I’m not the Nazi; YOU’RE the Nazi!
In July of 1961, Yale Univeristy psychologist Stanley Milgram began a fascinating experiment to see if ordinary Americans could be induced to torture their fellow citizens…which sounds a bit twisted; context – as always – is important. Just a few months earlier, on April 11, 1961, humanity’s eyes were glued to a new piece of technology known as “the television” to watch an unprecedented event (on many levels) in human history: the live broadcast of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the leading architects of the Nazi’s “Final Solution,” the attempt to wipe-out the entire Jewish population of Europe. Eichmann’s trial re-surfaced a deep moral quandary that we still struggle to understand today: how in the hell did the entire population of seemingly ‘normal’ German citizens allow this to happen? Given the cultural proximity of Germans to Americans, this was no mere academic question. Sitting in the front row at the trial was Hannah Arendt, a Jewish writer who had escaped both Nazi Germany (in 1933, having been once arrested by the gestapo) and occupied France (in 1940), before finally making it to the United States. Arendt had already published two books, but her classic – “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” in 1963 – is what she is most remembered for. (I’ll return to Arendt later).
A big part of the difficulty in all of the Nazi War Crimes Tribunals was how to assign legal blame for the acts committed – and supported by – an entire nation-state. The original indictments against 24 individuals and 7 organizations were filed on Oct. 18, 1945, and the trial opened on November 20, 1945. The later trials, including the Nazi Doctor trials, took place between 1946 and 1949, all in Nuremberg pursuant to the authority of the International Military Tribunal.
Stanley Milgram wanted to design an experiment that would show – he hypothesized – that Americans weren’t like that. His initial experiment would use “average” Americans from New Haven, Connecticut, followed by an identical trial with Germans to show, presumably, that they were like that… His entire thesis being that there was something about the German character or culture that could and would produce Nazis. This was a matter of significant academic, and even everyday, discussion. It was, after all, less than 15 years since the end of that global conflict. Many Nazi scientists had been given refuge and other leaders of that regime – like Eichmann – had fled to South America. Eichmann’s luck would not hold and the Mossad would hunt him down and snatch him from Argentina to stand trial back in Israel for his part in the attempted destruction of the Jewish people.
Original advertisement for the Milgram study – $4/hr(!)… more than minimum wage at the time.
Milgram’s design was ingenious, although later criticisms have argued it was unethical because of the stress and discomfort it placed on the “teachers” who were issuing the “shocks.” (I address some of the other criticisms of Milgram’s experiment methodology below.) As the image above shows, Milgram advertised for volunteers for a study about memory, although that was a subterfuge for the real experiment. Here’s how it worked: the study volunteers would show up and draw lots to see who would be the “teacher” and who would be the “learner.” A researcher, wearing a lab coat, would then take the two participants to the room where the “memory” experiment was to occur. One of the participants, the “teacher” did not know that the other participant – the “learner” – was a fake, an actor who was in on the sham. The draw was fixed and the “learner” was always “Mr. Wallace” – the actor pretending to be a volunteer who was sent to another room. 
The learner had electrodes attached to his arms, while the teacher and researcher went into a room next door that contained an electric shock generator and a row of switches marked from 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (!!!). See where it’s going yet?
Every time the “learner” missed a word pair – most of the time, by design – the “teacher” was told by the man in the lab coat to administer an electric shock to the “learner” – in order to help him learn.
Whenever the teacher refused to administer a shock, the experimenter had a series of orders/prods to ensure they continued. There were four prods and if one was not obeyed, then the experimenter (Mr. Williams) read out the next prod, and so on.
Prod 1: Please continue; Prod 2: The experiment requires you to continue; Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue; Prod 4: You have no other choice but to continue.
One other point about the setup: the teacher couldn’t actually see the learner, but pre-recorded cries were played in response to the (fake) shocks that the teacher believed they were administering to the learner.
The study results created a bit of a furor when they were published: every single subject [FN 1] went to 300 volts – 100% were willing to zap some poor schlub at dangerous level with some prompting in order to help him with his memory… 65% would go to the lethal setting – 450v. Milgram performed the experiment 18 different times, changing the initial conditions to see what effect it had on subsequent obedience. The various conditions that would lower or raise the compliance rate led to Milgram’s Agency Theory (1974). In January 1973, Milgram published the book “Obedience to Authority.” He adapted a much shorter version for Harper’s in December of the same year, called “The Perils of Obedience.” [FN 2] It is absolutely worth the read to see what conditions changed compliance – and how that influenced Milgram’s theories on people’s deference to even obviously illegitimate authority.
FN 1 – All of the original subjects were male. This has been one of the grounds for criticism of Milgram’s study. I understand the potential validity of such a criticism, but I’m not sure that it really is valid. Even if the phenomenon Milgram observed was purely limited to the male of the species, the results are undoubtedly still of profound moral and psychological interest.
FN 2 – Yes, he really wrote an article with that title. Can you even *imagine* anything with that title today?
Criticisms of the Study
There have been reams of criticism written about Milgram’s shock experiments. They run the gamut from colleagues and behavioralists who objected to virtually every aspect of the study, from the fake advertisement to the fixed lottery draw, from the co-conspirator/actor to the manufactured grunts and screams, right down to accusations of inadequate debrief and untold stress placed on the innocent “teachers.” The criticisms vary from reasonable and legitimate to nonsensical, histrionic, and irrelevant. Getting bogged down in this argument is rather an aside from this article, so let me point to what I believe is a relatively even-handed piece discussing Milgram’s experiment and its aftermath. The most important part of that article, however, is this:
In 2009, researchers conducted a study designed to replicate Milgram’s classic obedience experiment. In an article published in the APS Observer, psychologist Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University and author of the study described how relevant Milgram’s study is today: “The haunting black-and-white images of ordinary citizens delivering what appear to be dangerous, if not deadly, electric shocks and the implications of the findings for atrocities like the Holocaust and Abu Ghraib are not easily dismissed. Yet because Milgram’s procedures are clearly out-of-bounds by today’s ethical standards, many questions about the research have gone unanswered. Chief among these is one that inevitably surfaces when I present Milgram’s findings to students: Would people still act that way today?”
Burger made several alterations to Milgram’s experiment. The maximum shock level was 150-volts as opposed to the original 450-volts. Participants were also carefully screened to eliminate those who might experience adverse reactions to the experiment. The results of the new experiment revealed that participants obeyed at roughly the same rate that they did when Milgram conducted his original study more than 40 years ago.
Id., (emphasis added). Here is Burger’s own short article on this.
Notwithstanding all of the sturm und drang about Stanley Milgram and his methodologies, when the experiment was conducted even with the new pillows and guardrails to ensure it was completely on the up and up, participants obeyed at roughly the same rate. Huh. You don’t say. As far as I’m concerned, none of this is really news to anyone who’s spent some time seriously studying history, observing human behavior, and/or made it to middle age. In fact, it’s all an aside to what is at the heart of the problem.
The Real Problem – the banality ubiquity of evil
The real problem isn’t that Milgram discovered/demonstrated that a big chunk of human beings, about 3 out of 5 or maybe even 2 out of 3, people will blindly follow the instructions of some stranger to harm another stranger, as long as stranger #1 is wearing a lab coat and has “apparent authority” to do so. Indeed, if you really want a master class in psychology on how ordinary high school students can be turned into killers, PBS covered this already in a brilliant 1983 documentary called “Anybody’s Son Will Do.”
…there are on average about 20 wars going on in the world at any given time and they are all waged by men who learn to be soldiers away from the battlefield. All soldiers belong to the same profession and it makes them different from everybody else. They have to be different… for their job is ultimately about killing and dying; and that job doesn’t come naturally to any human being. Yet all soldiers are born civilians; the method for turning young men into soldiers – people who kill other people – is basic training. It’s essentially the same all over the world and it always has been because young men everywhere are pretty much alike.
There may be points to pick at in such broad generalizations, but I feel confident that the narrator’s point would hold true for at least 3 out of 5, or 2 out of 3, young men. None of this is the problem, however.
The real problem that gets missed is what Stanley Milgram noted in the very beginning of his experiment, before he had ever fooled a single volunteer with actors and fake shocks. The most important takeaway from Milgram’s experiment was the survey he did of Yale seniors to whom he explained the entire project beforehand.
Before giving an account of the experimental results, it is instructive to consider how persons predict others will perform when commanded to administer powerful shocks to another person. Fourteen Yale seniors, all psychology majors, were provided with a detailed description of the experimental situation. They were asked to reflect carefully on it, and to predict the behavior of 100 hypothetical subjects. More specifically, they were instructed to plot the distribution of obedience of “100 Americans of diverse occupations, and ranging in age from 20 to 50 years,” who were placed in the experimental situation.
There was considerable agreement among the respondents on the expected behavior of hypothetical subjects. All respondents predicted that only an insignificant minority would go through to the end of the shock series. (The estimates ranged from 0 to 3%; i.e., the most “pessimistic” member of the class predicted that of 100 persons, 3 would continue through to the most potent shock available on the shock generator–450 volts.) The class mean was 1.2%. The question was also posed informally to colleagues of the author, and the most general feeling was that few if any subjects would go beyond the designation Very Strong Shock.
(Emphasis my own). Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371–378.
The most terrifying aspect of the experiment is not the percentage of people willing to shock others to death; the most terrifying aspect is that no one – not a single person among all of the “higher educated”, super-dee-duper smahht folks at Yale, either the students – or as Milgram notes, his colleagues – were anywhere close to estimating the real number. Ruminate on that for a moment and then consider how many of our government officials, senior bureaucrats, lawyers, etc., have been educated at Yale. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that the results would have been identical if instead of it being Yale Blue it had been Harvard Crimson. To be clear, I don’t believe it would matter if it were U Penn or the Community College of Sheboygen.
Now consider the current circumstances surrounding Covid-19, mandatory vaccination, and the people cheering on fellow Americans losing their jobs, being denied medical treatment, denied the ability to travel or see relatives, all because they won’t take an experimental gene therapy shot. Those dirty unvaxxed… And there stands the President of the United States telling the entire country that it is the “unvaccinated” causing all of the problems in this country. The American people – indeed, all people – are blind to their own human nature. And so they remain mystified how all of Germany could become “accessories” (to use Milgram’s term) to the Holocaust by ignoring that yes, you are capable of administering those shocks. Moreover, you are also capable of much worse when you get removed further and further from being the direct agent of harm. If you haven’t read what I linked above about the variations of Milgram’s studies – and what parameters changed the outcomes, for both worse and better – it’s worth your time.
Milgram’s entire experiment shows what happens when we outsource our moral responsibility through the lessening of our own agency. Put on a lab coat and we’ll shock people to death at a rate of about 3 out of 5. After all, we tell ourselves, it’s his experiment and he seems to know what he’s doing. He’s a doctor.
Now think about Fauci, or a completely corrupted and compromised agency like the FDA…
After Hitler rose to power in the early 1930s, his pogroms started with those who had infectious disease – specifically, tuberculosis. This was nothing more than a continuation of what he had been saying since 1920. (It’s also worth noting that Hitler was wildly popular with socialists in the US and elsewhere during the 1930s. Franklin Roosevelt had tried repeatedly to have sit downs with Hitler to discuss how Hitler had revived Germany from the ashes of its crushing defeat in both the Great War and its awful Peace, the Treaty of Versailles.)
Hitler, we have observed, conceived of himself as a political physician. He insisted that every distress “has some cause or another.” His mission as a politician was to “penetrate to the cause” of Germany’s disease, and to effect a cure. On the evening of July 10, 1941, Hitler declared at his table:
“I feel I am like Robert Koch in politics. He discovered the bacillus and thereby ushered medical science onto new paths. I discovered the Jew as the bacillus and the fermenting agent of all social decomposition.”
At Hitler’s table talk on 22 February 1942, the following statement was recorded:
“The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that has taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged today is of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! We shall regain our health only be eliminating the Jew.”
Robert Proctor observes that Hitler was celebrated as the “great doctor” of German society and as the “Robert Koch of politics.” As Robert Koch had discovered the Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, Hitler imagined that he had discovered the Jewish bacterium (or virus): the cause of Germany disease and suffering.
Richard A. Koeningsberg, “Hitler as the Robert Koch of Germany“.
Hannah Arendt watched Eichmann from the front row and penned a series of articles for The New Yorker that would become her famous book. A Jew herself, she received significant pushback for that work, in much the same way that Stanley Milgram did for his studies. People were horrified to hear Arendt refer to what Eichmann had done as “banal.” Of course, that is not at all what Arendt said, but what Arendt said, much like what Milgram said, creates a very uncomfortable feeling inside for many people. In fact, Arendt was trying to explain that “evil” is not some other – it is not some disease of the mind, or unique, recessive trait of bad genetics… or even of national character or culture, peculiar only to those Aryans. Nope. What Arendt was trying to tell people was that evil on a truly grand scale requires only that we suspend our own reason and agency, that we acquiesce in the face of what we know is wrong because we tell ourselves that we’re not directly responsible. Stanley Milgram put a much finer point on it and showed how even average, ordinary American citizens had a penchant for obedience and could become instruments of evil, just like the petty bureaucrat Eichmann, who six different psychologists examined and all described as almost depressingly normal. Milgram publicly referred to his work as the proof of what Arendt had already (by then) written and published.
For people in the military, this is how and why it is easy to treat a person who was your friend yesterday like a leper the next – because you have built in mechanisms, legal principles and an entire moral edifice that reinforces “all orders are presumed lawful” and are “disobeyed at one’s peril.” That is how the entire German Army could become complicit in such a massive crime against humanity. If 60% of “regular” folks will shock someone because of a guy in a lab coat, just imagine how many people who have been through the indoctrination process outlined above will do it. That is how you mobilize a nation to dehumanize the non-conforming.
So the next time you read some mainstream media hit piece demonizing the unvaccinated, or you hear a politician pointing fingers at those who won’t bend the knee, do not be surprised. But more importantly, do not be surprised when the neighbors or your Uncle Al turn from warm and understanding fellows to petty and vicious tyrants to those whom they see as being untermensch. This is who and what we are.
The real problem is that we think it’s only 1.2% of us who are capable of such evil.
A big part of the difficulty in all of the Nazi War Crimes Tribunals was how to assign legal blame for the acts committed – and supported by – an entire nation-state.
I’ve always kinda wondered how many Germans legit couldn’t cipher what was going on until it was too late, and by the time they realized it, they also realized that to speak up or speak out was to earn a date with Herr Reichhart.
One of yesterday’s comment threads had some discussion about this with Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” quotes being the obvious jumping off point. Put another way, it’s asking how long should the frog wait before he starts fighting? And the best answer is before he ever gets put into the pot. I think that’s why we have such a disconnect from our Country’s Founding. I’ve said it before, but the early colonists were some hard bastards, men and women both. They were willing to use physical violence against His Majesty’s ships over a 2 pence tax on the price of tea. Because the colonists understood that they were going to be footing the bill for the British government to pay off its cronies – the East India Company – which had lost its ass in the years prior. NOW we just accept that “this is what government does.” And we can’t figure out why we keep getting fucked in the ass by our government. The colonists knew that the slopes ARE actually slippery, so they drew the line early, often, and then resorted to arms when push came to shove.
The scene in the John Adams mini-series where they tar and feather at the dock and run him out of town on a rail.
The TV show Sleepy Hollow had a revolutionary brought into modern day. There was a great bit when he starts looking at a receipt and asks about Sales Tax. The answer he receives causes him to launch into a wonderful rant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD0EHX8Bsr4
Read the Declaration of Independence.
Nothing he’s arguing isn’t exponentially worse today.
Yeah, but Jefferson was clever. He lied. Those weren’t the acts of the King, they were acts of Parliament. It would be vastly more difficult to assail the tyranny of the House of Commons, than it was the King.
Same with 1 Samuel 8.
And the best answer is before he ever gets put into the pot.”
I’m not much of a moral philosopher, but I translate this into human terms as, ‘The time to fight back, is when they try to render you incapable of fighting back.’
Good rule of thumb, I think. And it parallels nicely with interpersonal violence, too.
The time to fight back, is when they try to render you incapable of fighting back.
The first knock on the door? Because you can’t fight back once they chains go on.
Because you can’t fight back once they chains go on.
That comes up in “Unintended Consequences”.
–Some old band
The time to fight is when they knock on your neighbor’s door. By the time they get to YOUR door, its too late.
The reality is that most German never knew the German government was murdering Jews. Nor did they know that civilians were being slaughtered on the Eastern Front.
Jews and undesirables were being “relocated to the East” into settlements.
Do you know how how AmerIndians live on Reservation or prisoners at Gitmo are being treated? Unless you have been to a Rez or Gitmo, you have to depend on government media to tell you.
Total War of WWII was a new concept as WWI was mainly fought on static fronts for years. German civilians, just like American civilians, mostly had no concept of the horrors of total war.
I blame Germans for allowing Socialists to take over in 1933. Just like I blame Americans (myself included) for allowing Commies to take over here in America.
We are all responsible or none of us are.
I’ve seen it in my mother and people at work.
It’s disturbing to hear the vitriol in their voices.
Also, great article!
All of the original subjects were male.
I promise you that women’s numbers would be worse.
Thanks for this, Ozy. I visited Dachau years ago and was absolutely flabbergasted that the locals didn’t know what was going on. Of course I know now that they absolutely knew, they just turned a blind eye. Which may actually be worse.
Jordan Peterson talks about this capacity for evil quite often. He discusses classes where not one kid thought they could possibly be the bad guy – or could possibly kill their neighbors. Obviously not true.
We are stupid shaved apes and keep making the same mistakes over and over again. I have no idea where this is headed, but Australia suggests not in a good direction.
Terrific (if depressing) article!
I read once that the German plan got so many people involved, that it was easy to tell themselves they weren’t really doing anything.
“I just work at the train station, I’m not actually loading the box cars”
Box cars?
Boxcar.
Was going to be disappointed if that was anything else.
JP’s video – You are the Nazi.
” I visited Dachau years ago and was absolutely flabbergasted that the locals didn’t know what was going on. Of course I know now that they absolutely knew, they just turned a blind eye. Which may actually be worse”.
The locals certainly knew. The question is, what could they have done?
clearly the answer was conspire with the commandant’s secretary and the perimeter guards to take over the facility and free the prisoners.
Bravo sir!
I know several otherwise kind and friendly people who have bought into the whole “unvaccinated” othering. It’s scary to see, particularly as places like Australia are already sending them off to concentration camps.
His entire thesis being that there was something about the German character or culture that could and would produce Nazis.
That’s certainly turning the tables on those eugenicist bastards.
Brilliantly funny insight.
In fairness, they learned a lot about eugenics from Americans, who were enthusiasts for it before the Germans were.
I don’t know if anyone here is a fan of Curtis Yarvin, but in most podcasts he shows up on he recommends and old American propaganda film from WW2 called Hitler Lives. Apparently it won the Oscar for best short film that year and it was scripted by none other than Dr. Seuss. I highly recommend giving it a watch. The thesis of the entire thing is basically that “the German” is blood thirsty and murderous to his core and needs to be stamped out of existence to spare the world another great war. It is jaw dropping how closely it mirrors the German anti-jew films. There’s not even the slightest hint of self awareness to the fact that they are endorsing eugenics, race/culture based hatred and possible genocide to the bloodline of a single “race” as a simple quick fix to all of “the right-thinking” world’s problems. Stunning.
Great topic. Thanks for bringing this information to the table. More people need to understand the human mind and the powerful mechanisms that enforce compliance with the majority. They are numerous and varied, and explain much of modern politics.
Going OT quickly, but will comment on-topic after this.
I missed this last Wednesday, I don’t think the logo would go over well today.
http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/2021/11/lets-brew-wednesday-1881-whitbread-kkk.html
Sugar may now be regarded as a cheap substitute for malt. Not so in the 19th century, where it was the more expensive beers which tended to contain more.
117 IBUs, pushing 9% ABV originally, but aged for a year+. So Bretty and probably 10%. Hoppy, boozy, funky goodness.
The 19th century BrIts knew something about beer.
For example, when participants were reminded that they had responsibility for their own actions, almost none of them were prepared to obey.
Yet another reason libertarians must be marginalized.
Relevant.
I don’t even like liver.
Perfect.
Yeah, that’s a pretty succinct summary.
His politcs aren’t ours but Weinersmith regularly produces comics that make me LOL.
I thought of Sensei’s 3D printing article when reading this one
That’s pretty friggin’ funny.
Great article.
TL;DR – Humans are trash; dipshit monkeys with oversize frontal lobes. Expecting anything good from humans in the broad strokes betrays ignorance of their nature. IOW: this is all dumbass human shit.
Fascinating, but sadly very true,
Thanks Ozy! good read!
Wow, this a powerful article and some fine work. Thank you for writing this and making me a little smarter for reading it.
Ozy thanks for the great article.
When I read Shirer’s, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, what constantly stuck in my mind was how could the people of Germany allow shit to get so bad that they willingly let their leaders round up their Jewish neighbors and other without any pushback?
Being a family man myself now, I would like to think that I would fight the government if this ever happened but in reality, I would probably come to the conclusion that if I do fight, not only would my life be at risk but so would my wife’s and children’s. Is it worth fighting a losing battle at the expense of my family’s wellbeing? I hope I would never have to be faced with that decision. The second aspect is the election of Trump and by extension the whole COVID mess and how many of my acquaintances have turned into hate filled people who would cheer and even participate in your destruction if you don’t fall in line with the latest mandate or say the wrong thing. It’s downright scary at how so many people have become so callous at other’s people’s suffering simply because they don’t follow the “correct” opinions.
“how many of my acquaintances have turned into hate filled people who would cheer and even participate in your destruction if you don’t fall in line with the latest mandate or say the wrong thing”
Humans are always and everywhere the same.
Indeed.
“how could the people of Germany allow shit to get so bad that they willingly let their leaders round up their Jewish neighbors and other without any pushback”
Much as I resisted coming to this conclusion for years, the historical evidence is now overwhelming: most Germans were passive, happy accomplices in the removal of the Jews. It IS possible that few of them knew about the extermination and concentration camps. But, at the least, they knew the Jews were being shipped east, and unlikely to ever return. There are multiple accounts of Germans seizing Jewish goods and home property after Kristallnacht. And there are also accounts of post-war hearings where Jews had to go through a form of court process to get their homes back because non-Jewish Germans had simply moved in (none of this is to say the Germans were uniquely anti-Semitic).
Raven – I don’t disagree, but think fairness requires a nod to all of the Germans who hid and helped Jews escape. There were more than a few Oskar Schindlers who risked all – and a god number were executed – for daring to cling to their common humanity. I love the movie JoJo Rabbit because of its depiction of that segment of the German people.
I suspect – as many here note, and in an acknowledgment to CPRM, that the numbers may well not be 50-60%… many, many Germans probably “went along to get along.” But there were also those who simply could not stomach what they were witnessing and risked their lives for those untermensch.
One of my German teachers said she never knew her grandfather because the Nazis executed him for smuggling Jews out of the country to safety.
Yeah, that’s probably fair. What I was getting at – and didn’t explain very well – was that for a long time, people accepted the argument that “it wasn’t the average German, it was the Nazis who did all the evil stuff.” As you point out, that argument doesn’t stand up very well anymore but it did for a long time. The reasons for the Germans adopting it is pretty clear but, to some extent, they were aided and abetted by their new anti-communist western allies who needed West Germany.
For those interested: Tony Judt has a fascinating section (chapter?) in his Post-War (which is a brilliant book) on how the general German reckoning with the Holocaust didn’t really begin until the 1960s. Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men” is the classic analysis of how German troops took part in the Holocaust (and is better supported by historians than Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”). Info on ordinary Germans grabbing Jewish property is in Richard Evans’s Third Reich trilogy.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply – and the references. I wasn’t trying to impute more to you than you were saying. I just thought it was worth mentioning.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dmhgcC5dYkE
because non-Jewish Germans had simply moved in
Now do American citizens with Japanese property on the West Coast.
It IS possible that few of them knew about the extermination and concentration camps. I think its more than possible, and it was more than a few.
One of the lines I (partially) remember from Shirer is along these lines: “After the war, many people asked the question: ‘who could have known Hitler was going to do?’ My response is Everyone. After all, he’d been telling us for 15 years.”
Hitler wrote a book basically outlining what his plans were going to be after he seized power.
Yeah, that’s the part about Stalin that I could never figure out at all. It wasn’t really a mystery what Hitler’s plans were, given he’d written it all down in advance.
The one time in history that people actually assume a politician WON’T do what they say they’re going to do is the one time they were wrong. The irony hurts.
Yep. This is the lever they love to use.
Which is why the Constitutional prohibition on corruption of blood is so very important – even for treason.
I remember the Dyer documentary; as I recall it was labeled foreign propaganda by our benevolent govt due to it being a Canadian production and not mind-numbingly patriotic. It was good.
What might also be worth consideration is how evil has fallen out of the vocabulary of the contemporary conversation (save as an adjective); instead we view now evil as manifestations of some kind of mental illness, often brought on via external stimuli visited upon the benighted soul (also out favor). Lasch is quite keen on pointing to the whole therapeutic view in society at large, but especially in govt.
There is a rich vein of Jungian thought on shadow aspects that goes to the presumptions we have about who will commit evil acts.
“evil has fallen out of the vocabulary of the contemporary conversation”
POMO FTW!
It goes back farther than that. It is part and parcel of progressive beliefs in the ability to create a better person. That applied to an industrial model means you can mass manufacture the kind of people you want. Once psychological perspectives rise, then the old moral canon is of no value – relying on the now discredited notion of God (at least in the minds of all these smaht people). Even the ancient philosophers are of little use, after all, we are wiser now than they – we have science and industry at our command.
https://www.theonion.com/report-stating-current-year-still-leading-argument-for-1819576151
excellent
Reminds me of my favorite line from Blackadder.
“Well it IS 1487!”
The Wave was a mid-2000s German film exploring the ‘It could never happen again’ idea. But, as for Milgram’s experiments, I feel the fact that participants probably knew it was all bunk and played along could have distorted the findings. Having seen footage of the original experiments, the person ‘being shocked’ really hams it up.
I’ve linked to some of the criticisms, CPRM, and they seem to run the gamut from “Oh, people knew!!” and simultaneously “Oh, it violated all ethical precepts!!” It can’t be both.
And how do you explain that they got almost the same exact results when they re-did the experiment in 2005 with all of these safeguards in place? Nope, sorry to disagree, but I think that’s people trying to tell themselves a tale because they don’t like what Milgram’s experiments imply. Additionally, did you read the article that Milgram wrote – the shorter Harper’s version? He explicitly names people who went on the record and explained why they did what they did.
There’s also the fact that one of his critics says that she listened to the tapes and the people were “clearly forced” to do what they did. Again, it can’t be that they were “forced” and yet they also “played long.”
Clearly forced? Did she hear someone say “I am putting this gun to your head, do it or you will die”?
I’m not representing anyone’s beliefs but my own. Watching the footage it does seem like most of the participants are ‘playing along’, the ‘shock’ recipient is hamming it up and they are going along with with it. You can see it in the reactions. There are other participants that you can see ARE visually distressed and follow instructions anyhow, but it doesn’t appear to be the case for most of them. I have not seen footage on the replication, so that I can not judge. (remember, video is my expertise, so this is the part I’m focusing on)
In following one of Ozy’s links, it suggests that up to 50% of the participants may have realized the scam and were playing along.
That still leaves 50%.
It also misses the entire point of the article – as I note, the real problem isn’t whether it’s 60% or 50% who will do it – It’s that everyone who was asked ahead of time thought it was un-possible that it would be more than 2%.
THAT’S the problem.
And if Milgram was so wrong, was Arendt also wrong in her observations? Was Nazi Germany really an aberration? Can anyone look around currently and suggest that Milgram was just completely out to lunch?
I mean, what is the point of the criticism, CPRM? Is it all bullshit?
Nazi Germany wasn’t an aberration. It was almost Biblical. Isreal and the Canaanites.
The belief that people knew what was going on was made immaterial by the Stanford Prison Experiments. Everybody in those knew it was an experiment and got to pick which role they wanted. And it descended into sociopathy anyway.
There was an ABC After School Special on The Wave as well.
Great article!
I’ll respond to several of you by noting that I don’t find any of this depressing – it just is. You might say that’s it’s an entirely predictable phenomenon given the social nature of humans. That social nature, by the way, is how we managed to defeat all of the other, far-more-physically-capable, beasts of the wild. I’ve always loved the big cats – jaguars, leopards, panthers, lions, etc. I think they are amazing apex predators… who could snatch a single human like it was a fucking marshmallow. But as a group, the Masai will hunt down an individual lion with sharp sticks – and win.
Those social instincts were necessary for human survival; the ability to get ALL of the young men on board to attack a lion – hell, the teenagers will fight among themselves for the honor of being a part of the lion hunt – that instinct, however, needs to be understood in large societies. Our problem. isn’t that we’re wired this way – our problem is that we lie to ourselves and say “NO WAY, NOT ME!!” The first step in addressing a problem is admitting that there is one.
That, to me, is the great problem. Milgram sure as shit stumbled onto it, but most people today re like, “who?” Or worse yet, claim it couldn’t possibly be true.
Killing God was probably a bad idea.
Bingo. Yahtzee. You get the cupi doll.
Even my most ardent atheist friend tells me that he appreciates that a society w/o a God is probably headed nowhere good.
There is no society w/o a god, its just that something else is made god in place of God.
our problem is that we lie to ourselves and Killing God was probably a bad idea
Are two sides to the same coin.
The ancient Greeks and Romans did not have a Judeo-Christian belief system. Either their ethics were hopelessly flawed, being not properly derived from God, or the JC (and Muslim, because it is the same Levantine monotheism) are not the sole true ethics for man because they are God’s gift to us.
The ancient Greeks – at least the Stoics – routinely mentioned “God” or some other divine force in the universe. It doesn’t have to be Jesus.
I think Peterson does a wonderful job with this in his series of lectures on the “idea” of God. Construct your own version, JI, and tell me what you come up with.
Is it a mean-spirited, unforgiving God that tortures on a whim? Go through the mental exercise of all of the traits that one would “like” to have in a God – a universal, Kantian God, if you will – and it’s amazing how quickly the differences diminish.
Fair enough, like Aqualung, we create God in the necessary likeness of man. Also good point that the Greeks were not uniform in their beliefs, but that doesn’t exactly bolster the insistence (not that you are) on the J-C God-concept.
I like to assume that the universe is rational – which to my mind is the strongest argument in favor of a Creator. A rational universe by chance fails Occam’s Razor. Where religion falls apart for me is that we create it, even if the need for that seems built-in to us.
Maybe religion is rational?
Auguste Comte tried that – didn’t work out so well.
Their ethics were still based in their gods.
CS Lewis pointed out that Hitler tried to invoke the Norse gods, but he even got them wrong.
It doesn’t have to be Judeo-Christian – as other have pointed out; though it does seem that J-C has been particularly good at distilling the evolutionary and cultural knowledge of humans down into a ‘good’ story (and I don’t mean story in a demeaning way). I’ve become more convinced over time that humans need religion, or a religious base. Thinking about the evils that have been perpetrated, Nazi’s, Soviets, Pol Pot, Mao along with the good that’s been accomplished, e.g. our Declaration and the philosophical underpinnings that led to the American founding, I see an embrace of religious (or transcendent) thought or an abandonment of the same. I just can never get past the metaphysics of any particular religious viewpoint. And I find myself confronting the elitist view of “the hoi polloi” need that mumbo-jumbo of sincere belief, but not me, I can take the fundamental value of a religious outlook without the belief system. But that can’t be right either, I’m not special – well, at least not THAT special. How can one embrace the need for a culture to have a transcendent religious basis to provide as a bulwark against the banality of evil, but still be able to retain the rational “that story can’t be literally true, as useful and integral to the human experience as it seems to be”? I’m not sure how to reconcile those ideas. End incoherent ramble.
I didn’t Kill God, so he isn’t dead,
Who is They?
It’s a great quote:
IMO, Nietzsche is one of the most misread and misunderstood philosophers ever. He would be disgusted with how humanity has dealt with the death of G-d; by stripping intrinsic beauty and value from everything, by embracing nihilism and relativism, by building golden calves as replacements.
People think we’re following what Nietzsche would have wanted but we’re doing the exact opposite.
Q – I think you’re probably right. Peterson loves him and the lectures I noted above invoke Nietsche quite often. That series of lectures is an absolutely brilliant examination of the role of God in the human experience. Great listening on a cross-country drive. (New Mexico flew by and was beautiful.)
Yep. That’s a really misunderstood quote (it doesn’t help that most leave out the context).
He wasn’t celebrating, he was mourning.
Nietzsche admired the pinnacles of human achievement and the effort required to get there.
Our current civilization seeks to reduce everyone to the baseline.
Bs. He one of the masters of suspicion whose ideas along with Marx and Freud have caused much of the misery in the civilized world over the last 125 years.
This tremendous event is still on its way, wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder need time; the light of the stars needs time; deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen and heard.
Broke-tard is Nietzsche?
LOL
Have you ever seen them in the same room?
Double LOL
If by tremendous event, he means a cosmic orgasm ejaculating life-giving cum throughout the universe seeding the wandering stars across timelines then I’d say Nietzsche is actually Agile Cyborg.
“I don’t find any of this depressing – it just is”
Agreed. Absent any kind of cosmic moral judgement, however, it’s still a good survival bet in the modern world for an individual to be a distrustful misanthrope.
Not really. Ozy‘s point about our social nature is how we survive is important. The problem occurs with who-we-trust and who-we-don’t.
You even witnessed this in grade school or at least I did. You see someone getting bullied and ripped on and other’s would join in because they didn’t be seen as not being part of the in group. Like you said, the first step is acknowledging that we as individuals are capable of great evil if the environment is right.
When we think we couldn’t be active participants we have to remember My Lai. There were few that didn’t take an active role, fewer that said anything afterwards. Too lazy to check the numbers but the cover up went up the chain of command as well.
“The spirit of the bayonet is to kill!”
We killed a lot of fence posts, sand bags and tires at Fort Benning. It was easy and it was good.
Hence why I linked to that piece by Gwynne Dyer. I think it’s one of the most insightful pieces ever. I watched that before I watched Full Metal Jacket, but both will help you understand how we can all be turned into killers inside of 3 months – something I certainly don’t need to explain to you, Mr Fourscore.
Did you first see the Dyer piece before or after you went thru Basic?
Before.
So do you think it changed anything? I mean, you’re kind of aware of what the conditioning is.
It certainly helped me appreciate that if “Anybody’s Son Will Do” (for realz), then what’s inside of me (re: killing another person) isn’t unusual. Quite the opposite. The full impact of that understanding is something I still grapple with – see this whole article. And watching what’s going on around me re: vax mandates, lockdowns, Australia, Karens, masks, snitches, etc., is just another iteration of it. It’s a lesson that I think is hard to internalize because it is really difficult to quantify in any given circumstance. That’s probably why Milgram’s experiment appealed to me as a jumping off point for trying to explain my understanding of this phenomenon.
what’s inside of me (re: killing another person) isn’t unusual. Quite the opposite.
I know I am capable of killing another person. How anyone can believe otherwise about themselves just baffles me. You would have to be quite narcissitic, and/or quite ignorant of what goes on in the world, and has for millenia, to believe either you are so special or that people in general aren’t capable of killing.
And what is insidious is that, if you believe you aren’t capable of evil, you have no ability to resist your own impulses toward evil.
What I am uncertain of is the line I would need to be pushed to in order to kill, and how I will react afterwards.
If I was pre-desensitized to the plight of the other, I’d probably cope better in the wake of the event. But if it were a sudden me or them I’d wager I’d have guilt issues until I managed to rationalize it or destroyed myself.
This is based mostly on my reactions to events dealing with me causing the deaths of animals, as it’s the only data point I have.
I didn’t mean to kill that cat and am still plagued by regret, but I did aim to exterminate those mice and don’t lose sleep over anything save the possibility they came back.
RCD if you believe you aren’t capable of evil, you have no ability to resist your own impulses toward evil
That’s my touchpoint on Jung. Those who won’t own their shadow-self will serve it under it’s own terms.
Boot camp proved to me that it is very easy to brain wash people.
If you can control people’s life in every extent and then reward or punish them based on what they do, it isn’t long before you can get people to obey just about anything.
It was a wakeup call for me to realize that I wasn’t immune to such techniques. Fuck I thought I could resist all the bullshit, but I still can’t stand for my shoelaces to be anything except left over right. Lots of other crazy minor things will also set off pavlovian reactions.
Bwahahahaha!!!
Left over right – there is no other way. Shitpaper hangs from the top, CANDIDATES!!!
I still fold my underwear the same way. My wife asks me why and my reply is to ask her why she folds them the way she does.
I believe you and I had the same brainwashing, Your Holiness, so I’m certain we could do this all day long.
BENDS AND THRUSTS, THERE, YOU!!
Resisting Enemy Interrogation
Hello fellow members of the left over right club. My footwear meets standards too.
Left over right on the left foot.
Right over left on the right foot.
Symmetry
At Benning we were lucky to find anyone that could even tie their own shoes. Good thing counting cadence only went to 4, we could have done 5 (maybe) .
I don’t need to be turned into a killer. I know I have the capacity. I do not doubt my own potential for evil.
What I don’t have is a good reason to use that capacity and I think most would be hard pressed to give me one.
That’s where I learned people aren’t nice.
I got glasses in the second grade and instantly went from one of the kids to the one that got picked on.
On the bright side, eventually I learned to fight and still have a healthy distrust for people in general.
What Arendt was trying to tell people was that evil on a truly grand scale requires only that we suspend our own reason and agency, that we acquiesce in the face of what we know is wrong because we tell ourselves that we’re not directly responsible. Stanley Milgram put a much finer point on it and showed how even average, ordinary American citizens had a penchant for obedience and could become instruments of evil, just like the petty bureaucrat Eichmann, who six different psychologists examined and all described as almost depressingly normal. Milgram publicly referred to his work as the proof of what Arendt had already (by then) written and published.
How fortunate for us that public education in this country has, for decades, focused on buttressing the legitimacy of authority of the government and its legions of experts over the value of individual responsibility and self-ownership.
Hence my 2019 rant here about the need to burn public education to the ground.
Thanks for linking that – I don’t how I missed it when it was originally posted.
If you brought random people into your
laboratorysocial club for the criminally insane and showed them a person in a cage, and then handed them a gun and said, “Kill him,” not many would.But would it be all that difficult to ease them into it? I fear not. It would require time and effort, but…
“He’s dying of a brain tumor.”
“He murdered his own children.”
“He’s an IRS auditor.”
Your assertion is not evidence.
*shoots researcher*
“He’s an IRS auditor”
Forgiveable.
After all, Matthew was a tax collector.
Clearly forced? Did she hear someone say “I am putting this gun to your head, do it or you will die”?
Four bucks is four bucks.
Hell, they didn’t even threaten to claw back the four bucks!
So the next time you read some mainstream media hit piece demonizing the unvaccinated, or you hear a politician pointing fingers at those who won’t bend the knee, do not be surprised. But more importantly, do not be surprised when the neighbors or your Uncle Al turn from warm and understanding fellows to petty and vicious tyrants to those whom they see as being untermensch. This is who and what we are.
The real problem is that we think it’s only 1.2% of us who are capable of such evil.
Tribalism is the default setting.
How much does occupational burnout bleed over into non-work life?
More importantly, how do you treat it?
My schedule for today and tomorrow :
meeting
meeting
meeting
meeting
more fucking meetings
meeting
end of workday
after hours work
sleep
meeting
meeting
meetings ad nausium
meeting
more fucking meetings
meeting
end of workday
after hours work
I’ve lost track of what we’re even trying to do.
I’ve lost track of what we’re even trying to do.
Sounds like you need to set up a meeting to clarify goals.
Actually I think UCS has found the end goal.
“I’ve got eight hours to kill and all day to do it in”.
It 100% bleeds into the rest of your life. Unless you are some type of wizard who can compartmentalize incredibly well, in which case you’d probably not be burned out.
For me, getting a new job a few years ago helped immensely, but I do still struggle with it even today. I just came back from a 10 day vacation, and that also helped reset things.
I can’t take a vacation, it won’t be approved, it’s apparently a key phase in the project and we’re understaffed for the work being demanded.
I never understood why understaffed departments go all-in on meetings. But they do.
How else are you going to make sure that everyone’s time is optimized?
We have to explain to everyone else why the work isn’t done already.
And everybody has their own suggestions about what we need to do to make it happen.
Everyone says “of course you don’t have enough people, just do X” where X will slow down progress even more.
Gin.
Sex.
Gin & sex.
I think Sean is saying – “fuck the gin”
gin tastes like twigs.
Dude.
Change my mind: Gin is just flavored vodka.
Vodka is just half finished gin.
Gin is failed vodka
I think one of the lasting mistakes of the Holocaust response was to cast it as a one-off, rather than yet another evil act in human history that will in time become yet another footnote in the history books. Another couple of decades and the people who personally remember people who were alive during WWII and the Holocaust will gone too.
Now there’s an interesting question – did the fact that Germans were so like the victorious [western] allies, that their atrocities were treated as worse transgressions than the Japanese?
I think part of it was pragmatic. We allied with the Soviets to defeat Hitler even though politically we were much more similar to the fascists than the communists.
If Hitler had not aggressively waged war, we would not have lifted a finger to save the Jews. It was simply good propaganda after the fact to assure us of our own moral forthrightness.
yet another evil act in human history
I think the reasons it has been elevated to the supreme evil of all time are complex, but here are a few.
(1) The Germans were too much like us for us to just easily write it off. It forced, at some level, some introspection (hence Milgram’s experiment).
(2) Its relatively recent in history. This begs the question of how other evil that was contemporaneous (Soviet Communism) or more recent (Communist China, Pol Pot) is regarded as somehow less evil.
(3) Its convenient to say “But we aren’t as bad as the Nazis” as an excuse.
Us vs Them. Since the beginning of time. Until the end of time.
Thanks for the article. Like a partial dump of what’s in my brain if I were more eloquent and thoughtful.
Thanks for reminding me to listen to this for the first time in decades.
Peter Gabriel – We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)
Thanks Ozy.
That is how the entire German Army could become complicit in such a massive crime against humanity. If 60% of “regular” folks will shock someone because of a guy in a lab coat, just imagine how many people who have been through the indoctrination process outlined above will do it. That is how you mobilize a nation to dehumanize the non-conforming.
I recently finished Sebastien Haffner’s “Defying Hitler”. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting as there was very little defying of Hitler going on in the memoir. When I read the bit I quoted from Ozy’s article, I immediately thought of the section in Haffner’s book were he talked about wrapping up his law studies and his time as a Referendar. This part of the book took place after the Nazis took over Germany. All Referendars, before they could move on to become lawyers or judges, had to report to a training camp for political training. Haffner describes something very much like what I picture boot camp to be like. He seemed repulsed by the indoctrination.
The latest potential juror being questioned for selection is in court following a 15-hour overnight shift at Target, and is now extensively quoting Winston Churchill.
Is he going to do the beaches speech?
He’s off Churchill now, but just keeps rambling on and on as if he were having a chat.
Darn.
Did you ever know that you’re his hero?
To whom?
My dear, you are ugly, and what’s more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be disgustingly ugly.
The defense didn’t object to seating a juror who loves “True Crime” blogs and is openly anti-gun.
GM trial?
Potter trial
I’m going to drag down my reply to Raven from above because I think it’s worth having in light of the article itself and CPRM’s criticism of the Milgram experiment:
I will add that last night I was on a Zoom chat re: current lawsuit in federal court against the mil vax mandates. There are a large number of troops who have been sacked, removed from their jobs, denied leave, not allowed in the chow hall, denied TAD or PCS orders, denied liberty, and on and on (all of you vets can imagine the pressure that a commander can bring to bear) and they are courageously standing in the breech, knowing they’re likely to wind up with bad paper, kicked out, lose their VA benefits, be forced to pay back their GI Bill, etc. and they’re chuckling and doing everything they can to help. We shouldn’t lose hope, or become cynical, IMO, because these circumstances always present opportunities for the best in us to shine through, as well. There are more Schindlers than we think and they need to be en–couraged. And I mean that in its most basic sense – we need to give them reason to exercise their courage muscles. Courage is contagious, and so is fear and conformity. We need to pick one to elevate and emulate.
“There are a large number of troops who have been sacked, removed from their jobs, denied leave, not allowed in the chow hall, denied TAD or PCS orders, denied liberty, and on and on (all of you vets can imagine the pressure that a commander can bring to bear)….
This is how you purge a military of Unreliable Elements without bloodshed. The pickup artists had a phrase, “shit test”. This is a shit test.
It’s hard for me to see it any other way.
I do think it’s no coincidence that one of the cornerstones of Jordan Peterson’s recommendations for introspection is to imagine yourself as a Nazi and realize that you’re just as capable of being one as anyone else. He is also someone who has thoroughly studied the history of man’s atrocities against man so it’s not really a surprise that he would come to that conclusion.
I guess like Ozy says, the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one; but this is built into the human mind. Fixing it at the source is impossible and 99.9% of people will never have the level of introspection needed to even realize there is a problem, they’ll continue on thinking that all the people their particular in-group are virtuous and everyone in the out-group is evil and sub-human. Such it will be until we finally destroy ourselves.
You’ll despair if you hope to fix everyone. The best we can do is limit the damage – as Ozy‘s immediately preceding comment (#29) is perfectly on point. Just as Hitler and a small coterie of truly evil can corrupt, so too can a small band, like those we call our Founding Fathers (of whom we only readily know a handful), lead to a better outcome. The majority will only follow, one or the other that lead.
“imagine yourself”
“I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it. Of course, this is nonsense. Only the tiniest fraction of them, or of any of us, would have spoken up against slavery or lifted a finger to free the slaves. Most of them—and us—would have gone along. Many would have supported the slave system and happily benefited from it.”
Robert P. George (Princeton), 2020.
Question, in this thought experiment am I supposed to pretend to be a slaveowner, an overseer, or someone cometing with the plantation system?
In the first two cases, I’d probably be quiet. In the last I’d probably move west.
The majority of Southern whites did not own any slaves, yet they fought for the Confederacy.
The irony that the Georgia colony was founded as anti-slavery.
my reason for thinking of moving had more to do with “Am I likely to be more prosperous over there?”
Though I’m probably being optimistic there too, since I haven’t dragged my ass out of New York in real life.
Well, “over there” would have been dangerous territory if you simply mean west (and northwest at that).
Oz, “thanks” for another great article. I was reminded of this essay by Peter Kreeft (TW – Catholic theologian may not appeal to some).
About 20 years ago I was feeling sorry for myself and was wandering around in the bookstore at a retreat house. I came upon Making Sense out of Suffering, also by Kreeft, expecting some soothing palliative. Nope, sorry, take a look in the mirror, dude – the problem is right there in front of you. Not what I was expecting, but exactly what I needed at that time.
Thanks – added to my list.
Out of the Judeo-Christian tradition, I find Jews are far more honest contesting with this kind of problem. Kushner made more sense to me than most Christian apologetics.
Along those lines, a few years back I saw some article about how a logician had “finally” refuted the claim (I guess it had been longstanding) that the existence of evil disproved God’s existence. This was evidently done in some kind of symbolic logic proof. And I was like, “WTF?!? How could something so obviously wrong be counted as being logically proven!?” The original philosopher or person who had become famous on that whole schtick acknowledged that this new “proof” did refute his original claim. And I remember reading the article thinking, “Holy shit, I knew when I was about 5 that bad things in the world could almost always be attributed to the actions of people, even if those actions reached back in time and cause.” Maybe I was born with an understanding of Bastiat, but it always seemed so obvious to me that most of the shit people pointed to as being caused by some unknowable external force could easily be traced to some prior human act of stupidity or malice. (Insert that Heinlein quote about “bad luck.”) I never understood laying evil at God’s feet – but then I really dug in and what I think lies buried underneath all of this is the concept of “free will.” And it’s amazing to me how many atheists struggle with free will. I’ve had many atheist and agnostic friends and whenever we’ve had deep discussions about these kinds of subjects, the part that they all acknowledge that they can’t get past is free will. Because if we are unique moral agents, then it’s all on us. And maybe that’s the hardest part for people to come to grips with, the thing they simply can’t allow themselves to believe – or acknowledge.
What? What did these athiests/agnostics attribute evil to, if not the free choice of humans? Surely not some other supernatural entity.
If the last year has been any indication, it’s white supremacy.
Which must be a supernatural thing for them, since it infests the spirit of the unclean!
It was basically an attempt to “own the relig-idiots” by “proving” that evil in the world = God’s fault.
It was basically the mathematical/symbolic logic equivalent of the question “If God is benevolent and loving, how could God allow evil in the world?”
And someone evidently finally got around to showing that this “proof” was not actually a proof at all.
The whole thing struck me as idiotic, but what was shocking (and I can’t find the article now and I’m too lazy and busy to look for it) was that the original “proof” was evidently something that academics actually gave credence to. Like, it got the original author some kind of notoriety in that field or something.
To make it even more idiotic, most of them would probably identify as postmodern and not pure rationalists of the Enlightenment type.
It’s funny how those who subscribe to the philosophy of the inability to know anything, are often those who are most convinced of their rightness.
No I was talking more about your comment about friends and free-will.
One friend – the hardcore atheist – said that he could account for “everything” in religion except “free will.” He had a similar train of thought that “if it can’t be measured, then it doesn’t exist” to which I replied, “what about love?” He never answered, but I suppose he might claim it was some synaptic response, blah blah blah, which I always treat as a dodge because (a) we both know it’s a lie, but I didn’t see the need to rub his face in his bullshit like he did with people of faith, and (b) I’m always amused by the people who answer deep questions with “how” answers (mechanistic descriptions) and think they’ve proven something, like how smart they are. Again, I revert to (a) – I don’t feel the urge to point out their errors the way they seem to feel compelled to do with religious folks.
In all my travels, I’ve never met an atheist who wasn’t at least as dogmatic in their erroneous beliefs as the religious.
If free will exists, men are ultimately responsible for their actions. This is anathema to a large segment of the population.
I’ve always despised the anti-free will crowd.
If I am not responsible for my mistakes, then I cannot claim my successes either. I want ownership and I will fight anyone who tries to take it away from me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnxkfLe4G74
Because, of course I posted it.
Boethius covered this like 1300 years ago.
GiveSendGo for PhotoChad: https://givesendgo.com/Photochad
This guy was a witness in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial who has been placed on unpaid leave by his employer after being accosted and shouted at in his public facing job by people accusing him of “helping a murderer” by testifying truthfully in court.
Thanks.
I see someone donated a little bit before me under the name “Flufferboy”. I shouldn’t have laughed but I did.
Milgram’s findings were more about how far people are willing to go to play an anticipated role at the behest of an authority figure than obedience. I’ve watched the recordings and the fakery on the part of the confederates was evident. Same with Zimbardo.
For Juris.
Follow up on your comment yesterday.
Wouldn’t you know, just when I was acknowledging my own evil to myself.
I’ve always kinda wondered how many Germans legit couldn’t cipher what was going on until it was too late, and by the time they realized it, they also realized that to speak up or speak out was to earn a date with Herr Reichhart.
To be fair, I think by the time Hitler actually started to consolidate power, the die had already been cast. We have this view that Hitler just sort of sprang up and got power because nobody opposed him. But, it’s not true. The communists did oppose Hitler. And for a lot of Germans, I suppose, the communists were as bad or worse. Remember, all those awful nasty things the Nazis were doing before Hitler consolidated power – beating opponents, promising totalitarian rule, murdering innocent people – the communists matched the Nazis step for step. So, for a lot of Germans, the Nazis were probably the guys standing up saying no to the the communists. It’s the element that the people who celebrate Weimar seem to always conveniently miss. The problem wasn’t nobody said no to Hitler, so much as everybody looked the other way when the radicals from their own side cracked a few skulls. It’s an environment in which “Let’s have a democratic republic and respect the rights of the individual.” pretty quickly gets dealt out of the political process.
Hoffer muses on this quite a bit. The Germans were made ripe for a mass movement by their subjugation. They were a successful nation brought low by the Allied powers after WW1. There is no man more dangerous than one who had prosperity and then it was taken away. They want to lay blame somewhere and the cynical know how to use that bitterness to their advantage.
Speaking of losing prosperity, how about all of the people being fired from their jobs due to vaccine mandates?
?
Absolutely. And this country is one economic catastrophe away from God knows what we’ll do.
/looks at spending bills
Just one economic catastrophe?
Bust-up Business Bigger!
Just one chicken coming home to roost, to quote a famous preacher.
And for a lot of Germans, I suppose, the communists were as bad or worse.
Hard to say they were wrong. A great deal of the evil done by communists is whitewashed in this country (and elsewhere), after all.
And the increasing polarization of this country is not a good omen, not at all.
The “lesser evil” poses a moral and ethical dilemma, in my book. If your (realistic) choices are “greater evil” and “lesser evil”. does just opting out constitute an act of moral vanity? At a lesser level than the conflict between the fascists and the communists, what does this mean for our partisan politics? I certainly regard the Democrats as the greater evil, at the moment at least, but I struggle mightily with supporting the Republicans. And there are no other realistic choices. When the country is bumping along, sure, third parties are fine. Are we at an inflection point (I know, every election is the most important ever) where we truly do need to pick a side? I don’t know.
You! You are occupying my head and rendering my thoughts. So if I say “well said” will that be vain?
I think we’re at the point now where the left is turning a blind eye to their thugs. If that process isn’t stopped, it only stands to reason that the right will respond in kind. To some extent, they’ll have to. If your choices are fight, submit, or silently take a beating, there really isn’t a whole lot of choice. And when the thugs on both sides are given free rein, it’s not hard to figure out where that leads. And I sincerely doubt it’s the rational, reasonable people on either side holding sway.
By 1933, the communists had murdered millions, the Nazis had murdered at most a few hundred.
The notion that the fascists would solve the problems of free markets and industrialization while avoiding the hell that was communism was quite popular in the early 30’s and not unreasonably so.
Unfortunately, the most correct predictions about the oppression and suffering inherent to fascism came from obscure theoreticians like von Mises and Hayek who only got mainstream support when World War II was in full swing, and then were then ignored afterwards as the fascist-adjacent deep state consolidated its power.
“No class or group or party in Germany could escape its share of responsibility for the abandonment of the democratic Republic and the advent of Adolf Hitler. The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
All German political parties except the Social Democrats and the Communists (who’d been kicked out of the Reichstag) voted for the Enabling Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
And to this day, the Commies pretend that their inability to support (or oppose) Hitler makes them somehow purer than the rest.
All of America’s Communists did a volte-face after the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact and became ardent isolationists.
The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.
Sounds good in principle. Only unite behind what against it? Unite behind the commies who were also beating people in the streets? Unite behind the Social Democrats who were looking the other way?
The time to “unite” was well before Hitler consolidated power (i.e. the Enabling Act). It’s just nobody on either side was prepared to do that. Each side saw their thugs as a useful tool to shut down the other side. But, uniting against thuggery, on any side, is the only way you were going to avoid thugs gaining power.
I don’t think there was a way out. The predominant philosophies in control at that time were all collectivist in nature.
Had the commies gained control, they still would have steamrolled the Poles, just with Stalin’s help.
True. And I think (although it’s been a while since I read about this), that it was the commies who started violence at other political rallies. It was fairly low-grade but the Nazis used it as a pretext.
As to unite behind what? Well, I think Shirer’s argument was that Hitler was so evil that they everyone should have united just to stop him gaining power. Now, the mechanics of that, who knows? The problem is that not enough people believed the Nazis were evil enough that they should be stopped at any price. As you say, the stopping point is probably before people realize it has arrived. For example, in 1925 the Bavarian People’s Party refused to vote for the (German) Center Party’s candidate for president which meant that candidate lost to Hindenburg who became Hitler’s puppet (sort of). But, in 1925, no one seriously thought Hitler was ever going to come to power.
It was fairly low-grade….
Well, they took over Bavaria, Saxony, Thuringia, and the Rhineland. They attempted a revolt in Berlin. That doesn’t sound terribly low-grade to me.
And I think Shirer’s “any price” expectation is part of the problem. Instead of concentration camps the commies would have put in gulags. I guess that’s an improvement. Unless you’re one of the people who was going to be sent to the gulag.
Instead of concentration camps the commies would have put in gulags
I think it was “Bloodlands” that pointed out the Commies, after conquering Eastern Europe, turned Nazi concentration camps into Gulags.
Trying not to see parallels in recent events…….
By the way, Ozy, thanks for a great article.
+1
Cheers, wd. This one was like a canker sore I couldn’t get rid of. Took me quite a while to write, re-write, edit, re-edit, and finally get to something intelligible and reasonably coherent.
But writing is my own personal therapy, so I needed to work through it.
Props. I find writing is essential to clarifying my thinking.
Thank you for doing so, Ozy. I’d been trying to write on the same subject but I threw away so many drafts I was not satisfied with I just gave up. It helped my sanity but I can’t say I was proud of it.
I’ve read Milgrams book a few times over the last 20 years. I think your point about the smart set estimating 2% would follow orders is indeed the point. The last time I read the book was September and that’s when it hit me – virtue signaling. I tie that in with the deadly sins and the virtues. The people who are so prideful they need to signal their virtue don’t actually have any virtue and cannot fathom that pride is the deadliest of sins.
When I first read the book I later had a discussion with my Psych PhD sister. She is the first one to point out to me that the experiments are now considered unethical. I never really bought that but couldn’t dismiss it out of hand. Years later I decided that far too many psychologists are full of shit. How can one learn about unethical authorities by completely avoiding questionable methods? I think it points to the hubris of psychologists in general, which sets their profession up for a harder fall.
My larger point is that the last read of the book really made me sensitive to virtue signaling. (Along with a couple completely different things I was reading at the time.). Especially the more unintentional/covert’ type of virtue signaling. And that includes the go-along-to-get-along kind. I catch myself doing it at times so I know there must be times that I haven’t caught myself. It’s good for personal growth but I also know that type of growth scares the shit out of most people so they avoid self-criticism at all costs.
But I have found that in discussions with people that start to get nasty I try to change the subject by bringing up Milgram and Arendt. After a few minutes some start to sense that I wasn’t changing the subject at all and the nasty discussion withers away. The only one it annoys is my PhD sister- and she is one of the most arrogant virtue-signaling people I personally know.
Uffda Ozy. Good piece, but definitely not in harmony with the beautiful sunny day here in Minnesoda.
I think about how gung ho I was as a young man to go fight dirty commies and worry that I would have made bad choices if I had been around Germany in the ’30s. I hope I would have realized what was going on was wrong, but I worry.
That sort of worry is why I am always so leery of joining anything now. Even you Glibs, might turn me into a monster given half a chance.
That’s why Mrs Jimbo keeps you on a short lease, as well she should.
/Tundra made me say that
She wasn’t around back then!
And I was consorting – or at least trying to – with as many young ladies of questionable morals as I could find. I doubt any of them would have kicked me in the ass and told me I was being bad.
I doubt any of them would have kicked me in the ass and told me I was being bad.
Gotta pay extra for that.
At least they lost eventually. Plenty of young Russians joined up and became monsters. Same with young Chinese men who joined Mao’s army. Those who stayed in government never had to stop being monsters – it probably helped their careers.
https://www.axios.com/amazon-nlrb-redo-union-vote-alabama-bd0677e5-15b0-4b5e-a78d-59f60767c82b.html
Wait, is the .gov claiming election fraud via mail in ballots?
Fetch me my fainting couch.
Well I ducked a bullet, the HVAC system just had a broken wire. I figured it being the oldest of our systems would surely guarantee the need for a full replacement.
I would have guessed the problem was with the thermostat.
with the thermostat with a broken wire.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/health-aide-of-nyc-man-80-with-i-touch-little-girls-on-chest-is-charged-with-murder/3424701/
Secret Service must be sleeping a little easier tonight.
She seems nice.
I thought the Milgram experiment had been somewhat discredited because more people said no than they thought would, so the data was fudged.
You can read all the linkies above… and see some of the comments. It doesn’t appear the data was fudged, but that some number of people claimed that they “knew” what was going on. CPRM believes that and I believe Stinky does, as well. The re-do of the experiment in 2005, however, supposedly done ‘the right way’ came to a very similar number. Milgram also repeated the experiment 18 times, as did a number of other researchers in different cultures. They all got very similar compliance numbers. My point (commented on above) is that the real issue isn’t whether it’s 35% or 65%, but that everyone surveyed ahead of time swore the number would never be above 2%.
I’m inclined to believe Milgram was onto something and that a lot of people are making excuses after the fact for their sadism.
Well, you can see how this ties to denial of free will – they were doing what was required of them, what they were ‘forced’ to do. Every excuse you can imagine to avoid saying I chose to do this, and I am responsible for my choices.
mf;dr
My fault, didn’t read.
Now we know why they’re freaking about OMICRON
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhnf19JNL6A
Cha-ching!
So why the imperative that I get a booster now, CDC?
Because you are still breathing Bill Gates’ air?
From several of the better researched stories I’ve read it’s because the WH wanted it and the CDC and the rubber stamp FDA advisory committee members felt like they had to deliver regardless of the “science”.
Wasn’t the kid-stab approved based on “gut feelings” – like, literally? I seem to remember reading that a couple weeks ago.
The super-serious lady who voices all the propaganda commercials for my city assures us that it’s totally safe and effective for five-year-olds or whatever number they pulled out of their ass this time.
No J&J second dose, from my recollection was the “gut” comment.
It was “We won’t know if they are side effects until we use it”
And “It stimulates the creation of antibodies, that’s good.”
*picks up stick off the ground, waves it over brew of “vaccine”*
“Done!”
Gravy train keeps on a rollin’.
I think I saw today that Pfizer posted $37 BN in profits last quarter.
Building a business is easy when the government forces people to use your product!
+1 compulsory car (and now health) insurance
+ 1 New Hampshire
https://www.nh.gov/safety/divisions/dmv/financial-responsibility/insurance.htm
Moderna says hold my beer!
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-not-going-to-be-good-moderna-ceo-on-what-scientists-are-telling-him-about-the-omicron-coronavirus-variant-11638266621
So he’s taking the approach of blaming the variant for the vaccine failure.
Come on man, no one could have predicted a corona virus would mutate.
I’m guessing the remainder was T-Shirts, baseball caps and merchandise.
https://www.euronews.com/green/2021/11/29/sperm-is-being-used-to-create-an-eco-friendly-alternative-to-plastic
It’s called plastic.
Wow, so I was ahead of the game when I laminated all those magazine pages way back when.
Depending on the collection method I’ll volunteer to donate.
https://mittysupply.com/product/single-cow-milker-tjk1-ps/
The main flaw with “we are all possibly evil” studies and theories is that they are not true. Most humans throughout time have sought to further life by having families and/or not hurting others. Otherwise, humans would probably be extinct.
There are evil people. People I would say like to have a hand in others suffering or dying.
The majority I would call neutral. They do some bad things but do good things. The only times they have killed is war or self-defense.
There are a tiny minority of people who would rather die than hurt anyone, even in self-defense.
My experience with history is that most life lost was due to disease and starvation. War and direct cruelty deaths are a drop in the bucket in comparison.
To be honest, there are some evil fucks out there and some of those control nations. I dont want them to control my nation or life.
War and direct cruelty deaths are a drop in the bucket in comparison.
Many starvation deaths were due to evil – the Communists (Soviet and especially Chinese) used it as a tool to eliminate undesirables. The Holodomor also comes to mind. Many famines throughout history were a direct result of war or other intentional acts.
Then there is the starvation in China due to Maos war on sparrows. A complete disaster as the result of someone’s “virtuous” intent. That is why pride is the deadliest of sins. Evil is the result, not the driving intent.