experiment is merely a game, so to speak, and not the serious business of government, riot-control or war. Therefore no "pupil" is actually strapped to the chair. Furthermore, the experiment is not about "learning theory" but about the behavior of the "subjects" of the experiment. The professor is then led to another room, from which he is to give the "pupil" a "test." He reads a question into a microphone and hears the "pupil's" answer over a speaker. In front of the professor is a panel of buttons; labels identify the amount of voltage administered to the "pupil" by each button. The panel goes as high as 450 volts, and buttons corresponding to the highest voltages are marked "caution, severe pain." Every time he hears a wrong answer, the professor is to push a button corresponding to a higher level of voltage which passes through the "pupil." As the voltage increases, the "pupil" pleads and protests: "Let me out. I have a bad heart…" The professor listens to the speaker, waits for wrong answers, and continues to increase the voltage.
It might be wondered what would happen to this planet if the people Plato called Philosopher-Kings, the most conscious members of society, had the power to make ultimate decisions. It might be asked what future humanity would have if this depended on whether or not a modern Philosopher-King, a ten-to-thirty-thousand a year man, a cultured intellectual, pushed the last button, perhaps as part of a "pacification program," or as part of an experiment in "learning theory." In the experiment described above, 63% of the professors, two out of three intellectuals, pushed the last button.
It is noteworthy that the "subjects" of this experiment are in fact objects in all respects except, perhaps, in appearance. The alienation of human powers takes its most acute form among the representaives of modern spiritual life. The personification of an intellectual office, of a department of knowledge, possesses a specific virtue or potency, a special field in which its powers are developed to the level required by the task to which it is assigned. It is able to articulate perfectly the thoughts of its specific office. It is able to evaluate whether it finds itself in front of one or another of a given set of problems, to choose the approach suitable to the given problem, and to correct itself if it errs. However, when it evaluates, chooses, or corrects itself, it is not exerting its own powers but the powers of the office: its forms of evaluation, choice and self-correction are integral parts of the program in which it was instructed. The powers of a living human being are precisely what it lacks. In the face of social productive forces, it waits for instructions. The products of human labor are an alien world to it, and it therefore lacks both the human imagination and the will to appropriate these forces as instruments for self-expression. In the face of a human being, furthermore one who protests and pleads with its "innermost human self," its "moral core," it reveals itself to be an inanimate object in which there is no sense of community with human beings, a machine which totally lacks the rudimentary species-solidarity without which the human being could not have survived until today.
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