On an otherwise ordinary school day in 1967, Ron Jones, a young social studies teacher in Palo Alto, California, put his 10th grade students through an exercise which would become famous around the world. Adopting a stern façade, Jones explained that, as an experiment, students would from now on be expected to abide by a new set of rules. On that first day, he merely asked for stricter discipline, but by the second day the students were being drilled into a movement, complete with a cupped hand salute with which member of the group, which Jones named The Third Wave, were told to greet each other.
On the third day, students who were not originally in the class joined, drawn in by the excitement of The Third Wave members, who were eagerly designing banners with their slogan (“Strength Through Discipline”) and issuing member cards, such that by the end of the day the group counted over 200 loyal members, many so devoted that they started reporting those who did not follow the rules, which were to be adhered to even outside of school. By the fourth day, the experiment had taken on a life on its own and Jones, who felt it was slipping from his control, told his students that The Third Wave was actually a nationwide movement which would announce a presidential candidate the very next day. When students gathered on the fifth day to watch their leader, they were instead told that The Third Wave was disbanded and that they had in fact been part of an experiment to show how easily the seed of fascism could be planted and grow.
Just a year later, a schoolteacher in Iowa by the name of Jane Elliott divided her third-graders (all of whom were white) into two groups according to their eye colour and told them that the kids with brown eyes were superior to those with blue eyes – intelligence, she told the children, was determined by melanin – and she sent those with brown eyes to lunch first, gave them longer recess and sat them at the front of the class. Again, the results were immediate: the brown-eyed kids behaved more arrogantly and condescending towards those with blue eyes, who in turn became timid and seemingly accepted their lower position in the hierarchy. Elliot ran her experiment to teach about racism and show that prejudice is a learned behaviour, but it also confirmed what The Third Wave experiment had shown about how straightforward it is to conjure into existence an enforceable hierarchy and coerce complicity with a figure in a position of authority.
In these unprecedented days of suspension of basic civil liberties, brought on by governments scrambling to deal with the Coronavirus epidemic, it is worth reflecting on the experiments run by Jones and Elliott. Half the world’s population are in lockdown, ordered to stay at home to prevent the virus from spreading. Much like the subjects of the two experiments, we have been commanded by our governments to follow new rules that would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago, but which, when presented by authorities as necessary, most of us have accepted without question. Despite, or perhaps because of, virology and epidemic containment being subjects most of us can’t relate to, we do as we are told – and many of us with enthusiasm: an April 16 YouGov survey found that 91% of Britons supported extending the draconian lockdown measures, in force since March 23, for a further three weeks, and neighbours are spying on each other and reporting to the police if anyone breaks the rules.
Part of the explanation is surely found in a sense of distance that many people feel towards the very real consequences of the suspension of normal economic activity, furloughed as they are on a government paid break and seemingly unconscious of the pain they will be sharing in later. But there is more going on. Students in The New Wave experiment were horrified at how easy it was to indoctrinate them to fascist beliefs and behaviours. When we look back on the Coronavirus epidemic, we may be equally horrified at the lack of resistance to the dystopian power grabs by governments. As Hannah Arendt, the German-American political philosopher who witnessed the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, observed about the Nazis: “many were like him, and [ ] the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, [ ] they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” Too many, throughout history, have blindly followed their leaders. It’s time to ask questions.