comes, not only from the exigencies of the stage but, more from the need to analyse an occurrence. While reading Milgram’s text, it is surprising to find theoretical similarities with the theatre, undoubtedly all quite unintentional; but these are what we are interested in exploring, perhaps because they will reveal human nature to us.

TIMES AND WAYS

The entire MILGRAM project envisages two performances.

The first one ‘Il fantasma dentro la macchina’ (The ghost in the machine) will have its preview at Festival delle Colline Torinesi (on June, 8th) and will debut at Drodesera>Centrale Fies (on July, 29th  to 30th ) .

The final work ‘l’alba di un torturatore’ (the dawn of a torturer)

(a Teatrino Clandestino, Romaeuropa Festival, ERT Emilia Romagna Teatro, Ferme du Buisson, Scene National de Marne la Vallée coproduction)

is going to be presented in October 2005 :

at Festival Temps d’Images, Ferme du Buisson (France) from 7th to 9th (dates to be confirmed)

at Romaeuropa Festival, Teatro Palladium (Rome) from 20th  to 23rd

at VIE Scena Contemporanea Festival, Modena from 27th  to 30th