4 ms·

Your argument is that people are not lazy or ethically incompetent, but rather just straight up evil. Is that a fair characterisation? If so, I don't find it co

Your argument is that people are not lazy or ethically incompetent, but rather just straight up evil. Is that a fair characterisation? If so, I don't find it compelling.

0des 5y ago
Are you addressing this part of their comment or the previous piece? > You really think people are willing to risk their 6 figure salaries for some anonymous warehouse workers...
5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
No not evil. My observation is that people are pragmatic (hence, machiavelli and the arguments of moral ethics). My observation is that why should we expect highly paid tech workers to conform to some higher ideal. They have more to lose.
- hef19898 5y ago
  I have to disagree that ehite collar folks at FAANG have more to loose. Blue Collar flks are employed at low salaries in economically weak regions, they loosr their job they risk loosing everything. Especially in the US with a non-existant social safety net. White Collar, especially tech employees, have the option to work for similar salaries somewhere else rather easily. Other than that, full agreement.
heavyset_go 5y ago
This is Hannah Arendt's thesis behind "the banality of evil"[1]: > Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case. Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’. > Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief. [1] https://www.britannica.com/story/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-the-banality-of-evil https://www.britannica.com/story/what-did-hannah-arendt-real...
- skrbjc 5y ago
  - anonymousDan 5y ago
    Boring comment
  - TomSwirly 5y ago
    Empty comment.
- bigDinosaur 5y ago
  I think it's a compelling critique of Arendt that she basically just bought this characterisation wholesale - the Nazis had every reason to present their actions as 'banal' both in limiting the damages selfishly at an individual level and also limiting the damage to their ideology ('anyone could do it'). Eichmann was probably not the nazi-punchcard, mindlessly executing horrible plans, that she states.
  - toyg 5y ago
    The counter to that theory is the sheer amount of Nazi members in Germany - or really rank & file members in any fascist-like regime. That amount of people don't just go insanely evil on a whim, in most cases they are simply dragged there by mechanisms like Arendt describes.
    - bigDinosaur 5y ago
      Arendt was very specific though, her book was called Eichmann in Jerusalem. It wasn't 'mid-level German bureaucrat in Jerusalem'. After all, the railway workers (well, the unforced ones, since the Nazis did not have any compunction about slavery) who kept the trains running were fairly banal participants in the Holocaust, but we don't focus on them as the architects of it for a reason. Eichmann had every reason to present himself as a boring- somewhat clueless - bureaucrat as opposed to an architect of horrors of which he understood the full and gruesome extent. The right person in the wrong place can make all the difference. I'd have to read her responses to the criticism she got again, I believe she did walk back the extent of her claims, but could be wrong (and in saying this, I'm sure someone will correct me if I am misremembering ;))
coldtea 5y ago
They are close to "evil" unless trying (often hard) to become otherwise. Also known as the doctrine of "the original sin". As opposed to Rousseau's "noble savage".
adriand 5y ago
It’s not compelling and it’s not true. In fact most people are inherently good, and enjoy being generous and helpful. Let’s consider this within the context of tech workers specifically. The existence of an enormous open source software community and huge crowd-built resources like Stackoverflow are two examples that demonstrate the willingness of tech workers to contribute, free of charge, to each other and to the world at large. Or consider your own personal experience with people you have worked with. You may have had colleagues who were incompetent, unintelligent or annoying, but how many of them would you describe as evil? Over twenty years of working in the industry I have only ever encountered one person who I would genuinely describe, not as “evil” per se, but as lacking in certain moral qualities that we tend to take for granted among the people we know (and we take them for granted because most people are good). And he wasn’t a developer! I believe it is much more likely that people work for Amazon because they either genuinely believe it is a good company (after all, it is lauded by many) and/or because they are ignorant of the nature of what people in socioeconomic classes far below their own are experiencing in Amazon facilities. Just how aware are each of us of the reality on the ground at companies we support? Do you know what it is like to be a worker at every company whose stock you own? What about the companies who make the clothing you wear or the device you’re using to read this? If not, does that you make evil? Or are you a participant in a system that hides this reality from you? I’m not saying that owning stock or wearing apparel is the same thing as joining a company, by the way. People should be very discerning about who they work for. But I think there are more plausible and positive reasons for human behaviour than Machiavelli proposed. Let’s not view each other as evil and thus write off each other and in doing so, our future. Let’s work to change the system instead.
- banannaise 5y ago
  One of the truly unfortunate things about modern capitalism is that making money and doing good for the world are more or less mutually exclusive. There's little money to be made helping people, and even when you find an exception, it often gets quickly overwhelmed by grift.
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    Sounds like your definition of good is set far too restrictive to be "also a sacrifice madr without any benefit to themselves" as opposed to just "improving the situation" if you think they are mutually exclusive. Does the sin of making money wash away the virtue of creating a COVID-19 vaccine?

Your argument is that people are not lazy or ethically incompetent, but rather just straight up evil. Is that a fair characterisation? If so, I don't find it compelling.

0des 5y ago

Are you addressing this part of their comment or the previous piece? > You really think people are willing to risk their 6 figure salaries for some anonymous warehouse workers...

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago

No not evil. My observation is that people are pragmatic (hence, machiavelli and the arguments of moral ethics). My observation is that why should we expect highly paid tech workers to conform to some higher ideal. They have more to lose.

hef19898 5y ago
I have to disagree that ehite collar folks at FAANG have more to loose. Blue Collar flks are employed at low salaries in economically weak regions, they loosr their job they risk loosing everything. Especially in the US with a non-existant social safety net. White Collar, especially tech employees, have the option to work for similar salaries somewhere else rather easily. Other than that, full agreement.

heavyset_go 5y ago

This is Hannah Arendt's thesis behind "the banality of evil"[1]: > Arendt found Eichmann an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat, who in her words, was ‘neither perverted nor sadistic’, but ‘terrifyingly normal’. He acted without any motive other than to diligently advance his career. Eichmann was not an amoral monster, she concluded in her study of the case. Instead, he performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit[ted] crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’. > Arendt dubbed these collective characteristics of Eichmann ‘the banality of evil’: he was not inherently evil, but merely shallow and clueless, a ‘joiner’, in the words of one contemporary interpreter of Arendt’s thesis: he was a man who drifted, in search of purpose and direction, not out of deep ideological belief. [1] https://www.britannica.com/story/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-the-banality-of-evil https://www.britannica.com/story/what-did-hannah-arendt-real...

skrbjc 5y ago
- anonymousDan 5y ago
  Boring comment
- TomSwirly 5y ago
  Empty comment.
bigDinosaur 5y ago
I think it's a compelling critique of Arendt that she basically just bought this characterisation wholesale - the Nazis had every reason to present their actions as 'banal' both in limiting the damages selfishly at an individual level and also limiting the damage to their ideology ('anyone could do it'). Eichmann was probably not the nazi-punchcard, mindlessly executing horrible plans, that she states.
- toyg 5y ago
  The counter to that theory is the sheer amount of Nazi members in Germany - or really rank & file members in any fascist-like regime. That amount of people don't just go insanely evil on a whim, in most cases they are simply dragged there by mechanisms like Arendt describes.
  - bigDinosaur 5y ago
    Arendt was very specific though, her book was called Eichmann in Jerusalem. It wasn't 'mid-level German bureaucrat in Jerusalem'. After all, the railway workers (well, the unforced ones, since the Nazis did not have any compunction about slavery) who kept the trains running were fairly banal participants in the Holocaust, but we don't focus on them as the architects of it for a reason. Eichmann had every reason to present himself as a boring- somewhat clueless - bureaucrat as opposed to an architect of horrors of which he understood the full and gruesome extent. The right person in the wrong place can make all the difference. I'd have to read her responses to the criticism she got again, I believe she did walk back the extent of her claims, but could be wrong (and in saying this, I'm sure someone will correct me if I am misremembering ;))

coldtea 5y ago

They are close to "evil" unless trying (often hard) to become otherwise. Also known as the doctrine of "the original sin". As opposed to Rousseau's "noble savage".

adriand 5y ago

It’s not compelling and it’s not true. In fact most people are inherently good, and enjoy being generous and helpful. Let’s consider this within the context of tech workers specifically. The existence of an enormous open source software community and huge crowd-built resources like Stackoverflow are two examples that demonstrate the willingness of tech workers to contribute, free of charge, to each other and to the world at large. Or consider your own personal experience with people you have worked with. You may have had colleagues who were incompetent, unintelligent or annoying, but how many of them would you describe as evil? Over twenty years of working in the industry I have only ever encountered one person who I would genuinely describe, not as “evil” per se, but as lacking in certain moral qualities that we tend to take for granted among the people we know (and we take them for granted because most people are good). And he wasn’t a developer! I believe it is much more likely that people work for Amazon because they either genuinely believe it is a good company (after all, it is lauded by many) and/or because they are ignorant of the nature of what people in socioeconomic classes far below their own are experiencing in Amazon facilities. Just how aware are each of us of the reality on the ground at companies we support? Do you know what it is like to be a worker at every company whose stock you own? What about the companies who make the clothing you wear or the device you’re using to read this? If not, does that you make evil? Or are you a participant in a system that hides this reality from you? I’m not saying that owning stock or wearing apparel is the same thing as joining a company, by the way. People should be very discerning about who they work for. But I think there are more plausible and positive reasons for human behaviour than Machiavelli proposed. Let’s not view each other as evil and thus write off each other and in doing so, our future. Let’s work to change the system instead.

banannaise 5y ago
One of the truly unfortunate things about modern capitalism is that making money and doing good for the world are more or less mutually exclusive. There's little money to be made helping people, and even when you find an exception, it often gets quickly overwhelmed by grift.
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  Sounds like your definition of good is set far too restrictive to be "also a sacrifice madr without any benefit to themselves" as opposed to just "improving the situation" if you think they are mutually exclusive. Does the sin of making money wash away the virtue of creating a COVID-19 vaccine?