Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View – Stanely Milgram

Chapter 1

The Dilemma of Obedience

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A commonly offered explanation is that those who shocked the victim at the most severe level were monsters, the sadistic fringe of society. But if one considers that almost two-thirds of the participants fall into the category of “obedient” subjects, and that they represented ordinary people drawn from working, mana­gerial, and professional classes, the argument becomes very shaky. Indeed, it is highly reminiscent of the issue that arose in connection with Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book, Eichmann in Jeru­salem. Arendt contended that the ,prosecution’s effort to depict Eichmann as a sadistic monster was fundamentally wrong, that he came closer to being an uninspired bureaucrat who simply sat at his desk and did his job. For asserting these views, Arendt became the object of considerable scorn, even calumny. Some­how, it was felt that the monstrous deeds carried out by Eich­mann required a brutal, twisted, and sadistic personality, evil incarnate. After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine. The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation-a concep­tion of his duties as a subject-and not from any peculiarly aggressive tendencies.

This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any par­ticular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist author­ity. A variety of inhibitions against disobeying authority come into play and successfully keep the person in his place.

Sitting back in one’s armchair, it is easy to condemn the actions of the obedient subjects. But those who condemn the subjects measure them against the standard of their own ability to formulate high-minded moral prescriptions. That is hardly a fair standard. Many of the subjects, at the level of stated opinion, feel quite as strongly as any of us about the moral requirement of refraining from action against a helpless victim. They, too, in general terms know what ought to be done and can state their values when the occasion arises. This has little, if anything, to do with their actual behavior under the pressure of circumstances.

If people are asked to render a moral judgment on what constitutes appropriate behavior in this situation, they unfailingly see disobedience as proper. But values are not the only forces at work in an actual, ongoing situation. They are but one narrow band of causes in the total spectrum of forces impinging on a person. Many people were unable to realize their values in action and found themselves continuing in the experiment even though they disagreed with what they were doing.

The force exerted by the moral sense of the individual is less effective than social myth would have us believe. Though such prescriptions as “Thou shalt not kill” occupy a pre-eminent place in the moral order, they do not occupy a correspondingly intrac­table position in human psychic structure. A few changes in newspaper headlines, a call from the draft board, orders from a man with epaulets, and men are led to kill with little difficulty. Even the forces mustered in a psychology experiment will go a long way toward removing the individual from moral controls. Moral factors can be shunted aside with relative ease by a calcu­lated restructuring of the informational and social field.

What, then, keeps the person obeying the experimenter? First, there is a set of “binding factors” that lock the subject into the situation. They include such factors as politeness on his part, his desire to uphold his initial promise of aid to the experimenter, and the awkwardness of withdrawal. Second, a number of adjust­ments in the subject’s thinking occur that undermine his resolve to break with the authority. The adjustments help the subject maintain his relationship with the experimenter, while at the same time reducing the strain brought about by the experimental conflict. They are typical of thinking that comes about in obedi­ent persons when they are instructed by authority to act against helpless individuals.

One such mechanism is the tendency of the individual to become so absorbed in the narrow technical aspects of the task that he loses sight of its broader consequences. The film Dr. Strangelove brilliantly satirized the absorption of a bomber crew in the exacting technical procedure of dropping nuclear weapons on a country. Similarly, in this experiment, subjects become immersed in the procedures, reading the word pairs with ex­quisite articulation and pressing the switches with great care. They want to put on a competent performance, but they show an accompanying narrowing of moral concern. The subject entrusts the broader tasks of setting goals and assessing morality to the experimental authority he is serving.

The most common adjustment of thought in the obedient subject is for him to see himself as not responsible for his own actions. He divests himself of responsibility by attributing all initiative to the experimenter, a legitimate authority. He sees himself not as a person acting in a morally accountable way but as the agent of external authority. In the postexperimental inter­view, when subjects were asked why they had gone on, a typical reply was: “I wouldn’t have done it by myself. I was just doing what I was told.” Unable to defy the authority of the experi­menter, they attribute all responsibility to him. It is the old story of “just doing one’s duty” that was heard time and time again in the defense statements of those accused at Nuremberg. But it would be wrong to think of it as a thin alibi concocted for the occasion. Rather, it is a fundamental mode of thinking for a great many people once they are locked into a subordinate position in a structure of authority. The disappearance of a sense of responsi­bility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

Although a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to violate standards of conscience, it would not be true to say that he loses his moral sense. Instead, it acquires a radi­cally different focus. He does not respond with a moral sentiment to the actions he performs. Rather, his moral concern now shifts to a consideration of how well he is living up to the expectations that the authority has of him. In wartime, a soldier does not ask whether it is good or bad to bomb a hamlet; he does not experi­ence shame or guilt in the destruction of a village: rather he feels pride or shame depending on how well he has performed the mission assigned to him.

Another psychological force at work in this situation may be termed “counteranthropomorphism.” For decades psychologists have discussed the primitive tendency among men to attribute to inanimate objects and forces the qualities of the human species. A countervailing tendency, however, is that of attributing an imper­sonal quality to forces that are essentially human in origin and maintenance. Some people treat systems of human origin as if they existed above and beyond any human agent, beyond the control of whim or human feeling. The human element behind agencies and institutions is denied. Thus, when the experimenter says, “The experiment requires that you continue,” the subject feels this to be an imperative that goes beyond any merely human command. He does not ask the seemingly obvious question, “Whose experiment? Why should the designer be served while the victim suffers?” The wishes of a man-the designer of the experiment-have become part of a schema which exerts on the subject’s mind a force that transcends the personal. “It’s got to go on. It’s got to go on,” repeated one subject. He failed to realize that a man like himself wanted it to go on. For him the human agent had faded from the picture, and “The Experiment” had acquired an impersonal momentum of its own.

No action of itself has an unchangeable psychological quality. Its meaning can be altered by placing it in particular contexts. An American newspaper recently quoted a pilot who conceded that Americans were bombing Vietnamese men, women, and children but felt that the bombing was for a “noble cause” and thus was justified. Similarly, most subjects in the experiment see their behavior in a larger context that is benevolent and useful to society-the pursuit of scientific truth. The psychological labo­ratory has a strong claim to legitimacy and evokes trust and confidence in those who come to perform there. An action such as shocking a victim, which in isolation appears evil, acquires a totally different meaning when placed in this setting. But allow­ing an act to be dominated by its context, while neglecting its human consequences, can be dangerous in the extreme.

At least one essential feature of the situation in Germany was not studied here-namely, the intense devaluation of the victim prior to action against him. For a decade and more, vehement anti-Jewish propaganda systematically prepared the German population to accept the destruction of the Jews. Step by step the Jews were excluded from the category of citizen and national, and finally were denied the status of human beings. Systematic de­valuation of the victim provides a measure of psychological justification for brutal treatment of the victim and has been the constant accompaniment of massacres, pogroms, and wars. In all likelihood, our subjects would have experienced greater ease in shocking the victim had he been convincingly portrayed as a brutal criminal or a pervert.

Of considerable interest, however, is the fact that many sub­jects harshly devalue the victim as a consequence of acting against him. Such comments as, “He was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get shocked,” were common. Once having acted against the victim, these subjects found it necessary to view him as an unworthy individual, whose punishment was made inevi­table by his own deficiencies of intellect and character.

Many of the people studied in the experiment were in some sense against what they did to the learner, and many protested even while they obeyed. But between thoughts, words, and the critical step of disobeying a malevolent authority lies another ingredient, the capacity for transforming beliefs and values into action. Some subjects were totally convinced of the wrongness of what they were doing but could not bring themselves to make an open break with authority. Some derived satisfaction from their thoughts and felt that-within themselves, at least-they had been on the side of the angels. What they failed to realize is that subjective feelings are largely irrelevant to the moral issue at hand so long as they are not transformed into action. Political control is effected through action. The attitudes of the guards at a concentration camp are of no consequence when in fact they are allowing the slaughter of innocent men to take place before them. Similarly, so-called “intellectual resistance” in occupied Europe­-in which persons by a twist of thought felt that they had defied the invader-was merely indulgence in a consoling psychological mechanism. Tyrannies are perpetuated by diffident men who do not possess the courage to act out their beliefs. Time and again in the experiment people disvalued what they were doing but could not muster the inner resources to translate their values into action.

A variation of the basic experiment depicts a dilemma more common than the one outlined above: the subject was not ordered to push the trigger that shocked the victim, but merely to perform a subsidiary act (administering the word-pair test) be­fore another subject actually delivered the shock. In this situation, 37 of 40 adults from the New Haven area continued to the highest shock level on the generator. Predictably, subjects ex­cused their behavior by saying that the responsibility belonged to the man who actually pulled the switch. This may illustrate a dangerously typical situation in complex society: it is psychologi­cally easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermedi­ate link in a chain of evil action but is far from the final consequences of the action. Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but to participate in mass murder he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers. At the same time the man in the camp who actually dropped Cyclon-B into the gas chambers was able to justify his behavior on the grounds that he was only following orders from above. Thus there is a fragmentation of the total human act; no one man decides to carry out the evil act and is confronted with its consequences. The person who assumes full responsibility for the act has evapo­rated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organized evil in modern society.

The problem of obedience, therefore, is not wholly psycho­logical. The form and shape of society and the way it is develop­ing have much to do with it. There was a time, perhaps, when men were able to give a fully human response to any situation because they were fully absorbed in it as human beings. But as soon as there was a division of labor among men, things changed. Beyond a certain point, the breaking up of society into people carrying out narrow and very special jobs takes away from the human quality of work and life. A person does not get to see the whole situation but only a small part of it, and is thus unable to act without some kind of over-all direction. He yields to authority but in doing so is alienated from his own actions.

George Orwell caught the essence of the situation when he wrote:

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are on]y “doing their duty,” as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well ­placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it.

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Chapter 11

The Process of Obedience:
Applying the Analysis to the Experiment
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Antecedent Conditions of Obedience

First, we need to consider forces that acted on the person before he became our subject, forces that shaped his basic ori­entation to the social world and laid the groundwork for obedience.

Family

The subject has grown up in the midst of structures of authority. From his very first years, he was exposed to parental regulation, whereby a sense of respect for adult authority was inculcated. Parental injunctions are also the source of moral imperatives. However, when a parent instructs a child to follow a moral injunction, he is, in fact, doing two things. First, he pre­sents a specific ethical content to be followed. Second, he trains the child to comply with authoritative injunctions per se. Thus, when a parent says, “Don’t strike smaller children,” he provides not one imperative but two. The first concerns the manner in which the recipient of the command is to treat smaller children (the prototype of those who are helpless and innocent); the second and implicit imperative is, “And obey me!” Thus, the very genesis of our moral ideals is inseparable from the inculcation of an obedient attitude. Moreover, the demand for obedience re­mains the only consistent element across a variety of specific commands, and thus tends to acquire a prepotent strength rela­tive to any particular moral content.

Institutional Setting

As soon as the child emerges from the cocoon of the family, he is transferred to an institutional system of authority, the school. Here, the child learns not merely a specific curriculum but also how to function within an organizational framework. His actions are, to a significant degree, regulated by his teachers, but he can perceive that they in turn are subjected to the discipline and requirements of a headmaster. The student observes that arro­gance is not passively accepted by.authority but severely rebuked and that deference is the only appropriate and comfortable re­sponse to authority.

The first twenty years of the young person’s life are spent functioning as a subordinate element in an authority system, and upon leaving school, the male usually moves into either a civilian job or military service. On the job, he learns that although some discreetly expressed dissent is allowable, an underlying posture of submission is required for harmonious functioning with superiors. However much freedom of detail is allowed the individual, the situation is defined as one in which he is to do a job prescribed by someone else.

While structures of authority are of necessity present in all societies, advanced or primitive, modern society has the added characteristic of teaching individuals to respond to impersonal authorities. Whereas submission to authority is probably no less for an Ashanti than for an American factory worker, the range of persons who constitute authorities for the native are all per­sonally known to him, while the modern industrial world forces individuals to submit to impersonal authorities, so that responses are made to abstract rank, indicated by an insignia, uniform or title.

Rewards

Throughout this experience with authority, there is continual confrontation with a reward structure in which compliance with authority has been generally rewarded, while failure to comply has most frequently been punished. Although many forms of reward are meted out for dutiful compliance, the most ingenious is this: the individual is moved up a niche in the hierarchy, thus both motivating the person and perpetuating the structure simul­taneously. This form of reward, “the promotion,” carries with it profound emotional gratification for the individual but its special feature is the fact that it ensures the continuity of the hierarchi­cal form.

The net result of this experience is the internalization of the social order-that is, internalizing the set of axioms by which social life is conducted. And the chief axiom is: do what the man in charge says. Just as we internalize grammatical rules, and can thus both understand and produce new sentences, so we internal­ize axiomatic rules of social life which enable us to fulfill social requirements in novel situations. In any hierarchy of rules, that which requires compliance to authority assumes a paramount position.

Among the antecedent conditions, therefore, are the indi­vidual’s familial experience, the general societal setting built on impersonal systems of authority, and extended experience with a reward structure in which compliance with authority is re­warded, and failure to comply punished. While without doubt providing the background against which our subject’s habits of conduct were formed, these conditions are beyond the control of experimentation and do not immediately trigger movement to the agentic state. Let us now turn to the more immediate factors, within a specific situation, that lead to the agentic state.

Immediate Antecedent Conditions

Perception of authority. The first condition needed for trans­formation to the agentic state is the perception of a legitimate authority. From a psychological standpoint, authority means the person who is perceived to be in a position of social control within a given situation. Authority is contextually perceived and does not necessarily transcend the situation in which it is encoun­tered. For example, should the experimenter encounter the sub­ject on the street, he would have no special influence on him. A pilot’s authority over his passengers does not extend beyond the airplane. Authority is normatively supported: there is a shared expectation among people that certain situations do ordinarily have a socially controlling figure. Authority need not possess high status in the sense of “prestige.” For example, an usher at a theater is a source of social control to whom we ordinarily submit willingly. The power of an authority stems not from personal characteristics but from his perceived position in a social structure.

The question of how authority communicates itself seems, at first, not to require a special answer. We invariably seem to know who is in charge. We may, nonetheless, examine the behavior in the laboratory to try to dissect the process a little.

First, the subject enters the situation with the expectation that someone will be in charge. Thus, the experimenter, upon first presenting himself, fills a gap experienced by the subject. Accord­ingly, the experimenter need not assert his authority, but merely identify it. He does so through a few introductory remarks, and since this self-defining ritual fits perfectly with the subject’s expectation of encountering a man in charge, it is not challenged. A supporting factor is the confidence and “air of authority” exhibited by the experimenter. Just as a servant possesses a deferential manner, so his master exudes a commanding presence that subtly communicates his dominant status within the situa­tion at hand.

Second, external accouterments are often used to signify the authority in a given situation. Our experimenter was dressed in a gray technician’s coat, which linked him to the laboratory. Police, military, and other service uniforms are the most conspicuous signs of authority within common experience. Third, the subject notes the absence of competing authorities. (No one else claims to be in charge, and this helps confirm the presumption that the experimenter is the right man.) Fourth, there is the absence of conspicuously anomalous factors (e.g., a child of five claiming to be the scientist).

It is the appearance of authority and not actual authority to which the subject responds. Unless contradictory information or anomalous facts appear, the self-designation of the authority almost always suffices.

Entry into the Authority System. A second condition triggering the shift to the agentic state is the act of defining the person as part of the authority system in question. It is not enough that we perceive an authority, he must be an authority relevant to us. Thus, if we watch a parade, and hear a Colonel shout, “Left face,” we do not turn left, for we have not been defined as subordinate to his command. There is always a transition from that moment when we stand outside an authority system to that point when we are inside it. Authority systems are frequently limited by a physi­cal context, and often we come under the influence of an author­ity when we cross the physical threshold into his domain. The fact that this experiment is carried out in a laboratory has a good deal to do with the degree of obedience exacted. There is a feeling that the experimenter “owns” the space and that the subject must conduct himself fittingly, as if a guest in some one’s house. If the experiment were to be carried on outside the laboratory, obedience would drop sharply.

Even more important, for the present experiment, is the fact that entry into the experimenter’s realm of authority is voluntary, undertaken through the free will of the participants. The psycho­logical consequence of voluntary entry is that it creates a sense of commitment and obligation which will subsequently play a part in binding the subject to his role.

Were our subjects forcibly introduced to the experiment, they might well yield to authority, but the psychological mechanisms would be quite different from what we have observed. Generally, and wherever possible, society tries to create a sense of voluntary entry into its various institutions. Upon induction into the military, recruits take an oath of allegiance, and volunteers are pre­ferred to inductees. While people will comply with a source of social control under coercion (as when a gun is aimed at them), the nature of obedience under such circumstances is limited to direct surveillance. When the gunman leaves, or when his capac­ity for sanctions is eliminated, obedience stops. In the case of voluntary obedience to a legitimate authority, the principal sanc­tions for disobedience come from within the person. They are not dependent upon coercion, but stem from the individual’s sense of commitment to his role. In this sense, there is an internalized basis for his obedience, not merely an external one.

Coordination of Command with the Function of Authority. Authority is the perceived source of social control within a specific context. The context defines the range of commands con­sidered appropriate to the authority in question. There must, in general, be some intelligible link between the function of the controlling person, and the nature of the commands he issues. The connection need not be very well worked out but need only make sense in the most general way. Thus, in a military situation, a captain may order a subordinate to perform a highly dangerous action, but he may not order the subordinate to embrace his girl­friend. In one case, the order is logically linked to the general function of the military, and in the other case it is not.

In the obedience experiment, the subject acts within the context of a learning experiment and sees the experimenter’s commands as meaningfully coordinated to his role. In the context of the laboratory, such commands are felt to be appropriate in a general way, however much one may argue with certain specific developments that later occur.

Because the experimenter issues orders in a context he is presumed to know something about, his power is increased. Generally, authorities are felt to know more than the person they are commanding; whether they do or not, the occasion is defined as if they do. Even when a subordinate possesses a greater degree of technical knowledge than his superior, he must not presume to override the authority’s right to command but must present this knowledge to the superior to dispose of as he wishes. A typical source of strain occurs in authority systems when the person in authority is incompetent to the point of endangering the sub­ordinates.

The Overarching Ideology. The perception of a legitimate source of social control within a defined social occasion is a necessary prerequisite for a shift to the agentic state. But the legitimacy of the occasion itself depends on its articulation to a justifying ideology. When subjects enter the laboratory and are told to perform, they do not in a bewildered fashion cry out, “I never heard of science. What do you mean by this?” Within this situation, the idea of science and its acceptance as a legitimate social enterprise provide the overarching ideological justification for the experiment. Such institutions as business, the church, the government, and the educational establishment provide other legitimate realms of activity, each justified by the values and needs of society, and also, from the standpoint of the typical person, accepted because they exist as part of the world in which he is born and grows up. Obedience could be secured outside such institutions, but it would not be the form of willing obedience, in which the person complies with a strong sense of doing the right thing. Moreover, if the experiment were carried out in a culture very different from our own-say, among Trobrianders-it would be necessary to find the functional equivalent of science in order to obtain psychologically com­parable results. The Trobriander may not believe in scientists, but he respects witch doctors. The fourteenth-century Spanish Jesuit might have eschewed science, but he embraced the ideology of his church, and in its name, and for its preservation, tightened the screw on the rack without any problem of conscience.

Ideological justification is vital in obtaining willing obedience, for it permits the person to see his behavior as serving a desirable end. Only when viewed in this light, is compliance easily exacted.

An authority system, then, consists of a minimum of two persons sharing the expectation that one of them has the right to prescribe behavior for the other. In the current study, the experi­menter is the key element in a system that extends beyond his person. The system includes the setting of the experiment, the impressive laboratory equipment, the devices which inculcate a sense of obligation in the subject, the mystique of science of which the experiment is a part, and the broad institutional ac­cords that permit such activities to go on-that is, the diffuse societal support that is implied by the very fact that the experi­ment is being run and tolerated in a civilized city.

The experimenter acquires his capacity to influence behavior not by virtue of the exercise of force or threat but by virtue of the position he occupies in a social structure. There is general agree­ment not only that he can influence behavior but that he ought to be able to. Thus, his power comes about in some degree through the consent of those over whom he presides. But once this consent is initially granted, its withdrawal does not proceed automatically or without great cost.

The Agentic State

What are the properties of the agentic state, and its consequences for the subject?

Moved into the agentic state, the person becomes something different from his former self, with new properties not easily traced to his usual personality.

First, the entire set of activities carried out by the subject comes to be pervaded by his relationship to the experimenter; the subject typically wishes to perform competently and to make a good appearance before this central figure. He directs his atten­tion to those features of the situation required for such competent performance. He attends to the instructions, concentrates on the technical requirements of administering shocks, and finds himself absorbed in the narrow technical tasks at hand. Punishment of the learner shrinks to an insignificant part of the total experience, a mere gloss on the complex activities of the laboratory.

Tuning

Those not familiar with the experiment may think that the predicament of the subject is one in which he is assaulted by conflicting forces emanating from the learner and the experi­menter. In a very real sense, however, a process of tuning occurs in the subject, with maximal receptivity to the emissions of the authority, whereas the learner’s signals are muted and psycho­logically remote. Those who are skeptical of this effect might observe the behavior of individuals organized in a hierarchical structure. The meeting of a company president with his subordi­nates will do. The subordinates respond with attentive concern to each word uttered by the president. Ideas originally mentioned by persons of a low status will frequently not be heard, but when repeated by the president, they are greeted with enthusiasm.

There is nothing especially malicious in this; it reflects the natural responses to authority. If we explore a little more deeply, we will see why this is so: the person in authority, by virtue of that position, is in the optimal position to bestow benefits or inflict deprivations. The boss can fire or promote; the military superior can send a man into dangerous combat or give him a soft job; the tribal patriarch consents to a marriage or orders an execution; thus, it is highly adaptive to attend with meticulous concern to authority’s whim.

Because of this, authority tends to be seen as something larger than the individual. The individual often views authority as an impersonal force, whose dictates transcend mere human wish or desire. Those in authority acquire, for some, a suprahuman character.

The phenomenon of differential tuning occurs with impressive regularity in the experiment at hand. The learner operates under the handicap that the subject is not truly attuned to him, for the subject’s feelings and percepts are dominated by the presence of the experimenter. For many subjects, the learner becomes simply an unpleasant obstacle interfering with attainment of a satisfying relationship with the experimenter. His pleas for mercy are consequential only in that they add a certain discomfort to what evidently is required of the subject if he is to gain the approval of the central emotional figure in the situation.

Redefining the Meaning of the Situation

Control the manner in which a man interprets his world, and you have gone a long way toward controlling his behavior. That is why ideology, an attempt to interpret the condition of man, is always a prominent feature of revolutions, wars, and other cir­cumstances in which individuals are called upon to perform extraordinary action. Governments invest heavily in propaganda, which constitutes the official manner of interpreting events.

Every situation also possesses a kind of ideology, which we call the “definition of the situation,” and which is the interpreta­tion of the meaning of a social occasion. It provides the perspective through which the elements of a situation gain coherence. An act viewed in one perspective may seem heinous; the same action viewed in another perspective seems fully warranted. There is a propensity for people to accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority. That is, although the subject performs the action, he allows authority to define its meaning.

It is this ideological abrogation to the authority that consti­tutes the principal cognitive basis of obedience. If, after all, the world or the situation is as the authority defines it, a certain set of actions follows logically.

Loss of Responsibility

The most far-reaching consequence of the agentic shift is that a man feels responsible to the authority directing him but feels no

The relationship between authority and subject, therefore, cannot be viewed as one in which a coercive figure forces action from an unwilling subordinate. Because the subject accepts au­thority’s definition of the situation, action follows willingly responsibility for the content of the actions that the authority prescribes. Morality does not disappear, but acquires a radically different focus: the subordinate person feels shame or pride depending on how adequately he has performed the actions called for by authority.

Language provides numerous terms to pinpoint this type of morality: loyalty, duty, discipline, all are terms heavily saturated with moral meaning and refer to the degree to which a person fulfills his obligations to authority. They refer not to the “good­ness” of the person per se but to the adequacy with which a subordinate fulfills his socially defined role. The most frequent defense of the individual who has performed a heinous act under command of authority is that he has simply done his duty. In asserting this defense, the individual is not introducing an alibi concocted for the 1l10ment but is reporting honestly on the psy­chological attitude induced by submission to authority.

For a man to feel responsible for his actions, he must sense that the behavior has flowed from “the self.” In the situation we have studied, subjects have precisely the opposite view of their actions-namely, they see them as originating in the motives of some other person. Subjects in the experiment frequently said, “If it were up to me, I would not have administered shocks to the learner :”

Superego functions shift from an evaluation of the goodness or badness of the acts to an assessment of how well or poorly one is functioning in the authority system. Because the inhibitory forces which prevent the individual from acting harshly against others on his own are short-circuited, actions are no longer limited by conscience.

Consider an individual who, in everyday life, is gentle and kind. Even in moments of anger he does not strike out against those who have frustrated him. Feeling that he must spank a mischievous child, he finds the task distasteful; indeed, the very musculature in his arms becomes paralyzed, and he abandons the task. Yet, when taken into military service he is ordered to drop bombs on people, and he does so. The act does not originate in his own motive system and thus is not checked by the inhibitory forces of his internal psychological system. In growing up, the normal individual has learned to check the expression of aggres­sive impulses. But the culture has failed, almost entirely, in inculcating internal controls on actions that have their origin in authority. For this reason, the latter constitutes a far greater danger to human survival.

Self-Image

It is not only important to people that they look good to others, they must also look good to themselves. A person’s ego ideal can be an important source of internal inhibitory regulation. Tempted to perform harsh action, he may assess its consequences for his self-image and refrain. But once the person has moved into the agentic state, this evaluative mechanism is wholly absent. The action, since it no longer stems from motives of his own, no longer reflects on his self-image and thus has no consequences for self-conception. Indeed, the individual frequently discerns an opposition between what he himself wishes on the one hand and what is required of him on the other. He sees the action, even though he performs it, as alien to his nature. For this reason, actions performed under command are, from the subject’s view­point, virtually guiltless, however inhumane they may be. And it is toward authority that the subject turns for confirmation of his worth.

Commands and the Agentic State

The agentic state constitutes a potential out of which specific acts of obedience flow. But something more than the potential is required-namely, specific commands that serve as the triggering mechanism. We have already pointed out that, in a general way, the commands given must be consistent with the role of author­ity. A command consists of two main parts: a definition of action and the imperative that the action be executed. (A request, for example, contains a definition of action but lacks the insistence that it be carried out. )

Commands, then, lead to specific acts of obedience. Is the agentic state just another word for obedience? No, it is that state of mental organization which enhances the likelihood of obedi­ence. Obedience is the behavioral aspect of the state. A person may be in an agentic state-that is, in a state of openness to regulation from an authority-without ever being given a com­mand and thus never having to obey.

Binding Factors

Once a person has entered the agentic state, what keeps him in it? Whenever elements are linked in a hierarchy, there need to be forces to maintain them in that relationship. If these did not exist, the mildest perturbation would bring about the disintegration of the structure. Therefore, once people are brought into a social hierarchy, there must be some cementing mechanism to endow the structure with at least minimal stability.

Some people interpret the experimental situation as one in which the subject, in a highly rational manner, can weigh the conflicting values in the situation, process the factors according to some mental calculus, and base his actions on the outcome of this equation. Thus, the subject’s predicament is reduced to a problem of rational decision making. This analysis ignores a crucial aspect of behavior illuminated by the experiments. Though many sub­jects make the intellectual decision that they should not give any more shocks to the learner, they are frequently unable to trans­form this conviction into action. Viewing these subjects in the laboratory, one can sense their intense inner struggle to extricate themselves from the authority, while ill-defined but powerful bonds hold them at the shock generator. One subject tells the experimenter: “He can’t stand it. I’m not going to kill that man in there. You hear him hollering in there. He’s hollering. He can’t stand it.” Although at the verbal level the subject has resolved not to go on, he continues to act in accord with the experimenter’s commands. Many subjects make tentative movements toward disobedience but then seem restrained, as if by a bond. Let us now examine the forces that powerfully bind a subject to his role.

The best way to begin tracing these forces is to ask: What does the subject have to go through if he wants to break off? Through what psychological underbrush must he cut to get from his position in front of the shock generator to a stance of defiance?

Sequential Nature of the Action

The laboratory hour is an unfolding process in which each action influences the next. The obedient act is perseverative; after the initial instructions, the experimenter does not command the subject to initiate a new act but simply to continue doing what he is doing. The recurrent nature of the action demanded of the subject itself creates binding forces. As the subject delivers more and more painful shocks, he must seek to justify to himself what he has done; one form of justification is to go to the end. For if he breaks off, he must say to himself: “Everything I have done to this point is bad, and I now acknowledge it by breaking off.” But, if he goes on, he is reassured about his past performance. Earlier actions give rise to discomforts, which are neutralized by later ones. And the subject is implicated into the destructive behav­ior in piecemeal fashion.

Situational Obligations

Underlying all social occasions is a situational etiquette that plays a part in regulating behavior. In order to break off the experiment, the subject must breach the implicit set of under­standings that are part of the social occasion. He made an initial promise to aid the experimenter, and now he must renege on this commitment. Although to the outsider the act of refusing to shock stems from moral considerations, the action is experienced by the subject as renouncing an obligation to the experimenter, and such repudiation is not undertaken lightly. There is another side to this matter.

Coffman (1959) points out that every social situation is built upon a working consensus among the participants. One of its chief premises is that once a definition of the situation has been projected and agreed upon by participants, there shall be no chal­lenge to it. Indeed, disruption of the accepted definition by one participant has the character of moral transgression. Under no circumstance is open conflict about the definition of the situation compatible with polite social exchange.

More specifically, according to Coffman’s analysis, “society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in a correspondingly appropriate way. . . . When an individual projects a definition of the situa­tion and then makes an implicit or explicit claim to be a person of a particular kind, he automatically exerts a moral demand upon the others, obliging them to value and treat him in the manner that persons of his kind have a right to expect”. Since to refuse to obey the experimenter is to reject his claim to competence and authority in this situation, a severe social impro­priety is necessarily involved.

The experimental situation is so constructed that there is no way the subject can stop shocking the learner without violating the experimenter’s self-definition. The learner cannot break off and at the same time protect the authority’s definitions of his own competence. Thus, the subject fears that if he breaks off, he will appear arrogant, untoward, and rude. Such emotions, although they appear small in scope alongside the violence being done to the learner, nonetheless help bind the subject into obedience. They suffuse the mind and feelings of the subject, who is miser­able at the prospect of having to repudiate the authority to his face. The entire prospect of turning against the experimental authority, with its attendant disruption of a well-defined social situation, is an embarrassment that many people are unable to face up to. In an effort to avoid this awkward event, many subjects find obedience a less painful alternative.

In ordinary social encounters precautions are frequently taken to prevent just such disruption of the occasion, but the subject finds himself in a situation where even the discreet exercise of tact cannot save the experimenter from being discredited. Only obedience can preserve the experimenter’s status and dignity. It is a curious thing that a measure of compassion on the part of the subject, an unwillingness to “hurt” the experimenter’s feelings, are part of those binding forces inhibiting disobedience. The with­drawal of such deference may be as painful to the subject as to the authority he defies. Readers who feel this to be a trivial consideration ought to carry out the following experiment. It will help them feel the force of inhibition that operates on the subject.

First, identify a person for whom you have genuine respect, preferably someone older than yourself by at least a generation, and who represents an authority in an important life domain. He could be a respected professor, a beloved priest, or under certain circumstances a parent. It must also be a person whom you refer to with some title such as Professor Parsons, Father Paul, or Dr. Charles Brown. He must be a person who represents to you the distance and solemnity of a genuine authority. To understand what it means to breach the etiquette of relations with authority, you need merely present yourself to the person and, in place of using his title, whether it be Dr., Professor, or Father, address him using his first name, or perhaps even an appropriate nick­name. You may state to Dr. Brown, for example, “Good morning, Charlie!”

As you approach him you will experience anxiety and a power­ful inhibition that may well prevent successful completion of the experiment. You may say to yourself: “Why should I carry out this foolish experiment? I have always had a fine relationship with Dr. Brown, which may now be jeopardized. Why should I appear arrogant to him?”

More than likely, you will not be able to perform the disrespectful action, but even in attempting it you will gain a greater understanding of the feelings experienced by our subjects.

Social occasions, the very elements out of which society is built, are held together, therefore, by the operation of a certain situational etiquette, whereby each person respects the definition of the situation presented by another and in this way avoids conflict, embarrassment, and awkward disruption of social ex­change. The most basic aspect of that etiquette does not concern the content of what transpires from one person to the next but rather the maintenance of the structural relations between them. Such relations can be those of equality or of hierarchy. When the occasion is defined as one of hierarchy, any attempt to alter the defined structure will be experienced as a moral transgression and will evoke anxiety, shame, embarrassment, and diminished feel­ings of self-worth.

Anxiety

The fears experienced by the subject are largely anticipatory in nature, referring to vague apprehensions of the unknown. Such diffuse apprehension is termed anxiety.

What is the source of this anxiety? It stems from the indi­vidual’s long history of socialization. He has, in the course of moving from a biological creature to a civilized person, internal­ized the basic rules of social life. And the most basic of these is respect for authority. The rules are internally enforced by linking their possible breach to a How of disruptive, ego-threatening affect. The emotional signs observed in the laboratory-trem­bling, anxious laughter, acute embarrassment-are evidence of an assault on these rules. As the subject contemplates this break, anxiety is generated, signaling him to step back from the for­bidden action and thereby creating an emotional barrier through which he must pass in order to defy authority.

The remarkable thing is, once the “ice is broken” through disobedience, virtually all the tension, anxiety, and fear evapo­rate.

Chapter 12

Strain and Disobedience
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Physical Conversion

Conversion of psychological stress into physical symptoms is a commonly observed phenomenon in psychiatric practice. Ordi­narily, there is improvement in the emotional state of the patient as psychic stress comes to be absorbed by physical symptoms. Within this experiment, we can observe numerous signs of stress: sweating, trembling, and, in some instances, anxious laughter. Such physical expressions not only indicate the presence of strain but also reduce it. The strain, instead of eventuating in disobedi­ence, is deflected into physical expression, and the tension is thereby dissipated.

Dissent

Strain, if sufficiently powerful, leads to disobedience, but at the outset it gives rise to dissent. Dissent refers to a subject’s expression of disagreement with the course of action prescribed by the experimenter. But this verbal dispute does not necessarily mean that the subject will disobey the experimenter, for dissent serves a dual and conflicting function. On the one hand it may be the first step in a progressive rift between the subject and the experimenter, a testing of the experimenter’s intentions, and an attempt to persuade him to alter his course of action. But para­doxically it may also serve as a strain-reducing mechanism, a valve that allows the subject to blow off steam without altering his course of action.

Dissent may occur without rupturing hierarchical bonds and thus belongs to an order of experience that is qualitatively discon­tinuous with disobedience. Many dissenting individuals who are capable of expressing disagreement with authority still respect authority’s right to overrule their expressed opinion. While dis­agreeing, they are not prepared to act on this conviction.

As a strain-reducing mechanism, dissent is a source of psycho­logical consolation to the subject in regard to the moral conflict at issue. The subject publicly defines himself as opposed to shocking the victim and thus establishes a desirable self-image. At the same time, he maintains his submissive relationship to authority by continuing to obey.

The several mechanisms described here-avoidance, denial, physical conversion, minimal compliance, subterfuge, the search for social reassurance, blaming the victim, and noninstrumental dissent-may each be linked to specific sources of strain. Thus, visceral reactions are reduced by avoidance; self-image is pro­tected by acts of .subterfuge, minimal compliance, and dissent; and so forth. More critically, these mechanisms must be seen as subserving an overriding end: they allow the subject’s relation­ship to authority to remain intact by reducing experienced con­flict to a tolerable level.

Disobedience

Disobedience is the ultimate means whereby strain is brought to an end. It is not an act that comes easily.

It implies not merely the refusal to carry out a particular command of the experimenter but a reformulation of the relation­ship between subject and authority.

It is tinged with apprehension. The subject has found himself locked into a well-defined social order. To break out of the assigned role is to create, on a small scale, a form of anomie. The future of the subject’s interaction with the experimenter is pre­dictable as long as he maintains the relationship in which he has been defined, in contrast to the totally unknown character of the relationship attendant upon a break. For many subjects there is apprehension about what will follow disobedience, frequently tinged with fantasy of the authority’s undefined retribution. But as the course of action demanded by the experimenter becomes intolerable, a process is initiated which in some subjects erupts into disobedience.

The sequence starts with inner doubt, tension that is at first a private experience but which invariably comes to assume an external form, as the subject informs the experimenter of his apprehension or draws his attention to the victim’s suffering. The subject expects, at some level, that the experimenter will make the same inference from these facts as he has: that one should not proceed with the shocks. When the experimenter fails to do this, communication shades into dissent, as the subject attempts to persuade the authority to alter his course of action. Just as the shock series consists of a step-by-step increase in severity, so the voicing of dissent allows for a graduated movement toward a break with the experimenter. The initial expression of disagree­ment, however tentatively phrased, provides a higher plateau from which t( launch the next point of disagreement. Ideally, the dissenting subject would like the experimenter to release the subject, to alter the course of the experiment, and thus eliminate the need to break with authority. Failing this, dissent is trans­formed into a threat that the subject will refuse to carry out the authority’s orders. Finally, the subject, having exhausted all other means, finds that he must get at the very root of his relationship with the experimenter in order to stop shocking the victim: he disobeys. Inner doubt, externalization of doubt, dissent, threat, disobedience: it is a difficult path, which only a minority of sub­jects are able to pursue to its conclusion. Yet it is not a negative conclusion, but has the character of an affirmative act, a deliber­ate bucking of the tide. It is compliance that carries the passive connotation. The act of disobedience requires a mobilization of inner resources, and their transformation beyond inner preoccu­pation, beyond merely polite verbal exchange, into a domain of action. But the psychic cost is considerable.

For most people, it is painful to renege on the promise of aid they made to the experimenter. While the obedient subject shifts responsibility for shocking the learner onto the experimenter, those who disobey accept responsibility for destruction of the experiment. In disobeying, the subject believes he has ruined the experiment, thwarted the purposes of the scientist, and proved inadequate to the task assigned to him. But at that very moment he has provided the measure we sought and an affirmation of humanistic values.
The price of disobedience is a gnawing sense that one has been faithless. Even though he has chosen the morally correct action, the subject remains troubled by the disruption of the social order he brought about, and cannot fully dispel the feeling that he deserted a cause to which he had pledged support. It is he, and not the obedient subject, who experiences the burden of his action.

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Chapter 15

Epilogue
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Obedience and the War in Vietnam

Every generation comes to learn about the problem of obedi­ence through its own historical experience. The United States has recently emerged from a costly and controversial war in Southeast Asia.

The catalogue of inhumane actions performed by ordinary Americans in the Vietnamese conflict is too long to document here in detail. The reader is referred to several treatises on this subject (Taylor, 1970; Glasser, 1971; Halberstam, 1965). We may recount merely that our soldiers routinely burned villages, en­gaged in a “free-fire zone” policy, employed napalm extensively, utilized the most advanced technology against primitive armies, defoliated vast areas of the land, forced the evacuation of the sick and aged for purposes of military expediency, and massacred outright hundreds of unarmed civilians.

To the psychologist, these do not appear as impersonal his­torical events but rather as actions carried out by men just like ourselves who have been transformed by authority and thus have relinquished all sense of individual responsibility for their actions.

How is it that a person who is decent, within the course of a few months finds himself killing other men with no limitations of conscience? Let us review the process.

First, he must be moved from a position outside the system of military authority to a point within it. The well-known induction notice provides the formal mechanism. An oath of allegiance is employed to further strengthen the recruit’s commitment to his new role.

The military training area is spatially segregated from the larger community to assure the absence of competing authorities. Rewards and punishments are meted out according to how well one obeys. A period of several weeks is spent in basic training. Although its ostensible purpose is to provide the recruit with military skills, its fundamental aim is to break down any residues of individuality and selfhood.

The hours spent on the drill field do not have as their major goal teaching the person to parade efficiently. The aim is disci­pline, and to give visible form to the submersion of the individual to an organizational mode. Columns and platoons soon move as one man, each responding to the authority of the drill sergeant. Such formations consist not of individuals, but automatons. The entire aim of military training is to reduce the foot soldier to this state, to eliminate any traces of ego, and to assure, through extended exposure, an internalized acceptance of military au­thority.

Before shipment to the war zone, authority takes pains to define the meaning of the soldier’s action in a way that links it to valued ideals and the larger purposes of society. Recruits are told that those he confronts in battle are enemies of his nation and that unless they are destroyed, his own country is endangered. The situation is defined in a way that makes cruel and inhumane action seem justified. In the Vietnamese War, an additional ele­ment made cruel action easier: the enemy was of another race. Vietnamese were commonly referred to as “gooks,” as if they were subhuman and thus not worthy of sympathy.

Within the war zone, new realities take over; the soldier now faces an adversary similarly trained and indoctrinated. Any dis­organization in the soldier’s own ranks constitutes a danger to his unit, for it will then be a less effective fighting unit, and subject to defeat. Thus, the maintenance of discipline becomes an element of survival, and the soldier is left with little choice but to obey.

In the routine performance of his duties, the soldier experi­ences no individual constraints against killing, wounding, or maiming others, whether soldiers or civilians. Through his actions, men, women, and children suffer anguish and death, but he does not see these events as personally relevant. He is carrying out the mission assigned to him.

The possibility of disobeying or of defecting occurs to some soldiers, but the actual situation in which they now function does not make it seem practical. Where would they desert to? More­over, there are stringent penalties for defiance, and, finally, there is a powerful, internalized basis for obedience. The soldier does not wish to appear a coward, disloyal, or un-American. The situation has been so defined that he can see himself as patriotic, courageous, and manly only through compliance.

He has been told he kills others in a just cause. And this definition comes from the highest sources-not merely from his platoon leader, nor from the top brass in Vietnam, but from the President himself. Those who protest the war at home are re­sented. For the soldier is locked into a structure of authority, and those who charge that he is doing the devil’s work threaten the very psychological adjustments that make life tolerable. Simply getting through the day and staying alive is chore enough; there is no time to worry about morality.

For some, transformation to the agentic stage is only partial, and humane values break through. Such conscience-struck sol­diers, however few, are potential sources of disruption and are segregated from the unit.
But here we learn a powerful lesson in the functioning of organizations. The defection of a single individual, as long as it can be contained, is of little consequence. He will be replaced by the man next in line. The only danger to military functioning resides in the possibility that a lone defector will stimulate others. Therefore, he must be isolated, or severely punished to discour­age imitation.

In many instances, technology helps reduce strain by provid­ing needed buffers. Napalm is dropped on civilians from ten thousand feet overhead; not men but tiny blips on an infrared oscilloscope are the target of Gatling guns.

The war proceeds; ordinary men act with cruelty and severity that makes the behavior of our experimental subjects appear as angel’s play. The end of the war comes not through the disobedi­ence of individual soldiers but by the alteration in governmental policy; soldiers lay down their arms when they are ordered to do so.

Before the war ends, human behavior comes to light that confirms our bleakest forebodings. In the Vietnam War, the massacre at Mai Lai revealed with special clarity the problem to which this book has addressed itself. Here is an account of the incident by a participant, who was interviewed by Mike Wallace of CBS News:

Q. How many men aboard each chopper?

A. Five of us. And we landed next to the village, and we all got on line and we started walking toward the village. And there was one man, one gook in the shelter, and he was all huddled up down in there, and the man called out and said there’s a gook over there.

Q. How old a man was this? I mean was this a fighting man or an older man?

A. An older man. And the man hauled out and said that there’s a

gook over here, and then Sergeant Mitchell hollered back and said shoot him.

Q. Sergeant Mitchell was in charge of the twenty of you?

A. He was in charge of the whole squad. And so then, the man shot him. So we moved into the village, and we started searching up the village and gathering people and running through the center of the village.

Q. How many people did you round up?

A. Well, there was about forty, fifty people that we gathered in the center of the village. And we placed them in there, and it was like a little island, right there in the center of the village, I’d say.

. . . And. . .

Q. What kind of people-men, women, children?

A. Men, women, children.

Q. Babies?

A. Babies. And we huddled them up. We made them squat down and Lieutenant Calley came over and said, “You know what to do with them, don’t you?” And I said yes. So I took it for granted that he just wanted us to watch them. And he left, and came back about ten or fifteen minutes later and said, “How come you ain’t killed them yet?” And I told him that I didn’t think you wanted us to kill them, that you just wanted us to guard them. He said, “No,I want them dead.” So-

Q. He told this to all of you, or to you particularly?

A. Well, I was facing him. So, but the other three, four guys heard it and so he stepped back about ten, fifteen feet, and he started shooting them. And he told me to start shooting. So I started shooting, I poured about four clips into the group.

Q. You fired four clips from your. . .

A. M-16.

Q. And that’s about how many clips- I mean, how many­-

A. I carried seventeen rounds to each clip.

Q. So you fired something like sixty-seven shots?

A. Right.

Q. And you killed how many? At that time?

A. Well, I fired them automatic, so you can’t- You just spray the area on them and so you can’t know how many you killed ’cause they were going fast. So I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.

Q. Men, women, and children?

A. Men, women, and children.

Q. And babies?

A. And babies.

Q. Okay. Then what?

A. So we started to gather them up, more people, and we had about seven or eight people, that we was gonna put into the hootch, and we dropped a hand grenade in there with them.

Q. Now, you’re rounding up more?

A. We’re rounding up more, and we had about seven or eight people. And we was going to throw them in the hootch, and well, we put them in the hootch and then we dropped a hand grenade down there with them. And somebody holed up in the ravine, and told us to bring them over to the ravine, so we took them back out, and led them over to-and by that time, we already had them over there, and they had about seventy, seventy-five people all gathered up. So we threw ours in with them and Lieutenant Calley told me, he said, “Soldier, we got another job to do.” And so he walked over to the people, and he started pushing them off and started shooting.. . .

Q. Started pushing them off into the ravine?

A. Off into the ravine. It was a ditch. And so we started pushing them off, and we started shooting them, so all together we just pushed them all off, and just started using automatics on them. And then . . .

Q. Again-men, women, and children?

A. Men, women, and children.

Q. And babies?

A. And babies. And so we started shooting them and somebody told us to switch off to single shot so that we could save ammo. So we switched off to single shot, and shot a few more rounds. . . .

Q. Why did you do it?

A. Why did I do it? Because I felt like I was ordered to do it, and it seemed like that, at the time I felt like I was doing the right thing, because, like I said, I lost buddies. I lost a damn good buddy, Bobby Wilson, and it was on my conscience. So, after I done it, I felt good, but later on that day, it was getting to me.

Q. You’re married?

A. Right.

Q. Children?

A. Two.

Q. How old?

A. The boy is two and a half, and the little girl is a year and a half. Q. Obviously, the question comes to my mind. . . the father of two little kids like that . . . how can he shoot babies?

A. I didn’t have the little girl. I just had the little boy at the time.

Q. uh-huh How do you shoot babies?

A. I don’t know. It’s just one of these things.

Q. How many people would you imagine were killed that day?

A. I’d say about three hundred and seventy.

Q. How do you arrive at that figure?

A. Just looking.

Q. You say you think that many people, and you yourself were respon­sible for how many?

A. I couldn’t say.

Q. Twenty-five? Fifty?

A. I couldn’t say. Just too many.

Q. And how many men did the actual shooting?

A. Well, I really couldn’t say that either. There was other. . . there was another platoon in there, and . . . but I just couldn’t say how many.

Q. But these civilians were lined up and shot? They weren’t killed by cross fire?

A. They weren’t lined up. . . . They [were] just pushed in a ravine, or just sitting, squatting . . . and shot.

Q. What did these civilians-particularly the women and children, the old men-what did they do? What did they say to you?

A. They weren’t much saying to them. They [were] just being pushed and they were doing what they was told to do.

Q. They weren’t begging, or saying, “No . . . no,” or . . .A. Right. They were begging and saying, “No, no.” And the mothers was hugging their children, and . . . but they kept right on firing. Well, we kept right on firing. They was waving their arms and begging. . . .

(New York Times, Nov. 25, 1969)

The soldier was not brought to trial for his role at Mai Lai, as he was no longer under military jurisdiction at the time the massacre came to public attention.

In reading through the transcripts of the Mai Lai episode, the Eichmann trial, and the trial of Lieutenant Henry Wirz, com­mandant at Andersonville, the following themes recur:

1. We find a set of people carrying out their jobs and domi­nated by an administrative, rather than a moral, outlook.

2. Indeed, the individuals involved make a distinction be­tween destroying others as a matter of duty and the expression of personal feeling. They experience a sense of morality to the degree in which all of their actions are governed by orders from higher authority.

3. Individual values of loyalty, duty, and discipline derive from the technical needs of the hierarchy. They are experienced as highly personal moral imperatives by the individual, but at the organizational level they are simply the technical preconditions for the maintenance of the larger system.

4. There is frequent modification of language, so that the acts do not, at verbal level, come into direct conflict with the verbal moral concepts that are part of every person’s upbringing. Euphe­misms come to dominate language-not frivolously, but as a means of guarding the person against the full moral implications of his acts.

5. Responsibility invariably shifts upward in the mind of the subordinate. And, often, there are many requests for “authoriza­tion.” Indeed, the repeated requests for authorization are always an early sign that the subordinate senses, at some level, that the transgression of a moral rule is involved.

6. The actions are almost always justified in terms of a set of constructive purposes, and come to be seen as noble in the light of some high ideological goal. In the experiment, science is served by the act of shocking the victim against his will; in Germany, the destruction of the Jews was represented as a “hygienic” process against “jewish vermin” (Hilberg, 1961).

7. There is always some element of bad form in objecting to the destructive course of events, or indeed, in making it a topic of conversation. Thus, in Nazi Germany, even among those most closely identified with the “final solution,” it was considered an act of discourtesy to talk about the killings (Hilberg, 1961), Sub­jects in the experiment most frequently experience their objec­tions as embarrassing.

8. When the relationship between subject and authority re­mains intact, psychological adjustments come into play to ease the strain of carrying out immoral orders.

9. Obedience does not take the form of a dramatic confronta­tion of opposed wills or philosophies but is embedded in a larger atmosphere where social relationships, career aspirations, and technical routines set the dominant tone. Typically, we do not find a heroic figure struggling with conscience, nor a pathologi­cally aggressive man ruthlessly exploiting a position of power, but a functionary who has been given a job to do and who strives to create an impression of competence in his work.

Now let us return to the experiments and try to underscore their meaning. The behavior revealed in the experiments reported here is normal human behavior but revealed under conditions that show with particular clarity the danger to human survival inherent in our make-up. And what is it we have seen? Not aggression, for there is no anger, vindictiveness, or hatred in those who shocked the victim. Men do become angry; they do act hate­fully and explode in rage against others. But not here. Something far more dangerous is revealed: the capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures.

This is a fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival.

It is ironic that the virtues of loyalty, discipline, and self­-sacrifice that we value so highly in the individual are the very properties that create destructive organizational engines of war and bind men to malevolent systems of authority.

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.

What is the limit of such obedience? At many points we attempted to establish a boundary. Cries from the victim were inserted; they were not good enough. The victim claimed heart trouble; subjects still shocked him on command. The victim pleaded to be let free, and his answers no longer registered on the signal box; subjects continued to shock him. At the outset we had not conceived that such drastic procedures would be needed to generate disobedience, and each step was added only as the ineffectiveness of the earlier techniques became clear. The final effort to establish a limit was the Touch-Proximity condition. But the very first subject in this condition subdued the victim on command, and proceeded to the highest shock level. A quarter of the subjects in this condition performed similarly.

The results, as seen and felt in the laboratory, are to this author disturbing. They raise the possibility that human nature, or-more specifically-the kind of character produced in Ameri­can democratic society, cannot be counted on to insulate its citi­zens from brutality and inhumane treatment at the direction of malevolent authority. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.

In an article entitled “The Dangers of Obedience,” Harold J. Laski wrote:

. . . civilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnec­essary pain. Within the ambit of that definition, those of us who heed­lessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men.

. . . Our business, if we desire to live a life not utterly devoid of meaning and significance, is to accept nothing which contradicts our basic experience merely because it comes to us from tradition or con­vention or authority. It may well be that we shall be wrong; but our self-expression is thwarted at the root unless the certainties we are asked to accept coincide with the certainties we experience. That is why the condition of freedom in any state is always a widespread and consistent skepticism of the canons upon which power insists.

Appendix I

Problem of Ethics in Research
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This judgment is based, first, on the numerous conversations I have had with subjects immediately after their participation in the experiment. Such conversations can reveal a good deal, but what they showed most was how readily the experience is assimilated to the normal frame of things. Moreover, subjects were friendly rather than hostile, curious rather than denunciatory, and in no sense demeaned by the experience. This was my general impres­sion, and it was later supported by formal procedures undertaken to assess the subjects’ reaction to the experiment.

The central moral justification for allowing a procedure of the sort used in my experiment is that it is judged acceptable by those who have taken part in it. Moreover, it was the salience of this fact throughout that con­stituted the chief moral warrant for the continuation of the experiments.

This fact is crucial to any appraisal of the experiment from an ethical standpoint.

Imagine an experiment in which a person’s little finger was routinely snipped off in the course of a laboratory hour. Not only is such an experi­ment reprehensible, but within hours the study would be brought to a halt as outraged participants pressed their complaints on the university adminis­tration, and legal measures were invoked to restrain the experimenter. When a person has been abused, he knows it, and will quite properly react against the source of such mistreatment.

Criticism of the experiment that does not take account of the tolerant reaction of the participants is hollow. This applies particularly to criticism centering on the use of technical illusions (or “deception,” as the critics prefer to say) that fails to relate this detail to the central fact that subjects find the device acceptable. Again, the participant, rather than the external critic, must be the ultimate source of judgment.

While some persons construe the experimenter to be acting in terms of deceit, manipulation, and chicanery, it is, as you should certainly appreciate, also possible to see him as a dramatist who creates scenes of revelatory power, and who brings participants into them. So perhaps we are not so far apart in the kind of work we do. I do grant there is an important dif­ference in that those exposed to your theatrical illusions expect to confront them, while my subjects are not forewarned. However, whether it is unethical to pursue truths through the use of my form of dramaturgical device cannot be answered in the abstract. It depends entirely on the response of those who have been exposed to such procedures.

One further point: the obedient subject does not blame himself for shocking the victim, because the act does not originate in the self. It origi­nates in authority, and the worst the obedient subject says of himself is that he must learn to resist authority more effectively in the future.

That the experiment has stimulated this thought in some subjects is, to my mind, a satisfying . . . consequence of the inquiry. An illustrative case is provided by the experience of a young man who took part in a Princeton replication of the obedience experiment, conducted in 1964. He was fully obedient. On October 27,1970, he wrote to me:

“Participation in the ‘shock experiment’ . . . has had a great impact on my life. . . .

“When I was a subject in 1964, though I believed that I was hurting someone, I was totally unaware of why I was doing so. Few people ever realize when they are acting according to their own beliefs and when they are meekly submitting to authority. . . . To permit myself to be drafted with the understanding that I am submitting to authority’s demand to do some­thing very wrong would make me frightened of myself. . . . I am fully pre­pared to go to jail if I am not granted Conscientious Objector status. Indeed, it is the only course I could take to be faithful to what I believe. My only hope is that members of my board act equally according to their con­science. . . .”

He inquired whether any other participants had reacted similarly, and whether, in my opinion, participation in the study could have this effect.

I replied:

“The experiment does, of course, deal with the dilemma individuals face
when they are confronted with conflicting demands of authority and con­science, and I am glad that your participation in the study has brought you to a deeper personal consideration of these issues. Several participants have informed me that their own sensitivity to the problem of submission to au­thority was increased as a result of their experience in the study. If the experiment has heightened your awareness of the problem of indiscriminate submission to authority, it will have performed an important function. If you believe strongly that it is wrong to kill others in the service of your country, then you ought certainly to press vigorously for CO status, and I am deeply hopeful that your sincerity in this matter will be recognized.”

A few months later he wrote again. He indicated, first, that the draft board was not very impressed with the effect of his participation in the ex­periment, but he was granted CO status nonetheless. He writes:

“The experience of the interview doesn’t lessen my strong belief of the great impact of the experiment on my life. . . .

“. . . You have discovered one of the most important causes of all the trouble in this world. . . . I am grateful to have been able to provide you with a part of the information necessary for that discovery. I am delighted to have acted, by refusing to serve in the Armed Forces, in a manner which people must act if these problems are to be solved.

“With sincere thanks for your contribution to my life.”

In a world in which action is often clouded with ambiguity, I nonetheless feel constrained to give greater heed to this man, who actually partici­pated in the study, than to a distant critic. For disembodied moralizing is not the issue, but only the human response of those who have participated in the experiment. And that response not only endorses the procedures em­ployed, but overwhelmingly calls for deeper inquiry to illuminate the issues of obedience and disobedience.

Tales of Power – Carlos Castaneda

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An Appointment with knowledge
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“It doesn’t matter what one reveals or what one keeps to oneself,” he said.

“Everything we do, everything we are, rests on our personal power. If we have enough of it, one word uttered to us might be sufficient to change ‘the course of our lives. But if we don’t have enough personal power, the most magnificent piece of wisdom can be revealed. to us and that revelation won’t make a damn bit of difference.”

He then lowered his voice as if he were disclosing a confidential matter to me.

“I’m going to utter perhaps the greatest piece of knowledge anyone can voice,” he said. “Let me see what you can do with it.

“Do you know that at this very moment you are surrounded by eternity? And do you know that you can use that eternity, if you so desire?”
After a long pause, during which he urged me with a subtle movement of his eyes to make a statement, I said that I did not understand what he was talking about.

“There! Eternity is there!” he-said, pointing to the horizon.

Then he pointed to the zenith. “Or there, or perhaps we can say that eternity is like this.” He extended both arms to point to the east and west.

We looked at each other. His eyes held a question.

“What do you say to that?” he asked, coaxing me to ponder upon his words.

I did not know what to say.

“Do you know that you can extend yourself forever in any of the directions I have pointed to?” he went on. “Do you know that one moment can be eternity? This is not a riddle; it’s a fact, but only if you mount that moment and use it to take the totality of yourself for­ ever in any direction.”

He stared at me.

“You didn’t have this knowledge before,” he said,’smiling. “Now you do. I have revealed it to you, but it doesn’t make a ‘bit of difference, because you don’t have enough personal power to utilize my revelation. Yet if you did have enough power, my words alone would serve as the means for you to round up the totality of yourself and to get the crucial part of it out of the ‘boundaries in which it is contained.”

He came to my side and poked my chest with his fingers; it was a very light tap.
“These are the boundaries I’m talking about,” he said. “One can get out of them. We area feeling, an awareness encased here.”

He slapped my shoulders with both hands. My pad and pencil fell to the ground. Don Juan put his foot on the pad and stared at me and then laughed.

I asked him if he minded my taking notes. He said no in ‘a reassuring tone and moved his foot away.

“We are luminous beings,” he said, shaking his head rhythmically. “And for a luminous being only personal power matters. But if you ask me what personal power is, I have to tell you that my explanation will not ex­plain it.”

Don Juan looked at the western horizon and said that there were still a few hours of daylight left.

“We have to be here for a long time,” he explained. ‘So, we either sit quietly or we talk. It is not natural for you to be silent, so let’s keep on talking. This spot is a power place and it must become used to us ‘before night­fall. You must sit here, as naturally as possible, without fear or impatience. It seems that the easiest way for you to relax is to take notes, so write to your heart’s con­tent.

“And now, suppose you tell me about your dream­ing,’.

His sudden shift caught me unprepared. He repeated his request. There was a ‘great deal to say about it.

“Dreaming” entailed cultivating a peculiar control over one’s dreams to the extent that the experiences under­gone in them and those lived in one’s waking hours ac­quired the same pragmatic valence. The sorcerers’ allegation was that under the impact of “dreaming” the ordinary criteria to differentiate a dream from reality became inoperative.

Don Juan’s praxis of “dreaming” was an exercise that consisted of finding one’s hands in a dream. In other words, one had to deliberately dream that one was look­ing for and could find one’s hands in a dream by simply dreaming that one lifted one’s bands to the level of the eyes.

After years of unsuccessful attempts I had finally ac­complished . the task. Looking at it in retrospect, it had become evident to me that I had succeeded only after I had gained a degree of control over the world of my everyday life.

Don Juan wanted to know the salient points. I began telling him that the difficulty of setting up the command to look at my hands seemed to be, quite often, insur­mountable. He had warned me that the early stage of the preparatory’ facet, which he called “setting up dreaming,” consisted of a deadly game that one’s mind played with itself, and that some part of myself was going to do. everything it could to prevent the fulfill­ment of my task. That could include, don Juan bad said, plunging me into a loss of meaning, melancholy, or even a suicidal depression. I did not go that far, how­ever. My experience was rather on the light, comical side; nonetheless, the result was equally frustrating. Every time I was about to look at my hands in a dream something extraordinary would happen; I would begin to fly, or my dream would turn into a nightmare, or it would simply become a very pleasant experience of bodily excitation; everything in the dream would extend far beyond the “normal” in matters of vividness and, therefore, be terribly absorbing. My original intention of observing my hands was always forgotten in light of the new situation.

One night, quite unexpectedly, I found my hands in my dreams. I dreamt that I was walking on an un­known street in a foreign city and suddenly I lifted up my hands and placed them in front of my face. It was as if something within myself had given up and had per­mitted me to watch the backs of my hands.

Don Juan’s instructions had been that as soon as the sight of my hands would begin to dissolve or change into something else, I had to shift my view from my hands to any other element in the surroundings of my dream. In that particular dream I shifted my view to a building at the end of the street. When the sight of the building began to dissipate I focused my attention on the other elements of the surroundings in my dream. The end result was an incredibly clear composite pic­ture Of a deserted street in some unknown foreign city.

Don Juan made me continue with my account of other experiences in “dreaming.” We talked for a long time.

At the end of my report he stood up and went to the bushes. I also stood up. I was nervous. It was an un­warranted sensation since ,there was nothing precipitat­ing fear or concern. Don Juan returned shortly. He noticed my agitation.

Calm down,” he said, holding my arm gently. He made me sit down and put my notebook on my Lap. He coaxed me to write. His argument was that I should not disturb the power place with unnecessary feelings of fear or hesitation.

“Why do I get so nervous?” I asked.

“It’s natural,” he said. “Some1hing in you is threat­ened by your activities in dreaming. As long as you did not think about those activities, you were all right. But now that you have revealed your actions you’re about to faint.

“Each warrior has his own way of dreaming. Each way is different. The only thing which we all have in common is that we play tricks in order to force ourselves to abandon the quest. The countermeasure is to persist in spite of all the ‘barriers and disappointments.”

He asked me then if I was capable of selecting topics for “dreaming.” I said that I did not have the faintest idea of how to do that.

“The sorcerers explanation of how to select ‘a topic for dreaming,” he said, “is that a warrior chooses the topic by deliberately holding an image in his mind while he shuts off his internal dialogue. In other words, if he is capable of not talking to himself for a moment and then holds the image or the thought of what he wants in dreaming, even if only for an instant, then the desired topic will come to him. I’m sure you’ve done that, al­though you were not aware of it.”

There was a long pause and then don Juan began to sniff the air. It was as if he were cleaning his nose; he exhaled three or four times through his nostrils with great force. The muscles of his abdomen contracted in spasms, which he controlled by taking in short gasps of air.

“We won’t talk about dreaming any more,” he said. “You might become obsessed. If one is to succeed in anything, the success must come gently, with a great deal of effort but with no stress or obsession.”

He stood up and walked to the edge of the bushes. He leaned forward and peered into the foliage. He seemed to be examining something in the leaves, with­out getting too close to them.

“What are you doing?” I asked, unable to contain my curiosity.

He turned to me, smiled and raised his brow. “The bushes are filled with strange things,” he said as he sat down again.

His tone was so casual that it scared me more than if he had let out a sudden yell. My notebook and pencil fell from my hands. He laughed and mimicked me and said that my exaggerated reactions were one of the loose ends that still existed in my life.

I wanted to raise a point but he would not let me talk.

“There’s only a bit of daylight left,” he said. “There are other things we ought to touch upon before the twilight sets in.”

He then added that judging by my production in “dreaming” I must have learned how to stop my in­ternal dialogue at will. I told him that I had.

At the beginning of our association don Juan had delineated another procedure: walking for long stretches without focusing the eyes on anything. His recommenda­tion had been to not look at anything directly but, by slightly crossing the eyes, to keep a peripheral view of everything that presented itself to the eyes. He had in­sisted, although I had not understood at the time, that if one kept one’s unfocused eyes at a point just above the horizon, it was possible to notice, at once, every­thing in almost the total 18O-degree range in front of one’s eyes. He had assured me that that exercise was the only way of shutting off the internal dialogue. He used to ask me for reports on my progress, and then he Stopped inquiring about it.

I told don Juan that I had practiced the technique for years without noticing any change, but I had expected none anyway. One day, however, I had the shocking realization that I had just walked for about ten minutes without having said a single word to myse1f.

I mentioned to don Juan that on that occasion I also became cognizant that stopping the internal dialogue in­volved more than merely curtailing the words I said to myself. My entire thought processes had stopped and I had felt I was practically suspended, floating. A sensa­tion of panic had ensued from that awareness and I had to resume my internal dialogue as an antidote.

“I’ve told you that the internal dialogue is what grounds us,” don Juan said. “The world is such and such or so and so, only because we talk to ourselves about its being such and such or so and so.”

Don Juan explained that the passageway into the world of sorcerers opens up after the warrior has learned to shut off the internal dialogue.

“To change our idea of the world is the crux of sor­cery,” he said. “And stopping the internal dialogue is the only way to accomplish it. The rest is just padding. Now you’re in the position to know that nothing of what you’ve seen or done, with the exception of stop­ping the internal dialogue, could by itself have changed anything in you, or in your idea of the world. The provision is, of course, that that change should not be deranged. Now you can understand why a teacher doesn’t clamp down on his apprentice. That would only breed obsession and morbidity.”
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The Day of the Tonal
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“I was concerned with those jolts you have had, be­cause that is the way the nagual surfaces. At those mo­ments the tonal becomes aware of the totality of oneself. It is always a jolt because that awareness disrupts the lull. I call that awareness the totality of the being that is going to die. The idea is that at the moment of death the other member of the true pair, the nagual, becomes fully operative and the awareness and memories and perceptions stored in our calves and thighs, in our back and shoulders and neck, begin to expand and disinte­grate. Like the beads Of an endless broken necklace, they fall asunder without the binding force of life.”

He looked at me. His eyes were peaceful. I felt ill at ease, stupid.

“The totality of ourselves is a very tacky affair,” he said. “We need only a very small portion of it to fulfill the most complex tasks of life. Yet when we die, we die with the totality of ourselves. A sorcerer asks the ques­tion, ‘If we’re going to die with the totality of ourselves, why not, then live with that totality?’”

He signaled me with his head to watch the scores of people that went by.

“They’re all tonal,” he said. “I am going to single some of them out so your tonal will assess them, and in assessing them it will assess itself.”

He directed my attention to two old ladies that had emerged from the church. They stood at the top of the limestone steps for a moment and then began to walk down with infinite care, resting on every step.

“Watch those two women very carefully,” be said. “But don’t see them as persons, or as faces that hold things in common with us; see them as tonals.”

The two women got to the bottom of the steps. They moved as if the rough gravel were marbles and they were about to roll and lose their balance on them. They walked arm in arm, propping each other up with the weight of their bodies.

“Look at them!” don Juan said in a low voice.

“Those women are the best example of the most miser­able tonal one can find.”

I noticed that the two women were small-boned but fat. They were perhaps in their early fifties. They had a painful look in their faces as if walking down the church steps had been beyond their strength.

They were in front of us; they vacillated for a mo­ment and then they came to a halt. There was one more step on the gravel walk.

“Watch your step, ladies,” don Juan shouted as he stood up dramatically.

The women looked at him, apparently confused by his sudden outburst.

“My mom broke her hip right there the other day,” he added and dashed over to help them.

They thanked him profusely and he advised them that if they ever lost their balance and fell down, they had to remain motionless on the spot until the ambu­lance came. His tone was sincere and convincing. The women crossed themselves.

Don Juan sat down again. His eyes were beaming. He spoke softly.

“Those women are not that old and their bodies are not that weak, and yet they are decrepit. Everything about them is dreary-their Clothes. their smell, their attitude. Why do you think that’s so?”

“Maybe they were born that way,” I said.

“No one is born that way. We make ourselves that way The tonal of those women is weak and timid.

“I said that today was going to be the day of the tonal. I meant that today I want to deal with it exclu­sively. I also said that I had put on my suit for that specific purpose. With it I wanted to show you that a warrior treats his tonal in a very special manner. I’ve pointed out to you that my suit has been made to order and that everything I have on today fits me to perfec­tion. It is not my vanity that I wanted to show, but my warrior’s spirit. my warrior’s tonal.”

“Those two women gave you your first view of the tonal today. Life can be as merciless with you as it is with them, if you are careless with your tonal. I put myself as the counterpoint. If you understand correctly I should not need to stress this point.”

I had a sudden attack of uncertainty and asked him to spell out what I should have understood.

I must have sounded desperate. He laughed out loud. “Look at that young man in green pants and a pink shirt,” don Juan whispered, pointing to a very thin and very dark complexioned, sharp-featured young man who was standing almost in front of us. He seemed to be un­decided whether to go towards the church or towards the street. Twice he raised his hand in the direction of the church as though he were talking to himself and were about to start moving towards it. Then he stared at me with a blank expression.

“Look at the way he’s dressed,” don Juan said in a whisper. “Look at those shoes!”

The young man’s clothes were tattered and wrinkled, and his shoes were in absolute pieces.

“He’s obviously very poor,” I said.

“Is that all you can say about him?” he asked.

I enumerated ‘a series of reasons that might have ac­counted for the young man’s shabbiness: poor health, bad luck, indolence, indifference to his personal appear­ance, or the chance that he may have just been released from prison.

Don Juan said that I was merely speculating, and that he was not interested in justifying anything by sug­gesting that the man was a victim of unconquerable forces.

“Maybe he’s a secret agent made to look like a bum,” I said jokingly.

The young man walked away towards the street with a disjointed gait.

“He’s not made to look like a bum; he is a bum,” don Juan said. “Look how weak his body is. His arms and legs are thin. He can hardly walk. No one can pretend to look that way. There is something definitely wrong with him, not his circumstances, though. I have to stress again that I want you to see that man as a tonal”

“What does it entail to see a man as a tonal?”

“It entails to cease judging him in a moral sense, or excusing him on the grounds that he is like a leaf at the mercy of the wind. In other words, it entails seeing a man without thinking that he is hopeless or helpless.

“You know exactly what I am talking about. You can assess that young man without condemning or forgiving him.”

“He drinks too much,” I said.

My statement was not volitional. I just made it with­out really knowing why. For an instant I even felt that someone standing behind me had voiced the words. I was moved to explain that my statement was another of my speculations.

“That was not the case,” don Juan said. “Your tone of voice had a certainty that you lacked before. You didn’t say, ‘Maybe he’s a drunkard.’”

I felt embarrassed although I could not exactly de­termine why. Don Juan laughed.

“You saw through the man,” he said. “That was see­ing. Seeing is like that. Statements are made with great certainty, and one doesn’t know how it happened.

“You know that young man’s tonal was shot, but you don’t know how you know it.” .

I had to admit that somehow I had that impression.

“You’re right,” don Juan said. “It doesn’t really matter that he’s young, he’s as decrepit as the two women. Youth is in no way a barrier against the de­terioration of the tonal.

“You thought that there might be a great many reasons for that man’s condition. I find that there is only one, his tonal. It is not that his tonal is weak be­cause he drinks; it is the other way around, he drinks because his tonal is weak. That weakness forces him to be what he is. But the same thing happens to all of us, in one form or another.”

“But aren’t you also justifying his behavior by saying that it’s his tonal?”

“I’m giving you an explanation that you have never encountered before. It is not a justification or a con­demnation, though. That young man’s tonal is weak and timid. And yet he’s not unique. All of us are more or less in the same boat.”

At that moment a very large man passed in front of us heading towards the church. He was wearing an ex­pensive dark gray business suit and was carrying a briefcase. The collar of his shirt was unbuttoned and his necktie loose. He was sweating profusely. He had a very light complexion which made the perspiration all the more obvious.

“Watch him!” don Juan ordered me.

The man’s steps were small but heavy. There was awobbling quality to his walking. He did not go up to the church; he circumvented it and disappeared behind it.

“There is no need to treat the body in such an awful manner,” don Juan said with a note of scorn. “But the sad fact is that all of us have learned to perfection how to make our tonal weak. I have called that indulging.”

He put his band on my notebook and did not let me write any more. His rationale was that as long as I kept on taking notes I was incapable of concentrating. He suggested I should relax, shut off the internal dialogue, and let go, merging with the person being observed.

I asked him to explain what he meant by “merging.” He said there was no way to explain it, that it was some­thing that the body felt or did when put in observational contact with other bodies. He then clarified the issue by saying that in the past he had called that process “see­ing,” and that it consisted of a lull of true silence within followed by an outward elongation of something in the self, an elongation that met and merged with the other body, or with anything within one’s field of awareness.

At that point I wanted to get back to my writing pad, but he stopped me and began to single out different people from the crowd that passed by.

He pointed out dozens of persons covering a wide range of types among men, women and children of vari­ous ages. Don Juan said that he had selected persons whose weak “tonal” could fit into a categorization scheme, and thus he had acquainted me with a precon­ceived variety of indulging.

I did not remember all the people he had pointed out and discussed. I complained that if I had taken notes I could have at least sketched out the intricacies of his schemata on indulging. As it was he did not want to repeat it or perhaps he did not remember it either.

He laughed and said that he did not remember it, because in the life of a sorcerer it was the “nagual” that was accountable for creativity.

He looked at the sky and said that it was getting late, and that from that moment on we were going to change direction. Instead of weak “tonals” we were going to wait for the appearance of a “proper tonal.” He added that only a warrior had a “proper tonal,” and that the average man, at best, could have a “right tonal.”

After a few minutes’ wait he slapped his thigh and chuckled.

“Look who’s coming now,” he said, pointing to the street with a movement of his chin.

“It is as if they were made to order.”

I saw three male Indians approaching. They had on some short brown woolen ponchos, white pants that came to their mid calf, tong-sleeved White tops, dirty worn-out sandals and old straw hats. Each of them carried a bundle tied to his back.

Don Juan stood up and went to meet them. He spoke to them. They seemed surprised and surrounded him. They smiled at him. He was apparently telling them something about me; the three of them turned around and smiled at me. They were about ten or twelve feet away; I listened carefully but I could not hear what they were saying.

Don Juan reached in his pocket and handed them some bills. They appeared to be pleased; they moved their feet nervously. I liked them very much. They looked like children. All of them had small white teeth and very pleasing mild features. One, by all appearances the oldest, had whiskers. His eyes were tired but very kind. He took off his hat and came closer to the bench. The others followed him. The three of them greeted me in unison. We shook hands. Don Juan told me to give them some money. They thanked me and after a polite silence they said good.-by. Don Juan sat back on the bench and we watched them disappear in the crowd.

I told don Juan that for some strange reason I had liked them very much.

“It isn’t so strange,” he said. “You must’ve felt that their tonal is just right. It is right, but not for our time.

“You probably felt they were like children. They are. And that is very tough. I understand them better than you, thus I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of Sadness. Indians are like dogs, they have nothing. But that is the nature of their fortune and I shouldn’t feel sad. My sad­ness, of course, is my own way of indulging.”

“Where are they from, don Juan?”

“From the Sierras. They’ve come here to seek their fortune. They want to become merchants. They’re brothers. I told them that I ‘also came from the Sierras and I’am a merchant myself. I said that you were my partner. The money we gave them was a token; a war­rior should give tokens like that all the time. They no doubt need the money, but need should not be an es­sential consideration for a token. The thing to look for is feeling. I personally was moved by those three.

“Indians are the losers of our time. Their downfall began with the Spaniards and now under the reign of their descendants the Indians have lost everything. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Indians have lost their tonal.”

“Is that a metaphor, don Juan?”

“No. It is a fact. The tonal is very vulnerable. It can­ not withstand maltreatment. The white man, from the day he set foot on this land, has systematica11y destroyed not only the Indian tonal of the time, but also the per­sonal tonal of every Indian. One can easily surmise that for the poor average Indian the reign of the white man has been sheer hell. And yet the irony is that for another kind of Indian it has been sheer bliss.”

“Who are you talking about? What kind of Indian is that?”

“The sorcerer. For the sorcerer the Conquest was the challenge of a lifetime. They were the only ones who were not destroyed by it but adapted to it and used it to their ultimate advantage.”

“How was that possible, don Juan? I was under the impression that the Spaniards left no stone unturned.”

“Let’s say that they turned over all the stones that were within the limits of their own tonal. In the Indian life, however, there were things that were incompre­hensible to the white man; those things he did not even notice. Perhaps it was the sheer luck of the sorcerers, or perhaps it was their knowledge that saved them. After the tonal of the time and the personal tonal of every Indian was obliterated, the sorcerers found themselves holding onto the only thing left uncontested, the nagual. In other words, their tonal took refuge in their nagual. This couldn’t have happened had it not been for the ex­cruciating conditions of a vanquished people. The men of knowledge of today are the product of those condi­tions and are the ultimate connoisseurs of the nagual since they were left there thoroughly alone. There, the white man has never ventured. In fact, he doesn’t even have the idea it exists.”

I felt compelled at that point to present an argument. I sincerely contended that in European thought we had accounted for what be called the “nagual.” I brought in
the concept of the Transcendental Ego, or the unob­served observer present in all our thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. I explained to don Juan that the individual could perceive or intuit himself, as a self, through the Transcendental Ego, because this was the only thing capable of judgment, capable of disclosing reality within the rea1m of its consciousness.

Don Juan was unruffled. He laughed.

“Disclosing reality,” he said, mimicking me. “That’s the tonal”

I argued that the “tonal” may be called the Empirical Ego found in one’s passing stream of consciousness or experience, while the Transcendental Ego was found behind that stream.

“Watching, I suppose,” he said mockingly.

“That’s right. Watching itself,” I said.

“I hear you talking,” he said. “But you’re saying nothing. The nagual is not experience or intuition or consciousness. Those terms and everything else you may care to say are only items on the island of the tonal. The nagual, on the other hand, is only effect. The tonal begins at birth and ends at death, but the nagual never ends. The nagual has no limit. I’ve said that the nagual is where power hovers; that was only a way of alluding to it. By reasons of its effect, perhaps the nagual can be best understood in terms of power. For instance, when you felt numb and couldn’t talk earlier today, I was actually soothing you; that is, my nagual was acting upon you.”

“How was that possible, don Juan?”

“You won’t believe this, but no one knows how. All I know is that I wanted your undivided attention and then my nagual went to work on you. I know that much because I can witness its effect, but I don’t know how it works.”

He was quiet for a while. I wanted to keep on the same topic. I attempted to ask a question; he silenced me.

“One can say that the nagual accounts for creativity,” he finally said ,and looked at me piercingly. “The nagual is the only part of us that can create.”

He remained quiet, looking at me. I felt he was defi­nitely leading me into an area I had wished he would elucidate furtl1er. He had said that the “tonal” did not create anything, but only witnessed and assessed. I asked how he explained the fact that we construct superb structures and machines.

“That’s not creativity,” he said. “That’s only molding. We can mold anything with our hands, personally or in conjunction with the hands of other tonals. A group of tonals can mold anything, superb structures as you said.”
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The Whispering of the Nagual
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“Through the air?”

“No. For the nagual there is no land, or air, or water. At this point you yourself can agree with that. Twice you were in that limbo and you were only at the door of the nagual. You’ve told me that everything you encountered was uncharted. So the nagual glides, or flies, or does whatever it may do, in nagual’s time, and that has nothing to do with tonal’s time. The two things don’t jibe.”

As don Juan spoke I felt a tremor in my body. My jaw dropped and my mouth opened involuntarily. My ears unplugged and I could hear a barely perceptible tingle or vibration. While I was describing my sensa­tions to don Juan I noticed that when I talked it sounded ,as if someone else were talking. It was a com­plex sensation that amounted to my hearing what I was going to say before I said it.

My left ear was a source of extraordinary sensations. I felt that it was more powerful and more accurate than my right ear. There was something in it that had not been there before. When I turned around to face don Juan, who was to my right, I became aware that I had a range of clear auditory perception around that ear. It was a physical space, a range within which I could hear everything with incredible fidelity. By turning my head around I could scan the surroundings with my ear.

“The Whispering of the nagual did that to you,” don Juan said when I described my sensorial experience. “It’ll come at times and then vanish. Don’t be afraid of it, or of any unusual sensation that you may have from now on. But above all, don’t indulge and become 0b­sessed with those sensations. I know you will succeed. The time for your splitting was right. Power fixed all that. Now everything depends on you. If you are powerful enough you will sustain the great shock of being split. But if you’re incapable of holding on, you will perish. You will begin to wither away, lose weight, be­come pale, absent-minded, irritable, quiet.”

“Perhaps if you would have told me years ago,” I said, “What you and don Genaro were doing, I would have enough. . .”

He raised his hand and did not let me finish.

“That’s a meaningless statement,” he said. “You once told me that if it wouldn’t be for the fact that you’re stubborn and given to rational explanations you would be a sorcerer by now. But to be a sorcerer in your case means that you have to overcome stubbornness and the need for rational explanations, which stand in your way. What’s more, those shortcomings are your road to power. You can’t say that power would flow to you if your life would be different.

“Genaro and I have to act the same way you do, within certain limits. Power sets up those limits and a warrior is, let’s say, a prisoner of power; a prisoner Who has one free choice: the choice to act either like an impeccable warrior, or to act like an ass. In the final analysis, perhaps the warrior is not a prisoner but a slave Of power, because that choice is no longer a choice for him. Genaro cannot act in any other way but impeccably. To act like an ass would drain him and cause his demise.

“The reason why you’re afraid of Genaro is because he has to use the avenue of fright to shrink your tonal. Your body knows that, although your reason may not, and thus your body wants to run away every time Gen­aro is around.”

I mentioned that I was curious to know if don Gen­aro deliberately set out to scare me. He said that the “nagual” did strange things, things which were not fore­seeable. He gave me, as an example, what had happened between us in the morning when he prevented my turn­ing to my left to look at don Genaro in the tree. He said that he was aware of what his “nagual” had done al­though he had no way of knowing about it ahead of time. His explanation of the whole affair was that my sudden movement to the left was a step towards my death, which my “tonal” was deliberately taking as a suicidal plunge. That movement stirred his “nagual” and the result was that some part of him fell on top of me.

I made an involuntary gesture of perplexity.

“Your reason is telling you again that you’re immortal,” he said.

“What do you mean by that, don Juan?”

“An immortal being has all the time in the world for doubts and bewilderment and fears. A warrior, on the other hand, cannot cling to the meanings made under the tonals order, because be knows for a fact that the totality 01 himself has but a little time on this earth.”

I wanted to make a serious point. My fears and doubts and bewilderment were not on a conscious level and, no matter how hard I tried to control them, every time I was confronted with don Juan and don Genaro I felt helpless.

“A warrior cannot be helpless,” he said. “Or be­wildered or frightened, not under any circumstances. For a warrior there is time only for his impeccability; everything else drains his power, impeccability replenishes it.”

“We’re back again to my old question, don Juan.

What’s impeccability?”

“Yes, we’re back again to your old question and consequently we’re back again to my Old answer: ‘Impec­cability is to do your best in whatever you’re engaged in’ “

“But don Juan, my point is that I’m always under the impression I’m doing my best, and obviously I’m not. “

“It’s not as complicated as you make it appear. The key to all these matters of impeccability is the sense of having or not having time. As a rule of thumb, when you feel and act like an immortal being that has all the time in the world you are not impeccable; at those times you should turn, look around, and then you will realize that your feeling of having time is an idiocy. There are no survivors on this earth!”
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The Wings of Perception
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Don Juan moved closer to me. He leaned over and whispered in my right ear, “Don’t you think it’s funny?” Don Genaro also leaned over towards me and whis­pered in my left ear, “What did he say?” I had an automatic reaction to both questions and made an in­voluntary synthesis.

“Yes. I thought he asked it’s funny,” I said.

They were obviously aware of the effect of their maneuvers; they laughed until tears rolled down their cheeks. Don Genaro, as usual, was more exaggerated than don Juan; be fell backwards and rolled on his back a few yards away from me. He lay on his stomach, ex­tending his arms and legs out, and whirled around on the ground as though he were lying on a swivel. He whirled until he got close to me and his foot touched mine. He sat up abruptly and smiled sheepishly.

Don Juan was holding his sides. He was laughing very hard and it seemed that his stomach hurt.

After a while they both leaned over and kept on whispering into my ears. I tried to memorize the se­quence of their utterances but after a futile effort I gave up. There were too many.

They whispered in my ears until I again had the sensation that I had been split in two. I became a mist, like the day before, a yellow glow that sensed everything directly. That is, I could “know” things. There were no thoughts involved; there were only certainties. And when i came into contact with a soft, spongy, bouncy feeling, which was outside of me and yet was part of me, I “knew” it was a tree. I sensed it was a tree by its odor. It did not smell like any specific tree I could re­member, nonetheless something in me “knew” that that peculiar odor was the “essence” of tree. I did not have just the feeling that I knew, nor did i reason my knowl­edge out, or shuffle clues around. I simply knew that there was something there in contact with me, all around me, a friendly, warm, compelling smell emanat­ing from something which was neither solid nor liquid but an undefined something else, which I “knew” was a tree. I felt that by “knowing” it in that manner I was tapping its essence. I was not repelled by it. It rather invited me to melt with it. It engulfed me or I engulfed it. There was a bond between us which was neither ex­quisite nor displeasing.

The next sensation I could recollect with clarity was a wave of wonder and exultation. All of me vibrated. It was as if charges of electricity were going through me. They were not painful. They were pleasing, but in such an undetermined form that there was no way of catego­rizing them. I knew, nevertheless, that whatever I was in contact with was the ground. Some part of me acknowl­edged with concise certainty that it was the ground. But the instant I tried to discern the infinitude of direct per­ceptions I was having, I lost all capacity to differentiate my perceptions.

Then all of a sudden I was myself again. I was think­ing. It was such an abrupt transition that I thought I had woken up. Yet there was something in the way I felt that was not quite myself. I knew that there was indeed something missing before I fully opened my eyes. I looked around. I was still in a dream, or having a vision of some sort. My thought processes, however, were not only unimpaired but extraordinarily clear. I made a quick assessment. I had no doubt that don Juan and don Genaro had induced my dreamlike state for a specific purpose. I seemed to be on the verge of understanding what that purpose was when something extraneous to me forced me to pay attention to my surroundings. It took me a long moment to orient myself. I was actually lying on my stomach and what I was lying on was a most spectacular floor. As I examined it, I could not avoid a feeling of awe and wonder. I could not con­ceive what it was made of. Irregular slabs of some un­known substance had been placed in a most intricate yet simple fashion. They had been put together but were not stuck to the ground or to each other. They were elastic and gave when I attempted to pry them apart with my fingers, but once I released the tension they went right back to their original position.

I tried to get up and was seized by the most out­landish sensory distortion. I had no control over my body; in fact, my body did not seem to be my own. It was inert; I had no connection to any of its parts and when I tried to stand up I could not move my arms and I wobbled helplessly on my stomach, rolling on my side. The momentum of my wobbling almost made me do a complete turn onto my stomach again. My out­stretched arms and legs prevented me from turning over and I came to rest on my back. In that position I caught a glimpse of two strangely shaped legs and the most distorted feet I bad ever seen. It was my body! I seemed to be wrapped up in a tunic. The thought that came to my mind was that I was experiencing a scene of myself as a cripple or an invalid of some sort. I tried to curve my back and look at my legs but I could only jerk my body. I was looking directly at a yellow sky, a deep, rich lemon-yellow sky.

It had grooves or canals of a deeper yellow tone and an endless number of pro­tuberances that hung like drops of water. The total ef­fect of that incredible sky was staggering. I could not determine if the protuberances were clouds. There were also areas of shadows and areas of different tones of yellow which I discovered as I moved my head from side to side.

Then something else attracted my attention: a sun at the very zenith of the yellow sky, right over my head, a mild sun-judging by the fact that I could stare into it-that cast a soothing, uniform whitish light.

Before I had had time to ponder upon all these un­earthly sights, I was violently shaken; my head jerked and bobbed back and forth. I felt I was being lifted. I heard a shrill voice and giggling and I was confronted by a most astounding sight: a giant barefoot female. Her face was round and enormous. Her black hair was cut in pageboy fashion. Her arms and legs were gigantic. She picked me up and lifted me to her shoulders as if I were a doll. My body hung limp. I was looking down her strong back. She had a fine fuzz around her shoul­ders and down her spine. Looking down from her shoulder, I saw the magnificent floor again. I could hear it giving elastically under her enormous weight and I could see the pressure marks that her feet left on it.

She put me down on my stomach in front of a struc­ture, some sort of building. I noticed then that there was something wrong with my depth perception. I could not figure out the size of the building by looking at it. At moments it seemed ridiculously small, but then after I seemingly adjusted my perception, I truly marveled at its monumental proportions.

The giant girl sat next to me and made the floor squeak. I was touching her enormous knee. She smelled like candy or strawberries. She talked to me and I understood everything she said; pointing to the struc­ture, she told me that I was going to live there.

My prowess of observation seemed to increase as I got over the initial shock ‘of finding myself there. I noticed then that the building had four exquisite dysfunctional columns. They did not support anything; they were On top of the building. Their shape was sim­plicity itself; they were long and graceful projections that seemed to be reaching far that awesome, incredibly yellow sky. The effect Of those inverted columns was sheer beauty to me. I had a seizure of aesthetic rapture.

The columns seemed to have been made in one piece; I could not even conceive how. The two columns in front were joined by a slender beam, a monumentally long rod that I thought may have served as a railing of some sort, or a veranda overlooking the front.

The giant girl made me slide On my back into the structure. The roof was black and flat and was covered with symmetric holes that let the yellowish glare of the sky show through, creating the most intricate patterns. I was truly awed with the utter simplicity and beauty that had been achieved by those dots of yellow sky showing through those precise holes in the roof, and the patterns Of shadows that they created on that mag­nificent and intricate floor. The structure was square,and outside of its poignant beauty it was incomprehen­sible to me.

My state of exultation was so intense at that moment that I wanted to weep, or stay there forever. But some force, or tension, or something undefinable began to pull me.

Suddenly I found myself out of the structure, still lying on my back. The giant girl was there, but there was another being with her, a woman so big that she reached to the sky and eclipsed the sun. Compared to her the giant girl was just a little girl.

The big woman was angry; she grabbed the structure by one of its columns, lifted it up, turned it upside down, and set it on the floor. It was a chair!

That realization was like a catalyst; it triggered some overwhelming perceptions. I went through a series of images that were disconnected but could be made to stand as a sequence. In successive flashes I saw or realized that the magnificent and incomprehensible floor was a straw mat; the yellow sky was the stucco ceiling of a room; the sun was a light bulb; the structure that had evoked such rapture in me was a chair that a child had turned upside down to play house.

I had one more coherent and sequential vision of an­other mysterious architectural structure of monumental proportions. It stood by itself. It looked almost like a shell of a pointed snail standing with its tail up. The walls were made of concave and convex plates of some strange purple material; each plate had grooves that seemed more functional than ornamental.

I examined the structure meticulously and in detail and found that it was, like in the case of the previous one, thoroughly incomprehensible. I expected to sud­denly adjust my perception to disclose the “true” nature of the structure. But nothing of the sort happened. I then had a conglomerate of alien and inextricable “awarenesses,” or “findings,” about the building and its function, which did not make sense, because I had no frame of reference for them.

I regained my normal awareness all of a sudden. Don Juan and don Genaro were next to me. I was tired. I looked for my watch; it was gone. Don Juan and don Genaro giggled in unison. Don Juan said that I should not worry about time and that I should concentrate on following certain recommendations that don Genaro had made to me.

I turned to don Genaro and he made a joke. He said I that the most important recommendation was that I should learn to write with my finger, to save on pencils and to show off.

They teased me about my notes for a while longer and then I went to sleep.

Don Juan and don Genaro listened to the detailed account of my experience, which I gave them at don Juan’s request after I woke up the next day.

“Genaro feels that you’ve got enough for the time being,” don Juan said after I finished talking.

Don Genaro assented with a nod.

“What was the meaning of what I experienced last night?” I asked.

“You caught a glimpse of the most important issue of sorcery,” don Juan said. “Last night you peeked into the totality of yourself. But that’s of course a mean­ingless statement for you at this moment. Obviously, arriving at the totality of oneself is not a matter of one’s desire to agree, or of one’s willingness to learn. Genaro thinks that your body needs time to let the whispering of the nagual sink into you.”

Don Genaro nodded again.

“Plenty of time,” he said, shaking his head up and down. “Twenty or thirty years perhaps.”

I did not know how to react. I looked at don Juan for clues. They both had serious expressions.

“Do I really have twenty or thirty years?” I asked.

“Of course not!” don Genaro yelled and they broke into laughter.

Don Juan said that I should return whenever my inner voice told me to, and that in the meantime I should try to assemble all the suggestions that they had made while I was split.

“How do I do that? I asked.

“By turning off your internal dialogue and letting something in you flow out and expand,” don Juan said. “That something is your perception, but don’t try to figure out what I mean. Just let the whispering of the nagual guide you.”

Then he said that the night before I had had two sets at intrinsically different views. One was inexplicable, the other was perfectly natural, and the order in which they had happened pointed to a condition that was intrinsic to all of us.

“One view was the nagual, the other the tonal,” don Genaro added.

I wanted him to explain his statement. He looked at me and patted me on the back.

Don Juan stepped in and said that the first two views were the “nagual,” and that don Genaro had selected a tree and the ground as the points for emphasis. The other two were views of the “tonal” that he himself had selected; one of them was my perception of the world as an infant.

“It appeared to bean alien world to you, because your perception had not been trimmed yet to fit the desired mold,” he said.

“Was that the way I really saw the world?” I asked. “Certainly,” he said. “That was your memory.”

I asked don Juan whether the feeling of aesthetic appreciation that had enraptured me was also part of my memory.

“We go into those views as we are today,” he said. “You were seeing that scene as you would see it now. Yet the exercise was one of perception. That was the scene of a time when the world became for you what it is now. A time when a chair became a chair.”

He did not want to discuss the other scene.

“That wasn’t a memory of my childhood,” I said. “That’s right,” he said. “It was something else.

“Was it something I will see in the future?” I asked. “There’s no future! he exclaimed cuttingly. “The future is only a way of talking. For a sorcerer there is only the here and now.”

He said that there was essentially nothing to say about it because the purpose of the exercise had been to open the wings of my perception, and that although I had not flown on those wings I had nonetheless touched four points which would be inconceivable to reach from the point of view of my ordinary perception.
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The Strategy of the Sorcerer
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“Let me begin by telling you that a teacher never seeks apprentices and no one can solicit the teachings,” he said. “It’s always an omen which points out an apprentice. A warrior who may be in the position of becoming a teacher must be alert in order to catch his cubic centimeter of chance. I saw you just before we met; you had a good tonal, like that girl we encountered in Mexico City. After I saw you I waited, very much like what we did with the girl that night in the park. The girl went by without paying attention to us. But you were brought to me by a man who ran away after babbling inanities. You were left there, facing me, also babbling inanities. I knew I had to act fast and hook you; you yourself would’ve had to do something of that sort if that girl would’ve talked to you. What I did was to grab you with my will.”

Don Juan was alluding to the extraordinary way he had looked at me the day we met. He had fixed his gaze on me and I had had an inexplicable feeling of vacuity, or numbness. I could not find any logical ex­planation for my reaction and I have always believed that after our first meeting I went back to see him only because I had become obsessed with that look.

“That was my quickest way of hooking you,” he said. “It was a direct blow to your tonal. I numbed it by focusing my will on it.”

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“The warrior’s gaze is placed on the right eye of the other person,” he said. “And what it does is to stop the internal dialogue, then the nagual takes over; thus, the danger of that maneuver. Whenever the nagual prevails,even if it is only for an instant, there is no way of de­scribing the feeling that the body experiences. I know that you have spent endless hours trying to figure out what you felt and that to this day you haven’t been able to. I accomplished what I wanted, though. I hooked you.”

I told him that I could still remember him staring at me.

“The gaze on the right eye is not a stare,” he said. “It’s rather a forceful grabbing that one does through the eye of the other person. In other words, one grabs something that is behind the eye. One has the actual physical sensation that one is holding something with the will”

He scratched his head, tilting his hat to the front,over his face.

“This is, naturally, only a way of talking,” he con­tinued. “A way of explaining weird physical sensations.”

He ordered me to stop writing and look at him. He said that he was going to “grab” my “tonal” gently with his “will.” The sensation I experienced was a repetition of what I had felt on that first day we had met and on other occasions when don Juan had made me feel that his eyes were actually touching me, in a physical sense.

“But, how do you make me feel you’re touching me, don Juan? What do you actually do?” I asked.

“There’s no way of exactly describing what one does,” he said. “Something snaps forward from some­place below the stomach; that something has direction and can be focused on anything.”

I again felt something like soft tweezers clasping some undefined part of me.

“It works only when the warrior learns to focus his will.” don Juan explained after he moved his eyes away. “There’s no way of practicing it, therefore I have not recommended or encouraged its use. At a given moment in the life of a warrior it simply happens. No one knows how.”

He remained quiet for a while. I felt extremely ap­prehensive. Don Juan suddenly began to speak again.

“The secret is in the left eye,” he said. “As a warrior progresses on the path of knowledge his left eye can clasp anything. Usually the left eye of a warrior has a strange appearance; sometimes it becomes permanently crossed, or it becomes smaller than the other, or larger, or different in some way.”

He glanced at me and in a joking manner pretended to examine my left eye. He shook his head in mock dis­approval and chuckled.

“Once the apprentice has been hooked, the instruc­tion begins,” he continued. “The first act of a teacher is to introduce the idea that the world we think we see is only a view, a description of the world. Every effort of a teacher is geared to prove this point to his apprentice. But accepting it seems to be one of the hardest things one can do; we are complacently caught in our particu­lar view of the world, which compels us to feel and act as if we knew everything about the world. A teacher, from the very first act he performs, aims at stopping that view. Sorcerers call it stopping the internal dialogue, and they are convinced that it is the single most impor­tant technique that an apprentice can learn.

“In order to stop the view of the world which one has held since the cradle, it is not enough to just wish or make a resolution. One needs a practical task; that practical task is called the right way of walking. It seems harmless and nonsensical. As everything else which has power in itself or by itself, the right way of walking does not attract attention. You understood it and regarded it, at least for several years, as a curious way of behaving. It didn’t dawn on you until very re­cently that that was the most effective way to stop your internal dialogue.”

“How does the right way of walking stop the internal dialogue?” I asked.

“Walking in that specific manner saturates the tonal,” he said. “It floods it. You see, the attention of the tonal has to be placed on its creations. In fact, it is that atten­tion that creates the order of the world in the first place; so, the tonal must be attentive to the elements of its world in order to maintain it, and must, above all, uphold the view of the world as internal dialogue.”

He said that the right way of walking was a subter­fuge. The warrior, first by curling his fingers, drew attention to the arms; and then by looking, without focusing his eyes, at any point directly in front of him on the arc that started at the tip of his feet and ended above the horizon, he literally flooded his “tonal” with information. The “tonal,” without its one-to-one rela­tion with the elements of its description, was incapable of talking to itself and thus one became silent.

Don Juan explained that the position of the fingers did not matter at all, that the only consideration was to draw attention to the arms by clasping the fingers in various unaccustomed ways, and that the important thing was the manner in which the eyes, by being kept unfocused, detected an enormous number of features of the world without being clear about them. He added that the eyes in that state were capable of picking out details which were too fleeting for normal vision.

“Together with the right way of walking” don Juan went on, “a teacher must teach his apprentice another possibility, which is even more subtle: the possibility of acting without believing, without expecting rewards ­acting just for the hell of it. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I told you that the success of a teacher’s enterprise de­pends on how well and how harmoniously he guides his apprentice in this specific respect.”

I told don Juan that I did not remember him ever discussing “acting just for the hell of it” as a particular technique; all I could recollect were his constant but loose comments about it.

He laughed and said that his maneuver had been so subtle that it had bypassed me to that day. He then re­minded me of all the nonsensical joking tasks that he used to give me every time I had been at his house. Absurd chores such as arranging firewood in patterns, encircling his house with an unbroken chain of con. centric circles drawn in the dirt with my finger, sweep­ing debris from one place to another, and so forth. The tasks also included acts that I had to perform by myself at home, such as wearing a black cap, or tying my left shoe first, or fastening my belt from right to left.

The reason I had never taken them in any other vein except as jokes was that he would invariably tell me to forget about them after I had established them as regu­lar routines.

As he recapitulated all the tasks he had given me I realized that by making me perform senseless routines he had indeed implanted in me the idea of acting with­out really expecting anything in return.

“Stopping the internal dialogue is, however, the key to the sorcerers’ world,” he said. “The rest of the activi­ties are only props; all they do is accelerate the effect of stopping the internal dialogue.”

He said that there were two major activities or tech­niques used to accelerate the stopping of the internal dialogue: erasing personal history and “dreaming.” He reminded me that during the early stages of my ap­prenticeship he had given me a number of specific methods for changing my “personality.” I had recorded them in my notes and had forgotten about them for years until I realized their importance. Those specific methods seemed at first to be highly idiosyncratic de­vices to coerce me into modifying my behavior.

He explained that the art of a teacher was to deviate the apprentice’s attention from the main issues. A poignant example of that art was the fact that I had not realized until that day that he had actually tricked me into learning a most crucial point: to act without ex­pecting rewards.

He said that in line with that rationale he had rallied my interest around the idea of “seeing,” which, prop­erly understood, was the act of dealing directly with the “nagual,” an act that was an unavoidable end result of the teachings but an unattainable task as a task per se.

“What was the point of tricking me that way?” I asked.

“Sorcerers are convinced that all of us are a bunch of nincompoops,” he said. “We can never relinquish our crummy control voluntarily, thus we have to be tricked.”

His contention was that by making me focus my attention on a pseudo task, learning to “see,” he had successfully accomplished two things. First he had outlined the direct encounter with the “nagual,” without mentioning it, and second he had tricked me into con­sidering the real issues of his teachings as inconsequen­tial affairs. Erasing personal history and “dreaming” were never as important to me as “seeing.” I regarded them as very entertaining activities. I even thought that they were the practices for which I had the greatest facility.

Greatest facility,” he said mockingly when he heard my comments. “A teacher must not leave anything to chance. I’ve told you that you were correct in feeling that you were being tricked. The problem was that you were convinced that that tricking was directed at fool­ing your reason. For me, tricking meant to distract your attention, or to trap it as the case required.”

He looked at me with squinting eyes and pointed all around us with a sweeping gesture of his arm.

“The secret of all this is one’s attention,” he said. “What do you mean, don Juan?”

“All of this exists only because of our attention. This very rock where we’re sitting is a rock because we have been forced to give our attention to it as a rock.”

I wanted him to explain that idea. He laughed and raised an accusing finger at me.

“This is a recapitulation,” he said. “We’ll get to that later.”

He asserted that because of his decoy maneuver I became interested in erasing personal history and “dreaming.” He said that the effects of those two techniques were ultimately devastating if they were exer­cised in their totality, and that then his concern was the concern of every teacher, not to let his apprentice do
anything that would plunge him into aberration and morbidity.

“Erasing personal history and dreaming should only be a help,” he said. “What any apprentice needs to buffer him is temperance and strength. That’s why a teacher introduces the warrior’s way, or living like a warrior. This is the glue that joins together everything in a sorcerer’s world. Bit by bit a teacher must forge and develop it. Without the sturdiness and level-headed­ness of the warrior’s way there is no possibility of with­standing the path of knowledge.”

Don Juan said that learning the warrior’s way was an instance when the apprentice’s attention had to be trapped rather than deviated, and that he had trapped my attention by pushing me out of my ordinary cir­cumstances every time I had gone to see him. Our roaming around the desert and the mountains had been the means to accomplish that.

The maneuver of altering the context of my ordi­nary world by taking me for hikes and hunting was another instance of his system that had bypassed me. Context disarrangement meant that I did not know the ropes and my attention had to be focused on everything don Juan did.

“What a trick! Uh?” he said and laughed.

I laughed with awe. I had never realized that he was so aware.

He then enumerated his steps in guiding and trapping my attention. When he had finished his account he added that a teacher had to take into consideration the personality of the apprentice, and that in my ,case he had to be careful because I was violent and would have thought nothing of killing myself out of despair.

“What a preposterous fellow you are, don Juan,” I said in jest, and he exploded in a giant laugh.

He explained that in order to help erase personal his­tory three other techniques were taught. They were: los­ing self-importance, assuming responsibility, and using death as an adviser. The idea was that, without the beneficial effect of those three techniques, erasing per­sonal history would involve the apprentice in being shifty, evasive, and unnecessarily dubious about himself and his actions.

Don Juan asked me to tell him what had been the most natural reaction I had had in moments of stress, frustration, and disappointment before I became an apprentice. He said that his own reaction had been wrath. I told him that mine had been self-pity.

“Although you’re not aware of it, you had to work your head off to make that feeling a natural one,” he said. “By now there is no way for you to recollect the immense effort that you needed to establish self-pity as a feature of your island. Self-pity bore witness to every­thing you did. It was just at your fingertips, ready to advise you. Death is considered by a warrior to be a more amenable adviser, which can also be brought to bear witness on everything one does, just like self-pity, or wrath. Obviously, after an untold struggle you had learned to feel sorry for yourself. But you can also learn, in the same way, to feel your impending end, and thus you can learn to have the idea of your death at your fingertips. As an adviser, self-pity is nothing in compari­son to death.”

Don Juan pointed out then that there was seemingly a contradiction in the idea of change; on the one hand, the sorcerers’ world called for a drastic transformation, and on the other, the sorcerers’ explanation said that the island of the “tonal” was complete and not a single element of it could be removed. Change, then, did not mean obliterating anything but rather altering the use assigned to those elements.

“Take self-pity for instance,” he said. “There is no way to get rid of it for good; it has a definite place and character in your island, a definite facade which is recognizable. Thus, every time the occasion arises, self-pity becomes active. It has history. If you then change the facade of self-pity, you would have shifted its place of prominence.”

I asked him to explain the meaning of his metaphors,especially the idea of changing facades. I understood it as perhaps the act of playing more than one role at the same time.

“One changes the facade by altering the use of the elements of the island,” he replied. “Take self-pity again. It was useful to you because you either felt im­portant and deserving of better conditions, better treat­ment, or because you were unwilling to assume re­sponsibility for the acts that brought you to the state that elicited self-pity, or because you were incapable of bringing the idea of your impending death to witness your acts and advise you.
“Erasing personal history and its three companion techniques are the sorcerers’ means for changing the facade of the elements of the island. For instance, by erasing your personal history, you have denied use to self-pity; in order for self-pity to work you had to feel important, irresponsible, and immortal. When those
feelings were altered in some way, it was no longer possible for you to feel sorry for yourself.
“The same was true with all the other elements which you’ve changed on your island. Without using those four techniques you never could’ve succeeded in chang­ing them. But changing facades means only that one has assigned a secondary place to a formerly important
element. Your self-pity is still a feature of your island; it will be there in the back in the same way that the idea of your impending death, or your humbleness, or your responsibility for your acts were there, without ever being used.”

Don Juan said that once all those techniques had been presented, the apprentice arrived at a crossroad. Depending on his sensibility, the apprentice did one of two things. He either took the recommendations and suggestions made by his teacher at their face value, act­ing without expecting rewards; or he took everything as a joke or an aberration.

I remarked that in my own case I was confused by the word “techniques.” I always expected a set of pre­cise directions, but he had given me only vague sugges­tions; and I was incapable of taking them seriously or acting in accordance with his stipulations.

“That was your mistake,” he said. “I had to decide then whether or not to use power plants. You could’ve used those four techniques to clean and reorder your island of the tonal. They would’ve led you to the nagual. But not all of us are capable of reacting to simple recommendations. You, and I for that matter, needed something else to shake us; we needed those power plants.”

It had indeed taken me years to realize the impor­tance of those early suggestions made by don Juan. The extraordinary effect that psychotropic plants had had on me was what gave me the bias that their use was the key feature of the teachings. I held onto that con­viction and it was only in the later years of my appren­ticeship that I realized that the meaningful transforma­tions and findings of sorcerers were always done in states of sober consciousness.

“What would have happened if I had taken your recommendations seriously?” I asked.

“You would have gotten to the nagual,” he replied.

“But would I have gotten to the nagual without a benefactor?”

“Power provides according to your impeccability,” he said. “If you had seriously used those four tech­niques, you would’ve stored enough personal power to find a benefactor. You would’ve been impeccable and power would have opened all the necessary avenues. That is the rule.”

“Why didn’t you give me more time?” I asked. “You had all the time you needed,” he said. “Power showed me the way. One night I gave you a riddle to work out; you had to find your beneficial spot in front of the door of my house. That night you performed marvelously under pressure and in the morning you fell asleep over a very special rock that I had put there. Power showed me that you had to be pushed mercilessly or you wouldn’t do a thing.”

“Did the power plants help me?” I asked.

“Certainly,” He said. “They opened you up by stop­ping your view of the world. In this respect power plants have the same effect on the tonal as the right way of walking. Both flood it with information and force the internal dialogue to come to a stop. The plants are ex­cellent for that, but very costly. They cause untold damage to the body. This is their drawback, especially with the devil’s weed.”

“If you knew that they were so dangerous, why did you give me so many of them, so many times?” I asked.

He assured me that the details of the procedure were decided by power itself. He said that although the teach­ings were supposed to cover ,the same issues with all apprentices, the order was different for each one, and that he had gotten repeated indications that I needed a great deal of coercion in order to bother with anything.

“I was dealing with a sassy immortal being that had no respect for his life or his death,” he said, laughing.

I brought up the fact that he had described and dis­cussed those plants in terms of anthropomorphic quali­ties. His references to them were always as if the plants had personalities. He replied that that was a prescribed means for deviating the apprentice’s attention away from the real issue, which was stopping the internal dialogue.

“If they are used only to stop the internal dialogue, what’s their connection with the ally?” I asked.

“That’s a difficult point to explain,” he said. “Those plants lead the apprentice directly to the nagual, and the ally is an aspect of it. We function at the center of reason exclusively, regardless of who we are or where we come from. Reason can naturally account in one way or another for everything that happens within its view of the world. The ally is something which is out­side of that view, outside the realm of reason. It can be witnessed only at the center of will at times when our ordinary view has stopped, therefore it is properly the nagual. Sorcerers, however, can learn to perceive the ally in a most intricate way, and in doing so they get too deeply immersed in a new view. So, in order to protect you from that fate, I did not emphasize the ally as sorcerers usually do. Sorcerers have learned after gen­erations of using power plants to account in their views for everything that is accountable about them. I would say that sorcerers, by using their will, have succeeded in enlarging their views of the world. My teacher and benefactor were the clearest examples of that. They were men of great power, but they were not men of knowledge. They never broke the bounds of their enor­mous views and thus never arrived at the totality of themselves, yet they knew about it. It wasn’t that they lived aberrant lives, claiming things beyond their reach; they knew that they had missed the boat and that only at their death would the total mystery be revealed to them. Sorcery had given them only a glimpse but never the real means to get to that evasive totality of oneself.

“I gave you enough of the sorcerers’ view without letting you get hooked by it. I said that only if one pits two views against each other can one weasel between tem to arrive at the real world. I meant that one can arrive at the totality of oneself only when one fully understands that the world is merely a view, regardless of whether that view belongs to an ordinary man or to a sorcerer.

“Here is where I varied from the tradition. After a lifelong struggle I know that what matters is not to learn a new description but to arrive at the totality of one­self. One should get to the nagual without maligning the tonal, and above all, without injuring one’s body.

You took those plants following the exact steps I fol­lowed myself. The only difference was that instead of plunging you into them I stopped when I judged that you had stored enough views of the nagual. That is the reason why I never wanted to discuss your encounters with power plants, or let you talk obsessively about them; there was no point in elaborating about the unspeakable. Those were true excursions into the nagual, the unknown.”

I mentioned that my need to talk about my percep­tions under the influence of psychotropic plants was due to an interest in elucidating a hypothesis of my own. I was convinced that with the aid of such plants he had provided me with memories of inconceivable ways of perceiving. Those memories, which at the time I experi­enced them may have seemed idiosyncratic and discon­nected from anything meaningful, were later assembled into units of meaning. I knew that don Juan had artfully guided me each time, and that any assembling of mean­ing was made under his guidance.

“I don’t want to emphasize those events, or explain them,” he said dryly. “The act of dwelling on explana­tions will put us right back where we don’t want to be; that is, we’ll be thrown back into a view of the world, this time a much larger view.”
Don Juan said that after the apprentice’s internal dialogue has been stopped by the effect of power plants, an unavoidable impasse develops. The appren­tice begins to have second thoughts about his whole apprenticeship. In don Juan’s opinion, even the most willing apprentice at that point would suffer a serious loss of interest.

“Power plants shake the tonal and threaten the solidity of the whole island,” he said. “It is at this time that the apprentice retreats, and wisely so; he wants to get out of the whole mess. It is also at this time that the teacher sets up his most artful trap, the worthy opponent. This trap has two purposes. First, it enables the teacher to hold his apprentice, and second, it enables the apprentice to have a point of reference for further use. The trap is a maneuver that brings forth a worthy opponent into the arena. Without the aid of a worthy opponent, who’s not really an enemy but a thoroughly dedicated adversary, the apprentice has no possibility of
continuing on the path of knowledge. The best of men would quit at this point if it were left up to them to decide. I brought to you as a worthy opponent the finest warrior one can find, la Catalina.”

Don Juan was talking about a time, years before, when he had led me into a long-range battle with an Indian sorceress.

“I put you in bodily contact with her,” he proceeded. “I chose a woman because you trust women. To dis­arrange that trust was very difficult for her. She con­fessed to me years later that she would’ve liked to quit, because she liked you. But she’s a great warrior and in spite of her feelings she nearly blasted you off the planet. She disarranged your tonal so intensely that it was never the same again. She actually changed features on the face of your island so deeply that her acts sent you into another realm. One may say that she could’ve become your benefactor herself, had it not been that you were not cut out to be a sorcerer like she is. There was something amiss between you two. You were in­capable of being afraid of her. You nearly lost your marbles one night when she accosted you, but in spite of that you were attracted to her. She was a desirable woman to you no matter how scared you were. She knew that. I caught you one day in town looking at her, shaking in your boots with fear and yet drooling at her.

“Because of the acts of a worthy opponent, then, an apprentice can be either blasted to pieces or changed radically. La Catalina’s actions with you, since they did not kill you-not because she did not try hard enough but because you were durable-had a beneficial effect on you, and also provided you with a decision.

“The teacher uses the worthy opponent to force the apprentice into the choice of his life. The apprentice must choose between the warrior’s world and his ordi­nary world. But no decision is possible unless the ap­prentice understands the choice; thus a teacher must have a thoroughly patient and understanding attitude and must lead his man with a sure hand to that choice, and above all he must make sure that his apprentice chooses the world and the life of a warrior. I accom­plished this by asking you to help me overcome la Catalina. I told you she was about to kill me and that I needed your help to get rid of her. I gave you fair warning about the consequences of your choice and plenty of time to decide whether or not to make it.”

I clearly remembered that don Juan had set me loose that day. He told me that if I did not want to help him I was free to leave and never come back. I felt at that moment that I was at liberty to choose my own course and had no further obligation to him.
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The Predilection of Two Warriors
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My eyes began to cross at one moment and then without any transition I was watching a ball of luminos­ity sliding back and forth on something that appeared to be the floor of an ice-skating rink with a thousand lights shining on it.

The sight was sublime. Then the ball of fire came to rest and stayed motionless. A voice shook me and dis­pelled my attention. It was don Juan talking. I could not understand at first what he was saying. I looked again at the ball of fire; I could distinguish only don Genaro lying on the ground with his arms and legs spread out.
Don Juan’s voice was very clear. It seemed to trigger something in me and I began to write.

“Genaro’s love is the world,” he said. “He was just now embracing this enormous earth but since he’s so little all he can do is swim in it. But the earth knows that Genaro loves it and it bestows on him its care. That’s why Genaro’s life is filled to the brim and his state, wherever he’ll be, will be plentiful. Genaro roams on the paths of his love and, wherever he is, he is com­plete. “

Don Juan squatted in front of us. He caressed the ground gently.

“This is the predilection of two warriors,” he said. “This earth, this world. For a warrior there can be no greater love.”

Don Genaro stood up and squatted next to don Juan for a moment while both of them peered fixedly at us, then they sat in unison, cross-legged.

“Only if one loves this earth with unbending passion can one release one’s sadness,” don Juan said. “A war­rior is always joyful ‘because his love is unalterable and his beloved, the earth, embraces him and bestows upon him inconceivable gifts. The sadness belongs only to those who hate the very thing that gives shelter to their beings.”

Don Juan again caressed the ground with tenderness. “This lovely being, which is alive to its last recesses and understands every feeling, soothed me, it cured me of my pains, and finally when I had fully understood my love for it, it taught me freedom.”

He paused. The silence around us was frightening. The wind hissed softly and then I heard the distant barking of a lone dog.

“Listen to that barking,” don Juan went on. “That is the way my beloved earth is helping me now to bring this last point to you. That barking is the saddest thing one can hear.”

We were quiet for a moment. The barking of that lone dog was so sad and the stillness around us so in­tense that I experienced a numbing anguish. It made me think of my own life, my sadness, my not knowing where to go, what to do.

“That dog’s barking is the nocturnal voice of a man,” don Juan said. “It comes from a house in that valley to­wards the south. A man is shouting through his dog, since they are companion slaves for life, his sadness, his boredom. He’s begging his death to come and release him from the dull and dreary chains of his life.”

Don Juan’s words had caught a most disturbing line in me. I felt he was speaking directly to me.

“That barking, and the loneliness it creates, speaks of the feelings of men,” he went on. “Men for whom an entire life was like one Sunday afternoon, an after­noon which was not altogether miserable, but rather hot and dull and uncomfortable. They sweated and fussed a great deal. They didn’t know where to go, or what to do. That afternoon left them only with the memory of petty annoyances and tedium, and then suddenly it was over; it was already night.”

He recounted a story I had once told him about a seventy-two-year-old man who complained that his life had been so short that it seemed to him that it was only the day before that he was a boy. The man had said to me, “I remember the pajamas I used to wear when I was ten years old. It seems that only one day has passed. Where did the time go?”

“The antidote that kills that poison is here,” don Juan said, caressing the ground.

“The sorcerers’ ex­planation cannot at all liberate the spirit. Look at you two. You have gotten to the sorcerers’ explanation, but it doesn’t make any difference that you know it. You’re more alone that ever, because without an unwavering love for the being that gives you shelter, aloneness is loneliness.

“Only the love for this splendorous being can give freedom to a warrior’s spirit; and freedom is joy, efficiency, and abandon in the face of any odds. That is the last lesson. It is always left for the very last mo­ment, for the moment of ultimate solitude when a man faces his death and his aloneness. Only then does it make sense.”

Don Juan and don Genaro stood up and stretched their arms and arched their backs, as if sitting had made their bodies stiff. My heart began to pound fast. They made Pablito and me stand up.

“The twilight is the crack between the worlds,” don Juan said. It is the door to the unknown.”

He pointed with a sweeping movement of his hand to the mesa where we were standing.

“This is the plateau in front of that door.”

He pointed then to the northern edge of the mesa. “There is the door. Beyond, there is an abyss and beyond that abyss is the unknown.”

Don Juan and don Genaro then turned to Pablito and said good-by to him. Pablito’s eyes were dilated and fixed; tears were rolling down his cheeks.

I heard don Genaro’s voice saying good-by to me, but I did not hear don Juan’s.

Don Juan and don Genaro moved towards Pablito and whispered briefly in his ears. Then they came to me. But before they had whispered anything I already had that peculiar feeling of being split.

“We will now be like dust on the road,” don Genaro said. “Perhaps it will get in your eyes again, someday.”
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