5 ms·

Who Goes Nazi? (1941)

41 points by signa11 4y ago

jtode 4y ago
It takes her a while to get there, but eventually it gets around to the cry of the American Liberal: The left are the worst nazis of all.
anigbrowl 4y ago
(1941)
elcritch 4y ago
Interesting given our modern smartphone and TikTok riddled era. Though I’d hope Flynn’s law has raised our collective IQs, I still ponder what we’ve lost in mental discipline in modern days. Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.
- csense 4y ago
  > His soul has been almost completely neglected. Science is about how the world works, and spirituality is about how to have a good life. Scientific progress is obvious to everyone, but in terms of spirituality we seem to be losing ground. Organized religion has its flaws, and it's generally on the decline. There seems to be no good replacement on offer: - Neoliberal globalism and libertarianism both seem to tacitly endorse a sort of hedonistic nihilism which is good for consumer-driven businesses but is dangerously close to pure utilitarianism as a framework for making moral decisions, especially when tradeoffs are involved. - Conservative spiritualism seems to be about interpreting vague, selectively chosen parts of difficult-to-understand ancient spiritual authority to whip people into a moral frenzy to forcibly impose particular philosophies on an entire society. It's too much about outrage and political benefits, not enough about understanding the intended moral lessons of the ancient texts and the underlying philosophy. We should be finding the parts of those ancient ways of thinking can be improved / adapted to modern society / discarded because they're obsolete. Why is our understanding of how the world works so good that even elementary schoolkids are way more informed about the universe than Plato was, but our understanding of how people should live is so bad that half the population says "Moral philosophy? Meh. Do what feels good and increases GDP and it'll all sort-of work out" and the other half's moral compass says "Follow these thousand-year-old writings in incomprehensible language that tell a vague and self-contradictory sci-fi story about how humanity's ultimate moral objective should be pleasing an invisible man in the sky because he rage-flooded the world and nuked entire cities into salt when humans did something he doesn't like, and he only decided to stop hitting us when he got mad because we torture-executed his son."
darthrupert 4y ago
> Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis. > Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them. It's like nothing has changed in 100 years.
- cafard 4y ago
  If one takes enrollment in the Nazi party as contradictory to goodness (and I am happy to), then the first sentence is true to that extent. I have my doubts on the happy, secure, and gentlemanly ones, even among the committed, let alone the time-servers. And was Heidegger frustrated and humiliated in the early 1930s? It seems to me that there were quite a few von Thises and zu Thats with names in the Almanach de Gotha who signed up. If she had wished to say "good people don't go Nazi", well and good. To say "nice people" is to bring the argument to the level of esthetics.
timcavel 4y ago
[dead]
Philorandroid 4y ago
>Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. If Thompson's overarching point is that credulity, detachment from reality and moral flexibility are the different symptoms of willingness to support evil, then cheers to that; but unless she was being poetic, I'm not sure making a parlor game of it is conducive to honest judgment.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

41 points by signa11 4y ago

It takes her a while to get there, but eventually it gets around to the cry of the American Liberal: The left are the worst nazis of all.

anigbrowl 4y ago

(1941)

elcritch 4y ago

Interesting given our modern smartphone and TikTok riddled era. Though I’d hope Flynn’s law has raised our collective IQs, I still ponder what we’ve lost in mental discipline in modern days. Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.

csense 4y ago
> His soul has been almost completely neglected. Science is about how the world works, and spirituality is about how to have a good life. Scientific progress is obvious to everyone, but in terms of spirituality we seem to be losing ground. Organized religion has its flaws, and it's generally on the decline. There seems to be no good replacement on offer: - Neoliberal globalism and libertarianism both seem to tacitly endorse a sort of hedonistic nihilism which is good for consumer-driven businesses but is dangerously close to pure utilitarianism as a framework for making moral decisions, especially when tradeoffs are involved. - Conservative spiritualism seems to be about interpreting vague, selectively chosen parts of difficult-to-understand ancient spiritual authority to whip people into a moral frenzy to forcibly impose particular philosophies on an entire society. It's too much about outrage and political benefits, not enough about understanding the intended moral lessons of the ancient texts and the underlying philosophy. We should be finding the parts of those ancient ways of thinking can be improved / adapted to modern society / discarded because they're obsolete. Why is our understanding of how the world works so good that even elementary schoolkids are way more informed about the universe than Plato was, but our understanding of how people should live is so bad that half the population says "Moral philosophy? Meh. Do what feels good and increases GDP and it'll all sort-of work out" and the other half's moral compass says "Follow these thousand-year-old writings in incomprehensible language that tell a vague and self-contradictory sci-fi story about how humanity's ultimate moral objective should be pleasing an invisible man in the sky because he rage-flooded the world and nuked entire cities into salt when humans did something he doesn't like, and he only decided to stop hitting us when he got mad because we torture-executed his son."

darthrupert 4y ago

> Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis. > Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them. It's like nothing has changed in 100 years.

cafard 4y ago
If one takes enrollment in the Nazi party as contradictory to goodness (and I am happy to), then the first sentence is true to that extent. I have my doubts on the happy, secure, and gentlemanly ones, even among the committed, let alone the time-servers. And was Heidegger frustrated and humiliated in the early 1930s? It seems to me that there were quite a few von Thises and zu Thats with names in the Almanach de Gotha who signed up. If she had wished to say "good people don't go Nazi", well and good. To say "nice people" is to bring the argument to the level of esthetics.

timcavel 4y ago

[dead]

Philorandroid 4y ago

>Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. If Thompson's overarching point is that credulity, detachment from reality and moral flexibility are the different symptoms of willingness to support evil, then cheers to that; but unless she was being poetic, I'm not sure making a parlor game of it is conducive to honest judgment.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]