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Was Milgram Right? Rethinking Obedience After 10,000 Years

The ideas here stand on the shoulders of many researchers. But the through-line I sketch - the long, 10,000-year story of how humans were shaped from anti-authoritarian foragers into obedience-conditioned moderns, and what that means for interpreting Milgram - doesn’t seem to appear anywhere as a single narrative. If someone has already mapped this full arc, consider this a happy rediscovery rather than a claim of invention. And send me the link - I’d genuinely like to read it.

Few psychological findings have penetrated public consciousness as deeply as Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies. Conducted in the early 1960s, they seemed to reveal a grim truth: ordinary people will inflict harm on others when instructed by an authority figure, even as they tremble, plead, and sweat under the weight of what they believe they’re doing.

Milgram concluded that obedience to authority is a fundamental, near-instinctive human tendency.

For decades, this became the dominant narrative: the “banality of evil,” the innate weakness of conscience, the frightening pliability of human behavior.

But sixty years later - armed with anthropological insight, historical context, and critiques of experiment design - we’re forced to ask a more difficult question:

Was Milgram discovering something about human nature, or something about modern humans?

Milgram was right about the power of authority.
But he was wrong about where that power comes from.

What Milgram Did - and Didn’t - Discover

Milgram’s startling statistic - 65% of subjects administered maximum “shocks” when prompted - led him to argue that obedience is a universal human trait. In his interpretation, human beings possess a deep biological mechanism that causes them to relinquish agency to authority figures.

But Milgram’s participants were not neutral data points.
They were mid-century, post-war, industrialized Americans - products of schools, churches, factories, bureaucracies, and media narratives. They were shaped by Cold War conformity and decades of institutional obedience training.

Milgram interpreted their behavior as timeless.
But anthropology - and history - tell a different story.

Our Ancestral Baseline: Humans Were Not Obedient

For 95% of human evolution, people lived in small, nomadic, egalitarian bands. Across surviving hunter-gatherer societies, we see consistent patterns:

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm describes this as a reverse dominance hierarchy - not one where a chief dominates the group, but one where the group dominates any potential chief.

Among our closest relatives, chimpanzees, alpha males hold power only as long as coalitions support them. If the alpha pushes too far, mid-ranking males coordinate to depose him.

This is the evolutionary template.

Nothing in this pattern resembles the Milgram paradigm.
There are no lab coats, no abstract authority, no obedience as virtue.

Obedience, as Milgram conceptualized it, is absent from ancestral human life.

The deepest truth is this: non-obedience is the default human state.

Agriculture: The First Engine of Hierarchy

Everything begins to change around 10,000 BCE with the advent of agriculture.

Once humans can:

hierarchy becomes not just possible but advantageous - at least for the emerging elites.

Agriculture introduces:

This is the first environment where sustained hierarchy is economically viable.

Still, this is not yet Milgram-style obedience.
People comply out of necessity, not ideological alignment.

But the seed is planted.

Early States: The Birth of Institutional Authority

By 3,500 BCE, early states like Mesopotamia and Egypt introduce something new and world-changing:

This is where obedience becomes structural:

Here we see the first precursors to the mindset Milgram tapped into.

The Axial Age: Obedience Becomes a Moral Virtue

Between 800–200 BCE, philosophies and religions begin to encode obedience into ethics:

Authority becomes sacralized.

Obedience enters the human psychological bloodstream.

Empires: Scaling the Obedience Machine

Empires - Rome, Persia, Han China - industrialize hierarchy long before factories:

By now, humans have thousands of years of conditioning inside hierarchical institutions.
But obedience is still externally enforced.

The inner landscape has not yet fully changed.

Industrialization: Obedience Moves Inside the Mind

The 19th and 20th centuries fundamentally transform human psychology.

Industrial society introduces:

This is where obedience becomes internalized.

It stops being:

“I obey because I must.”

and becomes:

“I obey because I am shaped to.”

By the 1950s, the obedience infrastructure is fully mature.

Milgram was not studying “humans.”
He was studying the end product of a long cultural project.

The Milgram Paradigm Reinterpreted

Milgram believed he had revealed a universal psychological truth: obedience is innate.

But evidence tells a different story:

Obedience is not inherent - it is constructed.
Obedience is not universal - it is historical.
Obedience is not natural - it is engineered.

Milgram’s subjects obeyed for reasons tied to institutional trust, scientific legitimacy, patriotic framing, hierarchical schooling, and social conformity.

Later reinterpretations (like Haslam & Reicher’s “engaged followership”) show subjects obeyed because they identified with the authority’s mission.

Yet this leaves one question unresolved:
If obedience is not innate but installed, is the “control group” truly gone?

The Last Surviving Control Group

If obedience is not innate but the cumulative product of 10,000 years of hierarchy and discipline, a haunting question emerges:

Is the control group - the population untouched by obedience-conditioning - truly gone?

Anthropology suggests no.
Biology suggests no.
Adolescence suggests no.

Adolescence as an evolutionary echo

Across cultures, adolescents show:

Not immaturity - but our ancestral template reasserting itself.

The last window before obedience “locks in”

Between childhood conformity and adult compliance lies:

Teenagers may be the last surviving control group.

They are not malfunctioning adults.
They are functioning hunter-gatherers.

What this means for Milgram

Milgram tested fully conditioned adults.
The ancestral anti-authoritarian template had already been overwritten.

Teenagers might have produced radically different results.

This developmental exception reframes Milgram once more: he did not test “humans,” but adults whose egalitarian instincts had already hardened into obedience structures.

The Real Question: What Exactly Did Milgram Prove?

Milgram was right that authority can induce harm.
But he misunderstood why.

He believed he found a universal instinct.
He actually measured:

Milgram measured cultural output - not biological baseline.

Why This Matters Today

If obedience is innate, it cannot be changed.
But if obedience is manufactured, it is reversible.

We can:

Milgram did not reveal a flaw in human nature.
He revealed the cost of 10,000 years of hierarchy.

Conclusion

Obedience is not a biological imperative.
It is a cultural artifact.

But the ancestral template never disappeared entirely.
It flickers in adolescence before society finishes the obedience project.

By the time Milgram ran his experiments, the adult control group had vanished - replaced by citizens shaped from childhood by institutional hierarchies.

Milgram showed not what humans are, but what humans become under prolonged obedience conditioning.

If obedience was learned, it can be unlearned.

Afterword: The Autonomy Problem

If obedience is not innate but culturally installed - a 10,000-year overlay on our species’ original psychology - then an unsettling possibility emerges:

Is our concept of autonomy shaped by the very obedience framework we are trying to escape?