Thinking for Yourself

Here's an experiment from Curtis MacDougall's book Hoaxes (1940): A coin about the size of a fifty-cent piece was passed around a class of 48 boys aged 14-17, with instructions to examine it carefully. At the end of the period, each boy was asked to draw the coin and indicate the position of the hole in it. Although there was no hole, all but four drew one. Some drew two. Of the four who correctly noted no hole existed, only one (described as "the bad boy of the class, unaccustomed to obeying orders") was positive there was no hole.

Read that again. Forty-four out of forty-eight boys drew a hole that didn't exist, because the instruction implied one was there. The obedient see what they're told to see. The disobedient see what's actually there. And the obedient always outnumber the disobedient, which is why the obedient get to define "reality" for everyone else.

Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments at Yale University (1961, published in Obedience to Authority, 1974) took this principle to its logical conclusion. Participants were instructed by an authority figure (a researcher in a lab coat) to administer what they believed were increasingly dangerous electric shocks to another person in the next room. 65% of participants administered what they believed were lethal shocks. They could hear the "victim" screaming (the screams were recorded by an actor). They expressed distress. Many protested. But when the authority figure said "the experiment requires that you continue," they continued. Two-thirds of ordinary, otherwise decent people were willing to kill a stranger because a man in a lab coat told them to.

The implications are staggering and directly relevant. This is the psychological mechanism that made the Inquisition possible. That makes war possible. That makes every atrocity committed "under orders" possible. It's not that the executioners were uniquely evil. It's that they were ordinary, and obedience was enough to make ordinary people do extraordinary evil. The authority figure in the Milgram experiment wore a lab coat. The authority figure in Christianity wears vestments. The mechanism is identical.

Those who are disobedient and do not conform are always labelled as threats. Socrates was labelled an impious corrupter of the youth and executed for it (Plato, Apology 24b-c). Hypatia was labelled a witch and murdered by a Christian mob. Giordano Bruno was labelled a heretic and burned alive for proposing that the universe was infinite and that other worlds might harbour life. In every case, the crime was the same: thinking independently in a system that requires conformity.

Zeus and the Daemons have been trying to reach humanity for centuries with a consistent message: everything is backwards. We save our own souls by thinking for ourselves. Nearly all of the original spiritual teachings have been inverted by the Abrahamic programmes. Healing has been branded as witchcraft. Knowledge has been branded as sin. Self-development has been branded as pride (the "deadliest" sin). The cure has been labelled the disease, and the disease has been labelled the cure.

Think. Question. Investigate. Verify. Trust your own perception over anyone's authority, including ours. If something we say doesn't ring true to your experience, question it. If a teaching contradicts what you observe directly, favour your observation. The mind that thinks for itself is the only mind the Gods can work with. A mind that accepts programming without examination is a tool for whoever installed the programme. The meditation programme trains the capacity for independent perception. The Family of the Gods honours it.