If you want to make an omlet...

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to cut out a piece of his own heart."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Jew in the gas chamber, is just as human as the SS Trooper who tossed him in. If anyone denies their ability to ever become the second, they've walled off nothing but their own perception.

There is a certain level of ego involved in believing that the world can or should be changed. There is an even greater level of ego involved in believing that that the world should be changed to match your specific vision of it.

I just don't feel it.

In a comment to my recent post someone accused me of harboring genocidial tendancies and stated that this made me a bad person.

I am actually inclined to agree.

That said, when divorced of all the sacre dogma what does morality (in the political sense) mean to you?

Me, I see it as a lack of conviction.

Comments

[onefatmusicnerd.livejournal.com]

Oddly, I think I agree with you.

If there is a moral imperative, then you vote. If you lose with a paper ballet, you are compelled to vote with lead.

Luckily, for the time being, I am pretty immoral.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

If you lose with a paper ballet, you are compelled to vote with lead.

[rick-day.livejournal.com]

morality is simply what other people claim as their justification to control others through legislation, intimidation and fear.

There is no morals. There is the Golden Rule and all other rules should follow it's simple course of logic.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

LOL at asserting that "There is [sic] no morals" and then making a moral assertion.

Is/Ought

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

David Hume just vomited in his grave :P

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

That sort of empathy tends to be actively discouraged in wartime and even in pseudo-wartime. Even 10 years after 9-11, certain people will crucify you if you say that Al Qaeda got pissed off party because of US policies in the Middle East. The proper patriotic America-loving thing to say is that they are just evil and "hate our freedom".

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Careful now, people may get the wrong right idea.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

No, seriously, there are people who would never gas a Jew.

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

I would read that not so much as every person literally is capable of putting Jews in gas chambers, but that everyone is capable of performing evil acts given the right circumstances.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Does blowing cigarette smoke in their face count?

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Maybe but I have yest to meet one.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

True, but only those who have held that virtue under the limits of duress can say they never would and remain honest.

And most if not all of us here have never experienced the limits of duress in resistance of violating our virtue.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

"The first thing you must accept as an anarchist is not everyone wants to be an anarchist."

Wise words from a mentor on such things.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that you're actually talking about ethics and you're denouncing applied ethics. Neither of these things make a judgement call on morality. I find it hard to think researchers who want to engage in an issue of bioethics such as embryonic research are doing so for egotistical reasons.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

I don't understand the distiction.

[thies.livejournal.com]

there is no selflessness only twisted self gratification.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

The problem with "bad people" is that they don't really believe other people have a conscience. It's what the psychopaths tell every therapist under the Sun. It's just not a part of their reality so they cannot conceive of anyone else having actual scruples so strongly held that they would refuse unto death to partake. And there is nothing one can do for them. Hopefully they play along and act nice and die without anyone ever knowing what they are. Most "bad people"/psychopaths do just this. They muddle through life and society, acting it out and things work out.

Others go crazy. Your language, for instance, betrays the presence of this sort of cynical questioning, disparaging such as "sacre dogma". Because that it is all it is to you, at this point in life. You're not a bad person, you're just young still. Young people are quasi-psychopaths until their neurological wiring fully matures. It's an important part of the human maturation process and isn't bad in itself. It's just sometimes it becomes pathologized and you don't think anyone has any moral fiber (because you end up not having any and projection commences apace), so you think everyone else is just acting like you are acting.

This quasi-psychopathic stage is important to exploring and figuring yourself out. So don't worry. In about five years you won't be so skeptical about it.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Young people don't know what it is like to be old, so we never really understand age. We are age-ignorant, so to speak. So when old people talk, we don't really take it seriously, since we cannot possibly conceive of an existential reality formed over a number of years of existence. And then we get old and talk and young people wave their hands at us dismissively and so on...

The OP here is just wondering what it's like to have deeply rooted "dogma" garnered over some number of years of existence. Obviously it isn't really something that has happened yet to him, personally. But it will. Biologically speaking, our neurological development continues maturing well into our 30s, with our frontal cortex being the last to really "lock in"- it's the most developed, complicated and so on. Psychopaths also generally exhibit a deficit in compulsion control-- because the frontal lobe isn't quite all there yet. This is also why teenagers are all raving lunatic psychopaths with a death-wish.

That said, when divorced of all the sacre dogma what does morality (in the political sense) mean to you?
Independence. The power to say no. Self-control. Mastery. Age, maturation, wisdom, and all that bullshit old people keep babbling about like they have anything to tell us!

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

> The Jew in the gas chamber, is just as human as the SS Trooper who tossed him in. If anyone denies their ability to ever become the second, they've walled off nothing but their own perception.

DQ.

Credit where it is due...

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Thank you, but I am simply paraphrasing Lions_Wings on a personal journal.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

I try quite hard when teaching about WWII to humanise the Nazi's. There's no point in pretending they were inhuman monsters. I think it's important that kids learn that we all have the potential to become those monsters and that the need to be vigilant regarding demagogues and mobs is constant.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

Oddly, many Germans proved quite plainly that some people are perfectly capable of choosing not to gas Jews.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Bollocks to all of this. The Nazis had choices to do what they did. As an example, toward the end of the war they were shifting from gassing Jews to working them to death via slave labor as their regular armies dwindled and their work force collapsed. At another level, too, the Soviets, who did the most to defeat the Wehrmacht on the ground were put through an attempt to wipe out all of Europe's Slavs. When the USSR re-imposed Terror and discipline on its soldiers, their occupation on the whole was rather milder. Given how vicious and cruel the USSR of that time was, the deliberate decision not to do that by one totalitarian regime illustrates the choice and horror inherent to the other regime.

And then they send an errand boy to put you down like a dog

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

" I've seen horrors...horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that...But you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face...And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces...Seems a thousand centuries ago...We went into a camp to innoculate the children. We left the camp after we had innoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every innoculated arm. There they were in a pile...A pile of little arms. And I remember...I...I...I cried... I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized...like I was shot...Like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead...And I thought: My God...the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters...These were men...trained cadres...these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love...but they had the strength...the strength...to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral...and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordal instincts to kill without feeling...without passion... without judgement...without judgement. Because it's judgement that defeats us. "

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Can't speak for how he framed it, but I can speak for my part of it (as I said, that's a bit of a remix of my words.)

I wasn't talking about making them ethically equivalent. I was saying they were both still human. It's easy to back off the whole topic and say "it's inhumane" and mean it like "that person was no longer human when he did that."

But what I was trying to say is that it's not that easy. Terrible people have done terrible things. But so have otherwise good people. Someone saying "in order to do something evil, you have to not be human" means it's now more a matter of luck whether or not they'll dirty their hands, and to what degree.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

People say things like beliefs, values, even gender identities are socially formed but then for some reason they conflate this to meaning not real, or not important, or somehow arbitrary. These values are socially formed but, that does not mean we cannot objectively value them or the value of a socety, or that they are not fundamental to who a person is.

[sealwhiskers.livejournal.com]

Just because humans are both able to commit heinous acts as well as acts of great goodness, doesn't mean that this dualism is incorporated in each individual to the same extent. This type of reasoning is a pretty basic flaw of reasoning when familiarizing oneself with aspects of ethics and the ego.

I think most people get that ordinary humans, who act perfectly benevolently and decent in certain times, can commit horrible acts under certain circumstances, but at the same time, as has been pointed out by others commenting in this post, ordinary people have committed acts of incredible kindness and bravery under very grave circumstances as well. There is no simple way to put these individuals next to each other and point and say either:

a) Look, these are really all the same
b) If we can just distill out what trait differs these two categories from each other, then we can be free to point! (as some people want to make any mass murderer a psychopath or possessing certain fixed traits)

Both these patent reflexes are equally flawed, and while you are probably writing this post to object to b) you in the same breath dive fully into the errors of a).

No one has as of yet been able to fully pinpoint the human psyche to such an extent that we fully know who will act how under extreme circumstances, or what even would be such a circumstance.

That said, when divorced of all the sacre dogma what does morality (in the political sense) mean to you?

Me, I see it as a lack of conviction.

This is a horribly muddled and rather bad sentence, I wonder if you get just how bad it is.

You either want to strip politics of ethics or you claim that such ethics is a lack of conviction. In other words, ethics is a flaw.

I claim the very opposite. It is when we don't analyze ethics, in politics and otherwise (in ourselves non the least), that people become "monsters", even more so than circumstances would even dictate.

Example:

Janush Korczak, the Polish-Jewish pediatrician and author of classical Children's book King Matt the First (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Matt_the_First), chose to go with his Jewish orphan children to Treblinka, just to be able to comfort them. He carried toddlers to the train and calmed the older kids. The SS officer, who admired Korczak's books told him to stay and be free, but he went with the kids. The SS officer and Korczak were both educated men, civilized. They both *knew* the wrongness of herding a line of small children to execution, the SS officer was even described as a kindly man by eyewitnesses, and yet these two men were *not* the same. There is a choice involved here and ethics make all the difference.

The White Rose in Germany, and some other groups are also excellent examples, as is Irena Sendler, the Polish social worker who smuggled out thousands of Jewish children form the Warsaw Ghetto and had to suffer torture but still continued after she was rescued.

The White Rose kids, Irena Sendler, Janusz Korczak and the like weren't superhumans, they were just ordinary, but they *did* make hard choices and reflect on ethics, I think that is the opposite of "lack of conviction" as you put it. And I do believe that their personal choices, ethics and reflections actually made them unable to become the SS troopers, tossing people into gas chambers.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Just because humans are both able to commit heinous acts as well as acts of great goodness, doesn't mean that this dualism is incorporated in each individual to the same extent.

Maybe not to the same extent but I would argue (and this is the whole point of the OP) that this dualism is intrinsic to human nature, and that people who believe that they can be 100% evil or 100% good are either delluding themselves or are ignorant of thier own natures.

All good people have flaws, all bad people have some redeaming quality.

This is a horribly muddled and rather bad sentence, I wonder if you get just how bad it is.

You're right but what's done is done.

You either want to strip politics of ethics or you claim that such ethics is a lack of conviction. In other words, ethics is a flaw.

More like being certain of your ethics is a flaw. If you aren't constantly questioning your own moral/ethical/political convictions you're well on your way to becoming an ideologue. Reading your next statement I'm not sure what you are objecting to, as it would seem that the eventual conclusions would be the same.

As an aside, the older I get the less sure I am that "Monsters" exist. They're just people, utter bastards maybe but still people.

To cite your example, just as Irena Sendler, Janusz Korczak and the like were not superhuman the SS officer on the train was not inhuman.

Dehumanization is a dangerous road to go down.