Opposing Views On Obedience, By Doris Lessing

Obedience is complying with an order or the submission to authority. Humans are often obedient to different systems of authority throughout our life. Some of these may be to groups we belong to, for instance, a fitness club, church group, or beauty club. Others may be obeying the basic government laws within our everyday life, like traffic laws. Doris Lessing affirms that “the fact is that we all live our lives in groups- the family, work groups, social, religious and political groups” (652).We grow up obeying rules and laws that have been established since before we were born. Many of these rules were established for the purpose of a peaceful world set with structure. Psychologist Stanley Milgram asserts that “obedience is a basic element

Her overall concern is that the human race has an abundance of hard information available. However, we refuse to utilize it to improve social groups. Once we realize how easily groups can gain control of our lives, we can then begin to work on building groups that will improve our society. For instance, Lessing refers to experiments that most individuals are not aware of and explains that we refuse to go beyond our knowledge to become aware of this information. Although Lessing’s argument that human kind is naturally inclined to obedience of social pressures is valid and supported by a research from Milgram, her article lacks sufficient evidence to support her assertion of Westerners being “helpless against all kinds of pressures” (Lessing

She does not support her generalization of people from the West being ignorant to conforming to their surroundings. She asserts that “people in the West may go through their entire lives never thinking to analyze this very flattering picture, and as a result are helpless to all kinds of pressures on them to conform in many kinds of ways” (652). By contrast, Milgram proves that anyone is susceptible to conform while under pressure by providing a wide sample for his experiment with individuals of different backgrounds “As we moved from the pilot studies to the regular experimental series, people drawn from every stratum of New Heaven life came to be employed in the experiment: professionals, white-collard workers, unemployed persons, and industrial workers” (Milgram