Revisiting the Insurrection

And the truths it revealed

Last week, The New York Times released a 40-minute video of the January 6 insurrection on the Capitol. Using footage from filmmakers, the rioters themselves, law enforcement body cams, and graphics and other tools, the mini-film restores a sense of narrative to the event, which at the time washed over me, as it may have you, in increasingly astonishing/infuriating news bits and moments of sheer terror and disbelief. It was both upsetting to relive and oddly comforting to see the moments from that day retold in an explanatory form in chronological order. There are people in power who want us to forget what really happened that day; those people are not serving the public who elected them and are actively working to subvert democracy. (It’s good to keep this piece in mind in the face of those attempts.)

Also last week, On the Media released an investigation into one of the tools the insurrectionists used to organize and coordinate both before and on that day, a walkie-talkie app called Zello. (Zello has since removed many of the groups responsible.) Technology has undoubtedly given the people who are committed to acts like the insurrection a way to recruit and focus. From a technical perspective, they allow many of these groups to act in unison toward one goal, which can make them scarily effective. Obviously, today’s technological tools and media—social media like Facebook, apps like Zello, and news stations like Fox and OAN—do not create racists, reactionaries, and vigilantes. There have always been people who want to harm others, there has always been racist violence in the United States, and there have always been groups working to undermine democracy to enable white supremacists to stay in power. But these tools are connecting them to the corrupted people in power who support their efforts for their own gain. They provide organization and targets and can just move so much more quickly than similar groups have in the past. And, most alarming, these new tools are connecting them to a twisted sense of moral purpose.

In each report, we could hear people saying that they believed they were saving democracy, that they were acting heroically, that they were saving America. They believed were on the right side. At the Capitol, they kept telling the officers they encountered, surrounded, and attacked that they were “on the same side.” The Zello app had been used by the same groups prior to the Capitol insurrection to organize rescue trips to areas hit hard by hurricanes using their private boats, lending to their sense of heroism. They’re vigilante groups who have deputized themselves and, in some cases, include members of and are supported by law enforcement. They believe they’re good, moral people just doing what they have to do. It doesn’t help that a major political party keeps repeating the lies that led them to this belief.

It reminds me of the famous Stanley Milgram experiment: in it, subjects were asked to administer a questionnaire to an unseen person, and administer shocks when that other person got the answer wrong. The voltage allegedly went up; the unseen subject, who was in reality an actor, sounded increasingly harmed. The shocks were fake, but the real, unwitting subject of the experiment was the questioner and shocker. Milgram and his colleagues wanted to test the conditions under which otherwise good and normally kind people could be convinced to hurt someone else. Largely, people continued to administer the shocks even after they started to worry whether he unseen person was hurt.

Like many famous sociological and psychological studies, this one is widely misunderstood. If you ask most people what this study shows, they think it shows blind obedience to authority. That the experimenter told people what to do, and so they did it, despite their own moral qualms. But a RadioLab episode from 2012 shows that the truth is more complicated, and much darker. Over the course of several experiments, if the test subjects expressed concern, Milgram responded with four different prompts. The fourth was the most authoritative one, a direct order to continue giving shocks and upping the voltage no matter what. A “You have to do this because I said so,” response in the face of the subject’s concern. In those cases, the experiment’s subject was almost always totally disobedient. When told they had to do something, they basically said, “No I don’t!” and quit cooperating. Which means the study doesn’t show blind obedience at all.

The prods that actually worked, the appeals that convinced people to harm another human being they’d never met and had no quarrel with, was an appeal to the greater good. Before participating and administering the shocks they didn’t know were fake, the subjects filled out questionnaires and got an explanation about the importance of the project to science. They believed they were helping with an important experiment that was contributing to new knowledge. “They're trying to do the right thing,” Alex Haslam a professor of psychology from the University of Exeter (now at the University of Queensland in Australia), told the RadioLab crew. “They're not doing something because they have to, they're doing it because they think they ought to. And that's all the difference in the world.” Milgram’s findings held up when the experiment was repeated in 2006.

Haslam continues later: “There's a sort of chilling comparison which is a speech that Himmler gave to some SS leaders when they were about to commit a range of atrocities. And he said, "Look, this is what you're going to do is ... Of course, you don't want to do this. Of course, nobody wants to be killing other people; we realize this is hard work. But what you're doing is for the good of Germany, and this is necessary in order to advance our noble cause."

To convince people to participate in something terrible, destructive, illegal, and wrong, you just have to convince them that they’re acting for the greater good. And you don’t have to convince that many people to act: a handful of people can start to dismantle systems, piece-by-piece. In failing to account for what happened January 6, we’re ensuring that it wasn’t the end of anything, but the beginning of the next attempt. Donald Trump’s efforts to take a wrecking ball to institutions—sometimes laughably inept—nonetheless found weak spots: at the Capitol and in his party, both in what it was willing to do, what it was willing to overlook, and what it was willing to pretend to believe.

What I’m Recommending:

I have a new cookbook to be obsessed with. Colombiana, by Mariana Velásquez, is a culinary tour of the Colombia, from ocean to ocean, and contains breakfasts, weeknight meals, and entire dinner party plans. I’ve loved everything I’ve made from it so far, but I especially love the sumptuous, evocative book. It also makes me miss dinner parties.

Cute Animal Pic of the Week:

Here is a tiny baby kitty called Hopscotch. She wants to know if you like her mustache.