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Kurt Hahn was Adolph Hitler’s first political prisoner.¹ In January 1933, one month after Hitler came to power, Hahn was jailed for openly challenging the Fuehrer’s actions. Hahn was the founder of the Salem School, a school that focused on character development through the use of experiential education techniques. Upon learning that Hitler had sent a congratulatory telegram to five storm troopers who had murdered a young Communist by stomping him to death, Hahn had written a letter to all Salem alumni, telling those with ties to the SS to “terminate their allegiance either to Hitler or to Salem.”² For thumbing his nose to Hitler, Hahn was imprisoned. He was released a few months later, but being of Jewish origin and having just had a foreshadow of Germany’s future, Hahn fled to Great Britain. Within a year of arriving, he set up a new school in Scotland: The Gordonstoun School.

Like the earlier school, Gordonstoun used innovative, experiential approaches to education. Hahn believed that students benefit most when all aspects of their being are developed: mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual. Thus, the curriculum included rigorous study, strenuous exercise, periods of extended silence, craftwork, art and music, and character development. In addition to their studies, students learned mountain rescue techniques, participated in the local fire brigade, and rowed lifeboats along the rugged Scottish seacoast. Hahn believed that every student has a “grand passion” and saw it as his aim to help them shed the “misery of unimportance.” He explained, “We are all better than we know; if only we can be brought to realize this, we might never settle for anything less.”³ The school became so successful that Britain’s Prince Phillip, himself a Gordonstoun alumnus, insisted that each of his three sons, princes Charles, Andrew, and Edward, attend the school.

Living along the Scottish seacoast Hahn talked to many sailors who had been rescued after their ships were sunk by German U-boats. Over time, he had noticed that for the stranded seamen the difference between survival and death often came down to willpower and attitude. He had seen many young and fit seamen die, while older and less fit ones lived. This observation prompted him to start a new life-training course, employing adventure-based education techniques to prepare people for dealing with all of life’s toughest challenges. The goal of the new program was to train people to “not shirk from leadership” and to make independent decisions by putting “right action before expediency.”⁴

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Kurt Hahn is the founder of Outward Bound.

Today, Outward Bound is widely respected for helping people of all ages meet life’s challenges by taking intelligent risks. But its early proponents met with stiff resistance when attempting to start the program in the United States. One of Hahn’s American protégés, Josh Miner, wrote Hahn complaining that he had grown leery of trespassing on the domain of America’s educational establishment.⁵ Hahn’s two-word reply represents an important way of demonstrating your commitment to your risk. It also forms the basis of our ninth Right Risk principle: Trespass continuously.

You Must Obey! . . . Sometimes

Progress demands obedience. From the Egyptian pyramids to the Great Wall of China, from the Eiffel Tower to the Apollo space program, no great work of humankind could have been achieved without obedience to a chain of command. Great collective deeds require the subjugation of personal interests to the “greater good.” We are willing to postpone having our needs met when the benefits of doing so outweigh the benefits of getting what we want, or when following the desires of some authority preserves our communities. Organizations run most efficiently when people submit to a chain of command. Imagine, for example, conducting a military campaign without obedience? Or what if pilots flew self-directed without the uncompromising directives of an air traffic controller? Obedience is essential for social order, it keeps the group from becoming a mob. Hence our earliest lessons revolve around the importance of obedience. In the Bible, for example, two of the Ten Commandments deal directly with obedience to authority: thou shalt have no gods before me and honor thy mother and thy father. Further, it is by obeying all ten that we presumably get to heaven. Even the story of Abraham, where he obeys God’s order to commit infanticide, reinforces the virtue of obedience.

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But it doesn’t take much imagination to recognize that obedience also has a sinister side. As social critic and novelist, C. P. Snow once wrote, “When you think of the long gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.”⁶ Unquestioned obedience to authority was, after all, at the black heart of Nazism, where the systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews, gypsies, mentally ill, and others was carried out by people who offered the uncomplicated rationale that they were simply “following orders.” It may be easier for us to reconcile such atrocities as anomalies, fringe examples of human evil so rare as to seem remote from our own behavior. Surely we bear no resemblance to such diabolical souls.

But some disturbing research from the early 1970s showed that human obedience directed toward evil ends could not simply be explained away as a rare or a localized event. Moreover, the research also showed that the virtues of loyalty, discipline, and self-sacrifice (all of which obedience requires) could be twisted so as to bind even good souls to malevolent systems of authority. As unflattering as it may seem, under the right conditions, we, too, can be made to subjugate our own desires in order to carry out the evil orders of others.

Stanley Milgram’s Shocking Study

Stanley Milgram was a Harvard-educated psychologist whose controversial book, Obedience to Authority, is considered a classic in the field of social psychology.⁷ The book chronicles a series of experiments that Milgram conducted at Yale University during the 1960s and helps to explain how obedience acts as a forceful inhibitor of risk-taking. Here is how his study worked.

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Imagine that you come across an ad in your local newspaper announcing a research study on the effects of punishment on learning. The announcement notes that participants will be paid a small fee for their time, no special training is needed, and they are seeking people from all walks of life. Hoping to make a quick buck, you sign up for the study. Upon entering the lab you meet the researcher and another person, a likeable middle-aged guy who is introduced as a recruit like yourself. The researcher, a stern, impassive fellow, explains that you and the other person will each have a distinct role in the experiment, one of you will be a “teacher” and the other a “learner.” You each draw a piece of paper from a hat, and you find that yours says “teacher.” You watch as the learner is strapped down to a chair and an electrode is pasted on his arm. The researcher says that the strap will help prevent “excessive movement,” and that the electrode paste will keep the learner “from getting blisters and burns” during the experiment. After the learner expresses some concerns about his weak heart, the researcher tells him that though the shocks can be extremely painful, “they cause no permanent tissue damage.”⁸

At this point you are led to an adjoining room that has an electronic console with some thirty switches, each labeled with a different voltage ranging from 15 to 450 volts and a verbal description ranging from “Slight shock” to “Danger, severe shock,” to one ominously labeled “XXX” at the very end of the scale. You are to read from a list of word pairs and ask the learner to recite them back verbatim from memory, communicating through an intercom system. For each incorrect answer, you are to levy a shock in 15-volt increments. Just to make sure you are clear about the punishment you are to administer, you are given a sample shock of 45 volts. Yup, it’s real, all right.

As you progress through the experiment, the learner makes a lot of mistakes requiring you to up the voltage of the punishment. Early on the learner doesn’t seem to feel any pain. However, when you get to 75 volts he lets out an audible groan. At 120 volts, he says that the shocks are starting to hurt and reminds you about his heart condition. Troubled, you ask the experimenter for his advice, to which he passively replies, “The experiment requires that you go on.” So you do.

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At 150 volts, the learner shouts out, “Get me out of here!” Terrified, you tell the experimenter that you don’t want to hurt the learner. He replies, “Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly.” After a few moments, you reluctantly proceed. At 300 volts, the learner vehemently protests that he refuses to answer any more questions. Incredulously, the experimenter tells you to treat the absence of an answer as an incorrect response and instructs you to punish accordingly. You feel trapped; the pressure building inside you is immense. You want to push your chair back and defiantly walk out of the room. But you just can’t, you’ll get in trouble for ruining the experiment. Reluctantly, you flip the switch to 315 volts, and the learner screams in agony. He screams even louder as you flip the switch to 330 volts. But at 345 volts, ominously, no more sounds are heard from the learner. You are petrified, worrying, “Have I killed him?” You plead for the experiment to stop, but you are told, “You have no other choice; you must go on.” The pressure to disobey mounts; you feel fit to burst. The dilemma is maddening: disobey the experimenter and run the risk of ruining the study, or obey and run the risk of hurting—or even killing—the learner. What do you do?

If you are like most people, 66% in fact, you proceeded all the way to the maximum shock—the dreaded XXX switch—which you administered three times before the experiment was halted.⁹ To your great relief, the learner was actually a confederate who, unbeknownst to you until after the experiment, received no shocks at all. As striking as it may seem, Milgram’s study has been replicated over and over at numerous renowned universities throughout the world.¹⁰ And though there are many variations of the study, the predominant goal is the same: to discover at what point a person will defy authority in the face of a clear moral imperative not to inflict harm.

The findings consistently show that people will subjugate their most ardently held moral values in order to obey the commands of an authority figure . . . even commands that could only be explained as evil. As Milgram notes, “The person who, with inner conviction, loathes stealing, killing, and assault may find himself performing these acts with relative ease when commanded by authority. Behavior that is unthinkable in an individual who is acting on his own may be executed without hesitation when carried out under orders.”¹¹

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Notice how the pressure to disobey increased throughout the experiment. Milgram achieved this by using two mutually incompatible social pressures, the super-rational experimenter instructing you to proceed (pressure to obey) and the suffering victim begging you to stop (pressure to disobey). Through the antagonism created by these “counter-forces,” Milgram was looking for the point of rupture at which a person would switch from obedience to disobedience. Indeed, the specific voltage at which the participant refused to go any further signified the rupture point itself. But as noted, this switch was rarely made, and obedience was the predominant choice.

What is particularly remarkable is that the highest-level shocks were made in the absence of any real threat by the researcher. In fact, participants were told that they would receive their payment whether or not the study was successful. So the question becomes, why did most people continue shocking an innocent victim even after he begged them to stop? It turns out, for many of the same reasons people tend to obey those in authority: unwillingness to break a promise, belief in the legitimacy of the authority’s credentials and directives, politeness, conflict avoidance, complete preoccupation with the task and inability to see the big picture, and fear of being “in trouble.” When these forces are at play, we often divest ourselves of any personal accountability for our actions, becoming mere agents of the authority’s power. Like echoes from the Nazi era, many participants in this experiment attributed responsibility for their actions to the authority figure, offering the age-old explanation that they were just “following orders.”

I describe Milgram’s study because it offers stark evidence of how our desire to obey inhibits us from taking risks. And just what is the inhibited risk in this experiment? This is important to clarify because it is easy to confuse the harmful acts of this experiment with the actual risk. The real risk in Milgram’s study is not the act of inflicting pain on the learner. Doing exactly what you are told might describe allegiance, compliance, or even responsibility, but not risk. No, in these experiments, and indeed in many situations of obedience, the real risk is of disobedience, of trespassing beyond the authority’s orders.

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Disciplined Disobedience

Unlike in Milgram’s study, in real life the consequences for disobeying authority can be quite real. As children we learn that disobeying our parents’ wishes is the quickest way to a good spanking. Later, in adolescence, disobedient behavior may get us grounded. As we enter the work world, disobedience is seen as insubordination and is the surest way to getting fired. Hence, we devote an awful lot of time and energy to being well-behaved. Yet risk often requires just the opposite. Indeed, one of the most essential questions to ask yourself when facing a Right Risk is who or what will I have to disobey in order to complete this risk? Some risks require disobeying an actual person, like a boss, a parent, or a loved one. Others require disobeying institutions like our church or government. Most require disobeying your own fears, biases, and inclination not to risk. The point is, nearly every significant risk you will ever take is bound to offend someone, and the price of a Right Risk is often the stigma of misbehavior.

Right Risk involves self-leadership, the consequence of which is assuming responsibility for your own actions. In order to trespass beyond the “no” of someone in authority, you must be willing to say “yes” to your own authority. Then the orders you’ll be following will be your own. At the same time, Right Risk involves self-followership because once you become your own authority, you also become responsible for following your directives. Thus making the commitment to trespass continuously involves both fierce independence and supreme obedience. It involves independently trespassing beyond the directives of an external authority, while being an obedient servant to the voice of our inner authority.

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Right Versus Might

You are more likely to take a Right Risk when your moral convictions are stronger than your loyalty to those in authority. When this happens, as the following story illustrates, we are likely to choose trespassing over obeying.

On March 6, 1998, Hugh Thompson was awarded the Soldiers Medal at a ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Unlike most recipients of this coveted military award, Thompson didn’t receive the award for obediently carrying out the orders of his commanding officers. To the contrary, he and his younger helicopter crewmates, Lawrence Coburn and Glenn Andreotta, won the award for defiantly landing their helicopter between American soldiers and their targets, the unarmed Vietnamese civilians in the tiny village of My Lai.¹²

The massacre at My Lai is perhaps the most shameful act in all of American military history. The American soldiers rounded up and killed some 500 defenseless Vietnamese civilians. The revelations were infuriating: women raped and mutilated, babies and elderly adults murdered. As young Army pilots, Thompson and his crewmates witnessed the carnage from the air. They tried to make sense of all of the dead bodies they saw piled in an irrigation ditch. Could our own soldiers have forced them into the ditch only to mow them down with machine guns? Thompson and his crew realized that this had gone well beyond the conventions of war. As Thompson put it, “I didn’t want to be part of that. It wasn’t war.” Prodded by their own conscience and wanting to prevent further bloodshed, he and his team landed their chopper between their fellow troops and several elderly people and children who were being chased toward a shelter. After jumping out of the chopper and confronting the lieutenant leading the chase, Thompson decided to get the civilians out himself, instructing his crewmates to shoot any Americans who fired at the helpless victims, a command that would normally get one court-martialed. Though it took 30 years, Thompson and Coburn (Andreotta died in combat one month after the massacre) received their medals for choosing to defy military convention and to obey a higher authority than a chain of command: their own consciences.

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Although the moral correctness of the actions of Thompson and his crewmates is beyond question, defying their chain of command must have been an extremely difficult act. Even in instances where the moral choice is less clear-cut, the decision to defy authority is anguishing. How are you to know, after all, whether your defiance is an act of courageous risk, or just arrogant insubordination? I suppose it has something to do with selflessness. Trespassing continuously—and for that matter Right Risk—does not mean perpetually having to get your way. That is arrogance. Instead, it means not bowing to others out of fear or convenience, particularly when their decisions will limit or harm others. Whether it was Kurt Hahn admonishing Hitler, or Josh Miner taking on the educational establishment to start Outward Bound in America, or the heroes who defied orders to save lives at My Lai, or the rare individuals who refused to administer shocks in Milgram’s study, all of them were focused on serving others.

The Great Blasphemers

Bertrand Russell reportedly commented that all great ideas start out as blasphemy. I would add that all great deeds do as well. Defying authority, it turns out, is just as essential to human progress as obedience. History is filled with examples of people who trespassed continuously in order to bring about major scientific, cultural, and moral advancements.

Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin defied the superstitions of the church; Gandhi defied the British government by marching to the Arabian sea and washing in the salt waters; Nelson Mandela defied South Africa’s racist laws of apartheid; Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) defied the draft board; Rosa Parks defied a bus driver’s order to give up her seat; Jeffery Wigand defied the unwritten rules of the tobacco fraternity; and the list goes on and on. Indeed, America herself was founded on acts of defiance. Let’s not forget that nearly all of the Founding Fathers were traitors . . . to the British monarchy. Even Christianity would not exist had Christ surrendered to the Pharisees’ rules instead of God’s will. [Christ’s scathing indictment of the Pharisees can be seen in the Gospel of Matthew (verse 23), where he calls them “blind fools,” likening them to whitewashed tombs who are polished on the outside but rotten on the inside.] In each of these examples, the world would be an entirely different place had each person sheepishly “followed orders” and done exactly what they were told.

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Each of us will face Pharisees in our lives. There will always be people who undermine our confidence, and who piously prop themselves up while holding us down. In many respects, the more “right” our risk, the more intensely the Pharisees will try to thwart our efforts. Thus the presence of Pharisees should bring a sense of relief to the Right Risk-taker, a validation that they must be on to something good.

In the long run, right has might; good deeds overcome bad people. Making the commitment to trespass continuously means assuming responsibility for doing the right thing, regardless of who threatens or intimidates you. It means expecting that your Right Risk will incite detractors, and when it does, forging ahead anyway. Trespassing continuously means being owned by no one, while serving everyone.

Saintly Rebels

In The Courage to Create, Rollo May points out that throughout history the saint and the rebel very often have been the same person.¹³ People like Jesus, Gandhi, Socrates, and Joan of Arc possessed a wonderful blend of virtue and verve. They were willing—and in some cases eager—to trespass continuously on the province of the oppressive guardians of the status quo. As these saintly rebels showed us, Right Risks involve mixing moral decency with unruly indignation. It was through their disobedience to secular authorities that they were most able to demonstrate their allegiance to a higher one: a God of their understanding.

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Putting Principle 9 into Practice

• How has being obedient caused you to avoid risks in the past? In what instances do you use “following orders” as an excuse for abdicating responsibility?
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• What acts of disobedience are you most proud of? Least proud of?
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• Who or what will you have to disobey to complete your big risk? How big a barrier is this toward taking your risk?
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• Who is your favorite “saintly rebel”? Why?
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• What are some of your convictions or moral rules? How far would you go in challenging authority to uphold them?
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