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Comment by imh | Hacker News Reader

> In his introduction to the “Second Book,” which was finally published officially in 2003, Weinberg wrote, “Germany and the rest of the world have not yet come close to coming to terms with Hitler as a person, as leader of a great nation, and as a symbol.”

After each of the recent mass shootings, I've been wondering more and more about whether we aren't doing anything about it because it's so easy to just label the shooters as evil, as if they aren't people. It's tough to accept that real people, with identities and feelings just like you and me, can do terrible things. Understanding tragedy and history is key to not repeating it.

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I'll probably maintain for all my days that there is no good or evil, just acts. Yes, cry "moral relativism!", but morals are social constructs, whether you like it or not - there is no universal law of morality, even if your name is Kant.

Hitler thought he was good. Those who followed him thought he was good. In the narrative and perceptive reality of nazi Germany he was good. My grandmother waxes lyrical about the wonderful and charismatic Herr Hitler (she's Austrian, was a hitlerjugendherberge), and listening to her makes oh so clear the dreams and glory that hitler successfully sold to the very disillusioned masses.

He wasn't evil. He just served a moral code so alien and repulsive to us today that we write it off as "evil". In fact, at the time, his politics were aligned with those of the US, UK, and other allied powers - eugenics, fascism, and antisemitism were rife in all - but it was their expansionist policy which ultimately led to the branding as evil and ww2.

Don't get me wrong - I'm no apologist - but I do try to understand events from a contemporaneous and empathic perspective.

> I'll probably maintain for all my days that there is no good or evil, just acts. Yes, cry "moral relativism!", but morals are social constructs, whether you like it or not - there is no universal law of morality, even if your name is Kant.

Actually, "do unto others as you would have done unto you" is a pretty damn near universal law of morality. It doesn't encompass things like when to punish bad actors, but it covers a huge range of situations that we encounter every day.

However, what most people never recognize is that apathy is the mechanism that allows small evils to persist long enough to turn into great evils. Often even a few individuals standing up at the beginning can thwart a rising tide that will be impossible to resist once it gets going.

It's a reasonable seeming law, yes, just as the categorical imperative is - but what if your culture says that the more skulls you collect, the better a person you are? It's easy to define a law in isolation from social pressures which defy that law. Take the inquisition - by burning hereticks you saved their souls, and this was therefore good - so do as you would be done by applies, even if it comprises an auto da fé.

With re: apathy - "all that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing" - sure, but this still relies on a fixed idea of good and evil, and that you can recognise "evil" at its inception. The issue there is that tragic consequences tend to only become apparent in hindsight.

I do personally agree with "do as you would be done by", but you can't apply it as a universal law without the complete homogenisation of global culture - and even then folks will develop their own ideas of what constitutes good and evil.

Ultimately, it's all about societal consensus, which these days (since bernays in particular) is media led.

> It's a reasonable seeming law, yes, just as the categorical imperative is - but what if your culture says that the more skulls you collect, the better a person you are? It's easy to define a law in isolation from social pressures which defy that law. Take the inquisition - by burning hereticks you saved their souls, and this was therefore good - so do as you would be done by applies, even if it comprises an auto da fé.

I think the point is this--if the skull collector became the source of a skull, or the burner became a heretic, they would probably stop thinking those were "good" practices (due to the suffering and death and such), so those acts wouldn't satisfy the "do as you would be done by" rule. Even when those deemed heretics were part of the culture at the time, it's doubtful they thought "oh well, I guess this is the right thing to do".

If Hitler and his followers had been more apathetic, they wouldn't have displayed the zeal that they did in trying to change the world according to their ideals.

The problem with it is that you don't know whether you are the brave person speaking out against injustice or the lunatic that stands against obvious progress.

"do unto others as you would have done unto you" is a pretty damn near universal law of morality

It's insidiously evil. Many of the root versions (and in particular, the early Zoroastrian version, which I think might predate others and was influential in religions that followed) were to not do to others that which is abhorrent to you, but this corruption of it turns it into something else entirely.

Would you elaborate? I'd like to understand why you see it as evil.

It suggests that what you like having done to you is the correct thing to like, and that you're doing good works by forcing it on other people. It doesn't allow for the possibility that other people have different preferences; your preferences are the correct preferences and you are morally correct in applying them on others. Take this to extremes and you end up taking people's children away because they're being raised in the wrong culture, for example.

There may not be good and evil, but there is right and wrong (factually). Indeed, if I were to grant Hitler that everything he proposed as fact was true, then I would be complaining that he failed to solve the Jewish problem.

The Nazis weren't evil, but they were wrong. The whole "Jewish conspiracy" thing was bullshit. As was many of their beliefs. You could have Nazi values, and still disagree with the Nazis on a completely factual basis.

On the contrary, they absolutely were evil. It just turns out that evil doesn't look quite like we would have thought--hence the importance of studying history from primary sources, to know what evil actually looks like, to be able to recognize and oppose it today.

I think a great documentary that explores this territory (but within the context of Indonesia) is The Act of Killing [1]. It can be hard to watch because it lays bare the banality of "evil". No cackling madmen or volcano fortresses, just ordinary-seeming people who committed mass murder while still believing themselves to be just.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Act_of_Killing

Evil is "good people" thinking "the ends justify the means".

"It's unfortunate we have to persecute these even the women and children, but it's required to make a more fair and just world."

"It's unfortunate we have to go to war in Iraq, but it's required to defend peace in the region, from the threat of mass weapons of destruction."

Of course, "the ends" are never achieved, because the "means" they use will cause even more problems to be solved.

Persecuting Jews to achieve justice and fairness for the German people => Destruction of Germany.

War in Iraq to remove dictatorship and mass weapons of destruction => Rogue terrorist group governing by coercion and hundreds and thousands of civilian deaths.

I ask you. What other examples of evil can you see in our world, today? What other evil things are people are doing in the name of good?

Most important to remember: Evil is stopped by being persistently good ourselves, even when pressured and coerced to do otherwise, and that's all that we have to do.

I don't agree. In my opinion, evil is something done selfishly, knowing it will harm others. If you are doing terrible things because you believe they are right, then you aren't evil. Just wrong, or deluded.

Granted, some of the things the Nazis did were evil, in the sense they were selfish. Valuing their own race and country above others, for example.

Yes it was - but it didn't start with them. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was published in 1903 in Russia, kicked off that particular idea - and the nazis just ran with what popular thought already held.

Also, true - going back to my grandmother, she's a raving anti-Semite, but has a Jewish daughter in law - and (now deceased) husband. The cognitive dissonance required is incredible, but common. She'll rant over the dinner table about "the Jews" who are ruining the world - always followed up with a "not you, dear".

I do not think that necessarily relies on cognitive dissonance.

For example, there are plenty of example you can point to of an American conspiracy to overthrow governments, but it is not not cognitive dissonance to believe that a particular American was not involved in it.

The only reason that this logic does not apply to Jews is that their is no central hierarchy to Judaism, however it is still possible to believe that there is a shadow organization that is running the world and happens to be Jewish.

Logic doesn't come into it.

No, as far as she is concerned all Jews are part of the conspiracy, all are a drain on society.

She gets around this not with "you're one of the good ones", but rather, "I like you, so you can't really be Jewish.".

The same thing is rampant today. Rather educated, liberal people will claim that black people are, on average, more violent and less valuable as employees... but of course specific black people are fine. It's easy to do, you just have to rely on a little bad science and a lifetime of propaganda and that whole worldview seems sensible.

From my point of view, the majority of the "propaganda" I witness in media in general, pushes the opposite view that you are claiming is influencing people. It's accepted ridiculously easily as well it seems to the point of being absurd. So I would say that neither side is immune to bias and propaganda. At the end of the day, I will only be against violent individuals, and not ones that hurt my feelings.

You don't understand the difference between averages and specific cases? Black people are, on average, taller... but specific black people are short.

Wouldn't doing the opposite to this be: to extrapolate what black people are like, based entirely on the ones you know?

There's an old anime called "Legend of the Galactic Heroes" that explores this very idea through the POVs of two sides in an interstellar war. Very good show, from what I've seen of it.

Nicely flawed and lazy logic here. You don't have to take your reasoning much further to claim that all of human perception is relative, unprovable, and therefore basically nonexistent.

You sound like a nihilist. As another poster pointed out, "do to unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a good baseline for determining whether an action is good or evil.

I'm an atheist and I even realize this.

Nice ad hom. Works when you've nothing else to say, eh?

It's politically expedient to label the shooters as evil, as if they weren't people. Look at how this has played out in gun politics. The message is that we need "common sense" gun control in order to prevent "crazies" from obtaining guns, as if there were a filter function that could reliably distinguish "crazies" from ordinary folks. When such filter functions inevitably fail, as they always do (crazies start out as ordinary people and they can be crazy for a while before seeking, or being forced into, psychiatric help), that just means we need a better filter function, i.e., more background checks, till no gun changes hands without the feds knowing about it. Once Total Information Awareness is achieved on who has what guns, any number of scenarios can play out. Extraconstitutional gun confiscation is one, but that isn't even the most devious or fun. One scary scenario is the government doing profiling on who is likely to buy what type of weapons or ammo; buy the wrong type and you could be subject to scrutiny by the FBI's precrime operations, set up for stings, etc. Also if a tyrannical overlord wanted to impose dictatorial rule, with complete accurate information on gun and ammunition ownership he would know which areas to consolidate power in first -- the less armed ones -- before closing in on the more armed areas.

Said overlord should probably avoid tinfoil hat territory.

You don't need complete accurate information to do any of that - just go to your local Wal-Mart, and count the number of pickups with gun racks.

Or check the local gun store's tax returns.

Hitler - The Holocaust = Napoleon

There are a scary number of parallels. How differently would we view the Third Reich minus the atrocities of the Einsatzgruppen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and their ilk?

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