I can't believe how we got into this situation - don't people feel shame if "their side" is smearing their opponents? Its this some lack of standards? Don't people sometimes wonder, "what if its us who are the baddies"? Am i missing something here?
Never, it requires maturity.
- Bertrand Russell
The best example I can think of is Judeo-Christian thinking has the idea built in through the fall from paradise, Cain killing Abel, and broadly the repeated arc of humanity forming a covenant, breaking it, rinse, repeat; Christianity adds the whole story of Christ being crucified.
And I think that works, conceptually, because God can be good while people are awful. God is this immutable, objective "good" that we can't argue with or rewrite as we please.
Similarly, science can say that its theories are all wrong (bad), but the universe is right (good), so observations trump theory.
And a republic can work as a form of government because its premise is people are awful but reliably self-interested, so you can construct a structure of government that pits those different interests against each other and results in a big stalemate. There the "good" isn't very good, but self-interest is at least consistent, and the desire for a continuing political stalemate over a civil war is good enough.
So for an ideology to incorporate "we are baddies" into itself, it probably needs some external thing to be the "good" that it looks to, but that "good" has to be something that can't be easily rewritten to be whatever you want it to be.
What makes this sketch funny is that, no matter how outrageously bad they are, real people never ask this question about themselves.
They might also be so far down the road of evildoing that every time they do ask themselves, they cling to any excuse that they’re not the baddies.
This describes nearly all of us. You can semi-honestly ask yourself if you are acting good, and mostly about non-essential stuff. But deep down it's just a rhetoric exercise. It is essentially impossible to question your fundamental beliefs. Also, it is easy to verify that this is the case: have you ever held contradictory fundamental beliefs? Not at the same time, of course, but along the years? Like, something that you thought was an immutable basis of your opinion when you were 18, and when you become 35 you think about it and it is obviously wrong. Do you think you were capable at 18 of asking that question to yourself? Do you think you are now capable to do so, regarding your current fundamental thoughts? I may lie and say that I do, but I'm actually incapable to really question my deep beliefs about justice and fairness (even if at some time in the past I held the opposite beliefs!).
The sad thing is that there really is no venue to debate ideas anymore without either side banning the other for “trolling”.
Unless you’d go bragging about it yourself but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
It's not very common, but it happens - and not necessarily after finding out something new about your organization, but also after finding out something new about yourself and your standards.