The Door Was Open, He Did Not Flee: Why Do We Obey?

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The prison door stood open, the guard had been bought, his friends were ready. A seventy-year-old man refused to flee and drank the poison — because he believed he still owed something to the law that had handed down a verdict he considered unjust. So which contract did you sign, that you line up every morning?

Long before dawn, in a prison in Athens, a man was sleeping. He was seventy years old, he would be dead within days, and he was sleeping soundly. His friend Crito, waiting at the door, sat down amazed at that peaceful sleep and waited for him to wake. He had bribed the guard; the man had opened the door, let him in, and then withdrawn. So on that morning, the door of that cell stood open.

The news Crito had brought was urgent. Every year the Athenians sent a sacred ship to the island of Delos; from the moment that ship set out until the moment it returned, no execution could be carried out in the city. The few extra weeks Socrates had lived were owed entirely to the slowness of that ship. Crito said the ship had been sighted off Cape Sounion. It would be here tomorrow. If it entered the harbour tomorrow, the hemlock would be drunk the day after.

When Socrates woke, he calmly said the ship would not come that day. He had had a dream: a beautiful woman dressed in white had called out to him and told him that on the third day he would reach fertile land. That was all. A man postponing the date of his own execution by one day on the strength of a dream. While Crito's heart was in his mouth, he was talking about the poetry of what he had dreamed.

And why was Socrates there at all? In the year three hundred and ninety-nine, a popular court made up of more than five hundred citizens had tried him on two charges: not believing in the gods of the city, and corrupting the young. He had been found guilty by the narrowest of margins; by his own reckoning, had thirty votes gone the other way he would have been acquitted. The verdict, then, was not some settled truth but the product of the crowd's mood on that particular day. Everyone knew this. Crito knew it too.

And Crito's offer was serious, and what is more, it was ready. The money was there; Simmias of Thebes had brought it with him, and Cebes would contribute as well. The guards were cheap, and that part had already been taken care of. There were friends waiting for him in Thessaly, where he could live as a foreigner. The escape had been solved not as an idea but as a piece of logistics. Only one thing remained: the man had to stand up and walk.

Crito pressed him on three fronts. The first was personal: if I lose you, I shall never find another friend like you. The second was shame: people will think we were unwilling to spend money to save you, and we will be remembered as men too miserly to buy back their own friends. The third was the heaviest, because it concerned the children: your sons are small, you are leaving them fatherless; if you never intended to be a father, if you will not see it through to the end, then you are choosing the easiest way out.

Socrates' answer was not the answer of a condemned man. As though they were discussing the weather, he put a question to Crito: a man training his body, whose word should he listen to, anyone's at random, or that of the one trainer who knows the craft? If he listens to the wrong people, he ruins his body. Very well then; when it comes to justice and injustice, what do we suppose happens to our soul? The opinion of the crowd is no more an expertise there than it is in the case of the body. The crowd can kill you, yes; but the crowd cannot make you wise, and it cannot make you right. That it is able to kill you does not mean it is right.

Then he said the line: what matters is not living, but living well. To live well, to live beautifully, and to live justly are one and the same thing. So the subject of the argument was never survival; the subject was which life is worth living.

And then he set out a principle that still unsettles a person today. Under no circumstances should one commit injustice. Not even when injustice has been done to us. To return harm for harm is, in the eyes of the people, the most legitimate thing there is, the thing everyone takes for natural. But Socrates refused it. To answer evil with evil is itself an evil. And as he said it he added that those who hold this view are in the minority, and that with those who do not share this principle there is no common ground to stand on. He was aware of his own solitude.

Let us stop here and think. The door is open. The bribe has been paid. The money is ready. There is somewhere to go. And the man does not go. Let us say it once more, in the language of our own lives: all of us have stayed in rooms we could have walked out of. In jobs we could have left, swallowing words we could have spoken. Writing the resignation letter and never sending it. What happens in Socrates' cell is the purest, barest form of that everyday experience: staying inside when there is not a single chain outside.

But mark this: Socrates was not staying out of fear. Nor was he staying out of idleness. He owed Crito a reason, and in order to give that reason he gave voice to something that was not in that cell at all. He imagined the laws of Athens coming to him and standing before him. "Tell us, Socrates," they said, "what do you intend to do?"

The defence the laws mounted in that cell is the first example of one of the longest-lived ideas in Western political thought. This is what they said.

First they asked a threatening question: can a city stand if the judgments of its courts can be annulled by private individuals? If you run, you alone will have set out to destroy us. Then they made a claim of kinship: we are the ones who allowed your mother and father to marry, we are the ones who brought you into the world, we raised you and educated you. We are like your parents, and more than that. You have no right to strike your father; you have still less right to strike us.

And then they made the decisive move. In Athens, every citizen, once he comes of age and has seen how the city works and has seen us, the laws, is free, if he does not approve, to gather up his property and go wherever he likes. Not one of us detains anybody. You did not do this. What is more, no one has travelled less than you; you left the city almost only for military campaigns. You had your children here; so you must have found the place to your liking. At your trial you could have proposed exile as your penalty, and you did not, you chose death. Which means that for seventy years, every single day, by choosing to stay, you made an agreement with us. Not in words, but in deeds.

This is the idea of the contract. The contract nobody signed, but which you are deemed to have accepted by staying. For two thousand years this idea stood at the spine of modern political philosophy: the state's authority over you did not descend from the sky, it was born of your consent. Against claims of absolute power, this was an enormous advance. Because an authority born of consent is bound by the conditions of that consent.

But there is a problem, and it is the wall that everyone who takes the idea seriously eventually runs into. In the eighteenth century the Scottish thinker David Hume showed that wall with great clarity. To tell a poor peasant or artisan, he said, that by remaining in his country he consents to its government is meaningless. The man knows no other language, has no money to go anywhere, and lives from day to day on what he earns. His staying is not a choice. It is like telling a man carried aboard a ship while asleep that by remaining on board he has accepted the captain's authority, when his only alternative is to throw himself into the ocean and drown.

The objection is sharper still today. None of us chose the country we were born in. We did not choose our passport, our tax system, our criminal code. For most of us, the sentence "if you don't like it, leave" is not a real door but a rhetorical one: for someone without a visa, without money, without the language, without family, it is a door that never opens. Consent, when the cost of exit is this high, stops being consent.

And this logic is not confined to the state. Our daily life is full of contracts we never signed. Setting up your phone, you tick the box that says "I have read and I accept"; the people who wrote that text know perfectly well you did not read it. You did not negotiate the clauses of your employment contract, it was placed in front of you and you signed it, because you had rent to pay. You were not in the room where the decision was taken about how your neighbourhood would be redeveloped. Every time the same structure: staying counts as consent, when there is no option but to stay.

What is it, then, that holds people together in such a situation? Fear? In sixteenth-century France, a young man studying law while still only eighteen years old, Étienne de La Boétie, gave an answer to that question that nobody expected. In the text known as the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, he asked: how is it that a tyrant's eyes can see you everywhere? Are the eyes that watch you not your own eyes? Are the hands that hold you down not hands taken from your own hands? One single man crushes millions not with armies of his own, but with the strength those millions lend him.

The conclusion La Boétie drew was frighteningly simple: to bring down a tyrant, there is no need to push him. It is enough to stop holding him up. Like a colossal statue whose base has been pulled away, he collapses under his own weight. So the real issue is not the power of those who rule, but our own habit. People remain in servitude not because they have lost their freedom, but because they have forgotten what freedom is.

The question, then, changes. If nobody signed that contract, and if most of our obedience is habit, should we stop obeying altogether? No. Because Socrates himself did not do that. But Socrates had a line, and once, at the cost of his life, he had drawn it.

When democracy was suspended in Athens, a regime known as the Thirty came to power. While purging its opponents, this regime put ordinary citizens to work as well; that way everyone's hands were bloodied and nobody could stay clean. One day they summoned Socrates along with four others and ordered them to arrest a man named Leon of Salamis and bring him in to be executed. The order was official. The one who gave it was, at that moment, the effective power in the city. The penalty for refusal was death, and everyone knew it.

The other four went and brought the man in. Socrates walked home.

Telling the story afterwards, he said that had that regime not fallen soon after, he would in all likelihood have been put to death for it. So here is what we have before us: the man who refused to escape and the man who refused the order are the same man. Which means the issue was never obedience as such. The issue was where obedience ends. Socrates submitted to the punishment the law imposed, but refused to be the instrument of a man's unjust death. The difference between the two lies not in who the authority is, but in what is being asked of you.

This distinction does not belong to Greek thought alone. One of the most often repeated principles of the Islamic tradition says exactly this: obedience is only in what is right and good. Behind the principle lies a story that is told. The Prophet sends a detachment out under the command of a certain officer. On the way the commander grows angry with his soldiers and orders them to gather wood and light a fire, and then to walk into it. Some of them make to obey. A young man among them says, "It was precisely to escape the fire that we took refuge with him; do not be hasty." They do not go in. When they return and recount what happened, the answer they receive is unambiguous: had they entered that fire, they would never have come out of it again. Obedience is only in what is good. The same tradition has a shorter and harder formulation as well: where there is disobedience to the Creator, there is no obedience to the created.

The logic here says something beyond a religious rule. However high the authority issuing the command, the content of that command is subject to a measure that stands above that authority. Authority is not absolute, because authority is itself authority only in so far as it serves an end.

One of the figures who turned this idea into a system was al-Farabi. In his Virtuous City, written in the tenth century, he classifies cities according to the end toward which they are governed. The virtuous city is virtuous because the one at its head directs its people toward genuine happiness. Ranged against it are the ignorant cities, the misguided cities, the wicked cities. What deserves notice is this: in the corrupted cities al-Farabi describes, there is obedience too, and often an impeccable obedience. There too people carry out orders, order is maintained, the wheels turn. What is missing is not obedience but the destination. For al-Farabi, obedience to a ruler takes its legitimacy not from the power in his hands but from the goal toward which he leads his people. Power does not produce legitimacy; direction does.

Four centuries later Ibn Khaldun looked at the same question with a historian's eye. In the Muqaddimah he writes that injustice is the harbinger of the ruin of settled, cultivated life, of civilization itself; tyranny does not demonstrate a government's strength, it hastens its collapse. But Ibn Khaldun's most striking observation for our purposes concerns the education of children. He describes what becomes of a child raised with violence, with coercion, with beating: the spirit narrows, vitality goes out, the child grows idle, and out of fear learns to lie and to show the opposite of what he feels within. And these do not remain passing behaviours in him; they harden into character. Here Ibn Khaldun is not merely giving advice on pedagogy; he is describing how servility is manufactured. The submissive human being is not born, but raised.

The twentieth century took this argument out of theory and carried it into the courtroom. In nineteen forty-five, the founding charter of the international military tribunal established at Nuremberg closed off the defence the accused would reach for most often, before the proceedings had even begun: having acted on the orders of a government or of a superior does not free a defendant from responsibility; at most it may be taken into account in mitigating the sentence. In nineteen fifty, in the principles compiled within the United Nations, this was refined further still: having acted under orders does not remove responsibility, provided a moral choice was in fact open to the person. In drawing a limit around obedience, the law asked precisely our question: could you really have done otherwise?

And the principle did not stay confined to some abstract international text. The one hundred and thirty-seventh article of the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey sets out what a public official is to do when he finds an order he has received to be unlawful; if his superior insists on the order and repeats it in writing, the order is carried out and responsibility passes to the one who gave it. But the same article builds a wall right through its middle: an order whose subject matter constitutes a crime shall under no circumstances be carried out, and whoever carries it out cannot escape responsibility. The right to hide behind an unlawful order ends exactly there.

Between Socrates walking home rather than to Leon of Salamis and that article of law lie twenty-four centuries. What they say is the same thing.

On the eleventh of April, nineteen sixty-one, in a courtroom in Jerusalem, a thin, bespectacled man sat inside a bulletproof glass booth. Adolf Eichmann had run the logistics of transporting millions of people to the death camps. The defence he mounted at his trial gives this part of our story its title: he was a servant of orders. He had killed no one with his own hands. He had drawn up train timetables, calculated quotas, signed correspondence.

What truly shook the thinker Hannah Arendt, who followed the trial, was not Eichmann's monstrousness but the fact that he was not a monster. What she saw before her was not an ideological fanatic but an ordinary bureaucrat, attached to his title, speaking in clichés, incapable of stepping outside the language of officialdom. To describe this, Arendt used the phrase the banality of evil, and for years she was criticized for it, because many took it for an attempt to soften the charge. Her claim was in fact the opposite: what was appalling was that evil on such a scale could be carried out as a job, by an ordinary man who had stopped thinking.

Perhaps the strangest moment of that trial was this: when one of the judges asked Eichmann about his understanding of morality, Eichmann said he had lived his life according to Kant's moral principles, and then gave a roughly accurate account of the categorical imperative. He went on to add that once he was given his role in the Final Solution, he had stopped living by that principle. Arendt showed how Eichmann had twisted Kant: in Kant, the principle demands that every person be a lawmaker through his own reason. In Eichmann's version, a person was to bring his own will into line with the will of the lawgiver. The same sentence had been hollowed out and refilled with "whatever the superior wants." Conscience had put on the costume of obedience.

Only three months after the trial in Jerusalem began, in America, at Yale University, a young psychologist named Stanley Milgram placed an advertisement, and through that newspaper notice gathered ordinary men from New Haven into his laboratory. They were told this was an experiment on learning and memory. They would administer electric shocks of increasing intensity to a person in the next room each time he gave a wrong answer. In reality there was no electricity, and the person in the next room was an actor playing a part, but the subjects did not know this. The shock switches ran all the way up to four hundred and fifty volts, and the last section of the panel was marked with only three letters.

From the next room came first objections, then shouting, then complaints about his heart, and finally complete silence. Whenever the subject wanted to stop, the researcher in the lab coat would say, in a calm voice, just one of four sentences: please continue; the experiment requires that you continue; it is absolutely essential that you continue; you have no other choice, you must go on. He did not shout. He did not threaten. He was simply calm.

Twenty-six out of forty people went to the end. Sixty-five percent.

But the truly instructive part is the dozens of variations Milgram ran in the years that followed, altering the setup each time. When the researcher left the room and gave his orders by telephone, obedience collapsed, falling to around twenty percent; and beyond that, some subjects pretended to continue while in fact delivering low shocks. By contrast, when the subject was not given the job of pressing the switch itself but only an auxiliary task such as reading out the words, while someone else pressed the switch, obedience leapt to thirty-seven out of forty. Ninety-two point five percent.

These two numbers show the heart of the matter. What drives people into obedience is not the harshness of the authority, but the possibility of putting distance between themselves and their own act. Milgram gave this condition a name: a person stops seeing himself as the author of the deed and begins to see himself as the instrument of someone else's will. The sentence "I am doing this" quietly turns into "this is being done through me." And the moment that shift takes place, conscience does not fall silent; it simply becomes beside the point.

Today the sentences that bring about that shift are all within easy reach. The system won't allow it. That's the procedure. It came from above. I just work here. It's not up to me. That's what it says on the screen. The algorithm decided it this way. We're not meeting our targets. None of these is a lie; they are usually perfectly true, and that is exactly why they work. Modern institutions do not abolish responsibility, they thin it out and spread it around. When you divide a decision among a hundred people, nobody's share is heavy enough to be unbearable. Everyone is responsible for a small piece, and nobody is responsible for the whole. The official who signs the eviction order, the clerk who processes the form, the crew that turns up in the morning, each of them has filled in his own box.

But the picture is not hopeless, and the same laboratory showed that too. In another of Milgram's variations, two more people were placed beside the subject, and at a certain point in the experiment those two stood up and refused. Of the subjects who saw this, only four out of forty went to the end. One person saying no, in other words, makes it possible for everyone else in the room to say no. If obedience is contagious, so is refusal.

In his Ode to Freedom, Namık Kemal says that it is not possible to destroy liberty by cruelty and oppression; to do that, you would have to tear out of humanity its faculty of comprehension, its capacity to understand. That line points to exactly the place where our discussion of obedience has arrived. Just as no one can force you to think, no one can force you not to think either; not thinking is a decision that can be taken.

And here we can return to that seventy-year-old man and his open door. Socrates did not walk out through it. That same Socrates, on another day, refused to carry out an order he had been given and walked home instead. These two acts do not contradict one another, because both come from the same source: in each case the decision was his. He chose to stay and he chose to refuse, and he was ready to pay the price of both. Obedience in itself is neither a virtue nor a failing; the virtue or the failing lies in whether there is still, behind that obedience, a human being capable of deciding.

So the question is not "do you obey?" Everyone obeys, and has to; a society in which nobody complied with anything would not survive a single day. The real question is this: can you still name what you are doing in your own words? When you carry out an order, can you say that it is you who is carrying it out? Or have you already handed that sentence over?

Because the real danger is not the door being locked. The real danger is the day when the person who would have noticed the door was open is no longer inside.

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