Authoritarianism and the Agentic State (and Andor)
(I'm interested in questions of agency, and how automation and artificial intelligence serve to undermine this – agents versus agency, I've previously argued. It's particularly striking that "agents" are being marketed as an easy way to optimize one's personal and professional life – totally stripped of the term's history (philosophy, psychology, even technology). The ideas below are really quite fragmented and tentative. And honestly, I thought, at one point, that the connections to Star Wars made sense, but now that I've typed all this out, I'm not at all sure. So apologies, I guess. It's a Monday.)
The work of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram is both widely known and roundly discredited. His infamous experiments on compliance and control ostensibly measured the willingness of study participants to, when commanded by an authority figure, administer electric shocks to other volunteers in the lab. And while there have been many many questions about the research design and ethics, about the applicability of “obedience” in a lab to real-world scenarios, and about the validity of the findings and Milgram's theoretical interpretations, we are – as with dear B. F. Skinner and his behaviorism – still sort of stuck with the guy, it seems.
So it’s still worth engaging with Milgram and his work – not as rigorous social science to defend or decry but as a cultural artifact to think with and around. I’d argue his work can be both wrong and relevant (I mean, I’m not a psychologist or a social scientist, so I dare say this) – in its own context and in this very moment as we seem to be veering towards a global techno-authoritarianism, an authoritarianism automated through AI expressly wielded to diminish personal freedom and autonomy yet marketed as an enhanced sort of personal control: AI agents and agentic AI.
After all, Milgram called the psychological shift in his study participants, as they acquiesced to the person in change, the “agentic state”:
the condition a person is in when he sees himself as an agent for carrying out another person’s wishes. This term will be used in opposition to that of autonomy -- that is, when a person sees himself as acting on his own.
The agentic state is the master attitude from which the observed behavior flows. The state of agency is more than a terminological burden imposed on the reader; it is the keystone of our analysis. If it is useful, we shall find that the laboratory observations will hang together when linked by it. If it is superfluous we shall find that it adds nothing to the coherence of our findings. For clarity, let me again define what is meant by the state of agency. It may be defined both from a cybernetic and a phenomenological standpoint.
From the standpoint of cybernetic analysis, the agentic state occurs when a self-regulating entity is internally modified so as to allow its functioning within a system of hierarchical control. From a subjective standpoint, a person is in a state of agency when he defines himself in a social situation in a manner that renders him open to regulation by a person of higher status. In this condition the individual no longer views himself as responsible for his own actions but defines himself as an instrument for carrying out the wishes of others.
An element of free choice determines whether the person defines himself in this way or not, but given the presence of certain critical releasers, the propensity to do so is exceedingly strong, and the shift is not freely reversible.
Since the agentic state is largely a state of mind, some will say that this shift in attitude is not a real alteration in the state of the person. I would argue, however, that these shifts in individuals are precisely equivalent to those major alterations in the logic system of the automata considered earlier. Of course, we do not have toggle switches emerging from our bodies, and the shifts are synaptically effected, but this makes them no less real.
When people use AI – agents or otherwise – do they see themselves in control of the technology? Or are they surrendering to a greater authority? That is, does the AI agent allow its human users to control or demand its human users submit to the regulatory, programmatic, epistemological power of the machine? How and why?
In 1963, the same year that Milgram began publishing his findings on obedience, Hannah Arendt released her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: On the Banality of Evil. Reporting for The New Yorker, Arendt had traveled to Israel in 1961 for the trial of Adolf Eichmann, an SS officer accused of helping orchestrate the Holocaust. Milgram had begun his research the same year in order to understand if (and how and why) those who'd participated in the genocidal atrocities of World War II were "just following orders."
This is one of the questions Arendt explores in her book – a book that challenged many of the prevailing ideas about the Nazi leadership, about rank-and-file members of the party, and about not just Germany and the German people but about Israel and the Jewish people as well. Although Arendt had described Nazism as a "radical evil" in her earlier book The Origins of Totalitarianism, what she saw in Eichmann altered her analysis. The decisions that led to genocide were not made and carried out by monsters or psychopaths, she argued, but rather by “normal” people, many of whom were acting voluntarily. Their actions were moral failures, to be sure, but even more – and particularly in the case of Eichmann – failures of intellect and imagination. “He was not stupid,” Arendt writes in the epilogue. “It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.” This is the “banality of evil” invoked in the book’s subtitle: a kind of dangerous but insipid mediocrity that is all too pervasive among those striving to fit in – in to the bureaucracies of totalitarian regimes and beyond.
In the opening chapter of his 1974 book Obedience to Authority, Stanley Milgram cites Arendt: “After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine. The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation – a conception of his duties as a subject – and not from any peculiarly aggressive tendencies.” Milgram felt as if his experiments had proven what he’d taken to be Arendt’s point: that all of us have a potential, psychologically, for this sort of thoughtless compliance to authority.
No doubt, Milgram’s research and Arendt’s reporting on Eichmann’s trial have become deeply intertwined in the popular imagination. So much so that Arendt penned an essay, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” to clarify her stance. (She never mentions Milgram by name, but it’s clear this essay is, in part, a response to his claims.) “Obedience” is the wrong word to describe those who worked for the Nazi regime, she says – a pernicious fallacy that dates to an “age-old notion of political science which, since Plato and Aristotle, [that] tells us that every body politic is constituted of rulers and ruled, and that the former give commands and the latter obey orders.” But authority isn't simply "power over"; it is always – in democracies and in dictatorships, "power with." What might be construed as "obedience,” Arendt argues, is actually support – an act of recognition of authority and power, not just acquiescence. That is, people who go along with totalitarianism aren’t simply being ordered or forced to do so; they see totalitarianism as a legitimate expression of law and authority. They support it. They consent.
“Even in a strictly bureaucratic organization, with its fixed hierarchical order, it would make much more sense to look upon the functioning of the ‘cogs’ and wheels in terms of overall support for a common enterprise than in our usual terms of obedience to superiors,” she writes. “If I obey the laws of the land, I actually support its constitution, as becomes glaringly obvious in the case of revolutionists and rebels who disobey because they have withdrawn this tacit consent.”
“There is no such thing as obedience in political and moral matters" – Hannah Arendt
This semantic shift – from “obedience” to “consent” – is important, because it underscores that our political responsibility is both personal and shared; it carves out a space for freedom not simply to disobey but to refuse.
