 think tech, this is keeping the world company. And we're going to do the decline of leadership in America and elsewhere. With my co-host, Tim Apichella, and our special esteemed guest who we'd love to have on the show, Gene Rosenfeld. So, Gene, let's start with you. What is going on here that we have leaders who lie and we buy it? What is going on here that we have leaders who are able to get the nomination for president and then very possibly able to win that, although they lie on a daily basis and they make statements that are outrageous and they disregard our system and our justice and they take us back to the stone ages in so many ways. Why is that? What is the problem in the human condition that allows this to happen? Well, I've been doing some study of what we've learned about human behavior in a social setting and social psychology. There was a very famous experiment conducted in 1963 by Stanley Milgram at Yale in which he measured to what extent ordinary individuals with administer harm and pain to another individual under the influence of an authority. And he called this experiment obedience to authority. It was actually a number of experiments, very, very thorough. He wrote a book on it in 1974 by the same name. What it does is illuminate what's happening today in the Trump-Biden face-off. One reason why Donald Trump has never conceded the 2020 election is because he would lose authority if he did not present himself as a legitimate president and Joe Biden as an illegitimate president, thus setting up the stage for two competing leaders or authorities in the experiments that Milgram conducted. When you had two authorities directing another person to administer harm to a third person, there was paralysis. The individual that was supposed to take the action could not take the action until he could determine who was the greater authority. So if you have symmetric authorities competing, you have paralysis. And what do we have in the Congress today? And what do we have in the government today? More paralysis. So this means that Trump, not conceding the 2020 election, was a stroke of malevolent genius seen in individuals who are authoritarian leaders such as Putin, Mussolini, Hitler, and it undergirds the accusation that he has a neo-fascist movement going here, and he's very clever in what he's doing. So what we need to do is determine who is the authority, and that's what this election will do. It may or may not. If Biden wins this election, I expect Trump to still contest the results. He cannot afford to lose authority because he loses power. That also jobs with another theory in social science called the theory of charisma. There are two types of leadership, charismatic and bureaucratic. Bureaucratic is legitimate leadership acquired through the institutions of a legitimate government. Charismatic leadership comes from outside and sways the emotions of people and undermines the institutions of a legitimate government. And we've seen this play out in the last six years with Donald Trump undermining the respect we have for institutions and damning them as elites and not meritocracy which we need to negotiate a very complicated world. You know, it's not new. Just one reaction. You know, before the 2016 election, he said pretty much the same thing as he said before the 2020 election. They asked him whether he would concede if he lost. This is 2016 and he refused to answer the question suggesting that he would not concede. I suggest to you that if he had lost in 2016, he would have tried to do the same thing then. But, you know, the other reaction I have, and I'd like to, you know, put this to Tim, we have seen this throughout human history in one way or another. How did monarchs, how did bad monarchs get in charge? Then, you know, you can say it's sociology, social science. You can say it's, you know, psychology on a grand scale. You can also say that we're like ants and we have a queen ant or bees. We have a queen bee and we need to have this kind of leadership. It's a human need. It's biochemical is what it is, biochemical. That's my theory. And after all these years, we can study it retrospectively, but we really don't have an answer on how to deal with it. Your thoughts, Tim? Heavy topic, and I love this topic. On a very generic basis, Jay, I just think the fail of leadership is attributed to the, a direct correlation to the failure of the people that should expect a good leader and vote in a good leader. The American public expectation of what constitutes a good leader is, I think, has fallen by the wayside. We used to expect decency in our leader, not just charismatic, but also decency. And I don't think that is a top criteria anymore. And my evidence is Donald Trump. My evidence is those deplorables that have been elected into Congress, the House of Representatives. Maybe that's due to gerrymandering. I don't know, but the bottom line is some moral character and upstanding moral characteristics doesn't seem to be on the list of criteria any longer. And I don't know why that is, but it seems to be a reality of our politics. You know, Jean, when I was a kid, I went to summer camp. There was a Jewish Federation camp in the Catskills. It was a wonderful camp. It was run by wonderful people, social workers. It was a social work camp. And everything was, you know, seen through the lens of social work. And the part of the mantra of the camp, part of its success, was to identify and encourage good leaders and bad leaders. And you could find them and you could deal with them. Mind you, they were campers. So it's not like they had a choice to listen or not listen. But it seems to me that that's what we're talking about. Is something in the human condition that makes for a pathological leader? Is something in the human condition that makes for a good leader? You agree? Yes, I think the question of character is front and center here, which is why I'm starting out by studying human psychology. Back again to the Milgram experiments, the supposition going into those experiments, and he pulled a bunch of psychiatrists, was the expectation that individuals would not administer harm to a third person just on the say so of a perceived authority. That was totally wrong. I mean, it was almost two-thirds of the people that went on to administer the highest level of electric shock presumed, although this was set up and nobody was harmed, nobody knew that at the time, to the third individual. And one of the reasons that people gave for doing this was that they weren't responsible, the authority was responsible. And even though these individuals said their moral sense would not cause them to do harm, every time they protested against increasing the shock to the individual, the authority would tell them, just ignore that. It's really okay, it's not being harmed, just ignore it, go ahead. Even though the third individual would protest and scream, they would go ahead and do it. So they were contradicting their own moral precepts. We can't assume that the individuals who listen to a dictator or an authoritarian or charismatic leader are simply giving up their moral precepts. They're holding on to them, but they're finding other reasons not to. And the major reason through all of these experiments was obedience to a perceived authority, that individuals, even when they deceive themselves and think they're acting out of moral grounds, they're not, that we deceive ourselves. You know, I think I've seen footage about the people who were involved in this experiment and that they were asked by the authority to administer a shock to some person in another room. And then when they did electric shock and when they did that, the person in the other room would cry out in pain, although that was fabricated. And then the question is, how did the individual who administered the shock react to that? And my sense of it at the time, and maybe I was not as sophisticated as the report you're talking about, was that this was a kind of shodden Freud, that they were just joyous and happy in their hearts to be able to administer pain to someone. And that made it attractive. You're saying that's not so. It was not shodden Freud. No, it was not any innate aggression within the individuals involved. They were common people. And of course, this grew out of the questions from the Holocaust. Why did common people in Germany, why did they go along with this utterly indecent, immoral, brutal, awful and humane stuff? And interestingly, the few people that were in the experiment, they didn't know about all the facts that nobody was going to be harmed, who refused to do this. There were a couple of people. One of them was from the Netherlands. The other one was from Germany who'd had the experience of the German occupation. And they caught on to it pretty damn quick. Well, what you're saying, I think, is that this may differ from country to country. In some countries, the experiment would work this way. And in some countries, people wouldn't buy into it. So it is a cultural overlay, doesn't it? No. Unfortunately, that's not true. It just so happens that these two people have this specific experience. And it just rang a bell with them. Yeah, but in Germany, we know that a middle class German in population bought into it on a large scale. And in the process, took instructions to kill millions of people, innocent people. That has not happened, at least in Europe, anywhere else, right? Well, it could happen here. Obviously, and they go through this, if you read the whole book. I mean, it's a universal human behavioral modality that they conducted many, many experiments and many permutations of those experiments. And at each level, it was verified that obedience to authority was built into the hierarchical evolutionary structure of human group behavior, which enhanced the survival value of the group. And that we as individuals don't really understand or are not aware always, that we're not acting out of our moral values. We're not giving them up. But in fact, we are giving lip service to them, but we're acting out of obedience to authority. Okay. Tim, is this happening here? Well, I have to jump on to exactly what Gene's talking about. And that is, I think, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it plays into this, that, you know, the need for security, the need to be safe, the need to feel secure within a group, or, you know, if you want to see tribe, but that plays very much into why there's so many people following Donald Trump. It also plays into fear, the fear that I might lose economic security if I'm not with the group, or if I'm an anti-Trump, particularly by working in organizations that pro-Trump. And, you know, there's like the banking industry, a lot of Republicans in the banking industry. And if you're a liberal Democrat, you may stand out as not being part of the group. And so, it's often that when people feel like they may be on the outside of the group, they'll work extra hard to be inside the group. They may go above and beyond, particularly in shock there, you know, this experiment that Gene has referred to, they may go above and beyond providing shock to prove that they're probably more loyal and obedient and part of the, part of the group than they normally would do otherwise. It's very scary. You know, one of the examples given in the hearing in the Court of Appeals just a couple of days ago was, you know, would you, would you expect that somebody in SEAL Team 5 would assassinate for you, remember that one? It's very interesting. And the question is, what does SEAL Team 5 think about that? I remember an interview we had with a fellow who was in the Navy. And this was right after Trump ordered that the name McCain be painted over on a ship in Yacuzka. And the crew did it. And I asked him, I said, you realize that, you know, he was painting over the name of a war hero, a very important person, in my opinion, in American history and in the history of Vietnam. Why did you do that? Did you say no? Did you say I refuse to do that? This is an outrage. I'm not going to do it. He said, no, I was ordered to do it. And then I think of the fact that we are now spending $800 billion on the military and the fact that Trump tried to control the military in his first term. And I wonder if the military plays into this because the military, Jean, it's all about authority, isn't it? The military is all about authority. If I can control the military, I can get huge leverage to my orders, my instructions, my negative leadership, no? Well, the military is a model for these experiments that refer to military actions and behaviors throughout. And this was carried out right before and during and after the Vietnam War and the protests and the Milan massacre and all of that. It depends on who you perceive to be the authority. I mean, this experiments also showed what can cause rebellion against authority. And we can take some, I guess, comfort from that, that the group itself can stage a rebellion against authority because the pressure of conformity, which is the flip side of obedience in their experiments, although it doesn't sound like it, conformity to the group and obedience to the authority can be an un-conflict situation. Well, let me just go to Putin for a minute. He has people who protest against his war and his deprivation of civil rights, human rights in the war and in the country. Those people, he uses all the tools of an autocrat to suppress them. And so to the extent that he's the authority, certainly is, he causes them to abide by his and follow his wishes. But to the extent that he has these tools, he suppresses any protest. How can you do protest in that environment, Jean? It depends on who's doing the protesting. His followers are listening to the authority. In many of these experiments, they would switch the authorities and the authority would be the individual who was harmed, for example. Or there would be a second authority, as I alluded to before. And this would sometimes change the outcomes. But in terms of conformity and previous experiments on conformity, the peer group also exercises a control on the individual. So when we're in groups, we work for group survival and be known to ourselves. And our decisions are to some extent governed by the group. So when the authority in question like Trump and the group itself agree on the action to be taken, no matter what values they espouse, then you have a very strong propensity for authoritarian rule. And this is what happened in Germany and what happened in Italy. However, however, the counter protest to that is a group that espouses the opposite action. And then you have a conflict over who is the legitimate leadership. And if you have some two leaders like Biden and Trump, whoever is perceived to be legitimate, whether it's the institutional leader who's come up through the ranks, like Biden and supports the institutions of the government, or it's the revolutionary leader like Trump, the charismatic who undermines the institutions and attempts to, in essence, replace them with his own personnel and rule, whoever is perceived to be more legitimate, even if it's a smidgen more legitimate, will sway the outcome. In other words, Biden were to win this election, even if he had a minority vote, if he won the electoral votes, even if his minority vote was 1% over the other vote, it would not undermine his legitimacy to any extent. Whoever is perceived as legitimate is the guy who you are obedient to. Well, suppose some of them are perceived by one group to be legitimate, and some of them, one of them is perceived by one group to be legitimate, and the other is perceived by another group to be legitimate, such as what we have with Trump and Biden. There are people who will follow Trump no matter what he does, no matter what kind of stochastic remarks he makes. And there are people who understand Biden and follow Biden. So what you have is this conflict on a grand scale, and it's close in its own way. It's at a tipping point, and it will be at a tipping point in the election, I suggest. So I'll save the question. I want to go to Tim for one aspect of this. Tim, they say the way through peace is war. The way through protest is violence. How does violence play in all of this? If you want to have a person who acts as an authoritarian leader with certain others disagreeing and protesting, where does violence play in that? It plays in very importantly. If I conduct violent acts against a certain individual or groups, the thought processes in the public is, oh, that violence could potentially be turned against me if I act out of line. So it's a demonstration. It's to set an example. That's gone on through history way before Donald Trump is I'm going to set an example. Look at England when the prisoners or the captives, their heads were set on a pike right outside of London to set an example, a violent example. It works. If we've talked about anything in the past, it's that Donald Trump has given permission for people to say deplorable things and act in deplorable manner. And I'm reminded of the, I think he was a Navy SEAL or he was a Special Forces person in the Navy who was convicted of killing and executing a prisoner with a knife. And he was convicted. And Donald Trump gave him a pardon. And not only gave him a pardon, but elevated him to a status of patriot, a patriot warrior. And what that did by that act was to say he was deplorable, but as President of the United States, I don't think he's deplorable. So what message does that send to the ranks below, you know, from general on down is that deplorable acts are going to be deemed as acceptable. And if the President of the United States says it's okay, then I guess we could do the same thing without supervision in the field. These are the, you know, the beginnings of what happened to me lie or Abu Ghraib, the torturing of prisoners, is that there was some sense that permission was given to act against the Geneva Convention and do horrific things to prisoners and or prisoners of war. You know, this is the question I was holding back on. I think it's time for me to ask you this question, recognizing, you know, the sociology and the psychology, the experiment, the way people react as part of the human species biochemically. And, you know, in terms of the way our brains work on two authoritarian, perceived authoritarian figures, however moral or immoral they may be. With all the learning and observation and research that we've done, with all the writing on the subject, because it's, you know, it's part of our inquiry into the human condition to find out what this, what this is and how it works. Do we know how to stop it? Do we know how to undo the strange and negative connection that Trump has with his base with, you know, Putin and authoritarian figures around the world? Do we know how to break the spell? Well, one of the reasons why those who want to bring down a legitimate society and government is to induce chaos into the system is so that they destroy the hierarchy that is built up. If we assume that most of us act out of obedience to authority, then you need a hierarchy where each person perceives a level above him that has legitimacy and that level, it's like the military of ranks. Each rank has a higher level of authority and with that authority comes the power to induce action on the whole organization. That's how societies are in essence, that's their template. And if you destroy that, if you break that down, then you can rebuild it according to your own concepts of authority. Now, where does morality fit in this? Morality is what the authority espouses and the individuals act out of whether they ascribe to it or not, because the authority is telling them to do it. So in essence, the way you dismantle an authoritarian system is to not accept its authority. That's very difficult to do. Who then do you turn to? You have to create a hierarchy of your own, or you have to say there is an authority above human authority, and many people have used the word God in terms of rebelling against a system too. We have examples of this in literature in the play Antigone by the ancient Greeks. We have a young woman who defies the legitimate authority by describing her need to bury her brother who's fallen in battle outside to the gods. We have the example in World War II, the extraordinary example of Desmond Dofts, who was seven-day Adventist to refuse to carry a gun, served as a medic at Okinawa and did extraordinary actions to save others, even though he was initially persecuted for his refusal to carry a gun and that he was one man out of millions. So it's very difficult to do, but if you look at the Soviet Union, for example, why is it necessary to imprison Navalny? Because he's a danger in terms of his charismatic authority to an apparently tipping point number of individuals among the populace that he's perceived as a threat because he could create a counter authority, he could create a counter hierarchy. So there are ways to do this, but it's not easy. Well, just a comment on Navalny, I mean he'd be much more of a threat if he was out on the street. And if you move around Siberia and you have him appear and disappear and make him look weak and fragile and who isn't going to last very long in the circumstances, he's less of a threat. And so Putin knows this, Putin knows that if you have a threat of protest, there's ways, there's tools that he can use to put you down. So the other thing and I want to ask Tim about this is that going back to violence, if you want to protest, it's the who, Jane, the who. Who does it? What individuals, what group, what personality and leadership characteristics do we have to have to find a who? The who that will oppose the autocrat. And I suggest to you that that is, as in the case you mentioned with Dawes, Jane, that is pretty risky business or Navalny. His life is on the line every moment. And one of these days, like precocious, he's going to be killed. And so if you want to do that, if you want to be the who or organize the who, you'd better be willing to give up your life and not only in the sweetness of a middle class existence or better, but in the possibility you will be assassinated because the autocrat wants to do, you know, doesn't want to deal with you. Your thoughts? My thoughts are, you know, with the initial phase of an uprising. Unfortunately, those brave souls are the first to perish or imprisoned and never to be seen again. It's only after enough synergy has basically has persuaded other people in society to stand up and basically give up that which is dear and precious to them. I'm thinking of our own American Revolutionary War was that you had farmers who, by leaving the farmers, putting their family at risk of starvation or worse, and yet they joined the Continental Army. Why? Because they were so fed up with it, you know, they had reached a tipping point, a boiling point, and that's what they did. I look at the French Revolution, you know, to kill the king was, you know, it was a horrible thing to even think about killing a divine appointed king, but that's what they did. So it takes time for people to get fed up and I would say gain the courage through contact with other people who are also scared, but, you know, courage develops and increases in numbers, and that takes time to get those numbers. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, Jean. Time is a factor in all of this. If we're going to break the spell, we've got to be mad as hell like that movie. I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore. So that there comes this tipping point where people are willing to take the risk of opposing the authority, where they are going to have a revolt, a revolution, an insurrection. The problem is that, you know, sometimes that doesn't work, and you lose your life over it. So, Queery, where do you think time plays in all of this? How long can an authoritarian hang on to it before people drag him down? Well, let's just back off for a minute and return to where we are today. The question before us today is, which individual, the candidate of the Republican Party, or the incumbent in office that is running on the Democratic ticket, is perceived by a critical mass of the American public to be the higher authority? And this would confer on this individual the complete amount of power needed to run the organization and to keep our institutions in line. That's the question. That's where we're at right now. We're not really at the point where we have to stage any kind of coup or counter coup against a malevolent authority. And by the way, in these structures of authority, it doesn't matter what your values or your morality is. It's what the leader tells you to do in terms of action. So, who you choose. You have to be a very good judge of that person's character if you're really concerned about values and morals. Individuals may not be as attuned to this because what they're really looking for is something else. Maybe someone that they think is going to keep them more secure who's going to protect them, who's going to advance their interests. So, morality is kind of the third wall here. And it does make a difference whom we choose. That character that individual does make a difference. In terms of rebellion, let's hope we don't have to go there. That you can see in terms of resistance movements during World War II and occupied territories, the extremes people went to. The rare example, for example, the Warsaw ghetto of Klaus von Staufenberg who staged a coup from within the army, the German army, and failed. All of these individuals had an impact and we talk about them today, but they didn't really overturn the system. But they didn't live either. They were fatalities, casualties of their attempts. Tim, you were thinking of something? You know, Gene sparked something within me about undermining the authority. That's why the Republicans have undermined Joe Biden by questioning his cognitive ability, reducing his authority as a leader, his credibility as a leader. And I hate to say it, but it's worked. Before you go, I want to ask you the question I always address to you, Tim. What about the media here? And we're talking about a human process, you know, where people for whatever biochemicals, social or psychological reason will follow in authority, but isn't that accelerated, enhanced by whatever the media does? Of course. You know, I read it, therefore it's true. I saw it on TV, therefore it's true. I think the media actually now has recognized some of their hand in the rise of Donald Trump. For example, I saw immediately after his interview, immediate fat checking on the spot, fat checking, which he never used to see before, or his statement as he came out of the courtroom this morning and basically repeated what he said in the courtroom. Fat checking was taking place right then and there. So I think the media has recognized that they are partly at fault for Donald Trump's ability to lie and get away with it. Well, I think they're trying to do something about that now, but they're about five years too late. Yeah, Gene, you know, you say the morality has nothing to do with it, but what about the media? Are they a significant feature in this human process, or does the authoritarian figure brush them off? Do they brush off the media? How much do they play in terms of the ultimate recipe on this? It kind of depends on whether and what part of the media is regarded by those who listen, see and read it as the authoritative voice, as the truth. There are individuals who consider the mainstream media part of the problem. And we saw at the beginning of the Trump administration back in 2017 or so, the media was attacked. And in the article I wrote on fascism at that time and published, I said that one of the steps you would expect in a fascist administration was to undermine and attack the media and seize control of it. Trump has tried to do a set up alternative voices in the media like Steve Bannon, Breitbart News, Fox News, and alternative media, alternative facts, for his followers to listen to and stop by that information. So it simply reinforces what he's telling them. His message is the key to his power. And the more that message can be echoed, reverberates, is accepted, becomes the dominant message, then the greater his ability to seize power becomes. And the media unfortunately, good and bad, or Pro-Encon has given him billions of dollars of free publicity and has really built this man in which we look back historically on his time. We're gonna see the media as a very big factor in his rise and maybe his fall, I would hope, in his rise. Well, the oblique on that is education in general. You're an educator. You spend a career in the classroom talking to generations of students on subjects that were important to make them think critically. I suggest to you that the American education system hasn't done that well in terms of creating critical thought and those students become not only members of the community, become leaders of the community, sub the big authority. And I'm wondering whether we have critical thinkers by virtue of our, may I say, failure of education over the past few decades that can discern between truth and fiction. And if we don't, doesn't that fall in the hands of people like Trump? I'm a great supporter of education and a teacher. I've learned through it. It works slowly. It works generationally. And when we do not teach the lessons we need to continue for the next generation, we suffer the consequences. It's no coincidence, I think, that the people who experienced World War II and the fight against fascism globally are now at the end of their lives, approaching the end of their lives are gone. And this is the time when we've forgotten the lessons. And I don't think looking back, we really taught them enough. So we have to go back to that time. We have to restate what happened. We have to show people we have to educate people fast. But we have a greater means now to do that. We have the internet. We have this talk show. We have, we just have more devices to get the message out. And that's the message we need to get out, is that this has happened before, not exactly the same. But it's happened before. We can't fail to lose that lesson. We have to teach it again and again and again. And you can do that pretty fast under current circumstances. You can change perceptions. The media does it from week to week as to what is important, what should grab our attention. Well, Tim, I want to ask you about memory, something that Jean referred to, about recollections, about remembering what happened. I mean, there's a lot of people who don't see January 6th as all that bad. I can't remember exactly what happened. There's a lot of people who can't remember and don't see October 7th as all that bad. Because, you know, you get drowned out. The truth gets drowned out by the fickle finger of the media, of new information, new stories making you forget. A lot of people deny the Holocaust. They can't remember if they ever knew. And so, I'm wondering if people really remember what Trump did in his four years, what he said, what he threatened, how he hollowed out the government. I wonder if they remember, the press was full of it. It was not just us here on Think Tech talking about it. Everybody was talking about it. But now, if you go in the street, you're not sure they remember any of it. Your thoughts? Well, we are out of time. But human beings have a hard time remembering 10 items, not to mention 30,000 items. And that's how many lies that were attributed to Donald Trump during his four years with the United States. 30,000 bona fide lies. So, it's overload. And people can only handle so much. They become desensitized. And that's why Donald Trump says what he says repeatedly and often. And this never stops saying and doing deplorable acts because it's ongoing. And people can't track it all the time. They can't remember it. That's my take that as your final comment and offer Eugene the opportunity to make a final comment here. I think we need to examine our own actions and our own when we vote, for example, where we take a significant action or we're speaking to somebody else and say, who am I listening to? Who is influencing me? Is this in line with what I really believe? Okay. Critical thinking and separating, separating yourself from the cult. The, what was it? The Jonestown cult. Well, thank you very much. Gene Roosevelt, Tim Eppichel. I really appreciate this discussion. It's great to dig down on these issues. Talk to you again soon. Allah hafiz.