25-26 Sep 2010
I woke up at 7:00 PM, after sleeping for about 9 hours. It was good to catch up on that, although I'll probably have to wake up around 12:00 PM tomorrow for a family event. Falling asleep at 10 AM one day, waking up at 12 the next? Fun!
Now that I'm finished with Machete Season, I've been reflecting on my reasons for reading it in the first place. I was looking for the key to what caused these people to kill, a switch that flips and turns ordinary people into dedicated mass murderers. I haven't found such a clear-cut answer, and I'm not sure if there really is one. If anything, it seems that drawing a distinction between "normal people" and "killers" is misguided - here, there was no real difference. Everyday citizens spent weeks hunting down and slaughtering people every day. They approached it as just another job, with no serious thought to the fact that they were killing other human beings and no genuine moral consideration of this. They did it because they were told to, and they obeyed without much hesitance, and hacking people apart soon became normal for them. Hundreds of thousands of citizens quickly transitioned from their peaceful, everyday lives to slaughtering their neighbors en masse. So many people participated that some have been released from prison after only a few years, sometimes less - it's difficult to imprison that much of a nation. Many more were never even tried.
The only answer I've gotten from this is almost unthinkable, one that nobody wants to hear. It makes me scared of humanity. Not scared for it - scared of it. Quite simply, many people will readily kill others for no good reason and can be convinced to do so without a great deal of effort. By and large, the killers of Rwanda still give no thought to their victims whatsoever, and are concerned only with themselves. They have no meaningful grasp of the horror and moral weight of what they've done. To put it bluntly, these people are terrible assholes, and the author made this quite clear. They had no qualms about killing people at the time, and they still don't seem to. They likely wouldn't have stopped of their own accord if they didn't have to. The genocide was accepted as a regular part of their lives, hardly troubling to them at all.
This is why it concerns me when people dismiss the possibility that Uganda's attempts to institute the death penalty for homosexuality will result in a genocide. When the government itself declares that a certain group of people deserve to die, and defines their very existence as criminal, and moreover requires that everyone must report these people to the authorities, what exactly do you think is going to happen? It's a statement that these people are literally too dangerous, too threatening to be left alive and must be exterminated, and that it's everyone's duty to facilitate this. People can indeed be driven to genocide, with surprising ease, and a message like this only serves to hasten the progression to outright extermination. It specifically weakens or removes any barriers to killing the targeted group, and explicitly says that this is desirable. And yet many are unwilling to believe that such a thing could really happen, even though it has so many times before. The universe allows these things to happen, it does nothing to prevent them. And as long as people refuse to recognize that this is a distinct possibility, they'll see no need to try and avert it before it can happen.
"Quite simply, many people will readily kill others for no good reason and can be convinced to do so without a great deal of effort."
As far as I understand it, in most cases really just two necessary conditions need to be in place, for such things to happen
-approval of an authority figure(/peer group/society)
-missing(/ineffective) disapproval/rules against it from within the peer group/society
just look at
-the Stanford prison experiment
-the Milgram experiment
-the "third wave" highschool experiment
...
when people then get handed power over others without consequences,
they have the tendency to see those others not as equal feeling beings anymore and loose thereby their empathy towards them
Zinna, I finally came to a realization just a very few years ago: Humans are nothing more than clever apes. We are incredibly clever, no challenge there! But we are still just primates ruled by urges and "group-think." I will not think of Humans otherwise until we can manage to give up the "Us v Them" mentality or territorial squabbles. With 6.8 BILLION people, this planet is just too small for our species to not grow the hell up.
Rebecca and DeHerg are correct. From the standpoint of sapience, the human race hasn't advanced one inch from the mindless instincts of the hominids shuffling about the African savannas 2 million years ago: all virtues for the local group, undying violent hatred for those not of the local group, even if they look and behave just like you. Just as baboons and gibbons live today.
But this realization does not necessarily demand the death sentence for advanced mindfulness. Exceptions *are* possible (if rare enough). As an example, DeHerg mentioned the Milgram experiments, a terrifying condemnation of the possibilities of human understanding. Yet as damning as it was (follow the yin-yang here), there was one photon of illumination. At the version of the experiment conducted at Princeton, there was one student who refused to administer any shocks at all! This student's name was Ron Ridenhour.
A predicted anomaly, you say? Random contrariness? Perhaps. But as Jonathan Glover pointed out in his 'Moral History of the Twentieth Century,' this is the same Ron Ridenhour who, years later, was the primary whistle-blower at the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, and in whose name today the Ridenhour awards are presented to truth-tellers in journalism.
If true, this is equally powerful evidence that we are all not doomed to hairless monkey hell, but we *can* change our awareness--just as the reality of those few of us here following ZJ's light is evidence of the same.
But never doubt it would only take a few exclamations from the appropriately-baritoned, disembodied voice emanating from an AM radio to send all of us to mass unmarked graves. *Never* doubt that.
That is why the ideals of the Enlightenment and human reason must *never* be allowed to wiped from the Earth in blood (or apathy) ... it's the only way to get here from the African plains.
Sadly, the *species* can't grow up. Not in the time available before we extinguish ourselves, one way or another. The species changes only thru the incredibly slow process of evolution.
Individuals can grow up, but we have to raise each and every one right for that to save us. :(
ZJ, a Christian recently defended the genocides in the Old Testament by saying, "They deserved it because THEY were the evil ones!" So every man, woman, child, and animal was evil and deserved to be slaughtered. It's as simple as that. What a loving and wonderful religion Christianity is.
Did you see the 1980s science fiction movie "They Live"? It was a pretty good movie. It was about aliens, but the underlying theme was "do not question authority" and "no independent thought." In America today, ignorance seems to be revered and encouraged, and this whole concept of just accepting without question is very fashionable.
I feel very much like you do. I am also somewhat "scared of humanity." Humans can be very violent and blood thirsty.
When I was a kid, my dad always wanted to have dogs around for some reason. So he'd occasionally come home with a puppy and I, being a kid, would immediately fall in love with it. Over time, and because my father was generally too drunk to actually attempt to train it, the dog would start cramping in the house and/or digging in the yard. After my father reached a certain frustration level with this, he would simply shoot the dog. I would hear a gunshot and my beloved friend and companion of several months would be gone. This happened at least 5 times in the corse of my childhood.
My point in relaying this story is this: My father had been raised from a very early age to believe that animals were disposable. His father would head out and kill an animal as a normal course of his day. Chickens, pigs, cows, goats, etc for food. Drown a bunch of kittens or puppies. My father had the inherent belief that these creatures were disposable because he'd been raised that way.
The same applies to this massacre. Those who perpetrated it, truly believed that those they were attacking were non-people. They'd been raised to believe that. Just like most Americans are raised to believe that cattle, which are slaughtered by tens of thousands every day, are acceptable losses. They're disposable.
That's the reason. Is it evil? Absolutely. Religion is the primary way that a person can be lead to think that other people are disposable. They can be convinced that their enemy have no souls. They can be convinced that their enemy will have a better home in the afterlife. That can be convinced that their enemy was in league with the enemy of their deity. A person will believe these things without thinking, if they're instilled as truth when they're very young.
I wonder if its possible to determine if the part of our brains that controls empathy/conscience can be completely switched off in certain situations. I know that a lot of mental disorders have been said to be the cause of certain modules in the brain either being defaulted to off since birth or being switched off because of brain damage. Is it possible for the concept of "other" to be the right "trigger" that switches these modules on/off? I think it would be a good explanation as to why these events are seemingly unexplainable... We obviously can't see what's going on in a murderers brain when they finally snap and do decide to kill. I wonder, if we located that part of the brain and found a way to control the switch or found what triggers the switch... What would be the consequences of that. We can argue about morality, but I think its pretty clear that someone who murders is "out of their mind", so to speak... Whether they be narcissistic or anti-social or any other description. Those who are diagnosed as psychopaths are said to exhibit no empathy toward their victims, which allows them to commit unspeakable acts and even enjoy doing them, on a level that's absolutely horrifying to someone who is not a psychopath. But could we all be potential psychopaths?
"Is it possible for the concept of "other" to be the right "trigger" that switches these modules on/off?"
yes, I think so. Since empathy is the ability to set yourself in someone else's position, you can interrupt that process by convincing yourself that this would be impossible due to the (perceived)different nature of the "other". And this different nature doesn´t necessarily mean inferior(as femigaytheist implys) a perceived superiority can trigger this lack of empathy just as well (which is I think the case in the Rwanda genocide, Tutsi were for centurys the upper class there)
btw I have to switch of my empathy off from times to times as well because otherwise I could not sustain my mental health while reading some of the news about the world or (younger) history
(this is just self defense because otherwise I would curl to a screaming ball by hearing the word Africa or for example Uzbekistan alone)
Maybe they're not "ordinary people." Maybe they're people who have been brought up to believe that their lives are fragile and meaningless and violence is normal. Perhaps their everyday lives and security and so forth were the deviation from the norm.
I must admit, my first thought at seeing the title was that you had snapped after going off piracetam, blacked out, and woke up surrounded by bodies.
Unfortuneately mother nature gave us humans the urge to kill others not of our "kind" as explained somewhat in the book "The Lucifer Principle": A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History by Howard K. Bloom. His second book, "Global brain" is a creepy concept!
I have yet to read the book "Machete Season" but I cannot imagine how people could go on a mass killing spree of their own fellow citizens.How can people attack and massacre innocent people just because there were told to or because they blamed these people for real or imagined injustices?It is even more difficult to believe that many people who did these things never faced justice and are walking around free today.But Rwanda has changed from it's past .Here is a short paragraph from an article on wikepedia on Rwanda,
In 2009, a CNN report labeled Rwanda as Africa's biggest success story, having achieved stability, economic growth (average income has tripled in the past ten years) and international integration. In 2007, Fortune magazine published an article titled "Why CEOs Love Rwanda."The capital, Kigali, is the first city in Africa to be awarded the Habitat Scroll of Honor Award in the recognition of its "cleanliness, security and urban conservation model." In 2008, Rwanda became the first country to elect a national legislature in which a majority of members were women.
I hope what hapened there many years ago never happens again there or anywhere else in the world.I worked with many immigrants from africa and I'm surprised but their hard work ethic,positive attitude,some people I've worked with who were born and raised in this country are severely lacking these things.
I am most definitely afraid of humanity. I've been the recipient of some of it and am under no illusions about how nasty we can become. I also know what some of us will do, to stop it continuing. I'd be hard put to decide which is more dangerous when all is said and done.
God is real.
And you are a idoit.
You're a douche, and you do look like woman.
YOU FUCKING SUCK