Part 3: Obeying and Believing Authority 

Summary/Editor’s Note:

Frances Shure, M.A., L.P.C., has performed an in-depth analysis addressing a key issue of our time: “Why Do Good People Become Silent—or Worse—About 9/11?” The resulting essay, to be presented here as a series, is a synthesis of reports on academic research as well as clinical observations.

In answering the question in the title of this essay, last month’s segment, Part 2, addressed the anthropological study, Diffusion of Innovations, which discusses how change occurs in societies. These anthropologists discovered that, within diverse cultures, there can be found groups that vary in their openness to new ideas and technology—groups that fall within a neat bell curve. The success of the spread of an innovative technology or new idea reliably hinges on one point: whether or not opinion leaders vouch for it. In this context, the mainstream media can rightly be seen as promoting the official myth of 9/11, and therefore aiding and abetting the crimes of September 11, 2001.

We continue Ms. Shure’s analysis in Part 3 with the authority experiments of Stanley Milgram, Jane Elliott, and Philip Zimbardo.