- 05 Mar 2024 16:53
#15306564
I was running across this Quora piece and it looks interesting:
Of note to your question is the assessment by Captain GM Gilbert, an Army psychologist assigned to observe the defendants at the Nuremburg trials:
Fascism arrives as your friend. It will restore your honor, make you feel proud, protect your house, give you a job, clean up your neighborhood, remind you of how great you once were, clear out the venal and the corrupt, remove anything you feel is unlike you.
In my work with the defendants I was searching for the nature of evil, and now I think I have come close to defining it.A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to deal with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
That very lack of empathy is a defining attribute of America today, whether for immigrants, those lacking health-care coverage, the poor, the incarcerated, minorities… there’s really no poorly enfranchised group that is not being victimized by an uncaring body politic. Those with money, those with unquestioned access to the reins of power, even gun-owners - any group with obvious levers to exert their will - are unchallenged at the top of the pecking order, and work incessantly to further buttress, and even increase, their advantage.
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I really think that is true people. If I had to boil down what the worst thing a person can do in terms of their virtues or flaws that really make them evil? It is the inability to empathize. It means they are incapable of snapping out of their selfish stances and thoughts. A total lack of being able to put themselves in another person's shoes. Even for a moment.
That is evil defined.
What do you think it is?
Of note to your question is the assessment by Captain GM Gilbert, an Army psychologist assigned to observe the defendants at the Nuremburg trials:
Fascism arrives as your friend. It will restore your honor, make you feel proud, protect your house, give you a job, clean up your neighborhood, remind you of how great you once were, clear out the venal and the corrupt, remove anything you feel is unlike you.
In my work with the defendants I was searching for the nature of evil, and now I think I have come close to defining it.A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to deal with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
That very lack of empathy is a defining attribute of America today, whether for immigrants, those lacking health-care coverage, the poor, the incarcerated, minorities… there’s really no poorly enfranchised group that is not being victimized by an uncaring body politic. Those with money, those with unquestioned access to the reins of power, even gun-owners - any group with obvious levers to exert their will - are unchallenged at the top of the pecking order, and work incessantly to further buttress, and even increase, their advantage.
_______________________________________________________________________________
I really think that is true people. If I had to boil down what the worst thing a person can do in terms of their virtues or flaws that really make them evil? It is the inability to empathize. It means they are incapable of snapping out of their selfish stances and thoughts. A total lack of being able to put themselves in another person's shoes. Even for a moment.
That is evil defined.
What do you think it is?
La historia de mi amor
se pudiera encontrar
en cada corazón,
en cada soledad.
Silvio Rodriguez
se pudiera encontrar
en cada corazón,
en cada soledad.
Silvio Rodriguez