5 ms·
I'm going to Godwin myself here, but it kind of echoes Hannah Arendt's 'Banality of Evil' — this summary from Wikipedia covers it a bit, but I recommend reading
by accountface 10y ago
I'm going to Godwin myself here, but it kind of echoes Hannah Arendt's 'Banality of Evil' — this summary from Wikipedia covers it a bit, but I recommend reading the actual text, especially in the context of today's political climate... for those who aren't familiar, Eichmann was a Nazi on trial in Israel who was defending his complicity as "following orders."
"Arendt's book introduced the expression and concept "the banality of evil". Her thesis is that Eichmann was not a fanatic or sociopath, but an extremely average person who relied on clichéd defenses rather than thinking for himself and was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology. Banality, in this sense, is not that Eichmann's actions were ordinary, or that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of stupidity which was wholly unexceptional. She never denied that Eichmann was an anti-semite, nor that he was fully responsible for his actions, but argued that these characteristics were secondary to his stupidity."
- rosser 10y ago"Godwin"-ing is comparing your opponents in an internet argument to Hitler/Nazis, not relying on their historical example as an existence proof for how terribly our cognitive gaps can be exploited.
- accountface 10y agoI'm comparing Monsanto to the Third Reich, so I considered it Godwinning (what an amazingly terrible phrase). Fair enough though, I don't disagree with you.
- enraged_camel 10y agoI could buy that regarding a regular company employee or even a mid-level manager. But there are a lot of corporate executives who do shitty, evil things and also happen to be quite cunning, if not brilliant. Those are the scary ones, because they know how to get away with their actions.
- accountface 10y agoBut at the end of the day a lot of low-level employees are the ones making this stuff happen — they're doing the gruntwork and ghostwriting this stuff. They might be shielded by some specific data that is direct top-down evil, but many people are complicit.