Hannah Arendt’s insight into the psychology of obedience finds deep resonance—and some challenge—in the work of social psychologists who have explored how ordinary people become complicit in harm. The classic experiments of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo are especially revealing. Milgram’s Obedience to Authority study, conducted in the early 1960s, was designed to test how far individuals would go when instructed by an authority figure to harm another person. Participants assigned the role of “teacher” were told to administer electric shocks to a “learner” every time the latter made an error, with the voltage increasing each time. The learner’s cries of pain were pre-recorded, but the subjects believed them real. Despite hesitation, sixty-five percent of the participants went all the way to the maximum voltage, simply because the experimenter, wearing a lab coat, told them they must continue.
The standard interpretation of Milgram’s findings is that ordinary individuals can commit harmful acts when obedience displaces moral agency. Authority can anesthetise the conscience; moral autonomy dissolves into procedural compliance. Milgram’s work was often cited as an empirical counterpart to Arendt’s “banality of evil,” showing how decency collapses not in the face of hatred, but in the comfort of obedience. Later researchers such as Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher refined this view, arguing that people do not obey blindly—they obey when they identify with the authority or believe the cause to be legitimate. In that sense, obedience is not passive surrender but active alignment. We follow because we want to follow.
Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment a decade later dramatised similar dynamics. College students assigned as guards in a mock prison quickly adopted abusive, humiliating behaviors toward their peers cast as prisoners. The experiment that was meant to last two weeks had to be terminated after six days. The lesson was not merely that power corrupts, but that role structures, group identity and conformity can make cruelty feel normal. Zimbardo later drew explicit parallels between his findings and modern political cruelty, noting how dehumanisation and the demand for loyalty can reproduce the guard-prisoner mentality in populist movements and state practices alike.
Even earlier, social theorist Erich Fromm had diagnosed the deeper needs that make obedience attractive. Modern individuals, he wrote, often escape from freedom itself. The anxieties of choice, uncertainty and moral ambiguity lead many to surrender autonomy in exchange for security and certainty. The obedience impulse thus grows not only from fear but from a yearning to be relieved of responsibility. Taken together, these thinkers show that obedience is not simply a failure to resist—it is a psychologically appealing option when the world feels unstable, fearful or morally confusing.
If obedience is a strategy rather than an accident, then regimes that thrive on obedience are not anomalies—they are deliberate constructions. In contemporary politics, Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu offer two stark examples. Trump’s continued hold over American politics, even amid indictments and moral scandal, depends on a network of obedience that runs from his political base to the institutions that hesitate to restrain him. For his supporters, loyalty itself has become a moral good; the slogan Make America Great Again functions as a declaration of faith rather than a policy proposal.
Within Congress and the bureaucracy, many officials calibrate their actions to avoid defying Trump’s movement, while followers rationalise complicity as duty. They see themselves not as abandoning conscience but as serving a righteous cause. Trump’s persona, demanding unconditional allegiance, transforms obedience into belonging. Each norm violated, each lie defended, becomes another test of faith. Over time, obedience ceases to be exceptional; it becomes reflex. To question is to dissent; to dissent is to betray.
Netanyahu’s Israel presents a similar but differently coded pattern. His long rule has intertwined national identity, existential threat and political obedience into a single fabric. Framed perpetually in crisis—whether from external enemies or domestic dissent—the Israeli public is urged to equate loyalty with security. Critics are portrayed as undermining the nation’s survival. The judicial reforms his government has pursued exemplify this logic: by concentrating power and weakening checks, the Executive renders obedience not only virtuous but structurally necessary.
The atmosphere of perpetual emergency allows the demand for obedience to masquerade as patriotism. In both Israel and the United States, obedience becomes a scarce political currency: it defines who belongs and who does not.
Yet the habit of obedience runs far deeper than contemporary democracies. In much of the post-colonial world, obedience was institutionalised long before modern populism. Colonial administrations trained their subjects to equate obedience with civilisation and stability. When independence came, the bureaucratic machinery of command often remained intact, it was merely transferred to new rulers. In Egypt, for example, the reassertion of military power after the Arab Spring re-established obedience as political common sense. Citizens learnt that dissent invites punishment, while conformity ensures safety. The cultural memory of hierarchy makes disobedience seem chaotic and irresponsible.
In Pakistan, obedience has long been woven into the fabric of civil and military institutions. The army’s periodic interventions in politics, its self-presentation as the ultimate guardian of order and a bureaucratic ethos that prizes deference all cultivate a citizenry habituated to waiting for “orders from above.” Even in civilian life, obedience becomes synonymous with respectability. The patronage networks of political parties reward compliance and punish dissent.
Brazil and much of Latin America illustrate another legacy. After decades of military rule, obedience was rebranded as civic virtue—law and order elevated over deliberation, authority over questioning. The populist rhetoric of leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro taps into this heritage. For millions whose daily lives are precarious, obedience appears pragmatic: a means to survive violence, corruption and instability. In impoverished regions, where institutions are weak, obedience feels like the only viable posture.
The persistence of obedience across such different contexts suggests it meets real psychological needs. It provides cognitive relief by outsourcing judgment to authority; it offers moral hygiene by erasing guilt (“I was only following rules”); it grants social belonging by aligning the individual with a collective identity; it minimises risk by protecting one from punishment; and it strengthens itself through incremental entrenchment—small compliances that prepare the ground for greater ones. These mechanisms transform obedience from an act into a mindset. Arendt’s warning thus re-emerges with new urgency: in modern societies, obedience has become the default moral posture, not the exception.
If obedience is a trap, how might it be resisted? Arendt offered no easy formula, but she pointed toward an ethics of independence. To think, she said, is to “think without banisters”—to walk without the handrails of authority or tradition. In a world where moral coordinates are unreliable, each person must cultivate an inner dialogue, a private tribunal of conscience. This is neither comfortable nor safe. It produces hesitation, loneliness and doubt, which is why many prefer the certainties of obedience. But moral maturity demands precisely this discomfort: the courage to stop and think when everyone else is marching.
Resistance, then, begins in small acts—the refusal to repeat a convenient falsehood, the decision to question an unjust order, the willingness to protect those targeted by conformity. These gestures train the moral muscle that authoritarian systems seek to atrophy. Institutions must also be designed to counter obedience: independent courts, free media, strong civil societies and protections for dissenters all create space for judgment. Cultural education must honour disobedience where it served justice and teach citizens to value disagreement as a civic virtue rather than a threat.
Arendt’s final warning feels uncannily contemporary. Obedience has ceased to appear as submission; it now passes for virtue, patriotism and order. In the United States, the loyalist impulse of the Trump era has turned dissent into betrayal. In Israel, the language of national survival fuses with the demand for silence. Across much of the Global South, obedience endures as an inheritance of empire and survival strategy.
The challenge of our time is not only to restrain powerful leaders but also to awaken the citizens who make their power possible. Democracy does not die when leaders disobey the law; it dies when the people forget how to disobey power. To reclaim that forgotten art—to think, to judge, to refuse—is the only antidote to the foolproof strategy of obedience.
The writer is a professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.