Dangers of blind obedience are evident in both the past and right now. "Lesson: Obedience" analyzes the Holocaust, which took millions of innocent lives, to see how blind obedience was a huge factor in this. Also, an experiment done by a professor in Yale University revealed how blind obedience is still part of people today.

First of all, "Lesson: Obedience" goes into detail about what role blind obedience played in the Holocaust and the causes of it. During the Holocaust, German soldiers and government workers took Hitler's oath, which made them swear their "unconditional obedience" to Hitler. Whatever these people did, they did in the name of Hitler: "Soldiers recalled how taking this oath allowed them to commit horrible crimes in Hitler's name." Since they thought that they did not have to take any responsibility for their actions, they blindly obeyed the orders given them. They did not think about the consequences of their actions and how it would directly affect them. Also, children were taught from a young age to obey in the German society. So, they grew up thinking that that was the right thing. In this case, they did not have a chance to see the other side of situation, so blind obedience was their only option. Whether they chose not to think for themselves or they did not have a chance to think for themselves, blind obedience to authority, specifically Hitler, resulted in many lost lives. The Holocaust could have stopped at an earlier stage if people just stopped to think about what they were doing and reflected on their actions.

Through a research done by Stanley Milgram, a professor at Yale University, it was proven that blind obedience was not something that the Germans were more prone to, but a behavior that all human beings are prone to. College students were recruited and they were told to work in pairs, one as "learner" and the other as "teacher." In the presence of the "teacher", the "learner" was to take a word pairing test and every wrong answer would result in electric shocks. The "teacher" was told that the shock would increase by 15 volts for every wrong answer. Milgram and groups of psychologists and psychiatrists predicted that less than one-tenth of 1% of volunteers will administer 450 volts (highest, severe). To their surprise, 65% of volunteers went that far and even those who disobeyed acted "within the framework of acceptability.'" These students were willing to torture their fellow students because they were told to do it. They were being ignorant to their sense of morality. Their eyes were open, but were blind to see what they were doing. They were looking through another person's eyes, not their own. They were almost like robots in human form.

I think that it is quite frightening to think about the dangers that are still posed today by blind obedience. I would like to focus my research on finding how blind obedience affected the past dangerously, how it is still doing that now, and how it will possibly affect the future if we keep going down the path we are taking now. I would, also, like to look for some solutions to prevent blind obedience from having a powerful and deadly influence on humans/society in the future.