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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Tell that to those disappeared by their political competition. To those in Chinese concentration camps for the crime of being Muslim. To those being black bagged in Hong Kong. To those stuck in poverty because they have nothing of value to trade in a capitalistic society.

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I think the point may be that systems which produce such behavior are perversions, rather than expressions, of whatever essential nature humanity may be said to have.

And yet he has no answer for why people will willingly kill people over getting wrong answers in a quiz. Perhaps his hypothesis is wrong.

Hasn't he?

> Bregman's digging into subsequent critiques of the [Milgram] experiment revealed that it was not quite as bad as it seemed: a substantial proportion of the "torturers" had figured out that it was not real. Several more protested that it was wrong. Those who did continue were convinced by the researchers that what they were doing was for the greater good. Bregman, with something of a leap, goes from there to the Holocaust and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Bregman is horrified by the Holocaust, as anyone who believes in the goodness of humankind must be. He suggests that people will indeed do nasty things on a mass scale if they are convinced that it is for the greater good. It was not inherent nastiness that led to the Holocaust, Bregman suggests, but years of indoctrination.

Himmler complained obliquely in one of his Posen speeches, I believe, about how difficult this indoctrination was to enforce and maintain. While that's not a source I would ordinarily be happy to cite, this complaint in particular seems not without relevance here.

Then why does human nature seem to produce such behaviors so often?

My guess? Because we've only been at this whole "civilization" thing for a few thousand years, and although that sounds like a hell of a long time when compared with the few dozen years any one of us gets, it has so far not been enough for us to work out how we can reliably generalize at large scale the same altruistic instinct that so often and so regularly leads so many of us to risk harm to ourselves in defense of people we don't even know.

It's probably not a very good guess. But what the hell, at least it's a guess that leaves room for the hope of a better future, and I like that a lot more than any of the alternatives that seem to be at hand.

These systems are produced by people who believe in claptrap like this, that human beings are innately good but merely corrupted by institutions. How many million have died, from "Kulak" farmers to Chinese peasants, as a result of this kind of thinking which blinds us to thinking we can do no wrong?

...and the article has a direct response to your first part:

> He suggests that people will indeed do nasty things on a mass scale if they are convinced that it is for the greater good. It was not inherent nastiness that led to the Holocaust, Bregman suggests, but years of indoctrination.

For your last point about people in poverty, I would point out that the global poverty has gone down dramatically during capitalism's reign, and generally overall humanity has been toward helping poor countries and poor in their countries. Is there enough social protection for everyone? No. That does not invalidate the article's points. The fact that humans do not achieve perfect or near perfect does not mean we are not generally good.

And yet he has no explanation for why people will torture other people, to the point of death, for getting quiz answers wrong.

This kinda points to his hypothesis of these being outliers as being incorrect. The inherent selfishness, as he himself refers to, of humanity leads to the nasty and brutish behavior.

> I would point out that the global poverty has gone down dramatically during capitalism's reign

And yet the poverty numbers for the US, one of capitalism's biggest proponents, remain fairly static over the last 4-5 decades, times in which productivity and the GDP have flourished.

> And yet he has no explanation for why people will torture other people, to the point of death, for getting quiz answers wrong.

From the article:

"Bregman's digging into subsequent critiques of the experiment revealed that it was not quite as bad as it seemed: a substantial proportion of the "torturers" had figured out that it was not real. Several more protested that it was wrong. Those who did continue were convinced by the researchers that what they were doing was for the greater good."

So Bregman disagrees with your premise.

Re: US poverty.

https://www.vox.com/2014/12/14/7384515/extreme-poverty-decli...

If that's not progress, I don't know what is.

Also, the US official poverty rate doesn't take all the social programs (like food stamps, etc) into account. If you do:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w26532#fromrss

the poverty has dropped substantially.

You want,... "not-rundown petite bourgeoisie"

But more than 7 billion people have to behave obey...

Let me think... huh...sounds... 'dystopian'...? P-:

> It was not inherent nastiness that led to the Holocaust, Bregman suggests, but years of indoctrination.

Arendt's entire report on "The banality of evil" was essentially a direct refutation of that exact argument. Nazi evil was 'banal' in a way, to use Arendt's term, precisely because it was, unambiguously, evil. There was not even the start of a colorable argument that it could be for any sort of "greater" good, no matter how construed. And the whole indoctrination part was as banal and as evil as the rest of it. Complacency towards authority demands and the diffusion of responsibility were the key mechanisms, not indoctrination per se.

The bits I've read/seen recently were definitely leaning far harder on the (as they perceived it) greater good than any "let's unambiguously[1] be evil" rhetoric.

- Goebbels' Sportpalast 1943 speech[2] https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb36...

- Triumph of the Will 1935 https://archive.org/details/TriumphOfTheWillgermanTriumphDes...

- Hitler's Sportpalast 1933 speech https://www.stern.de/politik/geschichte/sportpalast-rede-die...

[1] granted, the ambiguity is up for discussion. But I think any criterion that colours the speeches above as unambiguously evil would also tar many current regimes with the same brush.

[2] a rationale: defending 2'000 years of "western civilisation" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24137060

How about all the slaves working for American prosperity, hidden away in foreign countries? No need to look further than at home for the worst examples to pop up.

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