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Comment by skylan_q | Hacker News Reader

This is a great article.

If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s-- or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.

This is lost on most people. You'll just hear "of course it was wrong!" and this point won't be given further thought.

But if it was obvious that it was wrong, why did masses of people agree to this? They wouldn't have done it if they also saw it as wrong.

So why are we the exception today? Couldn't we be just as gullible or misguided? You have to move your own ego and preconceived notions aside to seriously address the question.

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It's difficult to overstate the power of propaganda. I think an apt comparison here is the public's opinion of the Iraq war during the build up. The media told people what to think, and, by and large, they thought what they were told, or were cowed into silence. Not that it mattered-- millions protested anyway, and were ignored.

To be blunt, the majority of people didn't even have the capacity to say "but this is wrong!" whether behind closed doors, in their mind, or in public.

They have no agency.

I think a good rule is that people who are handed their worldview from the mainstream media are going to be gullible/misguided by default. It's harsh, but I haven't found any examples to the contrary yet.

I can't help but intrude here.

The point made in the italicized line [1] above is much much larger than the typically-trite debate over the consumption of mass media narratives.

Reducing it to a talking point - about the power of mainstream media to silence skeptics - cheapens the vast and profound meaning embedded in it.

This is not about doves vs hawks. This is much larger than that.

That statement is not just about propaganda or consensus, at the societal level.

It is also about personal convention and the nature of agreeableness in itself.

[1]

The major problem is that everyone\* likes to believe that—while they, of course, are not perfect!—they are fundamentally, in the end of the day, a basically decent and good and rational person. Likewise that their friends and loved ones and co-workers are too. And that their lifestyle, and the society they live in, and the institutions they belong to and identify with are fundamentally okay as well, not out-of-control nightmare carnivals. And that in so far as things are seriously screwed up, it's the fault of those other guys, a clearly-identifiable outlaw, villain, or oppressor group which does not include me or mine.

Of course, this is basically never true. But the unhappy realisation that it's not true in your own case is so agonising that the human mind distances itself from it like a cat from a hot stovetop. Cosmic-horror stuff about how many stars there are or how many metres you are from the centre of mass of the universe are is just an amusing trifle in comparison. Even people who are rationally aware of some of this (often because they recite it once every week) are protected by powerful psychological defence mechanisms from actually having to confront the realisation very often. (Often the upshot of the weekly exercises is that the person simply becomes more confident than ever that they're a great person and they have it all figured out, in much the same way that developing a self-image as a lover of truth and rationality so often makes people markedly dumber.) Add to that the fact that, of course, changing your behaviour to become less of a scumbag often comes with serious or very serious costs to your well-being and relationships with others, and it's not even close.

The final nasty kicker is that, of course, an individual person's judgement of right and wrong isn't necessarily any better than that of his or her society. Futhermore, people who share a particular critique (good God I hate that word) of their society tend to band together into their own subcultures, partly to better resist the material and social pressures from society to conform. So now you have a new self-image, a new lifestyle and a new in-group, and the process repeats itself.

\* The few exceptions, sadly, are largely psychopaths and other people who simply don't give a shit.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm

I think his ideas about us humans are brilliant. Still are very relevant. We didn't change. I believe Nietzsche turned out to be extremely far-sighted.

Would Zarathustra be the opposite of your scumbag description?

>Even people who are rationally aware of some of this (often because they recite it once every week) are protected by powerful psychological defence mechanisms from actually having to confront the realisation very often.

No, some of us just have to hold back tears on a frequent basis.

The media told people what to think, and, by and large, they thought what they were told, or were cowed into silence. Not that it mattered-- millions protested anyway, and were ignored.

Which is it? Were we cowed or did people make up their own minds to the extent that millions protested and (presumably) millions more disagreed? And why characterize the people against the war as freethinkers, while assuming those who supported it were tricked? I know a lot of people who were against the invasion who couldn't tell you five things about the entire region. I wouldn't consider them freethinkers. It doesn't feel like you've actually said anything in this comment.

"millions protested" is not a majority by a long shot. "millions" can be less than 1% of population. Even when 5 million people protested and 10 million silently disagreed, that still leaves 95%. Which is more than enough to qualify as "by and large", even after subtracting those who really gave some thought to the issue and then agreed.

> But if it was obvious that it was wrong, why did masses of people agree to this? They wouldn't have done it if they also saw it as wrong.

Because we, as a species, learn.

Yes, value systems might change. But it seems, at least to me, that they rarely (not never, but rarely) revert back to older norms.

We probably are "wrong" about things we believe right now, too. Some of the beliefs will be considered wrong in the future because we have different circumstances. Most of them will have changed because we've realized they're actively harmful to the continued existence of a human society.

It goes beyond learning though - I'd say we actually need those changed circumstances and advanced technologies for those changes to happen. Trying to adapt a 2010 US morality or system of government to a 1200 Mongols environment or a prehistoric one probably would just be a huge mismatch and not work.

Value systems revert to older norms all the time. In the 20's, people were liberated-then in the 40's and 50's, conservative. 60's-70's? liberated and alternately naive and cynical. 80's-early 90's? conservative.

This happens all the time. People go in cycles, not in a line.

Sure, Hegel, you can argue that the cycles have an overall slope, but that doesn't always bare out.

This is probably one of the better articles I've read on this subject, but I feel it walks around a greater issue that afflicts much of modern philosophical discourse.

It is nearly impossible to divorce the way we view the world with the way we talk about the world. This is basically what the author of this article is saying (and that societal structures reinforce this view by enforcing restrictions on language). The key point there is that the way we view truths about the world doesn't necessarily reveal any truths about the way the world actually is: this is a trap that makes all but the most abstract (and meaningless) philosophical metaphysics paper turn into an exercise in reading jargon.

The author limits his analysis to morality, but I think it can be extended to any sort of classification exercise. If societal definitions of truth and heresy change over time, why can't the definition of a chair? So while two thousand years ago, "chair" could have meant either something with four legs, a back and a seat or simply a straw mat.

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