The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

One thing I learned was never, ever, ever to judge people on first impressions. I think I thought "Oh no" when they put that kid in my cell, but he was an utterly fantastic cellmate. His case was fascinating; he had stolen approximately $60,000 over several months as a night cashier at Target by managing to pick the lock on the safes next to the register using a pen during hours of boredom. He burned through every penny flying around the country staying at nice hotels every weekend to fuel his burgeoning MMA career. He was finally called to the office by a manager at Target and two detectives were there. He didn't get a chance to deny anything as a roll of $3,000 cash fell out of his pants leg as he was stood right in front of them.

Raw humanity just isn't enough any more? Have we become so devoid of imagination and empaty?

Fear of the "other" is clearly an emotion, but all the justifications, reasons, and overall narratives about the "other" are thoughts.

Yes, that's true for everything, and it is exactly what believing your emotions over facts means.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Every assumption right or wrong comes from emotion. The problem tends to come when people let their emotions are left completely unchecked. "Bankers are taking advantage of me. My banker is an X minority. Therefore, we need to exterminate X minority" indeed has a nonzero degree of logic, but it's not the sort of reasoning 99% of people would come up with in a vacuum.

A counterpoint is that sometimes an irrational degree of emotion may be required to do extraordinary things like soldiers being brainwashed to fight even a defensive war, building a cathedral that fitting of the magnificence of god, or even a lot of cult-like startups.

For example to name the most well-known example, Hitler's goals were:

- unite the German people under one country

- more lebensraum (space to live) for said German people

- get rid of undesirables who hold the Germans back (Jews, disabled people, Gypsies, homosexuals, etc)

If you start from the axioms that the German people are the best and should be elevated and all other people don't deserve compassion, it's not hard to arrive at those goals by pure reason. Of course those are bad axioms from our point of view, but you can't reason yourself away from your axioms.

Using your mind and getting some distance and perspective would be quite beneficial here. The heart can follow the mind or the other way around. There isn't a clear cut and there cannot be a general answer which direction is the better one.

What probably is true in almost any case is that if you have an image of an enemy to put all the blame on, he probably just looks at you from the mirror.

Caesar was murdered to stop him becoming a King; but the process continued, and Octavian became the first emperor. Murdering the tyrant isn't enough, and imperial Rome lasted 500 years.

I've realized that my knowledge of Julius Caesar is sorely wanting, consisting mainly of vaguely-remembered quotes from Shakespeare's play (which, I realize, I've never read through, and never seen on stage). I evidently have some reading to do.

But fascists were cold and cruel, but also highly emotional. I mean, listen to their speeches, shouting, spitting saliva, calling for raw strength, sacrifice, honor -- it's all emotion. Emotion used for evil, but not robotic.

(I think however a degree of detachness must have been needed for say, people running extermination camps, gas chambers, etc. You must stop seeing your victims as people, you must detach yourself to be able to sleep at night. But that's different to the rallies and the support for fascism from the masses; that was highly emotional).

Quite the opposite: Romanticism was a reaction to (and rejection of) the rationality of the Enlightenment. Romanticism celebrated strong, overwhelming emotions, such as nationalistic zeal.

I don't feel like this is the case. Fundamentally all philosophy that has moral prescriptions is emotion-driven.

That is to say, this is the case in all philosophies that say that something "ought" (or "ought not") to be. To say that something "ought" to be a specific way, you can't just rationally and objectively look at the material world. That only tells you how things are, not how they ought to be. You have to cross Hume's Is/Ought gap at some point, and that can't be done objectively. Any philosophy that does this can be undermined by the average two year old asking "Why?" enough times.

You have to start with some fundamental moral assumptions in order to get an ought, and those are just absolutely dripping with emotion.

Not really. Many of the founding fascists were socialists, including Mussolini. It wouldn't be wrong to call fascism a type of or derivative of socialism.

And with how good LLMs nowadays, probably a numerical majority don't even contain anything worth noting.

I kind of think it's the web itself that has trapped people indoors and into un-social lives when, in the past, boredom would have sent them out into the world to find some kind of entertainment or actual companionship.

(And I speak as someone who thinks I also needs to get out more.)

idk about that. I remember being appalled at the political atavism on Usenet in the 1992 election. Douglas Adams was right to describe telepathy as 'that most cruel of social diseases.'

Love this.

Would you rudely shove youself in front of someone at the market to get the next spot at the cash register? Probably not. But, would you block oncoming traffic by tailgaiting the person who took a left in front of you, instead of just waiting one more light cycle? Absolutely.

The best thought leaders can do is not participate in the hate. Drive the speed limit, let cars out, be courteous and non reactive on the roads.

Each small good example plants a seed that won’t immediately resolve our worldly issues but will lead others to water in due time with persistence.

It's easy to think that you'll get a general cross-section of the population posting, and that they're relatively stable when commenting. But we can't see when people are drunk or under the influence of things, who the bots/psyops bad actors are, or the ages etc. Makes for a frothy mix. But I agree, much healthier to just avoid it and just interact in the real world where possible.

Will that do as a definition?

Be altruistic.

I don't think so. I believe the most common conclusions about what defines a decent human being are good ones. That is, the qualities that come to mind most naturally and frequently are truly benevolent.

Because they are defaults, they outlast efforts to slant and curate understanding.

> What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality — as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"

To find the balance between emotion and reason for wisdom.

https://www.therapistaid.com/therapy-worksheet/wise-mind

-- Stephen Hawking

Can you explain how they started to make sense to you, and what sense they make?

What you have to remember is that he’s not, you know, a smart guy. And the base he’s appealing to with this stuff are also generally, well, probably not in the running for any Nobel prizes.

From this I'd say limiting empathy to our social group leaves a hole where the empathy for everyone else should be - and that divisions grow in that hole.

That's the greed that's ingrained in all humans. "Humans take the perceived path of the most pleasure." is true in every human interaction I've witnessed or can think of.

We're all greedy by default. I think Agent Smith was right when he was talking to Morpheus, humanity is a virus that consumes all the resources in the local environment until they're depleted without thought for the greater good.

Even the worst people in history somehow believed they were the good (or at least the needed) guys and they deserved their riches. Political power always was a vehicle to maintain, defend, multiply those riches. This is why in the best version of that spiel the royals would understand that their position/riches came with very real duties attached. Duties towards those who had it worse than them. But this was already a forgotten idea, even in Chaplins time.

As someone whow grew up around both poor and very rich (including very old-rich) people, I can assure you that the poor people would often share their last penny while the rich ones were mostly afraid that someone might be after their money. Greed is buying a Lamborghini when your neighbour/employee/sister/village starves. Even when you totally earned it using your superhuman work ethic.

Everybody wants to be the good guy in their own story, so everybody will come up with their own reasons why they deserve it (they worked harder than a single mom with three bone breaking jobs) and why doing a good thing is actually a bad thing ("they will waste it on drugs and alcohol"). If you care about your real true self lies like these are a danger to ever discovering it in your life. And you only get one of those.

In the end the question is very simple. Do you care primarily about yourself or do you more care about the people and nature around you? Everybody likes to say they do — and so they lie to themselves why buying that Lamborghini is actually a totally selfless act. But if you realize the world would be a worse place if everybody decided like you, you might be the baddy all along.

So if you want to stay rich you have to somehow get the fact that tou don't do what is needed into balance with your own image of a good person. Aa result you become that attavistic kind of rich person that believes being good is naive and a luxury (no pun intended) they cannot afford. People who want to make the world better are idiots, only you know the world as it truly functions (let's ignore the fact that you profit from that believe). This is a quite common stance among the rich and powerful. Everybody is out to get you. Your game is not doing meaningful things, it is doing things that look meaningful to other rich people. Things become very symbolic. Actually meaningful is naive and dangerous so it must be avoided. These people are rarely ever happy and in the short moments they are, it is because they fell for the lies of their own greatness. We grew up in a world that told us money buys us happiness. To a certain degree it can give us safety and freedom, but after that it comes at a mental price. Greedy people are people who are willing to pay that price, no questions asked. And there are many of them. Remember, you get only this life.

Would I like to live a thousand years? Yes, with the obvious caveats.

Would the world be a better place if the technology for living a thousand years existed? Absolutely not, at least not at first, and certainly not today. There’s a great many people around right now who’s primary redeeming quality is their impending mortality - it’s not just science that advances one funeral at a time.