> While splitting the world into those who are “saints” versus those who are “pure evil” may protect oneself from pain and damage to their self-image, it ultimately stunts growth and development and ignores the ability to see the self and the world in all of its complexities.
I have seen this so many times in technical discussions that is not even funny. "I am right and everybody else are idiots" is a disease in many software companies.
Many technical solutions are trade offs. But creating absolute categories "solution A is perfect" and "solution B is bad" many engineers protect their egos and their own technical preferences. And that stalls growth, their own and the growth of the team.
> Those with a greater tendency for interpersonal victimhood also had a greater negative memory bias, recalling more words representing offensive behaviors and feelings of hurt
In technical environments, I have seen it related to bugs. The victimhood mindset tends to blame others for any production problems. And any try to bring an open and candid discussion is seen as an aggression. No technical review is possible as criticism of code or design is seen as just personal criticism and violently disregarded.
In the best companies I have worked for, teams are doers open to discuss designs without taking offense. All proposed solutions are understood as a trade-off between different options and that personal preferences may create bias on looking into problems. There is a growth mindset and are great companies were to learn and grow yourself. There is no evils or saints, but colleagues trying their best to solve a problem.
The line between good and evil runs straight through the heart of every man. The lack of charity to other people’s souls (cancel culture), combined with excessive charity to their incompetence (e.g. declining standards for customer service, managers beating around the bush instead of calling out sloth, etc.), seems to be the modern trend unfortunately.
> The lack of charity to other people’s souls (cancel culture)
How is "cancel culture" a lack of charity to other people's souls? How is it that largely powerless individuals who choose to embargo, sanction or ignore the powerful is cast as a "lack of charity" or a paucity of mercy? It is a backlash against the largely impersonal powers that hold sway over us; the bland and ubiquitous media, corrupt political powers, and empty-headed celebrity culture that fails to live up to the standards it expects in everyone else.
Merely because Fox News has given it a catchy title, does not mean it is new, unwelcome or a degradation in standards - it just means that the rich and powerful are afraid of it.
Destroying someone’s life for having the wrong opinions is not charitable to their humanity. It is not how America was until very recently. Sure, people have always been vilified for their views, but they’ve most times been able to continue making their private living nonetheless. Deviations from that, like the McCarthy Era, are rightly seen as wrongful failures to live up to this ideal.
As for the “rich and powerful”, do you mean high school kids making inappropriate jokes that become national news stories, blue collar guys being fired for not being up-to-speed on 2020 cosmopolitan sensibilities, or anyone who says a single negative thing about BLM riots?
"Cancel Culture" is the practice of naming and shaming PUBLIC figures and organisations and so your comment is a wee bit off the mark. You can't cancel a subscription to an individual, a high school kid who makes an off-colour remark is not a product.
By linking the public disapprobation of people who make statements (such as that scooter-driving gentleman in Florida who yelled "White Power" or the angry young schoolboy who decided to stare down a native American who would dare to try to defuse his incipient argument with some agitators) with companies who are being boycotted for actively funding anti-LGBTQ lobbying groups (for instance) is an attempt by politicians, companies and media groups to apply a chilling effect to speech. People should be able to boycott those companies who attempt to impact their lives; celebrities are not owed our respect, nor politicians the money they steal from public coffers.
It is very much NOT limited to public figures and is pervasive in large companies. Individuals get effectively blackballed because of disagreeing with the mob
> It is very much NOT limited to public figures and is pervasive in large companies.
That is not cancel culture. That is something else. Cancel culture, by definition, requires something that can be cancelled. Equivocating the two issues is an attempt to make public figures, organisations, etc less accountable.
I often use "we" language in code reviews and technical discussions. Just because one person is writing the code does not mean it is their code. It's our code. We will have to understand and maintain it. We are all on the hook for it.
I've found that using this type of language can often side step the issue of personal feelings because it's not YOU who wrote something that could be made better but it's WE who wrote it and WE should work together to make it as good as it can be.
A holy war suggests a deliberate preference. Often though the preference looks like a convenient face-saving qualifier to excuse an inability to perform.
So the article maybe does an ok job with the expectations set by the main title, but then there's this subtitle: "social science points to a better way" and the article totally flops on that end with nothing more than an end paragraph blurb of less-than-insightful opinions from the article's author.
edit:
Also FTA:
"the researchers found that an anxious attachment style was a particularly strong antecedent of the tendency for interpersonal victimhood."
And from another comment I posted below:
"When a child feels safe, seen, and soothed by their parent in a consistent way, they are able to form a secure attachment to that parent. However, when a parent is available and attuned at times and insensitive or intrusive at others, the child is more likely to experience an anxious ambivalent attachment pattern"[1]
This is a valid and important area of inquiry and I wish the article did a better job on this front.
I think it gives as much hint as you can without causing a massive wave of outrage:
>But there’s the thing: If socialization processes can instill in individuals a victimhood mindset, then surely the very same processes can instill in people a personal growth mindset. What if we all learned at a young age that our traumas don’t have to define us? That it’s possible to have experienced a trauma and for victimhood to not form the core of our identity? That it’s even possible to grow from trauma, to become a better person, to use the experiences we’ve had in our lives toward working to instill hope and possibility to others who were in a similar situation? What if we all learned that it’s possible to have healthy pride for an in-group without having out-group hate?
Basically, focus on your strong sides rather than weaknesses. Find people that make you happy and spend time with them doing things that make all of you happy, instead of focusing your attention on those who offend you. Pretty sound advice, IMO.
It's vindicating to read that Scientific American has finally used science to describe the out-group. Read it and weep, out-group!
Kidding aside, I have been guilty of at least one of these more than once in life, and it's really a question of whether it's a defining characteristic, and to whom. Treat it like any other cognitive bias, and recognize that noticing it in others doesn't protect us from it.
For people interested in philosophy, I'd say the concepts of "Ressentiment" and "Slave Morality" from Nietzsche (from the late 1800's no less!) are super relevant today and can be applied to the left or right political camps.
> The revolt of the slaves in morals begins in the very principle of resentment becoming creative and giving birth to values—a resentment experienced by creatures who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action, are forced to find their compensation in an imaginary revenge. While every aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says "no" from the very outset to what is "outside itself," "different from itself," and "not itself": and this "no" is its creative deed. This volte-face of the valuing standpoint—this inevitable gravitation to the objective instead of back to the subjective—is typical of "resentment": the slave-morality requires as the condition of its existence an external and objective world, to employ physiological terminology, it requires objective stimuli to be capable of action at all—its action is fundamentally a reaction.
This is really quite interesting and I think speaks to the character of a lot of supposedly political views.
In the war of ideas, I think it helps to classify them simply as 'antagonist' and 'normative' instead of anything else.
When people are young and they don't have power, they may feel aggrieved (possibly legitimately so, or internalise the grievances of other groups), or even simply want to 'rage against the machine' (i.e. what they perceive to be 'a machine'). This aggression may be creative, but I think often it's a visceral intellectualism. It's a 'challenge to power' through a vector of ideas and ideals. But the vector is actually not as important as the motivating impetus ... which is the 'challenge' not the 'ideal'. But this mentality does not at all lend well to the ugly, grinding, material reality of power and real management of systems.
Castro had some legit things to say about Cuba pre-revolution. But what happened when he actually took charge? A few nice things, but then it went pretty quickly into despotism.
If your identity is caught up in antagonism and you live and breathe lofty, impractical slogans that never actually have to be tested because they're never going to be actually tested, what happens when you do get power, and then have to deal with the bureaucracy, unions, police, very legitimate violent threats (internal and external), geopolitical shenanigans, poverty, yada yada? Any ideologue who actually tried to do a good, responsible job, would be considered a total sellout by his own vanguard.
It's odd because often real change does come from some of the more legitimately aggrieved voices ... at the same time, I'm not sure if waves of revolutionary leaders are able to handle 'the 99% of the rest of the job'.
One important point that the article totally misses is the economic part.
Someone with a personal growth mindset very likely spend most of their time minding their own business, whatever that would be.
A person with a victim mentality could be an order of magnitude more socially active. They feel that they are fighting for justice and changing the world to the better, so they would spend countless hours trying to argue their point. And in the world where the views and clicks translate into advertisement dollars, this creates a very unhealthy incentive. Literally, a permanently unhappy person obsessed with pouring their unhappiness on others generates more advertising revenue than a happier person spending their evening cooking or playing video games with their friends.
I have meditated quite a bit on victimhood. In many cases I think it is justified. But fundamentally it is a historiographic view of the world, not an operative one. It is dominated by stasis - the way things were - and not the way things ought to be. This is not to malign those who are victims. But I suspect that most therapists dealing with such victims seek to impart an operative view of the world: one with plans, growth, change - not stasis.
Individuals benefit greatly from developing personal agency and responsibility, whatever their circumstance.
Society at large must do systemic and holistic analysis (on multiple scales, e.g. neighborhoods, cities, states, and countries), which is where various forms of oppression can be most clearly identified and addressed. Of course, grassroots efforts can and often do lead the way.
I wonder if a part of this mindset can be explained by the inability, i.e., lack of skills, to deal with confrontation. We all have to confront people and life circumstances at various points in our lives in order to grow, and if we don't have the skills to deal with them, fight or flight kicks in. The latter, overtime, result in a gradual buildup of low self-esteem, resentment, and anger.
Dealing with confrontations is a skill that can be learned, like most of the life skills out there.
I found the article very enlightening. It is useful to have proper names for the phenomena that I have witnessed in others and partially myself.
The conclusion gives some good ideas how to fix interpersonal victimhood
> What if we all learned at a young age that our traumas don’t have to define us? That it’s possible to have experienced a trauma and for victimhood to not form the core of our identity? That it’s even possible to grow from trauma, to become a better person, to use the experiences we’ve had in our lives toward working to instill hope and possibility to others who were in a similar situation? What if we all learned that it’s possible to have healthy pride for an in-group without having out-group hate? That if you expect kindness from others, it pays to be kind yourself? That no one is entitled to anything, but we all are worthy of being treated as human?
The need for redress and criminalization is indeed a problematic and distressing mindset for all involved, usually just ending in an evolutionary dead-end and non-constructive waste of time and effort.
However, that doesn't mean operation from unbiased justice and fairness, or that we should focus on solutions rather than chart the problems to be solved first!
I dunno - if you eliminate shades of gray and stick to black and white you don't need critical thinking. Critical thinking takes effort - it's far easier to toss a label on someone and then dismiss them.
Is it supposed to be obvious who this subgroup is? I can't engage with your assertion that it's going to change "out of necessity" without knowing who we're talking about…
This is mostly crap. It is a thin scientific redressing of the old right wing slogan of "stop whining". "Stop whining about being oppressed, look at me I am not whining about doing the oppressing".
There is a lot of injustice in our society and there is nothing wrong in standing up and demanding justice. And don't let anyone tell you that demanding justice or seeking fairness is some kind of a personality disorder.
But while most of the article is pure bs, there is a kernel of truth in one of the details. And that is that often when you are wronged and you are angry you tend to ignore other people's feelings. Generally when you are angry you tend to stop thinking. And often you tend to lash out at everyone and think everyone is against you when you may have many potential allies. When I try to remember when I was bullied when I was younger, this is my regret. I would get angry and think everyone is against me and lash out at people, even when they leaned on my side. The bullies of course being psychopaths would never get angry, they would be calm and always kept their psycho charming personalities up, and would eventually gain allies and become socially acceptable even after the bad things they did.
So it is ok to be angry. But you have to always keep thinking and consider the feelings of others.
It's just about the perception of injustice. A privileged person facing minor injustices could completely have this mindset. In fact I've met many many people like this.
A journalist came up with this concept at the World Economic Forum, I think it was fractal poverty??, and it was this observation that from the poorest people in the world to the absolute richest there was this sense that they were excluded from and oppressed by someone more powerful. Absolutely anyone can feel this way.
Interesting observation. I feel it's all about baselines: To decide if you have a lot of something, you need to compare your allotment to some baseline. You'll feel like a victim if you're more mistreated than your baseline of choice. If zero -- that in the ideal world with no mistreatment -- you'll always feel put out. If it's the median amount of mistreatment, half will feel good half bad, etc. Interesting that humans seem to statistically select their baseline as that just better than their current state.
Exactly and it goes beyond victimhood as well. You'll have a group of people go through the same negative experience (e.g. almost dying from a natural disaster, being held as a POW and tortured) and what's interesting is you'll see a huge variation of the impact of those events.
Some people will come out of it relatively unscathed, while others will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives.
No doubt their past experiences shaped their mindset and how they made sense of the negative experience.
It's just about the perception of injustice. A privileged person facing minor injustices could completely have this mindset. In fact I've met many many people like this.
Privileged people facing no injustice howl the loudest that they are the most oppressed. In fact, facing no justice either, getting away with every crime under the sun.
The research that the article talks about was careful to separate the _mindset_ of victimhood from the actual experience of being a victim of someone else's antisocial or even violent behavior. The two are not the same. One can experience prejudice, social bias, and outright physical violence without developing a permanent self-image as a victim. But we all know that one crazy friend or family member who thinks (and says) the world is against them yet never had a truly traumatic experience in their whole life.
But like, I also know people who talked about being wronged and then it eventually turned out they really have been wronged. And it took them quite a lot of effort to get made sorta kinda equal - had they been accepting and silent, none of that would happen.
If it can be made right, then yea but if not, then it's probably better to imagine you weren't wronged.
I have a personal experience with this. I suffered an injury that caused a permanent disability, but because I was also knocked out, I don't know what caused it. Maybe I was assaulted or maybe I had an accident. Should I feel wronged just in case it turns out to be an assault? No! I'm kind of lucky not knowing whether to blame someone else or myself! Maybe if I knew, that emotion of being wronged would motivate me to fight for justice and the perpetrator could get convicted but I'm comfortable assuming it was an accident. That's a lot better than fighting and losing.
In cases I have in mind, it looked futile until it did not.
In the situation you described, you don't know what happened. So a good guess of your feelings would be confusion, I see no reason to force "feeling lucky" or "blaming yourself" or "feeling wronged" or any other emotion you don't actually feel.
I don't understand this prescribing what people should feel and I think it does more harm then good. People do feel, they also think and the two interacts. It is much more important to understand what your feelings actually are and how they are influencing you, rather then analyse what theoretical person should feel or try to force yourself to feel the things you dont.
Though I agree it's not helpful to force your feelings directly. I do think that there are things we "should" feel and those are the things that give better outcomes to us. Sometimes emotions are telling us something true and important but are also harming our wellbeing and we'd be better off without them. If we're lucky enough to lack some harmful knowledge, then all the better.
>But we all know that one crazy friend or family member who thinks (and says) the world is against them yet never had a truly traumatic experience in their whole life.
Man that rubs me the wrong way. You've been in their shoes for every experience they've ever had and used your psychological authority to assess that none of those experiences were "truly traumatic?"
Maybe some of their mindset stems from constant dismissal.
"""It’s important to point out that the researchers do not equate experiencing trauma and victimization with possessing the victimhood mindset. They point out that a victimhood mindset can develop without experiencing severe trauma or victimization. Vice versa, experiencing severe trauma or victimization doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is going to develop a victimhood mindset.
"""
Victim ideology writ large (group level - ingroups and outgroups) is still victim ideology. It doesn't become more right at the group level, it stems from the same biases and thought patterns.
I agree that how one frames the questions can lead to drastically different scores.
If I'm thinking about this in terms of my workplace, I would probably score fairly high due to the typical corporate injustices that many workers endure. But if I think about this on a personal life basis or overall basis, then I would score pretty low.
FTA: "However, the researchers found that an anxious attachment style was a particularly strong antecedent of the tendency for interpersonal victimhood."
So what precedes an 'anxious attachment style'?
"When a child feels safe, seen, and soothed by their parent in a consistent way, they are able to form a secure attachment to that parent. However, when a parent is available and attuned at times and insensitive or intrusive at others, the child is more likely to experience an anxious ambivalent attachment pattern"[1]
I think it's a reasonable assessment that the-unnamed did experience a form of trauma growing up...and now we as a society are dealing with the consequences of putting someone like that into power. I wonder if maybe those who elect these kinds of people relate to them on that fundamental level. Food for thought.
Nazi also complained that Jews are making themselves victims while they supposedly are not. And they also liked to frame themselves as strong manly man whose will and power will win over all obstacles. The primary identification was not victim, it was strongman.
"Nazi also complained that Jews are making themselves victims while they supposedly are not."
Sure, they can say that, but they would be lying. How were Jews not victims when millions of them were being murdered by Nazis?
I don't remember Nazis being locked up in ghettoes, concentration camps, or death camps by Jews in WW2.
The Nazis were clearly the aggressors, and their attempts to paint themselves as the victims were transparent lies.
It's truly sad that this still needs to be pointed out to some people.
"The primary identification [of the Nazis] was not victim, it was strongman."
It was both. They wanted to have it both ways, so they can pretend to be defending themselves and Germany when they attacked. And they wanted all of Germany to run to them for protection against the Jewish and Communist boogeyman. Tragically, their strategy worked.
And it was they, not the Jews, who were doing the attacking.
"We can play the nazi game both ways."
To you it may seem like a game, but the sorts of lies you're repeating have resulted in the deaths of millions of people, and may do so again. This is no game.
What actually happened after complaining that Jews make themselves victims does not make my statement false. Nazi did in fact complained about that and did felt Jews are making themselves victims.
Also the genocide mostly happened by the second half of the WWII, the rhetoric conflicts were mostly before war.
> The Nazis were clearly the aggressors, and their attempts to paint themselves as the victims were transparent lies.
Plenty of them actually did believed what they said. They did lied a lot, but they also did believed in a lot of they said.
> To you it may seem like a game, but the sorts of lies you're repeating have resulted in the deaths of millions of people, and may do so again. This is no game.
Not a single word that I wrote was a lie. I did reacted to parent who framed Nazi as primary making themselves into victims. I don't think that framing was the primary appeal. The parent was trying to use Nazi analogy to discount contemporary people/movements parent dislike, contemporary people who are not Nazi.
> Much of this is paralleled in contemporary politics, and the powerful continue to create myths that they are the victims of the powerless, while in fact themselves committing violence against the latter.
The stab in the back myth was not invented by Nazi either, although they believed it and were motivated by it. The stab in the back myth existed before Nazi, it came to existence right by end of WWI. It was widespread.
Also, nazi were not the first anti semitic group in Germany.
> they could feel more justified in using violence against their enemies, and so they could acquire more power to "protect" themselves
Answering this just for fun. Nazi did not thought like that, this is projecting our values on the past. Nazi believed, strongly believed that "might is right" and the "survival of the fittest". They did believed that victory power has right to do as it pleases. They also believed that violence is manly man thing. They had pretty clear ideas on masculinity.
They did felt justified to use violence solely on these grounds - not just against Jews but against whole range of groups.
> so they can pretend to be defending themselves and Germany when they attacked
Nazi primary argument for war in East was expansion - they claimed to need a living space. That was the justification toward Germans. The Germany was not overpopulated, but nazi did believed it is and that it needs more space. The expand the imperium policy was not invented by nazi either, but was part of German politics long before.
The communist threat was factor. But living space, alias Lebensraum was the policy and reason for expansion according to historians such as Richard Evans.
The comunist threat would not require the sort of policies they had in conquered teritories. They did actually had settlers and actually moved population.
That wasn't to say they didn't do Lebensraum[1], that was to say the way they justified[2] their actions to themselves can be heard, in certain circles, even today.
((Primary source) argument), not (primary (source argument)), sorry.
[1] For comparison, Custer's initial move at Greasy Grass was to threaten women and children. Some of the men in his command were in the US because they had emigrated from the reactionary aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. God is an iron.
[2] is man a rational animal, or a rationalising animal?
One of the giveaways of totalitarian logic is that their enemies are simultaneously both inferior and an existential threat to their superiors. (Agreed, the small-c communist threat would not have required Nazi policies. The large-C Communist threat was something I think Goebbels might have claimed existed so long as a single spark of Communism existed to re-ignite that totalitarian untermensch-driven "revolution.")
(Another giveaway is lack of humour: I don't know of any famous totalitarian comedy, especially any that have used self-deprecating humour, but I'd love to be proven wrong on this point. Some regimes even banned humour:
Two judges meet on the way to their chambers. One is chuckling and wiping tears from his eyes. The other asks, "what just happened?"
"Oy, I just heard the most hilarious Stalin joke ever. But I'm afraid I simply can't tell it to you: I just sent the last person who repeated it to Magadan.")
Here is the thing: German nazi would not claim to "protect The West" because they never claimed to be for the west in general. They were always for German race and for Germany.
The West is the cause of contemporary far right wing. But for Germans during WWII, the even the West was at max temporary ally meant to be conquered later. The "in certain circles, even today" is more of "especially today when the non-Germans adapted most of ideology to what their consider their race". Same with race. German racism did not put white race on the top, that is contemporary cause. Nazi put German race on the top.
Hitler himself was talking and writing about Lebensraum publicly.
Also, nazi used Communist and Jew interchangeable, so you gotta be careful when parsing what they mean. And the Germany had Communist party that did tried smaller revolution soon after WWI, so you also have to distinguish between when they talk about internal and external threats.
Not sure what the poem you linked is supposed to have to do with this argument.
Sometime I should compare the transcript[1] with Goebbels' recorded speech[2].
> "Die europäischen Mächte stehen hier vor ihrer entscheidenden Lebensfrage. Das Abendland ist in Gefahr. Ob ihre Regierungen und ihre Intelligenzschichten das einsehen wollen oder nicht, ist dabei gänzlich unerheblich."
> "Eine zweitausendjährige Aufbauarbeit der abendländischen Menschheit ist in Gefahr."
> "Die neutralen europäischen Staaten besitzen weder das Potential noch die militärischen Machtmittel noch die geistige Einstellung ihrer Völker, um dem Bolschewismus auch nur den geringsten Widerstand entgegenzusetzen."
> "Die Welt hat also nicht die Wahl zwischen einem in seine alte Zersplitterung zurückfallenden und einem unter der Achsenführung sich neu ordnenden Europa, sondern nur die zwischen einem unter dem militärischen Schutz der Achse stehenden und einem bolschewistischen Europa."
The poem was supposed to indicate that, just as Nazis viewed their struggle as benevolently protecting all the "superior races" (with theirs, coincidentally, on top, no matter what the protectees thought of the matter), Yevtushenko sees no reason to stand with antisemites, no matter that they may approve of his own ancestry.
If pigs tell dogs the sheep are inferior to dogs, should the dogs keep the sheep in line, or should they reflect on how pigs probably view dogs?
("alternately arrogant and servile" is another tell for totalitarians. Free people neither boss around nor suck up.)
> Nazis viewed their struggle as benevolently protecting all the "superior races"
Nazi viewed their struggle was for German race. Not for all superior races. That is part you want to have there, but they were pretty clear on the long term plan. It was not coincidentally and there were literally no actual protectees. Not per nazi view and not per occupied country people view.
Yevtushenko is Russian. Per nazi plan Slavic people were meant to be used as slaves, prevented breeding and being eliminated in the long term plan.
That was literally what living space on the East plan was.
> If pigs tell dogs the sheep are inferior to dogs, should the dogs keep the sheep in line, or should they reflect on how pigs probably view dogs?
Who is supposed to be dogs, sheeps and pigs here? I just can not map concrete groups onto this one.
> just as Nazis viewed their struggle as benevolently protecting all the "superior races"
This is not true. The nazi did not viewed their struggle as benevolently protecting all the "superior races". They did not perceived themselves benevolent. Nor as protecting.
Nazi value system interpreted being benevolent as weakness. And weak were meant to be eliminated and only strong were meant to survive.
We agree that the Nazi plan was intended only to benefit (a subset of) themselves.
We also agree that Nazis intended to treat slavs as prior empires had treated their Worthy Oriental Gentlemen (wogs, in the vernacular).
I'd like to make the distinction on the first point that they marketed[1] their intentions differently. I should have said "sold" instead of "viewed", sorry. And my "benevolently" had not been meant to be taken in a positive light. (If someone tells you they are benevolent, keep a hand on your wallet.)
To me it is clear that Goebbels said that the Nazis must protect 2'000 years of Western Civilisation from the Communists (who, you correctly note, were severely conflated with jews in that speech), and that not only was everyone who was not For Them implicitly Against Them, but that it didn't matter anyway, because they were totes going to protect even countries whose governments/intellectuals didn't wish such protection[2].
Would it help if I translate the parts I left in german into english? (I hadn't because I think the original translation pretty much got it right, but will try if you'd like fresh phrasing.)
As to sheep, dogs, and pigs, they're from Animal Farm[3], repurposed to fit one of PG's recent essays[4]:
Concrete groups:
pigs - animals who seizing power for animals from humans.
(aggressive unconventionals / Nazi leadership)
Somehow the benefits from this change of power don't extend much beyond pigs. At the end of the book, the pigs and the neighbouring human farmers get along just fine.
dogs - herd sheep on behalf of pigs.
(aggressive conventionals / blackshirts, SS)
Compare recent US police use of the "sheepdog metaphor", which I believe dates back at least to the conflict in Korea. Dogs get the pigs' table scraps, so they think themselves better than the sheep, who don't.
sheep - those who happily repeat all the domestic propaganda produced by the pigs
(passive conventionals / NSDAP rank and file, general populace)
The existence of many potential leaders with authoritarian tendencies is not necessarily a social problem. The existence of many followers with authoritarian tendencies, is.
Does the distinction between how the plan was intended by the leaders and how it was sold to the followers make more sense now?
[1] I doubt the Sportpalastrede was intended to be external propaganda: it was domestic propaganda to motivate "Total War". So maybe ordinary NSDAP members (the sheep) really bought into a "They are sick, and We are the cure" line even though the Nazi leadership (the pigs) and the SS (the dogs) knew it was, finally, all about whose knee was to be on whose neck.
[3] a book taught in the anglophone world as having been about Stalin, but it also maps to other targets. Considering that was written by an anglophone author for an anglophone audience, we should not be too surprised when we can find many parallels in the anglophone experience. (Goldstein's book in 1984 goes so far as to claim that Animal Farm is how things always work. For as much as I've read of Durant's Story of Civilization, Goldstein seems to be correct.)
> Goebbels said that the Nazis must protect 2'000 years of Western Civilisation from the Communists
See, from all I read about Nazism, whatever short quote in one propaganda speech was, Nazism was not concerned with Western Civilisation at all. As far as Nazism was concerned, there was German civilization. Not western, German. French are something different. British are something different. Americans are something different.
The western civilization concern is contemporary white supremacist concern.
> they were totes going to protect even countries whose governments/intellectuals didn't wish such protection
They were to conquer rest of west. That was appeal of Nazism.
> The existence of many potential leaders with authoritarian tendencies is not necessarily a social problem. The existence of many followers with authoritarian tendencies, is.
Meh. That argument takes responsibility away from those in power, away from those who seek power and places it on ambiguous faceless mass. It also ignores social systems those people operated in. It also ignores actual motivations for why people supported or did not supported movements.
Paul Graham is not exactly historian nor sociologist. Forcing his theories on history wont make you understand what happened - it will make you reject actual history and replace it by own imagination. You will come in with preconceived idea about who is who psychologically based on which group is sympathetic in hindsight, from the point of view of our values.
Paul Graham also makes up child psychology, but that does not matter much.
I'll happily stipulate we can leave PG to the side :-)
(just hope you don't mind if I make small attempts at making HN a little more of a garden and a little less of a stream:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23337759 )
If you could point me to other speeches laying out the Nazi domestic story differently, I'd appreciate it. I picked the Sportpalastrede because (a) it was what we'd read in school, (b) it comes at a critical point, after Rokossovsky had cut off the Nazis from middle eastern oil, and just before the Nazis go explicitly totalitarian, and (c) even though they'd basically lost momentum, the Nazis would go on to be even more cruel to even more people for a few years more. I don't believe that Max Mustermann would have given the consent of the governed[1] in 1933 for "we're going to conquer everyone and kill millions of undesirables", but "we're going to support our traditions, defend the church, and create a brilliant future for our children", despite being a different end approached by the same means, was probably a much easier sale.
"...going to protect even countries whose governments/intellectuals didn't wish such protection." was intended to be read exactly as "conquer rest of west". Sorry, often I fail to realise most people are not as cynical as I.
So, moving on to where I believe we differ:
> "takes responsibility away from those in power, away from those who seek power and places it on ambiguous faceless mass"
is exactly the point I'm arguing. I would say the implosion of the USSR is encouraging, because it shows us that people not in power can change the behaviour of those in power, when they are willing to say together, "you know, this system, it doesn't actually promote the ideals we were all taught to believe in."
(Yes, it likely helped immensely that Gorbi himself also seems to have believed in his childhood picture of what socialism was supposed to have been. Also, in the case of both of us[2], we belong to this mass despite being neither ambiguous nor faceless.)
I think asking people in power (especially people who sought power for its own sake) to be responsible is to ignore those thousands of years of history Goebbels claimed to be preserving. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23846415
Can you suggest a better method for avoiding self-interested leaders than the hypnopaedic suggestions of Brave New World or the arbitrariness of sortition?
(Go back a few hundred years, and one can find plenty of people willing to argue that monarchy is superior to democracy, as the identification of the monarch with the state means that the monarch is more likely to act with long term interests in mind. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23184621 )
Anyway, where we seem to differ is where best to address the problem of potential totalitarianism: with the many, or with the few? I believe it very difficult with the former, and impossible[3] with the latter.
How do you see it?
[1] compare Linebarger's Psychological Warfare, in the context of hot war, not peaceful political process:
"the defeated people may lose their sense of organization, fail to decide on leaders and methods, and give up because they can no longer fight as a group. This happened to the American Southerners in April, 1865. The President and Cabinet of the Confederate States of America got on the train at Richmond; the men who got off farther down the line were "refugees." Something happened to them and to the people about them, so that Mr. Davis no longer thought of himself as President Davis, and other people no longer accepted his commands. This almost happened in Germany in 1945 except for Admiral Doenitz."
I would argue by overall books like Third Reich Trillogy from Richard J. Evans. Or by Hitlers biography by Ian Kershaw. Or the book on Wehrmacht. Arguing by speeches is futile, because that way you can prove Nazi both Communists and anti-communists. As people gladly do, to get back at contemporary enemies. Cherry picking from sentences from hours long speeches is easy especially since they tended to be more of emotional experiences then rational ones.
As for "west" framing, consider that French were traditional enemies of Germany. They even occupied portion of Germany (Ruhr in 1923) between wars, which added quite a lot of strength to Nazi. Germany fought in WWI against other western countries, lost, it was formative experience for majority of Nazi leadership. Germans were very resentful about loosing that war.
> just before the Nazis go explicitly totalitarian
I would argue that this was part of ideology from the very early stages. Not from very early begining, but quite soon.
> I don't believe that Max Mustermann would have given the consent of the governed[1] in 1933
Max Mustermann is fictional person. 1933 is when Nazi took full power, physically destroyed possible opposition and question of consent became moot.
> for "we're going to conquer everyone and kill millions of undesirables",
In 1933, nazi did not knew they will accomplish genocide yet. They knew Jews are the enemy, but they did not knew what they will do with them yet. All of that came later.
> Anyway, where we seem to differ is where best to address the problem of potential totalitarianism: with the many, or with the few? I believe it very difficult with the former, and impossible[3] with the latter.
I did not talked about this at all. I argued about what did actually happened in the past, not about what should have. I think that this question is not much meaningful, precisely because it is motivated by overly simplified reading of history and because such dilemma does not exist in practice.
In retrospect, having whole generation of young man turn grow as soldiers in a wold war, celebrating militarism, interpreting their violence as patriotism all breads next round of violence.
Thanks for the book references. It will take me a while to track them down (may even need to "поиск"). Kershaw looks especially interesting. I have been reading Zweig, Weil, and a book by someone whose name I no longer recall (that I had thought had been a source for Der Untergang but is not listed in the latter's WP page) which I suspect may have been slightly self-serving. (also: Arendt and Lewis as references in the wider context)
However, as I said before, I am less interested in what the actual intentions were and more interested in how they were sold (cf. Linebarger). So emotional experiences are just fine — I don't believe rational arguments have ever had much to do with human politics[1]. And I prefer speeches because they are primary sources of propaganda[2]. It seems we'll have to agree to disagree, here.
We do agree on the german resent of france[3]. (Ironically, the author of the Hassgesang gegen England would first get scapegoated (by the equally patriotic but less extreme) in 1918, and then fail to be rehabilitated in the early thirties: because he was jewish.) However, in the context of 1943, it was fine to defend the Abendland, because most of it which was not neutral was, like france, under military occupation, client government, or both.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Germany#/media/File:World...
We also agree that the nazi ideology was implicitly totalitarian from the beginning. Consider Triumph des Willens[4]. However, 13 January 1943 was when the implicit and foreign became explicit and domestic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war#Germany
Yes, Max Mustermann is the teutonic "citoyen lambda" or "John Doe". Maybe I am too optimistic[5], but the question of consent[6] is never moot. No matter that anglophones love to paint their enemy du jour as iconified by a single person[7], Hitler wasn't about to personally beat up everyone who badmouthed the Reich, it took large numbers of people who believed in him to make his system work. See my previous Linebarger quote, about the point when no one would take orders from Mr. Davis, or consider the point in 1991 when no one would take orders from Comrade Yanayev.
We also agree that the Nazis got worse and worse as time went on. I'm interested in the shape of that slope. Some slopes are slippery ("We are the greatest people in the greatest country and it doesn't matter what we do to accomplish the greater good"), others not so slippery ("If you start disrespecting property rights by abolishing slavery, you'll end up with communism"). My guess is that, like coke dealers who partake of their own goods, the judgement of people who wind up believing their own propaganda is less than optimal.
Again, I think we'll have to agree to disagree on the purpose of transferring bones from one graveyard to another. I am interested in history more for the purpose of making predictions about the present (which does not mean I don't appreciate getting corrected on my understanding of it! Having poor probabilities leads to poor betting...) and less for its own sake. Figuring out how to avoid repeating history would be most excellent, but at the moment I am cynical enough to believe that "those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Those who study history are doomed to watch others repeat it." In any case, having gotten that off my chest, I'm happy to limit myself to the historical detail of 1919-1945.
> interpreting their violence as patriotism
Very well put. Even fools learn from experience[9]. The wise attempt to learn from someone else's experience.
[1] note that even the ancient greeks distinguished rhetoric from logic. I would also be willing to bet that NSDAP speeches were pro-communist exactly between 1939 and 1941, and anti-communist outside those dates. The convenient thing about Two Minutes Hates is that the $OTHER is always variable.
[2] not having an internet and explicit social graph, the Nazis had to make do with radio and loudspeaker truck.
in which Hitler plays the victim card hard. (but neglects to mention that the program for lifting the german Volk up involves putting others two meters under. Generalplan Ost would appear seven years later.)
[4] US fervour for the first Iraq war reminded me of nothing so much as Triumph des Willens. They treated going to war as if they were rooting for a basketball championship. (Der weiße Rausch, on the other hand, is not half bad.)
[6] Whose consent is another interesting question. In 1984, proles, like animals, are free. The Inner Party only needs to fear, and hence control, the Outer Party, roughly 13% of the population. (Luckily for them, Airstrip One has a long tradition of middle class norm self-enforcement. Even we today ask why we would need watch cameras in villages, because spiessig grandmothers keep themselves busy minding everyone elses' business.)
[7] Hitler, of course, would have agreed with the single-leader-principle. But he also, earlier, had agreed with the communists that no matter which one of them controlled the future, centrists such as the social democrats would have no place in it. In any case, here I'm thinking of "The Pope" or "Bonaparte", etc. (Come to think of it, this fear of a united continent may even be logical: if the continent is not full of balanced powers playing, from the english viewpoint, "let's you and him fight", they might turn their military spend from armies to a navy, which would be a direct threat to Oceania's ability to waive rules by ruling waves.)
[9] Körner notes in one of his books that the UK and US, having fought a war to destroy german and japanese militarism forever, then complained bitterly when the germans and japanese refused to join the Iraq adventure.
Edit: I think a point where we've been talking past each other is on the question of the many vs. the few. I agree that the few were responsible[a], not the many. I just happen to believe that if one wants to avoid a repetition, it is much easier (though still more difficult than many countries care to do, as it involves education) to keep the many from following genocidal totalitarians than it is to expect the few (of whom some would be genocidal totalitarians given the opportunity) to avoid climbing the greasy pole.
[a] Responsibility is a key reason that to be recognised as a Party to a Conflict, a group exercising the ultima ratio regum has to have a command structure. Lack of command would make it very difficult to know who ought to be sent to the ICC.
I have seen this so many times in technical discussions that is not even funny. "I am right and everybody else are idiots" is a disease in many software companies.
Many technical solutions are trade offs. But creating absolute categories "solution A is perfect" and "solution B is bad" many engineers protect their egos and their own technical preferences. And that stalls growth, their own and the growth of the team.
> Those with a greater tendency for interpersonal victimhood also had a greater negative memory bias, recalling more words representing offensive behaviors and feelings of hurt
In technical environments, I have seen it related to bugs. The victimhood mindset tends to blame others for any production problems. And any try to bring an open and candid discussion is seen as an aggression. No technical review is possible as criticism of code or design is seen as just personal criticism and violently disregarded.
In the best companies I have worked for, teams are doers open to discuss designs without taking offense. All proposed solutions are understood as a trade-off between different options and that personal preferences may create bias on looking into problems. There is a growth mindset and are great companies were to learn and grow yourself. There is no evils or saints, but colleagues trying their best to solve a problem.