'La Tendresse', a famous French chanson in both Mandarin and French. The seamless transition between the two languages is incredible. I don't think you can do something like this except in those two languages. It works because French and Chinese songs share similar melodies and the phonetic range is almost exactly the same.
Robert Kennedy Jr. has done more as HHS Secretary than any HHS Secretary in my lifetime. He is cleaning up the food supply. He is removing chemical dyes from children's food, pulling heavy metals out of baby food, investigating microplastics and forever chemicals. And he is working to bring the childhood vaccine schedule down from 54 vaccines to 26.
That isn't a small thing.
@RobertKennedyJr
This is why I'm here. This is why I'm traveling the world. If we all start speaking our truth, we have all the power we need to change every government in the world. We must recognize our only decision now is to stand up and make a change, or we will never be happy with the world we leave to our children.
Every obedience experiment in history had the same overlooked finding.
Not everyone complied.
In Milgramâs lab, 35% refused to deliver the final shock. In Aschâs line experiments, 25% never conformed, not once, across any trial. In Zimbardoâs 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 hadnât 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 donât. 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 werenât cynics. They were people who had already asked the question âunder what conditions would I refuse?â 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 couldnât 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.
Itâs that conscience can hold, if youâve 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.
âI never thought Iâd live to see the day when the right wing would become the cool ones giving the middle finger to the establishment, and the left wing becoming the snivelling self-righteous twats, going around shaming everyone.â
- John Lydon, The Sex Pistols