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Silverfish wrote (edited )

It's important to remember that tyrants are people who are ill, even if it's an illness that's common and often subtle. It's not healthy for people to be willing to abuse others. It just so happens that some illnesses aren't strictly biological, some of them are sociological.

People in general could be considered, "good" in a broad sense. Innately, humans are sensible and kind. It's the System which turns life into a perverted game with perverted rules and end goals. Individuals are thus limited, and horrific actions are framed within the context of reaching those goals.

This doesn't remove moral culpability to individuals. We always have the option, "not to play the game" and there have been multitudes of people throughout history who've done just that from the Mongol steppe to Nazi Germany. Nonetheless, it helps explain their actions and how they can be healed.

Consider what a surgeon does. A surgeon carefully and deliberately mutilates unconscious people. How are they able to do this, gazing at another person's insides without feeling overwhelming disgust and guilt? This is because the act is framed by institutions and social norms in an overall positive, heroic way.

Their actions are made normal and legitimate based on a certain outcome, i.e. the person under the knife will be helped and society as a whole will be helped by having a healthy individual.They can be made numb to the full reality of the situation and remain detached. This method works even in our, "stable" today.

We enjoy a relative degree of stability and luxury caused by modern technology and infrastructure (although that stability is crumbling and is unsustainable.) Think about the early 20th century. We take things like food security for granted, back then homelessness, humiliation, and starvation were tangible threats.

Fascist and other authoritarian institutions had even more freedom to frame actions in the name of, not even just reaching some, "greater good" but just surviving. Most famously this is how the Nazis could convince people to commit the horrors that they did. Conditions weren't any better throughout other parts of the history of authoritarianism.

This isn't even going into the fact that authoritarianism alienates, atomizes, and just all-around abuses us to the extent that we can quickly become irrational and commit horrors in that way. Again, this doesn't mean every police officer or soldier gets a psychological excuse, but it helps us understand how this stuff happens and how we can break the wretched cycle.

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[deleted] wrote

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celebratedrecluse wrote

What is the more honest narrative of the actual history? (genuine question)

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[deleted] wrote

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ziq wrote

Yup. The constant attempt to disassociate regular Germans from Nazis skeevs me out. The vast majority of the population were gung ho for Nazism.

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Silverfish wrote

You're correct, I should rephrase that, pre-fascist attitudes had a large effect on what happened.

Of course, the point itself still stands even if you move the blame from the Nazi institutions to the German or broader European institutions. No German innately hated the disabled, Romani, Jewish people, etc. it was an acquired attitude at some point in their life whether due to institutions themselves or their harmful effects.

The attitude was encouraged from and benefited by those in power.

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Ant OP wrote

A surgeon carefully and deliberately mutilates unconscious people.

I don't think that this is what surgeons do

We take things like food security for granted, back then homelessness, humiliation, and starvation were tangible threats.

This is not true for most people I know. probably for most people
I'm very interested to know who the 'we' you're talking about is

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Silverfish wrote

I don't think that this is what surgeons do

It's a technically accurate description of what surgery is if you go by the pure denotation of words rather than their connotation. A surgeon does use sharp and invasive objects to break the homeostasis of people who are rendered immobile and unaware of what's happening to them.

This is not true for most people I know. probably for most people I'm very interested to know who the 'we' you're talking about is

I apologize for not being more precise. I was mainly thinking of privileged people in advanced economies who have access to enough edible food regularly to maintain or increase their body weight and some form of shelter every night.

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