The song very obviously refers to Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment on authoritarianism, and is written from the perspective of a participant – one of the people who “pressed the buzzer” that appeared to give other people increasingly painful electrical shocks.

Controversy surrounded Stanley Milgram for much of his professional life as a result of a series of experiments on obedience to authority which he conducted at Yale University in 1961-1962. He found, surprisingly, that 65% of his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks-up to 450 volts-to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment. The victim was, in reality, a good actor who did not actually receive shocks, and this fact was revealed to the subjects at the end of the experiment. But, during the experiment itself, the experience was a powerfully real and gripping one for most participants.

Below you can see a video and the lyrics to the song. A higher-quality version of the song is here at NPR, recorded live in concert from WXPN and Wiggins Park in Philadelphia on July 11, 2008. I would be surprised if Dar Williams doesn’t talk about “Buzzer” in the NPR interview, but I’m resisting listening to it until I’ve worked this through.

Click to view video

Dar Williams, “Buzzer” (from “Promised Land”)

Sitting with the number eight platter at the restaurant,
Four twenty-nine for almost anything I want,
Add it up, it’s cheaper than the stuff I make myself,
I get by, I never needed anybody’s help,
And I tore out an ad and they told me that I
Would press the buzzer, press the buzzer,
At the graduate lab, they were doing some tests,
I pressed the buzzer, pressed the buzzer.

Ride the circle off of the highway.
Spiral into the driveway,
In the maze of old prefabs
They’ll be waiting at the lab.

I don’t know how everybody makes it through the daily drill,
Paint their nails, walk a dog, pay every bill,
I’m feeling sorry for this guy that I press to shock,
He gets the answers wrong, I have to up the watts
And he begged me to stop, but they told me to go,
I press the buzzer, I press the buzzer.
So get out of my head, just give me my line.
I press the buzzer, I press the buzzer.

Ride the circle off of the highway,
Spiral into the driveway,
In the maze of old prefabs
They’ll be waiting at the lab.

They called me back to the lab to discuss the test,
I put my earrings on, found my heels, wore a dress.
Right away I knew, it was like I’d failed a quiz
The man said “Do you know what a fascist is?”
I said, “Yeah, it’s when you do things you’re not proud of,
But you’re scraping by, taking orders from above.”
I get it now, I’m the face, I’m the cause of war
We don’t have to blame white-coated men anymore.

When I knew it was wrong, I played it just like a game,
I pressed the buzzer, I pressed the buzzer,
Here’s your seventy bucks, now everything’s changed,
I press the buzzer, I press the buzzer
But tell me where are your stocks, would you do this again?
I press the buzzer,
And tell me who made your clothes, was it children or men?
I press the buzzer.

Ride the circle off of the highway,
Spiral into the driveway,
In the maze of old prefabs
They’ll be waiting at the lab.

The opening of the song evokes the character of the singer, a self-reliant northeastern woman of the early sixties. She’s focused on the details of getting through each day, cutting corners, trying to be a responsible person. Seventy dollars for her participation would have been decent pay.

Right from the first chorus, there is something sinister about the people “waiting at the lab,” especially since they are surrounded by all the spirals and mazes in the chorus. The words are reinforced by the melody and the way the sound slows and expands, and the image of the people waiting in the middle of the maze is the last echoing image of the song.

She’s not without compassion. She’s not a sadist. She feels sorry, in a distant sort of way, for the man that she thinks she is training, or punishing, or torturing. His inability to get the answers right is associated structurally with a failure to meet everyday stresses and challenges; an implied judgment is yoked to a certain kind of empathy.

When he begs her to stop, she is told by an authority figure (one of the white-coated men, no doubt) to go on. And she does, without much further comment except the repetition of “I press the buzzer” throughout the rest of the song.

She would have been one of the majority who continued to press the buzzer (the button, the shocker) up to the limits of the experiment. I wonder if this song drew from the testimony of one of the actual participants. Imagine how horrible it would be to realize that you were capable of doing something like this, and not even under any dire choice or extraordinary sense of necessity, but just because there was an authority figure that told you it was all right and released you from attaching any sense of personal ethics and responsibility to your actions.

What a setup. What a perfect, horrifying setup.

It’s no big surprise that the Milgram experiment was controversial. It was a terrible thing to do to people, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some people were affected by it for the rest of their lives. I would be devastated to learn such an ugly truth about myself. But there were some, later, that were thankful for the experience; they learned a deep-down lesson.

62% wouldn’t refuse to continue? The results shocked the world. For many, it seemed to explain how Hitler could have transformed the “good Germans” into a nation that could condone and participate in the events of World War II.

I have always wondered what I would have done. The experiment itself has a high heuristic function, so once you know about it you can never really be sure what you would have done if you had not known about it. I think I would have protested, and then refused to continue – but I have never been totally and absolutely sure. That faint uncertainty in the background adds to my horror and sadness about the experiment – and probably makes the song more emotionally resonant and powerful. Milgram’s study of obedience to authority brought many insights that have been used for good – and for evil – in the years since.

For me, the song centers on the line “we don’t have to blame white-coated men anymore.” It comes after the realization of what has really happened here. Standing there, having failed the life quiz, dressed up in heels and a dress, to realize… But there is a bit of cognitive dissonance here. Yes, she admits it – “I get it now, I’m the face of war” but that doesn’t let off the “white-coated men” at all. Not at all. Mengele did experiments. The U.S. government has done some fairly awful experiments too. And there is a lot of debate in scientific circles about utilizing the results of experiments when human suffering has been involved. Even when the results are valid, it makes one complicit in what was done to achieve those results.

There is a vague undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in the song, which I understand because it strikes back at judgment. “You think you’re so much better than me? You think you’re so ethical. You’re not any better than me. You’d do the same, you people waiting at the lab.” There is a challenge here. “If I’m the fascist,” she seems to be saying, “then as I ask myself, ask yourself too: In what ways are you doing the same? Tell me about your stock portfolio, tell me about who makes your clothes, children or men! Have you stopped to consider all the many compromises we make in our lives every day, the ones that support human suffering under authoritarian power? I’m guilty, but you won’t even think about how you are part of the same system, how you shunt off the responsibility of it.”

An aspect of the Milgram experiment that has always bothered me is how Milgram staged it. Obviously, he couldn’t have Gestapo-uniformed people as the authority figures. I always thought it was an interesting choice to select scientists, people who looked like doctors, maybe. That’s a comment on the scientific community, and on the medical profession – isn’t it? – that they can be switched out for Nazis so easily.

And a further thing. I’ve never been completely satisfied with the explanations given about why a majority of the people continued to administer the shocks. There may be a very small minority who are sadists. Then there are the people who would start to feel uncomfortable. At what point would each person need to be urged to continue? And WHY would they continue? Really why? In his 1974 article, “The Perils of Obedience,” Milgram said:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

The participants were not urged with persuasion. Only these statements were used, and in this order:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

The experiment was halted if the participant expressed a desire to stop after all 4 statements. Otherwise, it was continued to the maximum of three 450-volt shocks. Other scientists have confirmed the consistency of the results: 61–66 percent, regardless of time or place, will continue.

How is this to be explained? Really?

What we have are theories, and despite the evidence I see – even from the pseudo-religious right and the flag-wavers and all of those groups who hand over their critical faculties to an outside authority, I’m not entirely convinced by either the conformity theory or the agentic state theory.

The theory of conformism comes from the work of Soloman Asch. It says that someone who has neither the ability nor the expertise to make decisions will let their in-group’s hierarchical authorities make the decisions. I call this the theory of the follower. It is everywhere around us, but it runs counter to what I see as America’s attempt to create a society of free individuals.

The agentic state theory is where Milgram went, and it says that under uncritical obedience an individual starts to view him/herself as the instrument for carrying out someone else’s wishes (an authority – a person, a group, an ideology, a god) and therefore no longer sees himself as responsible for his actions. It does make sense to me that once such a fundamental viewpoint change has happened, everything essentially bad about simple obedience to authority follows.

Both of these are descriptive. They don’t provide much on how to counteract some of the negative aspects of complicance with perceived authority. We desperately need some insights on how to break these tendencies. They tried to do it in the late sixties – there were some who really tried. It was a failure, ultimately.

I’ve sometimes wondered if the participants might have been frightened for themselves. In a context where someone was being hurt, the leverage of intimidation might have been under-analyzed. “Better him than me,” right? There is a subtle threatening aspect to certain forms of authority. Could a quick cost-benefit speculation figure into this at all? Did they feel that they could be punished in some way if they did not obey, if they were not compliant? Or are the majority of people really that easily manipulated?

This song can’t help but remind me of the mechanisms of social control at work in America today.

We often assume that there is some kind of ubiquitous “They” who determine what the “right thing to do” might be. “They” are rarely identified…

We’ve already allowed so much, but our fanaticism in various realms of ideology have been, and will continue to be, so very destructive. In college, I thought the theories that talked about “control of the masses” were quaint. That only seemed to apply to crazy places like the USSR. (I was young….)

Preachers of the past might have said that we are losing our souls, but some of the powerful reconstructionists and literalistic bible-thumpers and last-days people and others among the pseudoreligious right are among the most hurtful and powerful authoritarians that we have. They’re no help at all. And we worship Money – the circulation of capital leaving a a slash and burn zone whose results we are just beginning to harvest. And we have dehumanized other citizens of Earth as though they were some demonic Other to ourselves.

Education was my hope. Let’s just say that I’m not as optimistic about that anymore.

We have already nodded to torture and illegal surveillance and oppression and grandiose imperial ambitions and seizure of natural resources and so on and so on and so on. Our crimes are immense. We’re just trying to get through the day. Other people are in control, and it’s up to them. Many of us don’t even bother to find out about the issues. We haven’t thought about the results very much until it hit our pocketbooks. I wonder if anyone will ever describe us as the “good Americans.” What Milgram proved is that the Germans weren’t any worse than us.

We press the buzzer.

(Addendum after the first posting: Dar Williams did talk about “Buzzer” in the NPR interview. She described the experiment, and said that she has thought about it often over the years since she first found out about it in college. Later, she accidentally rear-ended a woman in a traffic accident and, because the woman was from New Haven, it reminded her about the Milgram experiment. Talking to her gave Dar Williams the outline of the character in the song. She felt that she was being responsible by doing what “she was supposed to do.” Then, having realized what that really meant, the woman was sensitized to that dynamic and wouldn’t participate in it again. It was transformative.)

The whole crusade is counter-productive in a number of ways, but it’s cleverly planned.

Of course, mislabeling international terrorism is not a great idea. What we are dealing with bears little resemblance to definitions of fascism, and tying it to Islam as a religion rather than toward the violent radicals of any religion (or none) is misleading and just mean. Terrorism is a method, not a religion.

The real intent of Horowitz’s program is to attack the political left – he really must have had an amazing conversion experience.

Meanwhile, voices like his move the entire discourse more toward the right. Fox News starts to look centrist… Oh yeah, other speakers scheduled for campus appearances: Ann Coulter, Robert Spencer, Rick Santorum. It’s about academic freedom….riiiiiight.

I’m glad Bertrand Russell isn’t alive to see his formerly Marxist aide turned into this…

Bertrand Russell, a longtime hero of mine, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 – “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.”

But Russell was an amazing character; maybe he would be more sanguine about it…

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won’t go. – Bertrand Russell

Horowitz has claimed such things as that there are 50,000 American professors who are “anti-American” and “identify with the terrorists,” that John Kerry was happy to see Communists win in Vietnam, that the Senate Intelligence Committee “exonerated” President Bush’s claim in the 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq sought uranium from Niger, and the like. His backers are interesting, too.

Horowitz’s ability to co-opt the language of oppression and turn a supposedly theoretical manifesto into his personal soapbox would put even the most emo slam poet on your campus to shame. –Amy Schiller, “Indoctrinating You?” CampusProgress.org.

Sad to say, he’ll be spewing at Emory today. No-one can claim it’s not a place for open debate, right? Sigh. I’m not fooled by the framing. I’ll take a cue from Bertrand Russell; since Horowitz’s aims and methods are repugnant to me, I simply won’t be participating in these events. Sometimes it’s a time to protest, sometimes it’s a time to vote with your feet. I’m hoping for a lot of no-shows.

More information:

• Are You Ready for ‘Islamo-Fascism Week’? – Inside Higher Ed
• Academic McCarthyism Threatens Democracy – New American Media
• The Fascist focus of the Islamo-phobes – The First Post
• Thought Police in the Lecture Hall – Washington Post
• Undermining Civil Society – David Horowitz’s Corrosive Projects – Counterpunch
• David Horowitz and the Attack on Independent Thought – Common Dreams
• David Horowitz Awareness – Columbia Spectator
• David Horowitz- Wikipedia
• David Horowitz (ex-Marxist) – SourceWatch
• David Horowitz – Media Transparency

Virgil Griffith has created a Wikipedia propaganda-tracking tool – the WikiScanner (tip o the hat to Alternet for the story).

People change Wikipedia entries all the time. While the identities of individual editors are sometimes opaque, the networks and IP addresses are not. This tool shows where certain kinds of edits come from (see the FAQ). He has matched up organizational IPs to edits made.

Changes made by people with close ties to an issue are not supposed to be allowed to contribute to entries on it. Tools like this will make attempts more transparent (and documented, and correctable).

When the change is made by someone with access to the organization’s network, you have to shake your head at the level or incompetence.

I mean, if you or I were doing information sabotage and cleansing work, I would hope that we would have the basic sense to go off-site, or at least off-network!

Generally speaking, this is the kind of information vandalism that Griffith has found:

1. Wholesale removal of entire paragraphs of critical information. (common for both political figures and corporations)

2. White-washing — replacing negative/neutral adjectives with positive adjectives that mean something similar. (common for political figures)

3. Adding negative information to a competitor’s page. (common for corporations)

The Department of Defense has been busy on really quite a lot of topics – I am really kind of shocked at the kinds of things that interest them these days!

From Griffith’s list, you can follow all the edits by organizational name and IP addresses. Griffith directs the reader to a juicy list of edits posted at the Wired site, and encourages everyone to submit “salacious edits.” Here’s a couple:

The School of the Americas (now called WHISC) at Fort Benning has a long history of training Latin American officers, who are later found to be commanding death squads, involved in killing Catholic nuns and archbishops in Latin America and so forth. This is an edit whitewashing the mention of human rights abuses at WHISC – the IP address coming from Fort Benning (doim1-358.benning.army.mil)

Someone at the Republican Party HQ changed the entry on the history of Iraq’s Baath Party from “US-led occupying forces” to “US-led liberating forces.”

Diebold removing all criticism and contreversy (sic) about them. Many edits : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=28623375
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=28623410
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=28623443
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=prev&oldid=28623637

Nobojo has collected some interesting Bob Jones University edits that seem to indicate a high degree of manipulation of the “Bob Jones University” Wikipedia article.

Have fun. If you discover anything, pass it on! Be sure to list the IP, the organization, and the nature of the change. If you found it at Virgil’s site, give him credit, too!

Blame Clinton, let Bush off the hook? Anyone who has done the least bit of research into what happened on 9/11 should know better. See Clinton, 9/11 and the Facts, and it’s not only Democrats who are objecting to this thing.

Follow the money… Who bankrolled the $40 million for the show? Comment if you know.

Max Blumental’s article suggests some possibilities:

“The Path to 9/11″ is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11’s director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to “transform Hollywood” in line with its messianic vision….

Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film’s director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father’s group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is “dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Television industry.” …

ABC hosted LFF co-founder Murty and several other conservative operatives at an advance screening of The Path to 9/11. (While ABC provided 900 DVDs of the film to conservatives, Clinton administration officials and objective reviewers from mainstream outlets were denied them.) Murty returned with a glowing review for FrontPageMag that emphasized the film’s partisan nature. “‘The Path to 9/11′ is one of the best, most intelligent, most pro-American miniseries I’ve ever seen on TV, and conservatives should support it and promote it as vigorously as possible,” Murty wrote. As a result of the special access granted by ABC, Murty’s article was the first published review of The Path to 9/11, preceding those by the New York Times and LA Times by more than a week.

The “docudrama” claims to be based upon the 9/11 Commission Report, but it directly contradicts even this tainted history. The screenplay was written by an avowed right-wing activist named Cyrus Nowrasteh, who last year spoke on a panel called “Rebels with a Cause: How Conservatives Can Lead Hollywood’s Next Paradigm Shift. he describes the series as “an objective telling of the events of 9/11.”

Using Scholastic books (which are sold at my son’s elementary school and across the nation) ABC planned to distribute the movie to 100,000 educators across the country to promote its inaccurate version of history, which blames President Clinton for 9/11. It’s mentioned on the front page of the Scholastic site, but now the aim seems to be to teach the controversy. I’m sure 3 hours of school time could be better spent with a more reputable project.

Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright has called the film – which includes several scenes with no basis in reality — “false and defamatory.”

Right-wing propaganda such as this one ought to be understood as such and not marketed as truth – especially right before an election. I’m all for free speech and civil liberties (as my readers know), but when you knowingly disseminate lies in the name of truth, that’s something else. Disney and ABC market this as “exactly what happened.” Disney and ABC have known for a year that the show was riddled with inaccuracies. They refused to fix it.

Remember, it was a right-wing campaign that forced CBS to cancel a miniseries about Ronald Reagan, and for the very same reasons that so many are objecting to this film (for that, tip o’the hat to Carolyn Kaye at MakeThemAccountable). Let them present their interpretation and point of view under the understanding of what that is and who is behind it – like Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11- but don’t market it as fact to actively misled and confused Americans.

Send your personal message of complaint to the F.E.C
http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/complain.shtml

http://www.charleswsanders.org/petitions/pnum495.php
Big List of Action Contacts at Daily Kos
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/6/101819/4311

Other Actions (thanks to Elainna):

http://thinkprogress.org/tellabc

http://www.democrats.org/pathto911

http://pol.moveon.org/abcdoc/

http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/action.cfm?itemid=21330

http://action.truemajority.org/campaign/dontdistort911

Here’s another piece of sneaky legislation: Frist has proposed holding a vote to see if estate tax cuts can get through the Senate if they are linked to a modest minimum wage increase. Insidious. The current minimum wage bill would finally grant a little boost in minimum wage (a $2.10 increase over three years, and tips are counted) – but only if it’s tied to yet more welfare for the superrich!

Don’t get excited about his latest incarnation of the estate tax reduction bill unless you and your family are pretty loaded. Most Americans don’t pay much if anything in estate tax now anyway. Next time you do your taxes, just ask about grandma’s house (if she has one). But if you’re really really rich, this is a big payoff. A married couple won’t pay penny one in estate tax on property unless it’s worth more than ten million dollars. The very top estate tax rate would fall from 46% to 30%. Another tax break for the people who least need it, more lost revenue for the government that Republicans want to break back to pre-FDR.

Yes, I understand that this kind of bundling is a way to pass things that wouldn’t otherwise pass, or even see a vote at all. But to combine unlike proposals like this in the same bill means that the public really doesn’t have a sense of what their representatives are voting for and against. How does a member of Congress, on either side or in the middle, decide how to vote on something like this?

1. Is it more important to boost minimimum wage for the lower classes, or to oppose additional huge gifts to the upper classes that drastically cut already-dwindling revenues (about $753 billion over the next decade)?
2. Is it more important to oppose any minimum wage increase, or to grant buddies and sponsors in the upper classes more favors?

Give just a few cakecrumbs to the bottom-level wage earners (be happy with the crumbs), strengthen the class divide (plan the excessively huge banquest of millions of designer cakes), and work to bankrupt the federal services and entitlements at the same time (get rid of any security for the American people) – nice class warfare (the use of cake imagery is intentional). When do we get to use the word aristocrats? When do we get to actually say that the class warfare is from the top down, and that the top isn’t even human, but protected and corporate?

Have a care, Congress. An election is coming up, and Americans are starting to get a sense of priorities again. What you do and what you are is more and more obvious with every passing day.

Look around the world – just look. We need real leadership, real ethics, real diplomacy, real intelligence and real planning.

To the party formerly known as Republicans: Don’t bother with your pitiful claims to empire. Don’t bother with your Constitutional disregard. Don’t bother with your gestures toward theocracy. Don’t bother with your transparent propaganda. Don’t bother with a staged terrorist attack. Don’t bother with your hate. Don’t bother trying to hide your mother lode of corruption. Don’t bother with your secrecy, your deceptions, your lies. Don’t bother scapegoating critical voices. Don’t bother with a rigged electoral system.

The multiple voices of America will be heard again. We will take back our democracy.

Watchtower, Sept. 15, 1895, p. 216.
Beware of ‘organization.’ It is wholly unnecessary. The Bible rules will be the only rules you will need. Do not seek to bind others’ consciences, and do not permit others to bind yours. Believe and obey so far as you can understand God’s Word today.

A couple of years after Russell’s death, that view was already in transition to its opposite:

Watchtower, April 1, 1920, pp. 100-101.
We would not refuse to treat one as a brother because he did not believe the Society is the Lord’s channel. If others see it in a different way, that is their priviledge. There should be full liberty of conscience.

Russell’s successor Judge Joseph Rutherford was well-known for his exclamation that “religion is a snare and a racket.” Nonetheless, his first move was to claim the Society as the Lord’s “channel,” while still holding onto liberty of conscience and brotherly, agapic love.

The “Judge” changed the name of the group to “Jehovah’s Witnesses” in 1931, and it was only after this that they stopped celebrating holidays and using the cross as a symbol. While they did move away from following any particular human leader (as some had followed Pastor Russell), the organization did something much worse: they claimed to be God’s only voice and actual visible presence in the world. Since then, they have been focused on advertising work. Evangelical marketing. Viral spread.

Instead of being submissive to God alone, JWs are submissive to the Governing Body of the Watch Tower (or Watchtower) Society. Criticism and debate are prohibited and classified as apostate, demonic, pornographic. They equate questioning of the organization with Satan’s rebellion against God, while actually accusing the questioner of hubris! Amazing. There is no discussion of how this Governing Body actually gets its direction from God, but to question them is to question God; it’s unthinkable for the average JW to do so.

For all their “anti-worldly” talk, the Watchtower Society has built a lucrative publishing empire with a dedicated salesforce of unpaid associates – an unquestioning set of followers to spread the memes.

In answer to a reader’s question (thank you, Kathy S!), JWs are no longer forbidden to use the Internet. Their work has always gone hand-in-hand with “wordly” technological advances – they really aren’t Luddites. For obvious reasons, JWs were very resistent to the Internet at first, but after some time they gave up and simply gave the same kind of warnings that they would issue with regard to any other kind of publication or interaction: Stay away from worldly influences, don’t look at porn, don’t read information that opposes the Society, and so on. They have a great legal team. They have been able to strongarm a couple of opposing sites off the net with copyright issues, but they really can’t control the information that is out there. The Society set up their own official website, and the PR site, and advised their people not to attempt to represent the Society or its teachings in any way. They are doing damage control at assemblies and through their publications, casting any critical voices in the usual terms.

They are not opposed to using outside sources of information, just so long as they are selectively filtered and approved by the Governing Body of the Watchtower Society – but their outside source selections and interpretations of them are as cherry-picked as the evidence to go to war in Iraq.

The perceptions and insights of others, even of their own people, don’t count at all. Human life is subordinated to the controlling doctrines – which are loaded with special terminology, cliches, and code phrases that trigger reactions even in people who have left the group.

Attempts at authentic personal study and discovery are squelched, and dismissed as Satanic. Higher education is discouraged, and research is conducted only by authorized persons of the corporation. Rank and file JWs will not even supplement the materials of the publications with studies in languages, archeology, textual analysis, sociology, or pastoral counselling. They are not “bible students” or “ministers” – they are slaves of a corporation.

The Watchtower is not the instrument of any man or any set of men, nor is it published according to the whims of men. No man’s opinion is expressed in The Watchtower. – Watchtower, November 1, 1937, p.327.

God uses The Watchtower to communicate to his people: it does not consist of men’s opinions. – Watchtower, January 1, 1942, p. 5.

Theocratic ones will appreciate the Lord’s visible organization and not be so foolish as to pit against Jehovah’s channel their own human reasoning and sentiment and personal feelings.” – Watchtower, February 1, 1952, p. 80

Newcomers must learn to fall in line with the principles and policies of the New World society and act in harmony with them. Sometimes it becomes rather difficult for some of our new associates to make the change. They are prone to be a little rebellious or unruly. But to become genuinely a part of the New World society it is Imperative that proper respect for theocratic arrangement and order be shown. A humble, obedient mental attitude is required. – Watchtower, June 1, 1956, p. 345.

Who controls the organization, who directs it? Who is at the head? A man? A group of men? A clergy class? A pope? A hierarchy? A council? No, none of these. How is that possible? In any organization is it not necessary that there be a directing head or policy-making part that controls or guides the organization? Yes. Is the living God, Jehovah, the Director of the theocratic Christian organization? Yes! – Watchtower, November 1, 1956, p. 666.

Only this organization functions for Jehovah’s purpose and to his praise. To it alone God’s Sacred Word, the Bible, is not a sealed book. – Watchtower, July 1, 1973, p. 402.

Avoid Independent Thinking
From the very outset of his rebellion Satan called into question God’s way of doing things. He promoted independent thinking. ‘You can decide for yourself what is good and bad,’ Satan told Eve. ‘You don’t have to listen to God. He is not really telling you the truth.’ (Genesis 3:1-5) To this day, it has been Satan’s subtle design to infect God’s people with this type of thinking.—2 Timothy 3:1, 13.

How is such independent thinking manifested? A common way is by questioning the counsel that is provided by God’s visible organization. For example, God’s organization has from time to time given warnings about listening to certain types of immoral and suggestive music, and about frequenting discos and other types of worldly dance halls where such music is played and people are known to engage in immoral conduct. (1 Corinthians 15:33) Yet certain ones have professed to know better. They have rebelled against such counsel and have done what is right in their own eyes. With what result? Very often they have become involved in sexual immorality and have suffered severe spiritual harm. But even if they have not been so affected, are they not reprehensible if others follow their example and suffer bad consequences?—Matthew 18:6.

This fact cannot be overemphasized: We are in a war with superhuman foes, and we constantly need to be aware of this. Satan and his demons are real; they are not mere figments of the imagination. They are “the world rulers of this darkness,” and we have a spiritual fight against them. (Ephesians 6:12) It is absolutely vital that we recognize their subtle designs and not allow ourselves to be overreached by them. Very appropriately, then, we will next consider how we can arm ourselves to fight against these wicked spirits. – Watchtower, January 15, 1983, pp. 18-22, “Exposing the Devil’s Subtle Designs”

They rigorously promote the idea that any questioning or “independent thinking” is evil by definition. I hope a few ex-JWS (and current JWS too) have been watching the Frontline series “From Jesus to Christ” to get an idea of the range of some of the information they’ve been missing.

Actually, as I observe the sad collection of fanaticisms that pass for Christianity in America today, I hope much of the country was able to catch at least part of the series.

For such a prideful organization, an organization that has taken the place of God for so many, to equate discussion and debate and inquiry with Satanic rebellion, shows just how far from authentic spirituality they have strayed. JWs have lost the critical capacity even to see this contradiction, which negates their own historical aims. They have become much of what they had opposed. Now one could argue that in some ways they worship the organization, the governing body of the Watchtower Society, as much or more than they worship God. It’s a form of idolatry based on very very shaky biblical interpretation.

It’s comparable to Media Matters, only a little less researched, more opinion-based, perhaps a little bit more hip, a bit less careful. A younger audience?

Don’t wanna be an American idiot.
One nation controlled by the media.
Information age of hysteria.
It’s calling out to idiot America.
- American Idiot, Green Day