Nazis and the Nature of Evil

[Dragon Ball Fan]

There's a reason "Crime" is in quotes there.

Like, we can't definitively say what Jack the Ripper was thinking of course. We're not definitively sure who all he killed. But it's no large stretch to say what they "did" to him was... be prostitutes. It's not at all uncommon for society to look at prostitutes as objects of sin, and so their existence was a crime and Jack enacted justice upon them.

But sure, we could also suppose he's a case of "I want to prove my superiority", which is basically the same as the "I wanna kill more people than anyone ever" so we can talk about them together. And this comes back to Nazis too: you kill them because they're not as important as you, and killing them advances my goals. Proving you're smarter than the police, becoming famous for your killing prowess, strengthening and preserving the German People by eliminating the Undesirables, it's the same basic mentality: I'm the center of the universe, and everyone else is just an obstacle between me and my destiny.
The "Crime" is "their existence keeps me from having the life I should." And usually there's a strong undercurrent of "how dare they make me kill them".

your second paragraph really just proves my point, that's how a truly evil being thinks.

[CmdrKing]

Sure, we can revise my thesis here a bit.

Here's the thing: Killing because you enjoy seeing someone die or to preserve the integrity of the white race is not meaningfully different from demanding unwavering subservience from a spouse or a police officers opening fire if instructions are not followed precisely. There's no exceptional "extra" evil underlying the drive to murder en mass, just lowered inhibitions (and in some cases faulty premises due to disordered thinking, sure).

Heck, going back to nazis, you can use the original inhibitions and empathetic response to make people better killers: order someone to kill, and once they do, use their guilt and horror to instead make them angry at the victim. The cries and begging and smell of corpses is awful, how DARE these people make you feel that way! Combined with a sense of relief and having these things stop once more are dead and well, you've just turned a basic prison guard into a mass murderer. congrats.

That's why it's important not to assign some special exceptional nature to these sorts of people, because you can get "ordinary" people, which really is anyone whose not actively aware of and resisting the process, do more or less the same things by weaponizing their basic psychological defense mechanisms against them. And a serial killer is usually someone who "self-taught" that process of feeling compelled to do something or acting on impulse, feeling guilt over the act, then turning that guilt into anger and motivation to keep going.

(If you wanna see this in real time, dig back a few months on a Trump-supporters feed when news started coming out about the camps. Pity, justifications about "well it's terrible but they're breaking the law!", increasing anger as evidence of worse conditions come out, I'm sure in a few months asking for them to be secretly killed before crossing the border so as not to have to deal with it will start turning up.)

[Dragon Ball Fan]

Sure, we can revise my thesis here a bit.

Here's the thing: Killing because you enjoy seeing someone die or to preserve the integrity of the white race is not meaningfully different from demanding unwavering subservience from a spouse or a police officers opening fire if instructions are not followed precisely. There's no exceptional "extra" evil underlying the drive to murder en mass, just lowered inhibitions (and in some cases faulty premises due to disordered thinking, sure).

Heck, going back to nazis, you can use the original inhibitions and empathetic response to make people better killers: order someone to kill, and once they do, use their guilt and horror to instead make them angry at the victim. The cries and begging and smell of corpses is awful, how DARE these people make you feel that way! Combined with a sense of relief and having these things stop once more are dead and well, you've just turned a basic prison guard into a mass murderer. congrats.

That's why it's important not to assign some special exceptional nature to these sorts of people, because you can get "ordinary" people, which really is anyone whose not actively aware of and resisting the process, do more or less the same things by weaponizing their basic psychological defense mechanisms against them. And a serial killer is usually someone who "self-taught" that process of feeling compelled to do something or acting on impulse, feeling guilt over the act, then turning that guilt into anger and motivation to keep going.

(If you wanna see this in real time, dig back a few months on a Trump-supporters feed when news started coming out about the camps. Pity, justifications about "well it's terrible but they're breaking the law!", increasing anger as evidence of worse conditions come out, I'm sure in a few months asking for them to be secretly killed before crossing the border so as not to have to deal with it will start turning up.)

um, no, serial killers don't turn feelings of guilt into anger, they are incapable of feeling guilt in the first place.

[CmdrKing]

By the time they get caught, sure.
And the first time they killed? Was that even a person, the first time they killed? You're getting hung up on evil being some exception and it's just not. The barrier for some people is lower, that's about it.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

By the time they get caught, sure.
And the first time they killed? Was that even a person, the first time they killed? You're getting hung up on evil being some exception and it's just not. The barrier for some people is lower, that's about it.

it is an exception. yes there are some scenarios where a normal person can be driven to do immoral things but they still have their compassion and such witch keeps them from going to far but those who kill for no reason whatsoever have something inherently wrong with them because as a whole, humans evolved to be compassionate and not want to hurt one another.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Seems like you take overly moral people as the norm. Or I mean, what you consider the norm is overly moral compared to a good number of people that function otherwise properly in society.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

Seems like you take overly moral people as the norm. Or I mean, what you consider the norm is overly moral compared to a good number of people that function otherwise properly in society.

I'm pretty sure moral people are the norm, otherwise, serial killers and genocidal dictators would be literally everywhere.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

There's a huge gray area between "doing good" and "doing bad". People that are concerned with their own matters and generally don't cause problems and aren't considered "doing bad" until they start becoming rich and avoid undue philanthropy.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

There's a huge gray area between "doing good" and "doing bad". People that are concerned with their own matters and generally don't cause problems and aren't considered "doing bad" until they start becoming rich and avoid undue philanthropy.

such individuals can be on the level of Hitler and Jack the Ripper depending on how much suffering their apathy causes.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Poetic.

There's a pretty dynamic scale on the continuum of understandable vice to some type of mass murderer.