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While going through training in the army, I was very puzzled about the — Bertram Raven

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"While going through training in the army, I was very puzzled about the number of things which we had to do... why learn to lace our shoes a particular way, walk back and forth through puddles, salute commissioned officers... Only much later did I realize that, in audition to combat training, basic training was a stage setting device, especially for the establishment of legitimate position power. Those in command were not ready to put their trust in informational power: Particularly in combat conditions, officers would not be able to give us reasons. Coercive power, under limited surveillance, would also not be sufficient. We must learn, as Tennyson said of the Light Brigade, that when ordered to do something, "ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die." So it was important that we were ordered to do meaningless things, and learn to obey legitimate authority without question, while coercive power was still hovering in the background."
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Bertram Raven
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Bertram Raven
Bertram Raven
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Bertram Herbert Raven was an American academic. He was a member of the faculty of the psychology department at UCLA from 1956 until his death. He is perhaps best known for his early work in collaboration with John R. P. French, with whom he developed an analysis of the five bases of social power.

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"Harold Kelley’s long-term relationship with John Thibaut, from 1953 until Thibaut’s demise in 1986, is considered an exemplary model of scientific collaboration. It began with their being invited to write a major chapter on group problem-solving and process for the Handbook of Social Psychology (1954). That chapter, updated in 1968, not only became a major resource in that field, but it led them to a separate volume, The Social Psychology of Groups (1959), which became one of the most influential works in social psychology."
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Bertram Raven
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"Parents control their children in the interests of the family, universities exercise control over professors and students, government exercises control over citizens, and religions control their adherents... Societys need for social control was stated most dramatically by Hobbes (1651/1958), who observed that in the "natural" state (without social control), as each person attempted to satisfy his/her individual needs and desires at the expense of others, humankind would be in a war of all against all, such that life would be "nasty, brutish, and short."
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Bertram Raven