Social Reality: Violence, Power, and Change
The Effects of Power - Part 3 - Submission

We are still talking about the effects of Power that I had to divide into five posts, the first one we make a Philosophical Rally, followed by the analysis of the Deprivation, today we talk about the Submission and the in next ones we will approach the subjects of Corruption and Resistance.

1 - Introduction

"Power must be scrutinized" - charlie777pt
Power is difficult to identify and is like a mysterious ingredient hidden behind veils within veils, in every act of social life.
Power has irrecoverable impacts on the destruction of humanity (people and planet) and the worst victims are those affected by impotence and submission that leads to dehumanization and marginalization.
This is correlated with increased profits in all multinationals, noting that most of them are from the US, and alerting to the fact that they totally disrespect the environment and the local human communities, and is driving globalization to give them control over legislation and internal control of the States.
The personal Power is the capacity of self-control and the participation on the management of the involving nature, as inalienable human rights and needs, acquired by birth with "green blood" of planet Earth, instead of the "blue blood" of the divine and institutional rulers.

"The first is the question of living space, for there are certain powers which are fighting for space those which are also called the totalitarian states. The fact that they are on the move is a sign that the division of the Earth, as developed historically, requires being altered." - Ernst Junger

Government is a destructive force in permanent conflicts with our liberty and individual rights, and it is showing and increasing hostility and invading people’s privacy and we must be aware and eternally vigilant.
We must resist.!!!
Submission to the abuse of power is the most harmful and annihilating force of any human natural energy and to the creative light of mankind.

The concentration of Power makes impossible the prevention of endemic corruption, generating inequality with policies and practices of governments, that can only be replaced by a total decentralization of power and participation in "our" decision-making processes.

The increasing distrust of citizens for those in Power is a potential basis for further public practices of direct action, against political solutions harming the interests of the collective.

"The modes and methods of technical thinking must not encroach where human happiness, love, and well-being should flourish" - Ernst Junger

The blockchain and decentralization can bring back the Power to the People and replace justice in the code of Law.
If you want to understand better the process of Submission and the relations between conformism and power I suggest this post, Is society going in the direction of a State conformism and a normalized mass behavior?

2 - Submission

Submission is interconnected with self-internalized authority, used by the power legitimating structures that induce obedience to orders, emanated from authority figures.
Power in the case of abuse generates a Submission based on the appropriation of a person self-ownership by blindness, voluntary meaningless servitude or pure conformism.
The Consequences of Power are multi-factorial involving various forms of compliance and submission, with variable degrees of motivation and autonomy on people, but can also create resistance and fight for freedom and rights.

2.1 - The Milgram experiment

This experiment is very well spread in universities, with lots of info on the Internet and even in Hollywood 's movie The Milgram Experiment (2009), a good alternative to people that don't like this long posts, or want to know more.
Milgram wanted to know how some of their relatives in concentration camps, have been murdered by human beings just in the base of obedience to authority, measuring the grade of submission and obedience in the presence of an "important" authoritarian figure pressing to go higher in the punishments.
The subjects were recruited for the experiment and were enthusiastic to participate, and in the beginning they are briefed that the study will measure the consequences of electric shocks on the memory of "false" subjects (students) This was tested in the process of learning association of words and adjectives, and the participants (teacher) must use electric shocks to punish the guinea pig's errors.

Of course, Milgram wanted to know what is the degree of obedience of the teacher, submited to the experimenter's authority.
The shocks can go from 15 to 450 volts graded in buttons in a panel in front of the teachers that will not see the student because he is behind a glass, but they can hear the sounds, they know he is wired in a chair and even has ointment for burnings.

The actor(student) according to the increasing shocks, would say ouch, complain, say stop, scream and near the end make sounds of collapsing.
The teachers are "pressured" by the authoritarian figure of the experimenter to increase punishment, urging the subject to continue to use more voltage to punish mistakes.
The amazing results showed that 62% of the participants went all the way up to the 450 volts until they were interrupted, sadly showing the tiny human resistance to the "force" and "importance" of authority by "blind obedience".

So the degree of Submission is based in the demands of an "important" authority, explaning all the horrors of the extermination camps, committed by "normal" people "working" in a factory of human slaughtering.

Milgram in parallel created a study asking three groups, psychiatrists, students and middle-class adults, what they would do in those circumstances, and what "other people" would do.
The surprising results showed that everybody was sure they would never obey when placed in that situation, with a bias of 2% of the people that would go all the way to the top electrocution ( but this was people with mental pathologies). :)

The group of Psychiatrists said that most of "other people" would never go up then 150 volts, 4% would go to 300 volts, and only 1 % or 2 % would go to the end and totally submit themselves to the present authority figure of the experimenter.
People deceive themselves into thinking that "other people" are good and do not punish the innocent, and that we are the owners of our actions, even with an "authority" that can erase our personal convictions, and we will try to understand what causes this feeling.

2.2 - Socialization and Power

During our life development since an early age, we live in a world of models of authority, in the family, in school, in the play yard, that we internalize and obey impositions but feeling it as "good" and "moral" the deed of obedience as a reward.
In situations like this where we have to obliterate our personal values, in reality, people try first to focus on the "biggest" and "best" authority figures present to look for models of orientation and submission avoiding the responsibility of assuming their autonomy.
Obedience is correlated with blindfold internalized "old" beliefs about what is right or wrong, by respect and submission to external authority.

2.3 - Actor Constraints by Power

Milgram concluded that there are two psychological facets: the autonomy of our sense of responsibility for our actions and the other is when people are subordinated to power and cleans up their consciences by sticking to the "orders" that are the appraisal of their actions/jobs.
Milgram found out too that people in this typical situations listen and pay much more attention to the authority than to the complaints and screams of the "student".
People have an Achilles' heel that makes them obey orders when they recognize "legitimate" power by a clearly identified source of authority, and they are giving a good image of themselves to the central person, and they put the responsibility of their convictions and values aside.
People are just following "orders", it's "guilt-free" and they are just "doing the job".
In another experiment under a weak institutional image with old buildings and offices, where surprisingly found out that in this conditions the teachers would go down to the end in 42% of the cases, compared to the 62% when the experiment was made in a reputed institution.

2.4 - Big Corporations

In Big Corporations, bureaucracy and technocracy are the manifestations of Power and the interpretation of its effects, created and controlled by the "out of reach" top leaders of the pyramid making the rules.
So the enterprise creates a double mirror where there seems to be an absence of submission to the authority as a illusion that there is no imposition.
Those "far away" rules that seem absent and diffuse because the mechanism of coercion is immanent in the regulations for the enterprise optimal functioning, creating a mirage that there is no submission but just good ways of doing things that give a false sense of controlling reality. and create an illusion like a "scrutinized and supervised freedom".

We have finished explaining in this post the aspect of Submission as a Consequence of Power, and the next ones go through the subject of Corruption and Resistance.

The original film made in the Milgram experiment

Last posts in this series on Social Reality: Violence, Power and Change
Introduction:

Social Reality: Violence, Power and Change

A - Violence:

An Introduction to Violence
The Concepts of Violence, Aggression, and Aggressiveness
The Theories on Violence
The influencers of Violence -Part One - Culture and Social Context
The influencers of Violence -Part Two - Social , Cognitive and Environmental Factors
The ascend of Today's Violence

B -Power:

What is Power? - Introduction
The Nature of Power

• Part I - The Notions of Power
• Part II -The Dimensions of Power
• Part III -The Foundations of Power

The Dynamics of Power:

• Part 1 - The Legitimacy of Authority
• Part 2 - The Models of Leadership
• Part 3 - Characteristics of Leadership
• Part 4 - The Relation in Leadership
• Part 5 - Decision-making and Leadership

The Effects and Consequences of Power

• Part 1- Philosophical Rally on the Matrix of Power
• Part 2 - Deprivation
• Part 3- Submission - this post

Articles from the next series of posts about Social Reality, Violence, Power and Change:

• Part 4- Corruption
• Part 5- Resistance

C - Change:

Change and Culture
The Theories and conceptualization of Change
Factors determining Change
The ways of Change
Social Change

References consulted:

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Castel, R. The metamorphoses of the social question. Voices, 1998.
Moscovici, S. (1976). Social influence and social change. London: Academic Press
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes.
French, J. R. P., Morrison, H. W., and Levinger, G. (1960). Coercive Power and forces affecting conformity
Dahl, R.A. (1957), The Concept of Power.
Giddens, Anthony, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber, 1971.
Grabb, Edward G., Theories of Social Inequality: Classical and Contemporary Perspectives,1990.
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Porter, L. and Lawler, E. (1968). Atitudes e Performances Administrativas. Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press.
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