Anarchism and Religion..Preliminary Comments
Anarchism and left wing politics in general has religious roots, in the
"West" Christian and Islamic roots. I hope to look at this stuff, and have
a lot on this page about the English Revolution , about the great radical
Christians of that era like Winstanely and Lilburne
I also hope to look at the Milgram experiment (which showed that your
average citizen will torture another human being to death if someone in a
white coat tells them to do so) and its relationship to spiritual practice
and in particular the ideas of George Gurdjieff.
The Milgram experiment was described in detail in Milgram's book "Obedience
to Authority". If you've ever gone near a sociology course you will have
heard of it, it is also known as the "Teacher Test". People were paid to
become involved in a phoney experiment in which they were told to shock
bound and helpless victims to obviously dangerous and agonising levels. If
the victim did not correctly answer certain banal questions (the experiment
was supposed to test the effect of pain on learning) a shock was given,
higher for each incorrect answer. Of course the "victim" (actually a stooge
working for the experimenter) always answered wrong. In the initial
experiments everyone was prepared to shock the victim to a clearly
dangerous level, and 65% were prepared to shock the victim to apparent death.
I have often explained anarchism in terms of the Milgram experiment, an
Anarchist society is one where the Milgram experiment would fail.
MORE ON...
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/8908/religion.html
More Jeremy Dixon.
