Every obedience experiment in history had the same overlooked finding.
Not everyone complied.
In Milgram’s lab, 35% refused to deliver the final shock. In Asch’s line experiments, 25% never conformed, not once, across any trial. In Zimbardo’s prison, at least one guard refused to dehumanize. One prisoner demanded a lawyer instead of a doctor and broke the psychological frame entirely.
We spent decades studying the ones who obeyed.
We barely asked what made the others different.
That question matters more now than it ever has.
The resisters in the COVID era were not difficult to find. Physicians who filed exemptions and lost their licenses. Nurses who walked away from careers rather than mandate patients into decisions they hadn’t genuinely chosen. Scientists who published contrary data knowing what it would cost them. Parents who stood alone at school board meetings. Ordinary people who simply said, quietly, without drama , no.
What made them different?
Research consistently identifies a cluster of factors. Not personality traits you either have or don’t. Situational and cognitive patterns that can be cultivated.
First: prior reflection on authority. The resisters had usually thought, before the crisis, about the limits of institutional trust. They weren’t cynics. They were people who had already asked the question “under what conditions would I refuse?” before anyone was asking them to comply.
Second: a concrete reference point outside the consensus. A value, a principle, an oath, a relationship that existed independently of the institutional structure demanding compliance. Something the system couldn’t reach.
Third: at least one other person. Milgram found that a single dissenting confederate reduced compliance dramatically. The resisters rarely stood entirely alone. They found each other. Sustained each other. Gave each other permission.
Fourth: the willingness to tolerate social pain. Not immunity to it. Tolerance of it. They felt the pressure. They felt the exclusion. They chose the discomfort of integrity over the comfort of belonging.
None of this is innate. All of it is learnable.
The most important thing Milgram, Asch, and Zimbardo taught us is not how fragile conscience is.
It’s that conscience can hold, if you’ve trained it, named its limits, and found even one other person willing to hold theirs beside you.
Build that now. Because the experiment is always running.
Until then stay humble.
I’ve never said we did. But I stand my comments that there still needs to be a minor party that holds the majors to account. That is our aim.
One Nation still can’t be trusted. Your mate Barnaby stuck the boot into you and your fellow freedom fighters during Covid or have you forgotten that.
He said nothing when Morrison signed up to Net Zero despite being the leader of the Nationals.
Are you now paid by Israel because you sure as hell sound like it?
I’m more than happy to call out duplicity and cowardice every time I see it.
A male bee mates for less than 5 seconds in midair. The ejaculation is so explosive you can hear it pop from a few feet away. His body rips in half. He falls dead before hitting the ground. And he is one of the lucky males in the hive.
When a male bee, called a drone, chases down a queen mid-flight at speeds of 22 miles per hour, his entire reproductive organ turns inside out. The pressure required for this comes from nearly all the blood in his body, which rushes downward to force the organ outward like a spring. The semen fires into the queen with so much force it makes the audible pop. The organ then snaps off and stays lodged inside her like a cork. As he flips backward off her body, his abdomen rips open. The next drone waiting his turn has to physically yank out the dead male's cork before he can mate. The same thing then happens to him.
The queen does this 12 to 20 times in a single afternoon. She flies up to a spot in the sky that beekeepers call a drone congregation area. Picture an invisible meeting point about 50 to 130 feet above the ground where up to 11,000 male bees from as many as 240 different hives are hovering, waiting for her. These spots stay in the exact same locations year after year, sometimes for over a decade. No one fully understands how brand new drones, born only weeks earlier, find them.
By the end of her mating run, the queen has collected around 100 million sperm cells. She keeps only 5 to 6 million in a tiny internal storage organ that keeps them alive for years. From that supply, she uses just two sperm cells per egg for the rest of her life, laying up to 2,000 eggs a day for 2 to 7 years. After that one afternoon in the sky, she will never mate again.
A 2019 study from UC Riverside, the University of Copenhagen, and the University of Western Australia found that bee semen contains toxic proteins that temporarily blind the queen by interfering with how vision genes function in her brain. If she can't see well, she can't fly out again to mate with more males. Their semen also carries a separate protein that attacks and kills sperm cells from rival drones still inside her. The males keep competing long after every one of them is dead.
The 99.9% of drones who never get to mate have it worse. As autumn arrives, the female worker bees in the hive stop feeding their brothers, then drag them out of the entrance after biting off their wings. The drones can't fly back in. They starve or freeze in the grass within days. The colony raises a fresh batch of disposable males the next spring, and the whole cycle starts over.
Senator @MurrayWatt is an opportunistic grub happy to deceive the Australian people for political gain.
He knows that most people won't look up the Parliamentary Sitting Calendar, don't understand what Senate Estimates is, and will never figure out that @PaulineHansonOz was not needed in Canberra and was perfectly entitled to pause for some cake on her birthday back home!
This is exactly the kind of misleading, cynical, dishonest behaviour from the Uniparty that has led to the rise of @OneNationAus in the first place.
Keep it up Murray. Keep it up.
Take a look at the post from Murray, then the calendar which clearly shows that the House were meeting, and Senate Estimates were meeting, neither of which involve Senator Pauline Hanson personally.
Cheap, beneath contempt, worthy of derision and scorn.
Today, I was given a permanent ban of posting on my Facebook page, @Meta. The page can exist - apparently - but I am not allowed to post on it anymore. The page has been deemed controversial due to the Giggle v Tickle case and increased popularity of 25,000 new followers in a week. I don't want to labor the irony of being banned on a social networking platform while fighting in court for the right to ban men from a woman only social networking platform, it is what it is. Frankly, I'd love to have the same right that you do, @Meta.
Women are routinely punished for not accepting men as women. It doesn't turn those men into women. Nothing will.
Channel 9 news anchor Allison Langdon, who's paid $1.5 million a year, exposes her hypocrisy. Are viewers going to sit there and watch her put on a sad face for those injured by the 'safe and effectives' just because there's a policy shift at the station?
Sec. Kennedy’s Press office needs to do a whole lot better. They could have saved themselves a whole lot of negative press by stating just what this declaration is and isn’t. Why wasn’t it made clear that this PREP Act Declaration was limited in scope and focus to a specific antiviral drug ? Clarity from a communications office should be a no-brainer. Isn’t this what they are trained to do?
A press office operating in 2026 should understand that an unexplained declaration doesn’t stay unexplained; the vacuum gets filled, and it gets filled by whatever is most shareable.
@SecKennedy Bobby, I remember so many inspiring strategy discussions during your campaign. Providing liability protection to corporate interests for a virus that killed 3 people out of 7 billion was not one of them.
Aus Doc Article ( an excerpt)
A GP has been struck off for at least five years for issuing 311 cursory or inaccurate COVID-19 vaccine and face mask exemptions.
Dr Denes Borsos issued 189 vaccine exemptions and 122 mask exemptions in three days in 2021 without adequate clinical assessments, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal has found.
About 220 patients received one or both exemptions based on identical, short, inaccurate or incomplete clinical records, it said in a judgement published last week.
“Dr Borsos’ evidence was that if a patient stated that they did not wish to have a COVID-19 vaccination, this was sufficient justification to grant the patient a vaccination exemption,” it said.
https://t.co/vuLKjlFchd