Comment by croes
8 days ago
Ever heard of the banality of evil? Ignorance is in some ways worse than being genuinely evil.
You should be worried because the same guys who are resonsible for this web site are now in charge of much more vital systems and there are much bigger threats who just wait do get important data.
I don't think it's ignorance. It's indifference. The vast majority of Americans simply don't give one iota of care as long as they are currently comfortable.
I don't remember the quote, but something about them only learning from catastrophe.
> only learning from catastrophe.
Worse. 1.1 million people died in a deadly plague and there's no national mourning, just straight back to the culture war and polarization.
But 9/11 Never Forget!
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Suppose they do care. What would that look like? Posting memes to TikToks and Instagram? Would it look protests in all 50 states? Because 50501 did that and got barely any coverage. If you knew to look for them you could and can find coverage, but it didn't dominate the news cycle on all channels for days on end.
We're not united because they've goaded us into to fighting each other over two topics that really aren't, and there's only two teams to pick from. One was bad, and the other one worse.
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> The vast majority of Americans simply don't give one iota of care as long as they are currently comfortable.
Can you blame them? They've been toiling hard for decades while getting poorer and poorer, while the privileged class has lived lives of wealth and comfort from milking these government institutions. Did they care about the vast majority being comfortable or not?
Yes.
The repubs lost their battles, and decided they wanted to win at all costs. They had people show up to vote, vote in a bloc, volunteer for lower level positions, join multiple different organizations and basically organized them to dismantle the country.
If people can be driven to do that, then its not much to assume that at least a few more people could have done the same thing.
> They've been toiling hard for decades while getting poorer and poorer
This is, by every metric, completely wrong. We have never been wealthier.
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Sometimes- it also just rains. The end of WW2 and free trade + technology, have given the futurist ideology that every problem is solveable way to much credibility. Some problems are just hard and inherently not solveable and sometimes not even workaroundable by technology.
Utopists who run into accumulating problems, closing resource windows and simple limitations of humans (tribal creatures) and the meta-machinery they built, are bound to just run around with their pants on fire.
I would make a stronger claim: ignorance + power + conviction is exactly equal to evil.
Mao killed tens of million of his own people because of his misconceptions about farming, economics, and ecology.
Hitler killed millions because of his misconceptions about jews.
9/11 was executed becuase of a small group that were very confused about the basic facts of reality ("god").
There is only delusion + power + conviction. There is no other evil.
I do think 9/11 was more a response to brutal colonial warfare and three letter agency shenanigans going back many years and less about religion..
A lot of people think that. Just a tiiiiny problem: the hijackers didn't think that. They were jihadis.
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Delusion + power + conviction doesn't always equal evil, so there has to be something missing in that equation. I'd wager it's evil.
Though this doesn't really answer the question of motivation. Few people aim to do something that they regard to be bad. (It's possible, mind you.)
Give me a counter example.
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Calling something "evil" is implying an external force (often linked to religion), that I don't think should be used. It reduces the responsibility of the person doing "evil" acts.
I think the missing ingredient is simply not caring about the outcome. It could be because they don't have empathy (sociopaths), or that the society has trained them into normalising obedience to the cause (facsism / communism) or inhumanized their targets (consentration camps).
Acts can certainly be described as "evil", but I don't agree that "evil" is some type of force that affects people.
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The People for the New American Century or the off script timezone goof by the BBC?
Or maybe the Gelatin art crew?
>There is only delusion + power + conviction. There is no other evil.
If you believe this, your beliefs are out of step with essentially every Western justice system, which hold murder to be a worse crime than manslaughter. The difference between them is solely the intention.
Not that I agree with GP at all, but you are strawmaning him. I'll steelman his argument with your example: Premeditated murder is worse than just murder: for you to commit murder, you have to be convinced you have to do it, and the power to push it through. And in case of a premeditation, the dellusion you'll be able to do it without consequences.
(I still think it's a bad example even presented like this, and I disagree with GP, but your example seemed wrong)
How does conviction (as OP used it) not align with intention? I don't follow your point here about murder vs manslaughter and how it contradicts what OP said.
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In fact it covers it 100%. Examples:
Manslaughter is when you kill someone without conviction and/or delusion. You can hit someone without the conviction that you need to kill them and they fall really badly and die.
Murder. You can hit someone in self defense where you have no conviction that the person must be killed (because for example they say you had sex with their wife, but you in fact know you didn't, it's a misunderstanding), and you don't have any delusion (you know the attacker is delusional in fact). And then you defend yourself and he dies because he hit his head badly on the way down.
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