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> how they rationalized this aggregate behaviour. Fictionalised, quite accurately perhaps, Michael Cristofer as Phillip Price and Bruce Altman playing Terry Co
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> how they rationalized this aggregate behaviour.
Fictionalised, quite accurately perhaps, Michael Cristofer as Phillip
Price and Bruce Altman playing Terry Colby in Sam Esmail's "Mr Robot"
both do an outstanding job of capturing the shrugging banality of evil
at genocidal scale. The feeling I got from that (Esmail is a first
class writer) was of those inside accounts of the Nuremberg trials
with Eichmann laughing
The banality of evil is that murdering a million people is just
something you do on a nondescript Wednesday afternoon over wine and
canapés while everyone is watching the clock to get out to the golf
course.
There is no "rationalisation". No moustache twisting or maniacal
laughter. No drama. No thought at all. It is the "amorality", the
total absence of moral thought that is horrifying beyond anything
Colonel Kurtz could conjure up at the dark end of the river.
- voisin 4y agoI will check that out, but one point: I don’t see the Nazi atrocities as good comparables. Those examples are people doing horrible things to other people. In the current instances of people at major corporations poisoning the air, water, and land, they are doing horrible things to themselves, their loved ones, their descendants. It is like a slow motion mass suicide. I feel like it is significantly more difficult to explain, as it can’t be rationalized as crimes being done to some demonized group that isn’t seen as deserving of protection. How can self-harm (and harm to your own loved ones) be moralized in the same manner that Nazis felt their acts to be moral?
- nonrandomstring 4y ago> they are doing horrible things to themselves, their loved ones, their descendants. It is like a slow motion mass suicide. I feel like it is significantly more difficult to explain, Excellent points, well worth thinking about more.