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Iain Davis's avatar

Trolls and bots are not welcome!

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Evelyn K. Brunswick's avatar

To an otherwise excellent introduction I have two issues.

1/ You wrote: "The ease with which some of us applaud indiscriminate slaughter is not a religious or cultural problem, it is a human problem."

You are utterly psychologically wrong here. And it's something which really gets my goat. Partly because it's always the people who make these blatant generalisations about 'human nature having a dark side' who would say 'oh but I don't mean myself, obviously'. It's always 'others'.

The truth is that it IS a 'religious or cultural' problem - specifically, it's a CULT problem. We do humanity a massive disservice if we allow these ideologies to be given the get out clause of 'religion'.

Furthermore, it's almost bordering on the awful Pinker-esque calumny that humans were murderous barbarians in their natural form before 'civilisation' (law and order etc.) came along. As an sort-of anarchist, Iain, I would've thought you'd find that view insulting. Law and order hasn't been used, historically, to 'contain human nature's natural tendency to barbarism', but quite the opposite - it has been used for social control, and to ironically provide an excuse for barbarism practiced by the minority ruling classes (who call themselves a State).

If you want to understand what might make otherwise normal human beings support evil things, then you MUST understand it in terms of the subversive effect of CULT-like ideologies. Human nature, in its natural setting, is beautiful, peaceful, harmonious, cooperative and so on.

I'll do a 2/ as separate.

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