Sociological Perspectives: Blind Obedience, By Karl Marx

Some big takeaways from this class were the three sociological perspectives, but for me, specifically the conflict theory. This theory or perspective was put forward by Karl Marx, and says that it “sees society as an arena of inequality the generates conflict and change.” This means society grows and changes based off of conflict. For example, there is one party who likes one thing, and another party who likes a different thing, so they compromise and meet somewhere in the middle, but then another group comes along and doesn’t like that new thing so they compromise. This repeats over and over again and never stops. There will always be someone who doesn’t like how something works, and because of this, there will always be change. This has had

Obedience is “compliance with commands given by an authority figure.” For example, when your mom asks you to do your laundry, and you actually do it. The idea of blind obedience, however, is following directions just because someone told you they should be followed. There is no real authority, just that assumed by you or society. For example, those who follow the laws are victims of blind obedience. We as a society give meaning to the laws and pretend they have authority, but if enough people decided they didn't want to follow them, then all authority would be lost. Like people saying “The law is the law.” One of the biggest moments this was observed was during World War II with the Nazis and concentration camps. When they were questioned, they almost all said “I was just following orders.” This idea of blind obedience, of course, seems crazy and everybody agrees that they would never do anything like that, but, we, as humans do. For example, say a doctor put you in a room and you were given a device to shock another person in a different room. If the doctor kept urging you to shock the patient, even up to lethal amounts, nobody would just say okay; that just seems absurd. As outrageous as this sounds, this scenario did take place as part of an experiment and the subjects did just that. This is exactly what the Milgram experiment was. It showed that 65% of the people tested, when being urged by the “doctor”, went up to levels of shock that are considered lethal. Of course, nobody was being shocked, but the people did not know that. They just blindly agreed. This immediately reminds me of peer pressure. A person of power doesn't have to be someone in a lab coat. It is whatever an individual decides to give power to at the time. So when someone wants to fit in, they will give power to others to tell them what to do. Even if that leads to bad decisions, they will blindly