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Obedience, Authority, and Climate Paralysis: Reassessing the Milgram Analogy in the Age of Trump [1]

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Date: 2025-06-19

Obedience, Authority, and Climate Paralysis: Reassessing the Milgram Analogy in the Age of Trump

In Climate Catastrophe and Stanley Milgram’s Electric Shock “Obedience” Experiments: An Uncanny Analogy (www.mdpi.com/...), authors Nestar Russell and Annette Bolton explore a deeply unsettling parallel: the same psychological mechanisms that enabled participants in Milgram’s famous obedience experiments to inflict pain on others may also be operating today, enabling societal inaction in the face of climate catastrophe. Their analysis is incisive and timely. Yet, to fully grasp the political implications of their analogy, it is essential to examine how certain political figures—most notably, the Trump administration—have not only mirrored but actively weaponized the very dynamics Milgram identified. In doing so, they have magnified the "Milgram effect" on a mass scale, turning democratic disengagement and climate denial into instruments of political strategy.

Understanding the Analogy: Milgram Meets Climate Inaction

Russell and Bolton begin by acknowledging a troubling paradox: despite the public's growing awareness of climate change over the past several decades, greenhouse gas emissions have only continued to rise. Why, in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus and worsening environmental consequences, do so many remain passive or even resistant to change?

They propose that Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments provide insight. In the 1960s, Milgram famously demonstrated that ordinary people, when placed in a system that sanctions authority and diffuses responsibility, will obey commands that result in the suffering of others. Participants in his study administered what they believed were painful electric shocks to a stranger simply because an authority figure instructed them to do so. Most continued even as the "victim" protested in distress.

Russell and Bolton draw a provocative analogy:

⁃ The "Experimenter" is represented today by powerful political leaders, corporate executives, and media figures who legitimize harmful environmental practices.

⁃ The "Teacher" becomes the functionary citizen, the worker, or the consumer—those who follow instructions, cast votes, or make purchases without questioning the long-term consequences.

⁃ The "Learner" represents future generations and the natural world—those who suffer from the results of our present-day actions.

The authors argue that much like Milgram's participants, many citizens operate within systems that abstract and compartmentalize harm, making it psychologically easier to comply with destructive norms. Obedience becomes not an act of malice, but a byproduct of normalization and structural coercion.

The Milgram Effect and the Trump Era

While Russell and Bolton's analogy is illuminating, it leaves unexamined how obedience can be cultivated and intensified through political strategy. The Trump administration provides a vivid case study in how Milgram's findings have been employed—consciously or not—to encourage compliance, stifle dissent, and deepen the crisis of climate inaction.

1. Manufacturing Authoritative Legitimacy

In Milgram's experiments, the authority figure—symbolized by a lab coat—projected legitimacy that encouraged obedience. Likewise, the Trump administration crafted a carefully curated image of infallibility, supported by partisan media outlets and a robust online propaganda apparatus. Scientific dissent, especially regarding climate change, was routinely attacked. Experts were labeled as politically motivated, elitist, or fraudulent.

This framing established a false dichotomy: to obey the authority was patriotic; to question it was un-American. The space for critical engagement was squeezed out.

2. Diffusing and Deflecting Responsibility

Trump and his allies employed misinformation and strategic deflection to relieve citizens of personal responsibility. By shifting blame to other countries, casting doubt on climate science, and labeling environmentalism as a partisan or globalist agenda, they normalized inaction.

In this way, citizens could participate in a harmful system without perceiving themselves as morally complicit—a direct parallel to Milgram’s subjects who continued delivering shocks while claiming they were "just following orders."

3. Bureaucratic Obedience and Institutional Sabotage

Within federal agencies, the administration reshaped environmental policy through top-down directives that punished dissent and rewarded compliance. Whistleblowers were demoted or dismissed; environmental protections were rolled back by executive decree. Scientists were silenced, and decision-making power was consolidated among political loyalists.

As in Milgram's study, the system enabled functionaries to carry out harmful tasks with a sense of bureaucratic detachment, reinforced by institutional pressure to conform.

4. The Press as Enabler

Milgram noted that dissent reduced obedience. In a healthy democracy, independent journalism serves as that voice of dissent. Yet during this period, key segments of the media became instruments of reinforcement rather than resistance. Outlets amplified denial, spread disinformation, or downplayed the urgency of climate change.

Rather than exposing the experiment for what it was, much of the media normalized it. The "experimenter" was no longer questioned, and the "learner" remained unheard.

Conclusion: Escaping the Experiment

Russell and Bolton's analogy between Milgram's obedience experiments and modern climate inaction is more than a metaphor; it is a mirror. Yet if we accept this analogy, we must also confront the real-world systems that weaponize obedience.

The Trump administration—through rhetorical manipulation, institutional reshaping, and media co-optation—successfully applied the Milgram model to climate inaction. It created a culture in which obedience to harmful authority was normalized, dissent was punished, and truth was deformed to serve power.

To break free from this apparatus, we need more than policy reforms. We need a reinvigoration of civic conscience, institutional protections for dissent, and a collective reckoning with how easily complicity takes root. Only then can we hope to disrupt the experiment now playing out in real time—not in a laboratory, but on a rapidly warming planet.

The stakes, unlike in Milgram's simulated study, could not be more real.

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