Posted by:
Lot's Wife
(
)
Date: August 12, 2021 04:44PM
Elder Berry Wrote:
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> I don't think this is apple to apples with Nazis.
Doesn't it matter which Nazis we are discussing? I was not comparing the Danites or the child-killing father with Hitler. Hitler and his associates aren't particularly interesting; such sociopathic leaders are a dime a dozen. My focus was on the nameless, faceless followers of Hitler or whatever other charismatic leader has ascended the podium. The interesting human question is what makes "ordinary" people commit enormities like the slaughter of innocent Jews, Romani, Slavs, gay people, and the disabled before they go happily home for dinner with their children? What is so weak in their character as to permit their participation in evil?
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> The re-masculinizing of America to make it great
> again shares some similarities sure, but laying
> these murders at the feet of whoever is what you
> are seeing as Hitler is as myopic in my opinion
> and the people easily swayed by rhetoric because
> it feels good to them.
Since my focus is on the common people who were transformed into agents of evil, I am not comparing anyone to Hitler. I am addressing the weakness of most human beings and their amenability to manipulation by whoever is ascendant at any given time. My focus is on Hannah Arendt's ordinary Germans, the banal people with their banal atrocities.
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> Did the woman injure her husband willingly by her
> decision to not vaccinate when he let her decide
> in another recent article posted here? Can the
> blame be put on politics for people in unfamiliar
> circumstances acting "insane?" The argument from a
> wave of inanity is just too broad brush.
Yeah, I don't understand this point. Do you really believe that the vaccination debate is *not" influenced by politics? How many people raged at school meetings when their children were required to get the MMR vaccine? What is different this time? And how do you describe the geographic pattern of vaccinations without reference to contemporary politics? How do you explain the January Insurrection of middle- and upper-class white people without politics?
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> This country is very religious. Should I think all
> the religions teaching things including Abraham
> sacrificing his son should be considered murders
> when a father does it because he thinks God wanted
> him to do it?
I didn't say anything like that. I said that persuading people to ignore factual reality makes it easier for them to act atrociously. I stand by that. There is no doubt that the Abrahamic sacrifice and the murder of Laban played a role in tipping exceptionally weak people into committing grievous sins on some occasions. There is no question that Mussolini had a more profound effect in his country, Hitler in his, Stalin in his, Jim Jones in his community, Joseph Smith in his, etc. Those men differ greatly in their individual character and morality, but that does not matter if the question--my question--is why normal people are so willing to surrender their judgment to those monsters and thereby become monsters themselves.
There is no doubt that part of that is the leaders' success in divorcing the followers from reality; in the German case, citizens were taught to view Jews as the enemy; the same happened in Mormonism when JS dehumanized the gentiles and in Utah when BY dehumanized the Fancher party. Separate people from facts, tell them that "what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what's happening," and you increase the likelihood that those people will act in morally ungrounded ways.
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> I completely disagree with the politically rolling
> up the reasons to QAnon or anyone else in this
> father's murder of his children.
Are you "completely" familiar with all the evidence pro and con? I'm not, and I doubt you are. Surely the appropriate position is therefore to recognize that, according to his own words, the father and his actions were based in part on QAnon. Were there other factors? Almost inevitably since people are always motivated by clusters of sometimes incompatible considerations. But that does not exculpate any single major factor.
The January 6 debacle is a better example. Without QAnon and the Big Lie the vast majority of those people would have stayed home, running their little companies and dining at their country clubs. Something different happened, though; something tipped the balance so that not only did loons like the Shaman but also average citizens chartered airplanes or booked seats and took up arms against their government.
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> Voltaire was in "make believe." It takes a lot to
> make a person believe.
No, it does not. There is not a fully rational person on the planet, and we are all influenced by those around us and those on TV. The susceptibility may differ from person to person, but the vast majority of people are highly malleable--and especially when under the influence of a charismatic Pied Piper.
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> People usually do this on
> their own without having to be made to believe.
I disagree. People absolutely *want* to believe, and they believe that to which they are exposed. That is why people in the US are predominantly Christian, people in India are predominantly Hindu, and people in Northern Europe are generally humanitarian secularists. It is in my mind implausible that people devise their own belief systems: they in fact make minor changes in the systems to which they are exposed.
Which shifts the emphasis to what the systems are, how they are manipulated, and what changes in average behavior we see as a result.
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> I
> doubt the appeal of QAnon is coercive enough or
> backed by government enough to blame the murder of
> these children on it.
That's very possibly true. But I didn't say QAnon and the Big Lie were the determinative factors, just that they were among the factors involved. What Voltaire was saying is that a charismatic sociopath, however defined, can alter average behavior by average people. I think that is historically beyond dispute. It is certainly evident in the behavior of anti-vaccers and American Express-holding "patriots" who try to overturn elections. They didn't come up with those ideas themselves.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/12/2021 04:49PM by Lot's Wife.