Loyal Henchmen The Devil's Disciples
Louis Menand has a very interesting essay in the New Yorker on totalitarian regimes and the people who live under them:
Few puzzles in political philosophy are more daunting than the Problem of the Loyal Henchmen. The Problem of the Loyal Henchmen is a subset of the more familiar Problem of Authority. Why does authority command obedience? A man who tells you to pick your gum wrapper up off the sidewalk is generally ignored; a man in a uniform who makes the same request, even if it is the uniform of a bus driver, is instinctively obeyed.
People wearing white lab coats and carrying clipboards, with no other evidence of expertise, have succeeded in persuading subjects in psychology experiments to act in the belief that they are torturing other human beings. In these cases, people can persuade themselves that the authorities they obey are benign ... that picking up litter and torturing other human beings in a laboratory are in the interests of civic order and scientific progress.
· And it gives plausibility to the henchman who sacrifices his life to take a final shot at James Bond [NewYorker]