Just something I found, felt like sharing
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Fascism, a different take...and Lack of Empathy
- Thread starter Evangelicalhumanist
- Start date
Hannah Arendt, after observing Adolf Eichmann at his 1961 trial, came up with the phrase "banality of evil."
The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt on the Normalization of Human Wickedness and Our Only Effective Antidote to It
Excerpt [Edit to clarify--this quote is from the above article, not from Arendt herself]: "The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.
It is through this lens of bureaucracy (which she calls “the rule of Nobody”) as a weapon of totalitarianism that Arendt arrives at her notion of “the banality of evil” — a banality reflected in Eichmann himself, who embodied “the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them.”
And Arendt does agree, Eichmann showed no empathy for those affected by his implementation of policies. He like many others, offered the "It was legal and I was only following orders and procedures" defense, which the Tribunal at Nuremberg utterly rejected.
The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt on the Normalization of Human Wickedness and Our Only Effective Antidote to It
Excerpt [Edit to clarify--this quote is from the above article, not from Arendt herself]: "The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.
It is through this lens of bureaucracy (which she calls “the rule of Nobody”) as a weapon of totalitarianism that Arendt arrives at her notion of “the banality of evil” — a banality reflected in Eichmann himself, who embodied “the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them.”
And Arendt does agree, Eichmann showed no empathy for those affected by his implementation of policies. He like many others, offered the "It was legal and I was only following orders and procedures" defense, which the Tribunal at Nuremberg utterly rejected.
JoshuaTree
Flowers are red?
Fascism would be nothing without narcissists.
Rather than a lack of empathy,
it's a surfeit of evil.
it's a surfeit of evil.
JoshuaTree
Flowers are red?
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber & Business Owner
Doesn't look like it to me, as fascism is an extreme of group conformity.
JoshuaTree
Flowers are red?
Conforming to what?
Gilbert is absolutely right, in fact I would also add that this kind of regimes have a common element: the delirium of Omnipotence, which is the delusion that anything can be transformed for good, by destroying democracy and freedom.
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Lack of empathy certainly has something to do with it. But empathy is something some sadists, maybe most or all of them, use to "feel" their victim's pain in order to somehow enjoy it. Empathy, like most other things in this world, can be perverted to evil uses.
So can information. Around 1920 in America, the available science of the day was harnessed to the job of ramping up the effectiveness of propaganda. The first person to do it was Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud. He was also one of two men credited with being the American founders of the Public Relations industry. At the time, the other nation that was creating a PR industry was the United Kingdom.
Bernays wasn't subtle about it. He called his industry's product, "propaganda". Crisscrossed America for years making speeches to local leaders about how useful propaganda was in controlling the public's perception of reality, and thus controlling the public's behavior. Even wrote a book about it.
The first PR campaign in which he sought scientific advice to design it was intended to change the attitudes of American women towards smoking cigarettes. The client was the American Tobacco Company, and traditional advertising just wasn't working for them. Despite fortunes spent advertising cigarettes to women, only 5% of women had taken up smoking.
Bernays went at in the traditional manner at first, and at first he failed just like everyone before him had.
That's when he hired a psychologist to tell him how to get to women.
By the 1930s, over 30% of American women were smoking cigarettes. Didn't take much longer than ten years to change things around, make smoking cigarettes stop being something only whores and other outcast women did, and start being something strong, independent women did as a mark of their ability to make up their own minds about things, without anyone's help needed.
Clever. Clever. Clever.
I do not believe American politics can be meaningfully understood without understanding how many, many things came together to make it what it is today. Continuing improvements in propaganda techniques and practices are among those things.
So can information. Around 1920 in America, the available science of the day was harnessed to the job of ramping up the effectiveness of propaganda. The first person to do it was Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud. He was also one of two men credited with being the American founders of the Public Relations industry. At the time, the other nation that was creating a PR industry was the United Kingdom.
Bernays wasn't subtle about it. He called his industry's product, "propaganda". Crisscrossed America for years making speeches to local leaders about how useful propaganda was in controlling the public's perception of reality, and thus controlling the public's behavior. Even wrote a book about it.
The first PR campaign in which he sought scientific advice to design it was intended to change the attitudes of American women towards smoking cigarettes. The client was the American Tobacco Company, and traditional advertising just wasn't working for them. Despite fortunes spent advertising cigarettes to women, only 5% of women had taken up smoking.
Bernays went at in the traditional manner at first, and at first he failed just like everyone before him had.
That's when he hired a psychologist to tell him how to get to women.
By the 1930s, over 30% of American women were smoking cigarettes. Didn't take much longer than ten years to change things around, make smoking cigarettes stop being something only whores and other outcast women did, and start being something strong, independent women did as a mark of their ability to make up their own minds about things, without anyone's help needed.
Clever. Clever. Clever.
I do not believe American politics can be meaningfully understood without understanding how many, many things came together to make it what it is today. Continuing improvements in propaganda techniques and practices are among those things.
Heyo
Veteran Member
That's pretty irrelevant. The focus is on being part of the group, the tribe and the tribe being more important than the individual.
It's about being a cog in a machine and feeling great about it.
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber & Business Owner
Authority, national identity, tradition and other facets typical for a fascist rule.
Heyo
Veteran Member
Bernays formalized what the nazies did out of intuition. (They were also masters of propaganda.)
Another thing that was formalized in the US which was done in Germany efficiently without a theoretical background was bureaucracy.
The Precedence diagram method - Wikipedia and the concept of Compartmentalization (information security) - Wikipedia. The US built the Atom Bomb efficient and in secrecy with these methods while the nazies used similar methods to kill 6 million Jews. Very few people in Germany really knew about the death camps, those at the top and those who did the killing. There were many cogs in between who just did what was ordered, knowing nothing about what they were doing.
Many of the Nazi leadership were indeed intuitively good at propaganda. I'm not at all trying to snipe when I say that being good at propaganda isn't that hard to do. Just check out the studies done on how fast small children can become skilled at lying.
If you're curious, you might want to dig into the stories about Goebbels' habit of telling American visitors how grateful he was for Edward Bernays, then pointing to Bernays' book on his bookshelves. Maybe that was a bit of disinformation on Goebbels' part, maybe not.
You can find some interesting parallels between Bernays and Goebbels. Nothing conclusive, but few things in history are ever conclusive, are they?
Cooky
Veteran Member
Social issues.
All social conformity is fascism, even social justice. All SJW's are fascists.
Heyo
Veteran Member
Still onto that false equivalence? Fascist has a defined meaning and it is not synonym with authoritarian. There have to be additional properties for something to be fascist, nationalist and right-wing for example.
SJW are authoritarian, they are not fascist. Get your vocabulary straight.
Cooky
Veteran Member
Well they are nationalist when they claim this and that "community"... The community is their nation.
Samael_Khan
Qigong / Yang Style Taijiquan / 7 Star Mantis
Indoctrination at its most basic.
I think it needs to be kept in mind that Fascism is an actual philosophical worldview and political ideology, not a psychological concept or mental health diagnosis. 
Heyo
Veteran Member
And now you want to redefine "nation".
Exaggerations (authoritarian -» fascist) and euphemisms (anti abortion right -» "pro life") are the 101 of propaganda. They are not conductive to an open conversation.
Cooky
Veteran Member
What you seem to not realize is that isolating groups into different types is just building walls... It's the same us vs. them mentality that always causes division and violence.
...As long as people insist on calling these similarities not discussable, we will continue to be biased, and we won't be able to see our neighbors as equals.
...The people of the future, IMO, will know us as a bigoted and hypocritical generation. I'm not talking about the right or the left, I'm talking about both.
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