Lifestyle Choices

Those more influenced by external authority have a greater tendency to be depressed. Obedience to something outside yourself and lack of freedom of action involve repressing your own vitality and your own inner authority. The outside authority may be a forceful parent or spouse, or the inflexible regime of the institution you may live in or work for.

The most extreme example is being literally imprisoned. Your anger at your loss of freedom is likely to be repressed after a while; you are likely to be bored; you may well lose hope; in addition, you will lose the freedom and sometimes the capacity for self-regulation. Regulating yourself, making your own decisions, assessing your own risks and choosing your own paths are essential aspects of living life to the full. On the other hand, being in prison is very safe: it provides free housing and free food, and does not involve a great deal of personal responsibility. Most people in fact choose at least some form of relative imprisonment in order to feel safe and secure. The American psychiatrist Abraham Maslow, reckoned that only five per cent of people were truly autonomous, the other 95 per cent following without challenge the rules of life that had been dictated to them.

In a frightening study by Stanley Milgram at Yale University in 1963, subjects were asked to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to a human being who was being experimented upon. The victim was actually an actor and the shock generator was simulated, but the effect was very realistic, as evidenced by the extreme levels of emotional tension created in the subjects. The instrument was clearly marked with gradations from 15 to 450 volts. From 375 volts to 420 volts was marked “Danger: Severe Shock“. The voltages 435 and 450 were ominously marked “XXX”. Subjects were told that they were taking part in a learning experiment to study the effects of punishment on memory— of 40 subjects, all 40 administered a shock of 300 volts at which point the victim pounded against the wall and could no longer answer any more questions. 26 out of the 40 obeyed the orders of the experimenter to keep increasing the voltage, despite no further sounds or answers from the victim, to the very end, that is, two steps beyond the designation “Danger: Severe Shock“. Observers looked through one-way mirrors and one related:

“I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled on his earlobe, and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist on to his forehead and muttered: `Oh God, let’s stop it’. And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the end.”

Obedience is a very strong human trait. So long as you are obedient, you suffer less responsibility and can feel some measure of security because you are following a respected or powerful person or organization. If you are more self- regulating, you take more risk, for you are aware that you are responsible for the results of your own decisions, positive or negative. Freedom and security are opposites: the balancethat people choose varies from physical and mental imprisonment to inner self-reliance.

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