Being unwilling to discuss Hitler, Labelling him as evil

[Preety_India]

Just now, Carl-Richard said:

Is lying, stealing, manipulating, gaslighting for personal gain not evil?

No. You can't compare normal human frailties and flaws to something magnanimously evil on the scale of what Hitler did. 

Lying and stealing are very basic human vices that we are all guilty of. 

 

Just now, Carl-Richard said:

Yes, but my desire to listen to it was still not in my hands so to speak. The suffering was too great.

My conscience currently tells me all life is sacred. Your conscience seems to think differently. How did that happen? ?

Your conscience is buried because you don't open up to it very often. Consider this as a cooking exercise. I have cooked many dishes. So I can cook really fast and easy with experience under my belt. I have also learned certain tricks of the trade during the process. 

However you never entered the kitchen. Obviously on the first day of your cooking exercise, your knowledge is going to be limited and your focus scattered. But with time you can become like me, only if you enter the kitchen regularly. 

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Preety_India said:

No. You can't compare normal human frailties and flaws to something magnanimously evil on the scale of what Hitler did. 

Lying and stealing are very basic human vices that we are all guilty of. 

 

Your conscience is buried because you don't open up to it very often. Consider this as a cooking exercise. I have cooked many dishes. So I can cook really fast and easy with experience under my belt. I have also learned certain tricks of the trade during the process. 

However you never entered the kitchen. Obviously on the first day of your cooking exercise, your knowledge is going to be limited and your focus scattered. But with time you can become like me, only if you enter the kitchen regularly. 

There is a diffence for sure, but at the end of the day, he did what he did as a product of his own suffering, just like I did as a product of mine, and there is room for compassion there. That is not to excuse or condone bad behavior. Evil is complicated.

However, I understand how mentioning compassion in the same sentence as the greatest evil of the 20th century can come off as repulsive and frankly offensive for most people, so I will keep that to a minimum. Besides, skirting that edge with potential nazi sympatizers just around the corner is probably not the best thing to do.

Edited April 16, 2021 by Carl-Richard

[Roy]

3 hours ago, Preety_India said:

What Hitler did was so evil, plain and simple. 

No it wasn't. Not from his point of view. In fact he thought what was was doing was great and perfectly good.

Evil doesn't really exist. All it is is an illusion of a simple majority social consensus.

Let's say history played out different where the majority of the world actually sided with the Axis and their worldview and they won WW2. What you would live in is a world where people like you and me would be Nazis too and think we were perfectly good, and if you thought you'd think like you do now in this hypothetical, you'd be lying to yourself because it would mean you would have to sacrifice your survival and die being a conscious objector. 99% of people cannot admit how quickly they'd abandon their principles once their skin is in the game.

In other words, Evil is precisely what we call things that are inconvenient to our survival. Where whatever is convenient to our survival we call good.

The intuitive distinction we make that actually draws us to a higher "goodness" is operating in the background of the traditional conversation of moralism, and it's that we recognize any strategy for survival that is too blatantly limited, not expansive, and causes excess suffering (like Nazism) can't be a good strategy for a constantly evolving species.

I guess you could call this intuition a "spiritual" morality and it takes the brutal relativity of reality into account.

Though this intuition is more like an overarching guiding force and most people are completely unconscious of it. This is what people are really talking about when they bring up the "Moral Arc of the Universe".

Edited April 16, 2021 by Roy

[Preety_India]

22 minutes ago, Roy said:

In other words, Evil is precisely what we call things that are inconvenient to our survival. Where whatever is convenient to our survival we call good.

What sort of survival is achieved by killing millions of people based on bigotry? I don't even get it. 

Survival can exist even without killing people. 

By this logic, all sorts of evil would be condoned and justified, even considered necessary. 

I don't get it.. You mean humanity would stop surviving if they learned to live in love, joy and peace? 

Then what was the purpose of the message of Christ and Christianity if all evil is to be given the green signal? 

 

[kray]

Hitler was definitely evil, but he was not the only anti-Semite/racist of his time. In fact, hatred for Jews has existed in Europe for pretty much thousands of years. After the crash of 1929, there was this notion that the Jews were responsible in about every single western country. From the US, to the UK, to France, there were those who dedicated their careers in being anti-Semitic. In fact, there was the British Union of Fascists founded by Oswald Mosley, which had a pretty intense following throughout England in the 1930s. Hitler just took this anti-Semitic sentiment in Europe and made a killing machine out of it, literally. Even Hitler's whole racialist philosophy, nordicism, was inspired by the american eugenicist Madison Grant. Oh and speaking of eugenics, that existed throughout the western world well before Hitler's rise to power, with America being number one in it. So its not like Hitler all of a sudden injected this antisemitism/racism in society. I would say that he is still evil in that he exploited the existing extreme hatred for Jews by creating a killing machine (concentration camps, death camps, etc.).

 

(In fact, one could argue that more Jews died during the pograms in the Russian Empire/Soviet Union)

Edited April 16, 2021 by kray
Adding a detail

[Roy]

14 minutes ago, Preety_India said:

Then what was the purpose of the message of Christ and Christianity if all evil is to be given the green signal? 

You see from the perspective I'm offering I'm not telling anyone what they should or shouldn't do, but from the message of organized religion and the similar objective morality perspective that you have in your mind right now you ARE telling people what they should or shouldn't do by the very idea of a "green" signal. That green = "should", "OK", and "Good".

It's by the very mechanism of having an ought that actually justifies all the "evil" acts that people do because they are operating from a place of ignorance and righteousness. Ignorance from truly seeing things from others perspective and ignorance of what life could be.

18 minutes ago, Preety_India said:

What sort of survival is achieved by killing millions of people based on bigotry? I don't even get it. 

Survival can exist even without killing people. 

Exactly it could, you are right. But the people who kill millions of people like Hitler aren't aware of that. They think they need to do what they do because they are ignorant of how to survive in a better way, not because they are "evil".

You create the label of evil because it goes against your interests. If it was in your interests it would be good.

There is no objective good or evil written anywhere for us to discover, we make it up. The universe doesn't give a fuck because it makes no difference to the universe if all the Nazis die or if all the Jews die on this planet. The world will keep spinning.

[Carl-Richard]

2 hours ago, Preety_India said:

What sort of survival is achieved by killing millions of people based on bigotry? I don't even get it. 

Survival isn't the opposite of taking life. Survival is when self-perpetuating patterns compete in a system with limited resources. Even in the case of Hitler's worst atrocities, there was always an underlying argument of how to distribute resources and perpetuate a set of behavioral/ideological patterns.

A survival pattern could be about eliminating the most patterns possible, including itself, and it would still be called survival, because that in itself is still perpetuating a pattern. Whether it's capable of achieving that goal or not depends on the access to resources, and the consumption of those resources usually goes at the cost of others. The stage yellow dream is to be able address all patterns in the best way possible.

Edited April 16, 2021 by Carl-Richard

[Axiomatic]

10 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Survival isn't the opposite of taking life. Survival is when self-perpetuating patterns compete in a system with limited resources. Even in the case of Hitler's worst atrocities, there was always an underlying argument of how to distribute resources and perpetuate a set of behavioral/ideological patterns.

A survival pattern could be about eliminating the most patterns possible, including itself, and it would still be called survival, because that in itself is still perpetuating a pattern. Whether it's capable of achieving that goal or not depends on the access to resources, and the consumption of those resources usually goes at the cost of others. The stage yellow dream is to be able address all patterns in the best way possible.

preety india's views on existence are still very black and white and lack real deep thinking. In her world, shes good and people who disagree are evil. She isn't ready to understand the concepts of not demonizing anyone. As terrible as hitler was, he didn't come out of the womb as a demon. And to suggest that hes inhuman and 'evil' suggest that we as humans have no connection or understanding of who he is. It is perfect for the ego to distance hitler as an evil non human who we cant relate to at all. It makes the ego feel all good and all knowing. 

Everyone has the capability to go down the path that hitler did, and that is why it is important to not see him as inhuman. We are doing ourselves a disservice to understanding our true nature when we do that, and it leaves the option for us to repeat history. Preety India is not ready to see this. 

Edited April 16, 2021 by Axiomatic

[Epikur]

Did so many Germans and Hitler did what they did because of socio-economic reasons?

 

[Axiomatic]

I'm sure there are neo liberals who would gladly send all white people to concentration camps, because in their eyes, white people are the cause for all of suffering in society. To them, that would be justified and for the greater good.

Yet if one tried to compare them to Hitler, they would be outraged. "It's not the same thing! Hitlers reasons were wrong, and mine are justified! So it's different!"

Thats the ego for ya tho. 

[Forestluv]

1 hour ago, Axiomatic said:

I'm sure there are neo liberals who would gladly send all white people to concentration camps, because in their eyes, white people are the cause for all of suffering in society. To them, that would be justified and for the greater good.

Yet if one tried to compare them to Hitler, they would be outraged. "It's not the same thing! Hitlers reasons were wrong, and mine are justified! So it's different!"

Thats the ego for ya tho. 

A red herring. . . 

1 hour ago, Axiomatic said:

As terrible as hitler was, he didn't come out of the womb as a demon. 

Everyone has the capability to go down the path that hitler did, and that is why it is important to not see him as inhuman. 

We don't know that. There is genetics associated with sociopathic / psychopathic brain activity. We don't know what Hitler's genetics was. He may have been carrying alleles that made him pre-disposed to sociopathy / psychopathy. 

I don't think it's quite fair to say that everyone has the capability to go down the path Hitler did. Someone with a genetic pre-disposition to sociopathy / psychopathy is wired in a way that will make it much more likely they will behave sociopathically. In contrast, someone with genetics that promote high empathy would have an very low capability to go down Hitler path. A sadistic-oriented brain enjoys inflicting suffering onto others. An empathic-oriented brain would suffer if they inflicted suffering onto others. . . There is some potential for synaptic plasticity and rewiring, yet there are limits. . . Somewhat similar to someone having a stroke, there are limits to how much plasticity can take place.

Yet in 100 years, we may understand genetics and neural chemistry much better and be able to fix a brain pre-disposed to sociopathy. 

1 hour ago, Epikur said:

Did so many Germans and Hitler did what they did because of socio-economic reasons?

Socio-economics certainly played a role in the rise of Nazism. Just prior to Nazi rise, there was severe poverty in Germany. A lot of people were suffering, desperate and vulnerable - which allows for the rise of corrupt, manipulative leaders. 

My understanding is that most German's were not directly or actively engaged in atrocities. It was more of a passive support or turning a blind eye. The human mind is very good at compartmentalizing, filtering, denying and rationalizing cognitive dissonance.

Hitler would be a different story. He was directly and actively involved as the leader. There could be many inputs, including both genetic and environmental. Sociopaths have aspects of altered brain structure/function, which has both genetic and environmental inputs. Yet we don't know, because there was not a post-mortem analysis of his brain. However, if they saved some of his DNA, they could analyze that. 

Yet saying one person is sociopathic partly due to genetics is very different than say an entire race of people is violent due to genetics. They are two very different contexts. One of the key features of racism is that someone takes the behavior of one person and extrapolates that to a group of people. This is conflation. For example, it could very well be that Hitler had extreme sociopathic behavior partly due to his genetics. Yet it would be racist to extrapolate that and say that Germans in general are sociopathic in part to their genetics. That would be characteristic of race realism.

 

[Epikur]

1 hour ago, Forestluv said:

A red herring. . . 

We don't know that. There is genetics associated with sociopathic / psychopathic brain activity. We don't know what Hitler's genetics was. He may have been carrying alleles that made him pre-disposed to sociopathy / psychopathy. 

I don't think it's quite fair to say that everyone has the capability to go down the path Hitler did. Someone with a genetic pre-disposition to sociopathy / psychopathy is wired in a way that will make it much more likely they will behave sociopathically. In contrast, someone with genetics that promote high empathy would have an very low capability to go down Hitler path. A sadistic-oriented brain enjoys inflicting suffering onto others. An empathic-oriented brain would suffer if they inflicted suffering onto others. . . There is some potential for synaptic plasticity and rewiring, yet there are limits. . . Somewhat similar to someone having a stroke, there are limits to how much plasticity can take place.

Yet in 100 years, we may understand genetics and neural chemistry much better and be able to fix a brain pre-disposed to sociopathy. 

Socio-economics certainly played a role in the rise of Nazism. Just prior to Nazi rise, there was severe poverty in Germany. A lot of people were suffering, desperate and vulnerable - which allows for the rise of corrupt, manipulative leaders. 

My understanding is that most German's were not directly or actively engaged in atrocities. It was more of a passive support or turning a blind eye. The human mind is very good at compartmentalizing, filtering, denying and rationalizing cognitive dissonance.

Hitler would be a different story. He was directly and actively involved as the leader. There could be many inputs, including both genetic and environmental. Sociopaths have aspects of altered brain structure/function, which has both genetic and environmental inputs. Yet we don't know, because there was not a post-mortem analysis of his brain. However, if they saved some of his DNA, they could analyze that. 

Yet saying one person is sociopathic partly due to genetics is very different than say an entire race of people is violent due to genetics. They are two very different contexts. One of the key features of racism is that someone takes the behavior of one person and extrapolates that to a group of people. This is conflation. For example, it could very well be that Hitler had extreme sociopathic behavior partly due to his genetics. Yet it would be racist to extrapolate that and say that Germans in general are sociopathic in part to their genetics. That would be characteristic of race realism.

 

I guess it was also socio economic reasons for this:

 

Quote

The American State Department and the British Foreign Office had no intention of rescuing large number of European Jews. On the contrary, they continually feared that Germany or other Axis nations might release tens of thousands of Jews into Allied hands. Any such exodus would have placed intense pressure on Britain to open Palestine and the United States to take in more Jewish refugees... Consequently, their policies were aimed at obstructing rescue possibilities....

Authenticated information that the Nazis were systematically exterminating European Jewry was made public... in November 1942. President Roosevelt did nothing... for fourteen months, then moved only because... political pressures....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abandonment_of_the_Jews

[Insane butterfly]

What is the difference between this (WWII)

and this? (Jemen)

Was Hitler more evil than me and you?  Is the first personal evil and the second collective evil? 

Who suffers more because of evil?

The first pioneers of evil and genocides in the ancient world were the Jews,  some part's of the old testament have stories for a very strong stomach's, was Hitler more evil than the Jews? 

If we digg in history about evil Hitler is just the example!

[Forestluv]

@Epikur I was addressing the brain structure / mindstates of Hitler, Nazi's and regular German citizens. I'm not into red herrings about allied forces. 

46 minutes ago, Insane butterfly said:

Was Hitler more evil than me and you? 

Using a conventional definition of "evil", everyone on this forum could safely answer "yes" with plenty of room to spare. 

[DocWatts]

Trying to understand the motivations and intent behind Hitler's actions (including placing those actions into a broader historical context) is quite a different thing from condoning Hitler's actions, or having sympathy for fascist ideology.

For even moderately thoughtful people this should not be a difficult distinction to make.

Edited April 16, 2021 by DocWatts

[EddieEddie1995]

@DocWatts  Yep! To understand someone is to get into he's perspective! How to do that? Well... there are ego defensive mechanisms, genetics, personalities, diseases...  and everything that Leo is talking about! 

@Preety_India If someone kidnaped your child and torture it for years, will you be willing to kill every  one of those mutherfuckers to get your child back? Or you will think oh well.. let them torture my child, it would be unhuman for me to kill them... who is going to feed their children then?  and if you don't do any of those, are you going to live a happy life? Let go? Forgive?  Think about that   

But, this is too harsh... Try with your own example. When is the last time you were hurt by someone, or you were suffering very much...? How did you feel then? Were you as loving as you thought you are? How did you rationalize the situation/reaction afterwards? Oh... he deserved it? 

 When our life is on the line, our morality flies out the window! Or not Depends on the person  

Edited April 16, 2021 by EddieEddie1995

[Preety_India]

17 minutes ago, EddieEddie1995 said:

If someone kidnaped your child and torture it for years, will you be willing to kill every  one of those mutherfuckers to get your child back? Or you will think oh well.. let them torture my child, it would be unhuman for me to kill them... who is going to feed their children then?  and if you don't do any of those, are you going to live a happy life? Let go? Forgive?  Think about that

That's not called offense, it's called defense. Offense is evil, defense is not. Don't mistake one for another. Think clear 

 

 

 

[Carl-Richard]

4 hours ago, Insane butterfly said:

The first pioneers of evil and genocides in the ancient world were the Jews,  some part's of the old testament have stories for a very strong stomach's, was Hitler more evil than the Jews? 

?

21 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Besides, skirting that edge with potential nazi sympatizers just around the corner is probably not the best thing to do.

Before you play devil's advocate, try to show that you're not the devil ?

Edited April 17, 2021 by Carl-Richard

[kray]

5 hours ago, Insane butterfly said:

What is the difference between this (WWII)

and this? (Jemen)

 

The first pioneers of evil and genocides in the ancient world were the Jews,  some part's of the old testament have stories for a very strong stomach's, was Hitler more evil than the Jews? 

 

I would be very careful in saying something like this, this is simply not a fact.