Thank you for this important corrective. In my haste to make my point, I did not stop to ask if Professor Milgram may have had a reason — perhaps immortality in Psych 101 textbooks — for telling a vivid story.

I am sympathetic to your oft-expressed belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature. My arguments on this site in favor of freedom and market solutions depend on people generally wanting to work together and get along.

The idea that some Teachers wanted to trade places with the Learner is especially comforting and gives me hope that I might have performed better than Fred Prozi is said to.

Nevertheless, as you have acknowledged, people are not always good. Atrocities happen. It seems to me that whenever someone does shock their neighbor, choke out a suspect, waterboard a stranger, disappear students, or annihilate a genotype, and these things happen in an organized, methodical way, there is a common element in the scene: a bully in a uniform.

This is a generality, of course, and there are exceptions. But I think we should recognize that the greatest harms have occurred under the auspices of people exercising legal authority.