Nazis and the Nature of Evil

[Dragon Ball Fan]

most people may not have much problem killing household pests but they still have empathy to all other humans and maybe most other living things. the only way Hitler's actions make any sense to me is that he was a sociopath who completely lacked empathy, empathy doesn't care about ideology, so if he had empathy, his ideology saying the Jewish weren't people wouldn't matter.

Your failing is looking at it from your own perspective. He had a different one. It is obvious that arguing that a group of people should be killed is easier than doing it. However, when does the later stop being a concern? I'd argue that for your average non-psychopathic human being, it is a question of degrees of seperation. You do care for your family, your neighbours and co-workers and friends, but what about the person two cities away, that just got run over by a car the moment you finished reading this sentence? Or the thousands of other people that just died to a traffic accident somewhere in your country? Does that phase you at all? Statistically, someone dies to a traffic accident roughly every 13 minutes in the US (for Germany that number is one death every 2h 37m, for the UK it is 1 death every 4h 20m). Now that I pointed your concious thought onto them, you certainly feel a vague sorryness for them, but I needed to take away a degree of seperation in order for you to have any feeling about them at all in the first place.

Now think about a group of people you hate. Some islamic terrorist in Nowherestan. I just pointed your conciousness to him dying, but do you even care in this instance? Despite his terrible ideology, he's the son of a loving mother, who now sits in her run-down house, alone, crying, not being able to comprehend how he died for something truely stupid despite her having done what she thought would be the best for him? How does that make you feel?

Do you see what I mean? Hitler never killed anyone. Even in World War I, where he was a soldier, he never killed anyone to our knowledge, thanks to him being a regimental dispatch runner. He never interacted with the people he wanted dead and we know for fact that even in cases where he knew the person being killed, like Ernst Röhm (head of the SA), he relegated as far away from him as possible. Hitler hated jews, hated communists, hated slavs and in his mind, those are the people who actively tried to destroy what he thought of as one of, if not the most important things in his life, his nation. This distance made it easy for him, allowed him to sleep at night and i have absolutely no doubt that, if you had just a normal conversation with Hitler (which did not go into anything he had any strong negative feelings about), you'd get along with him just fine. From all we know, he was a very personable chap in his private life, who loved his dogs to the max. Declaring him to be mentally unsound or sick, makes it easy to dismiss the case that evil creeps in bit by bit.

there's a difference between not knowing a dead individual personally who died in an unrelated situation and being responsible, if only indirectly, for someone's death. the latter, is still unfathomably to me.

and I might feel sorry for the terrorist, it depends, was he just a follower indoctrinated into his extreme ideology or was he the leader of the terrorists who was almost certainly a monster using religion as an excuse to kill?

and why does everyone still talk about ideologies and different points of view, there are, in fact, those who do horrible things for no reason other then their own amusement or gain, that's what a sociopath is.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

There's a difference, you know, between not liking one's brother and not caring when some dumb Irish flatfoot drops him out of a building - Simon Gruber

[Yukaphile]

Not comfortable saying what, but I will tell you this: Political correctness forces people to try and make the criminal side seem to have legitimate reasons. Everyone's putting a political slant into everything, and it's so disgusting, it's why I left politics behind. This is my biggest beef with psychology culture, and political correctness. Take, and for instance, this is just a LOOSE example, but I feel it's appropriate... let's say there's an African-American man who is wronged by somebody, and this is just a hypothetical, no way accusing all blacks of being like this, but this dude in this scenario is a gang member, who then breaks into his house, murders his wife, rapes his daughter right in front of him, and jacks the car on the way out. A certain political spectrum would try and spin this into how "those black communities really suffer from poverty and white establishment, so clearly that must be our agenda - help them." Can't... can't helping the poor and racially disenfranchised be its own reward, instead of pushing an agenda, blaming his environment rather than him? Take a white shooter like Dylann Roof or God knows who else, and you'd have the right insisting it's mental illness, the left, it's about white privilege. It's all politics. I have literally seen people try to misrepresent a rape victim as "not innocent." Meanwhile, the very same people pushing this agenda will try to spin her being left so broken by the experience, she's wondering if they had legitimate cause to do this, as being a sign of great "strength." Rather than not normal and not healthy, something to get deeply concerned about, not praise! In all these cases, it's painting the victim as morally equivalent to their victimizer, and it gets so old, and sickening, I don't care. I won't try to change a system that does that.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Yuka...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

[Yukaphile]

Hoping for the future is my best bet now. It's why I think time and technology will stop this.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

most people may not have much problem killing household pests but they still have empathy to all other humans and maybe most other living things. the only way Hitler's actions make any sense to me is that he was a sociopath who completely lacked empathy, empathy doesn't care about ideology, so if he had empathy, his ideology saying the Jewish weren't people wouldn't matter.

Your failing is looking at it from your own perspective. He had a different one. It is obvious that arguing that a group of people should be killed is easier than doing it. However, when does the later stop being a concern? I'd argue that for your average non-psychopathic human being, it is a question of degrees of seperation. You do care for your family, your neighbours and co-workers and friends, but what about the person two cities away, that just got run over by a car the moment you finished reading this sentence? Or the thousands of other people that just died to a traffic accident somewhere in your country? Does that phase you at all? Statistically, someone dies to a traffic accident roughly every 13 minutes in the US (for Germany that number is one death every 2h 37m, for the UK it is 1 death every 4h 20m). Now that I pointed your concious thought onto them, you certainly feel a vague sorryness for them, but I needed to take away a degree of seperation in order for you to have any feeling about them at all in the first place.

Now think about a group of people you hate. Some islamic terrorist in Nowherestan. I just pointed your conciousness to him dying, but do you even care in this instance? Despite his terrible ideology, he's the son of a loving mother, who now sits in her run-down house, alone, crying, not being able to comprehend how he died for something truely stupid despite her having done what she thought would be the best for him? How does that make you feel?

Do you see what I mean? Hitler never killed anyone. Even in World War I, where he was a soldier, he never killed anyone to our knowledge, thanks to him being a regimental dispatch runner. He never interacted with the people he wanted dead and we know for fact that even in cases where he knew the person being killed, like Ernst Röhm (head of the SA), he relegated as far away from him as possible. Hitler hated jews, hated communists, hated slavs and in his mind, those are the people who actively tried to destroy what he thought of as one of, if not the most important things in his life, his nation. This distance made it easy for him, allowed him to sleep at night and i have absolutely no doubt that, if you had just a normal conversation with Hitler (which did not go into anything he had any strong negative feelings about), you'd get along with him just fine. From all we know, he was a very personable chap in his private life, who loved his dogs to the max. Declaring him to be mentally unsound or sick, makes it easy to dismiss the case that evil creeps in bit by bit.

there's a difference between not knowing a dead individual personally who died in an unrelated situation and being responsible, if only indirectly, for someone's death. the latter, is still unfathomably to me.

and I might feel sorry for the terrorist, it depends, was he just a follower indoctrinated into his extreme ideology or was he the leader of the terrorists who was almost certainly a monster using religion as an excuse to kill?

and why does everyone still talk about ideologies and different points of view, there are, in fact, those who do horrible things for no reason other then their own amusement or gain, that's what a sociopath is.

As far as what Madner seemed to be getting at, I do think it's easy to give conviction to Hitler's actions as monstrous. I mean at least as far as your concerns of empathy, there's a difference between pushing a button for $10 million that will execute an unknown person and the vast level of organization that Hitler carried out.

Though the separation aspect isn't for nothing, as it does start to show the limits of empathy as we exhibit it; you can have empathy in one direction without it being applied elsewhere. I think he did touch upon that with a breath. But it's just to assert that empathy isn't an overarching biological programming that informs all our decisions to much the same protocol.

[Yukaphile]

You can say the same for millions of people back then.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

You can say the same for millions of people back then.

I'm sure you can, but what point are you responding to particularly?

[Yukaphile]

Just being rhetorical.

As a further illustration, I have seen people utter things that are so shockingly insensitive, you have to wonder how any decent human being could ever voice such sentiments, much less believe them? Then you realize they all had one thing in common. They are very politically-minded.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Just being rhetorical.

As a further illustration, I have seen people utter things that are so shockingly insensitive, you have to wonder how any decent human being could ever voice such sentiments, much less believe them? Then you realize they all had one thing in common. They are very politically-minded.

I see. Yeah that's what me and Mecha were saying earlier. The degree to which lack of empathy applies to people throughout global society is staggering.