For The Many, The Norm Is To Obey—An Analysis (1 July 2024) by Lawrence Davidson
Part I—Albert Einstein’s 2%
On the evening of 14 December 1930, Albert Einstein gave a speech to the New History Society at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York City. The topic was not a scientific one. Rather, it was “War and Peace.” Einstein was a principled pacifist and so advocated “militant resistance” to all war, and particularly the one he saw on the horizon—eventually World War II. He told his audience that “if only 2% of the men liable for war service were to refuse, there would not be enough jails in the world to take care of them.” He said it was time “for action and not just talk.”
Einstein’s message did not catch on during WWII (the number of refusers in the U.S. was about 3 tenths of one percent.) When Einstein was forced to leave Germany and move to the United States, his advocacy of resistance to war was one of the reasons the FBI started a secret file on him (and his close associates) that eventually ran to 1400 pages. Herbert Hoover thought he was likely a communist. Hoover could not imagine someone claiming to be a pacifist without having an ulterior motive.
Yet Einstein’s 2% message did have potential and one can see this in the U.S. during the Vietnam War. “By the later years of that war … all major cities faced backlogs of induction-refusal legal cases. … [The] draft resisters, combined with the larger antiwar movement on campuses and inside the military, were successful: there were too many people to punish or send to prison.” The circumstances were admittedly exceptional. Vietnam was the first televised war. The media featured body bags also spurred protest and refusal. It is too bad that Einstein was not alive to witness this. No doubt he would have felt at least momentarily vindicated.
Part II—War at One Remove
What happens when your country is at war at one remove—aiding and abetting some other country’s criminal slaughter—a war that systematically targets civilians, indulges in massacres, even approaches the level of genocide? Historically, we know that such wars can threaten civilized society. Even participating at arm’s length, by helping an “ally” through diplomacy, material and money, someone on the aiding and abetting side ought to take critical notice and resist. And, of course, some do.
Today, in the face of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians—a war in which the Zionist state is committing moral suicide in public through daily internet scenes of carnage, it is worth noting that some Americans deem it morally necessary to protest. However, the numbers aren’t high: some aware college students, those Jews of great moral courage, and a few officials in the U.S. government who find the whole thing too revolting to sanction. How many in this last category of officialdom? Well, publicly to date, nine plus one suicide. I won’t even try to figure out what percentage of all U.S. government workers that is. Nonetheless, Einstein’s sensibility seems to be still alive, here and there.
Here and there? It is likely the case that the cumulative protests that helped stop the Vietnam War are an exception to the otherwise normal ability of the state to wage repeated criminal wars relatively free of public opposition. Why is it so hard to reach Einstein’s 2%?
Part III—Bell Curve Communities
The behavior of any given population will be shaped by both external and internal factors. Among the external ones are culture, family, peers, and personal experiences. Internally, there are our genetic and hormonal makeups interacting with external circumstances. This might sound rather broad, but in practice it creates a determining set of factors for behavior.
For the majority in any population, external circumstances will lead one to conform to culture. Family and peer groups will follow the same cultural traditions and belief systems as the community, and the individual’s personal experiences (even in those rough adolescent years) will not seriously challenge this system. Overall, it is training in obedience to the nation—and those who interpret its interests.
The result is that we live in “Bell Curve Communities.” * Here, the large majority of the population will group within the center bulge of the bell curve (say within two standard deviations of the mean). However, there will be a relatively small minority who will appear deviant in acceptable or unacceptable ways and they will be scattered at the tailing away ends of the curve. This deviance will be the consequence of genetic makeup plus a history of individual experiences that do result in anomalous behavior.
Therefore, for most, a culturally-themed community outlook on the world sets the guide rails. For instance, every nation has a self-glorifying theme that is inculcated into its population through multi-generational education and general peer pressure. Certainly, both the United States and the Soviet Union qua Russia have such themes. These themes can sometimes be expressed in racist terms as when a U.S. politician told the Chief Prosecutor of the ICJ that his institution was created only to prosecute Africans, not civilized Western leaders.
Part IV—The Protester Is the Exception
These normative obedience-affirming cultural mindsets are often enforced by official institutions. A universal set of examples are government institutions which insist on a tight centering of the bell curve or, in other words, loyalty to the community and its chosen form of governance and leadership.
Take the stories of those few government employees who have resigned in the face of the present U.S. administration’s support of genocidal slaughter in Gaza. Even in the face of definitive horror, or what some may characterize as “pure evil,” to break with the official line is a struggle. Here is an example:
In early November, 2023, Major Harrison Mann resigned from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. Harrison is both Jewish and a 13 year veteran of military service. The reason he gave for quitting was the “nearly unqualified support” the US has provided Israel “which has enabled and empowered the killing and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians” [in Gaza]. He explained, “at some point… you’re either advancing a policy that enables [the] mass starvation of children, or you’re not. … I know that I did, in my small way, wittingly advance that policy.”
You would think that such a revelation would make backing away from complicity in such a policy easy, but that turned out not to be the case. Mann had been part of an institutional culture of top-down authority. You start with the President, the Commander and Chief, and authority flows downward through the ranks. “I told myself, I don’t make policy and it’s not my place to question it.” [Defendants at the Nuremberg trials described the same cultural imperative.] His office environment was one wherein “few colleagues spoke out about the war in Gaza and US support for Israel. He was sure that when he did so, others would “feel betrayed.” His ultimate decision to stop following those orders made him an outsider, occupying the tailing off regions of his institution’s bell curve. For everyone who, like Mann, leaves, thousands stay on. Protest is not the norm, obedience is the norm. That is why both institutional systems and societies carry on for so long—for better or worse.
Part V—The Case of The Israeli Jews
It should be noted at this point that, embedded in the culture of the modern United States, is lip service paid to notions of universal human and civil rights. These are taken relatively seriously by a progressive minority, and in the 1960s and 1970s actually had an impact on federal law. Subsequently, when official policy contradicts these sentiments, some people do notice. Depending on the circumstances, some of them will act on the resulting cognitive dissonance. However, unless circumstances cause the numbers to build (such as with the Vietnam War or perhaps the George Floyd protests by about 20 million people) to the point that the habit of obedience— foundational to all cultures—is shaken, the majority will ignore contradictions, logical or moral, and be ready to obey an official directive to march into hell.
This is certainly the case with the Jewish population of Israel—the nation on the receiving side of the supply line causing the dismay described above. Zionist Israel is a themed state par excellence—and not in a good way. In fact, what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz described as the “brutalization of Israel” might just have been inevitable. Here is why:
Zionist Israel was designed as a refuge for world Jewry in an anti-Semitic world. The modern notion of this design was laid out in the 19th century by European Jews—Europe being where most of that antisemitism was practiced. 19th century Europe was also the home of the world’s major imperial powers. The first step for the Zionist leaders was to find a great power sponsor to assist in their quest for a safe refuge. If the Europeans did not like the Jews, they could at least help them relocate.
In 1917, the Zionists hit the jackpot when they struck an alliance with the British government. At the time the British controlled a worldwide empire and were led by what today we would call Christian fundamentalists. So here was the deal: 1. The Zionists wanted a land for the Jews, 2. The British had lots of land and were conquering more, 3. In exchange for Jewish support for their WWI war effort, the British would arrange for the Jews of Europe to colonize Palestine, 4. This made almost everyone happy. The Jews because of Palestine’s biblical connections, and the British leaders because they convinced themselves they were aiding in the fulfillment of God’s plan for the Jews. 5. Of course, the native residents of Palestine were not happy, but neither the European Jews or the British cared because they were racists (culturally normal for the West at this time) and saw the natives as inferior beings.
How does all this make today’s genocidal war in Gaza (and the ethnic cleansing going on in the West Bank) just about inevitable—or at least a high historical probability? Well, it bears repeating that you can expect trouble when you insert large numbers of Europeans, who have ambitions to form a state exclusively for themselves, into a non-European land filled with hundreds of thousands of locals. The incoming settlers were Jews, but they were also Europeans and so had an imperial European superiority complex. To this you can add a persecution complex (perhaps more understandable) that made them interpret all opposition as antisemitic. The Palestinians, of course, saw things differently. They were being robbed by a bunch of Western imperialists and so they repeatedly rebelled.
For the next hundred years (counting from 1917), the Zionists taught their children that Palestine was Israel and that the Palestinians were Jew haters. After the battle of 7 October 2024, the Israelis, now led by opportunists and religious fanatics, decided to free themselves of those turbulent Palestinians. They activated the ‘Dahiya’ doctrine,‘ an Israeli military doctrine first formulated in 2008, that holds that “in asymmetric wars in which the enemy holds territory populated by a supportive population, destruction of infrastructure and civilians’ homes with disproportionate force is essential.” Just about the entire Jewish Israeli population saw this as culturally acceptable, gave a cheer, and marched into hell. No great surprise.
Part VI—Conclusion
You know that old saying “one bad apple can spoil the whole barrel”? What happens when it is the barrel that is rotten due to racism, colonialism, ultra-nationalism, religious fanaticism and the like? When you can convince most of the population to see their world in any of these terms, Albert Einstein’s 2% doesn’t stand a chance.
In a follow-up interview with G.S. Viereck in January of 1931, Einstein pragmatically observed that “nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.” In 1938, the governing council of the U.S. based Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues asserted that “if we learn how to discount the propaganda of war-makers and how to insist upon the peaceable adjustment of conflicts, there is no psychological reason for wars to continue.” Alas, it was never that easy. The normative culture of bell curve communities is “propaganda” based, and an acceptance of war is in that mix. Thus, as we have seen, except under unusual circumstances, only a small minority will make the choice to resist the call to war, and they will mostly be those whose personal history and circumstances position them on the tail ends of their bell curve society. The rest of us, true to more community compatible upbringings, will just obey.
*A Bell Curve is a “symmetrical probability distribution in statistics”. Probability distribution is presented in the shape of a bell wherein the most numerous or common data is clustered in the center/thickest part of the bell shape (around the center mean), while less common and less frequently occurring data appears at either of the tapering tail ends of the bell shape.
