We must move beyond a culture of followers

There is a brief but essential message from a holocaust survivor in the April 17 story on Holocaust Remembrance Day: “Don't be a follower just for the sake of being a follower.”

Today this seemingly simple message remains one of our most challenging tasks, one steeped in dilemma and fraught with controversy, often resulting in failure. In the United States, we have stifled those who did not follow, even to the point of widespread McCarthyism.

In psychology, alarming studies have examined authoritarianism, conformity and “obedience to authority.” They found that, with pressure to conform, those who refuse to follow a “bad leader” are so few that they're best labeled as “radicals.”

Since the holocaust, our modern culture has become mega modern, characterized by massive concentration and what Lewis Mumford called megatechnics and megamachines. We've seen this, not just in a military-industrial complex, but across the board, for example in medicine, energy, media, and, so close to home, the agribusiness complex. Each lobbies massively in Washington. It's bad government, as each contributes its own “foxes” to oversee what's left of the regulation of its own “henhouses.”

We've seen, as Mumford warned, that even in our democratic society, megatechnics is an “authoritarian technics.”

A biblical model for addressing this is through “exodus” from such followership, followed by a “jubilee” of justice.

Brad Wilson

Springville