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Post by Deleted on Jul 22, 2018 15:00:57 GMT -5
All I can say now (and I don't have time for more at the moment), if you can figure out that someone is doing "bad" things without being sorry for it, or pretending to be sorry for something but shows no conscience, RUN! I don't care what you call it, evil or something else. And that's really what my topic is mainly about. I think one would eventually figure out the difference. Interesting fact I learned: Kids are effectively sociopaths until they start learning to care for other people's feelings (which I believe is usually at ages 5-7?), and there are rare cases of even relatively normal kids not learning empathy until they hit puberty.
Even as adults, we are able to selectively remove empathy by conditioning ourselves to not look at certain people as "people".
There are some famous stories about soldiers in the Vietnam war ruthlessly killing Vietcong soldiers, but when they encountered their enemies doing mundane activities like taking a leak, eating or drinking etc. they would later suffer severe psychological trauma and PTSD. Recognizing their enemies as regular human beings was enough to go from cold-blooded killer to being shaken to their core by the horror of their own actions.
The reverse, of course, happens quite a lot as well, when people call other people "vermin", "parasites", or otherwise treat them as abstract problems, dangers and terrors rather than fellow human beings with wants and desires and problems not unlike their own. That's why modern racist demagogues, for example, love using abstract terms like "illegals" or "Islam" to talk about refugees: It creates a mental disconnect that allows us to temporarily rescind our natural empathy towards other human beings.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 22, 2018 15:13:18 GMT -5
Yes, Dr. Peck has a chapter on Mylai [Vietnam] An Examination of Group Evil. I'll report on that later. But just as a brief summary, he says that in the end it's people that have to decide to act as individuals and that basically group evil is people that see themselves as parts of the whole and don't see themselves as individually doing anything wrong. They see themselves as just cogs in the machine. We see that argument in those that participated in the Nazi atrocities.
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Post by faskew on Jul 23, 2018 7:33:20 GMT -5
Soldiers like one-syllable names for the foe. In the US Civil War, it was "Rebs" versus "Yanks". In WW1 Germans were "huns", in WW2 they were "krauts" and Japanese were "Japs" or "monkeys". In Korea the foe were "gooks" or "commies". This carried over to Vietnam where,"Gooks in the wire!" meant that enemy troops were sneaking through the barbed wire to attack. Of course, there's some variation. The foe in the Mid-East are often called "rag-heads" or "camel-fuckers".
But if you're going to travel far from home to kill strangers, you need to distance yourself from who they really are. 8-<
Of course, with modern weapons, it's easy to kill people from miles away and never see their bodies. It's only guerrilla warfare that forces infantry to enter villages and homes and to actually see the people they kill. For pilots flying over, they just look at a screen, like a video game.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 23, 2018 12:02:56 GMT -5
And you don't think that group mentality has anything to do with it?
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Post by faskew on Jul 23, 2018 13:38:24 GMT -5
Me? Sure it does. I think our ethics come more from the people around us than from us thinking about options and making rational choices. Thinking is work, and disagreeing with your family and peers has a social cost. Doing what everyone else is doing is easy.
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Post by rmarks1 on Jul 24, 2018 16:31:55 GMT -5
Me? Sure it does. I think our ethics come more from the people around us than from us thinking about options and making rational choices. Thinking is work, and disagreeing with your family and peers has a social cost. Doing what everyone else is doing is easy.
I agree. That's the way it is. But that's not the way it ought to be. Each of us can make the situation better by making our ethics as rational as possible.
Bob
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Post by Deleted on Jul 25, 2018 1:28:45 GMT -5
I worded that wrong. Not group mentality, but not feeling personally responsible doing something normally one would consider unacceptable to oneself when doing it as one part of a group together with others.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 25, 2018 12:45:02 GMT -5
I worded that wrong. Not group mentality, but not feeling personally responsible doing something normally one would consider unacceptable to oneself when doing it as one part of a group together with others. Absolutely. Goldhagen writes in Hitler's Willing Executioners that many Wehrmacht soldiers in WW2 volunteered to be part of executions against civilians, Jews, or communists, even though there was no punishment for not participating in these atrocities. But they still did it, out of peer pressure to go above and beyond the call of duty, so to speak.
Chains of command and other hierarchical structures seem to have a similar effect. Milgram's famous experiment can be interpreted as people being a lot more willing to follow along doing terrible things as long as there are authorities present that tell them they're doing the right thing.
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Post by rmarks1 on Jul 25, 2018 18:25:23 GMT -5
I worded that wrong. Not group mentality, but not feeling personally responsible doing something normally one would consider unacceptable to oneself when doing it as one part of a group together with others. Absolutely. Goldhagen writes in Hitler's Willing Executioners that many Wehrmacht soldiers in WW2 volunteered to be part of executions against civilians, Jews, or communists, even though there was no punishment for not participating in these atrocities. But they still did it, out of peer pressure to go above and beyond the call of duty, so to speak.
Chains of command and other hierarchical structures seem to have a similar effect. Milgram's famous experiment can be interpreted as people being a lot more willing to follow along doing terrible things as long as there are authorities present that tell them they're doing the right thing.
Which is another good argument for reducing the number of government chains of command and hierarchical structures.
Bob
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Post by Deleted on Jul 25, 2018 22:12:49 GMT -5
When did you become an anarchist?
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Post by rmarks1 on Jul 25, 2018 22:30:12 GMT -5
When did you become an anarchist?
Another "Do you beat your wife" question.
I said reduce. I did not say eliminate.
Bob
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