Show Notes
In April 1961, Adolf Eichmann sat in a glass booth in a Jerusalem courtroom and told the world he was just following orders. He had organized the deportation of millions of Jewish people to concentration camps. He had managed the logistics of industrialized murder. And his defense was that he was doing what he was told by legitimate authority. Three months later, a young psychologist named Stanley Milgram sat in his office at Yale University and asked a question that would define his career: was Eichmann special, or would anyone do what he did? Milgram believed the answer would be reassuring. He told his colleagues and students before running the experiment that he expected only a small, pathological minority to go all the way. He predicted that most people would refuse long before the shocks became dangerous. He was confident that ordinary Americans, unlike the Germans who had participated in the Holocaust, would stop when their conscience told them to. He was wrong.
The Experiment Nobody Expected The basic design of Milgram’s experiment is now famous. A volunteer sits in front of a shock machine. A man in a gray lab coat, holding a clipboard, stands behind them. In a separate room, another person, secretly an actor, answers questions. Every wrong answer means a shock. Every shock is higher than the last. The machine goes from 15 volts to 450 volts. The labels escalate from “Slight Shock” to “Danger: Severe Shock” to a final red label that simply reads “XXX.” At 150 volts the actor begins screaming. At 300 volts he pounds on the wall and begs to be released. After 330 volts he falls silent. The volunteer does not know whether the man in the other room is unconscious or dead. The lab coat stands behind them and says four things, always in the same order, always calmly: “Please continue.” “The experiment requires that you continue.” “It is absolutely essential that you continue.” “You have no other choice. You must go on.” 65% of participants went all the way to 450 volts. Every single participant went to at least 300 volts. These were not sadists or sociopaths. They were ordinary people recruited through a newspaper ad in New Haven, Connecticut. Teachers. Salesmen. Engineers. Postal workers. And two out of three of them delivered what they believed was a lethal electric shock to a stranger because a man in a lab coat told them to. Milgram published his initial findings in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1963. In his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority, he introduced the concept that explained what he had witnessed. He called it the agentic state: the psychological shift that occurs when a person stops seeing themselves as responsible for their own actions and begins seeing themselves as an agent carrying out someone else’s will. The moral weight transfers upward, from the person doing the harm to the authority giving the order. And once that transfer happens, the person is capable of things they would never do on their own.
What the Variations Revealed The original experiment told Milgram what he did not want to know: most people will obey. But Milgram did not stop there. He ran 18 variations of the experiment with 636 total participants, and the variations revealed something far more useful. They showed what breaks obedience. When the man in the lab coat left the room and gave instructions by telephone, obedience dropped sharply. Physical distance from the authority weakened its hold. When the experiment was moved from the prestigious campus of Yale University to a set of run-down offices in Bridgeport, Connecticut, obedience dropped to 47.5%. The authority’s institutional credibility mattered. When the lab coat was removed and replaced with an ordinary person in street clothes, obedience dropped to 20%. The appearance of authority, not its substance, was doing much of the work. But the most revealing variation involved proximity to the victim. In the original design, the volunteer could hear the actor scream
More from The Lucas Bean Show
There is a particular kind of man who shows up to political rallies in body armor he bought online, drives a truck that has never hauled anything, and screams about strength while falling apart the moment someone disagrees with him. He is not hard to spot. He is the loudest person in any room he enters. He is also, according to decades of research, the most frightened. The video that accompanies this piece covers sociologist Robb Willer’s research on masculine overcompensation: the finding that men whose masculinity is threatened respond with exaggerated displays of dominance, aggression, and toughness. The effect is consistent and measurable. It shows up in attitudes toward war, attitudes toward gay people, and even in what kind of car a man wants to buy. But the research goes much deeper than one study, and the implications stretch far beyond a rally.
There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the evidence, rewrite the timeline, and emerge on the other side with a story they’ve rehearsed just enough to almost believe. “I never really supported him.” “I just voted against the Democrats.” “I don’t talk about politics anymore.” This is happening right now across America. The yard signs are coming down. The hats are going into drawers. The Facebook posts are being deleted. And millions of people who spent a decade loudly and publicly cheering for cruelty are quietly trying to exit the building before someone turns the lights on. The companion video to this piece says what needs to be said plainly: they’re not confused. They’re lying. They know what they did. They know what they defended. And they’re trying to erase the evidence before accountability arrives. This Substack examines why that matters, why it won’t work this time, and what history tells us about populations that try to pretend they were never part of the thing they spent years supporting.
Most political analysis starts with policy. Voters chose this candidate because of the economy, immigration, healthcare, taxes. And for most voters in most elections, that’s probably true. But Donald Trump is not most candidates. And the question that keeps surfacing isn’t why people agree with him. It’s why they love him more every time he does something cruel. The mockery. The insults. The attacks on disabled reporters, Gold Star families, and women. Behavior that would end any other political career has somehow become the foundation of his. In 2021, psychologist Matthew Yalch at Palo Alto University published a study in PLOS ONE titled “Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump.” And what he found should make everyone uncomfortable, including the people it describes.
In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually predicts whether someone will support the populist radical right. The answer wasn’t immigration. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t religion. It was loneliness. Lonelier individuals were consistently more likely to support radical right movements, with the association holding across all fifteen years of Dutch data and appearing across multiple European countries. The researchers noted that the effect sizes were comparable to the known health correlates of loneliness, meaning that the connection between loneliness and far-right support was statistically as meaningful as the connection between loneliness and heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression. A 2021 RAND Corporation study of former extremists and their families confirmed this from the other direction. Half of the former extremists surveyed said feelings of marginalization drove them toward radicalization, with most citing isolation and loneliness specifically. Individuals reported that the social benefits of joining extremist organizations, the friendship, the camaraderie, the sense of finally belonging somewhere, were among the most powerful forces keeping them in. These people didn’t join a movement because they were convinced by policy arguments. They joined because someone finally made them feel like they weren’t alone. And that tells us more about what MAGA actually is than any analysis of tariffs or border policy ever could.
A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren. Not a therapy session. Not a family mediator. Not a phone call to her daughter asking what went wrong. A federal law. That single moment contains more psychology than most textbooks. Because what she revealed, in front of cameras and a cheering crowd, wasn’t a grandmother’s heartbreak. It was a narcissist’s playbook when someone finally tells them no. How a boundary becomes a theft. In 2002, psychologist Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University published a theory that combined two existing psychological frameworks into something new. The first was narcissism, the personality structure built around an inflated self-image that requires constant validation. The second was psychological reactance, a concept developed by Jack Brehm at the University of Kansas in 1966, which describes the motivational state people enter when they perceive their freedom as restricted. Brehm found that when people believe a choice or behavior has been taken from them, they experience an intense drive to restore it, often wanting the restricted option more than they did before it was restricted. Baumeister’s insight was that narcissism supercharges reactance. When an ordinary person encounters a boundary, they may be disappointed, but they can process it. When a narcissist encounters a boundary, they don’t experience disappointment. They experience theft. The boundary isn’t perceived as another person’s valid choice. It’s perceived as something that belongs to them being taken away. And they feel entitled to take it back by whatever means necessary. Baumeister called it narcissistic reactance. This grandmother didn’t process her daughter’s boundary as a painful but legitimate decision by an autonomous adult. She processed it as her property being stolen. Those grandchildren aren’t people her daughter is protecting. In her mind, they are hers. Access to them is her right. And no one, not even their own mother, gets to take what’s hers.