I’ve always been a libertarian, and so naturally take to the wisdom of designing government in such a way that it’s self-limiting, self-correcting, and so on. And although I have some natural appreciation of the dangers of mass hysteria (as I discuss here
Yes I agree we need to find hysteria-robust forms of government. The more I reflect and observe people the stranger it becomes. Just now I watched a chap saying "as soon as you appeal to loony bin Nazi comparisons you've lost any rational argument" (that's paraphrased but fair I think). And yet, in the 20th century we can find at least 3 events (Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Cultural Revolution) in which millions of people were caught up in *something* -we can call whatever we want; let's call it mass psychosis.
Now given that this happened, how in the world is it irrational to assume it might happen again? I think there's a hidden moral assumption, which is that the Nazis were sub-human - we in the modern, clever, technologically advanced liberal democracies are better people than the Nazis, we are inherently immune to behaving as they did, and as such it is in fact immoral and crazy to even compare us.
Which if course is precisely one of the underlying psycho-social conditions that led to the behaviour of past mass psychosis; othering another group of humans.
As soon as you rule out any hypothesis about the world a priori you've lost the rational argument.
Maybe we should look at it like this: "given the risk of mass psychosis and the difficulty of detecting a mass psychosis before it develops to the point where atrocities are committed, the burden of proof is on the person claiming we *aren't* in a mass psychosis at any point in time". It certainly can't be assumed at the outset that *we* would never turn into the monsters that *they* did.
Yes I agree we need to find hysteria-robust forms of government. The more I reflect and observe people the stranger it becomes. Just now I watched a chap saying "as soon as you appeal to loony bin Nazi comparisons you've lost any rational argument" (that's paraphrased but fair I think). And yet, in the 20th century we can find at least 3 events (Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Cultural Revolution) in which millions of people were caught up in *something* -we can call whatever we want; let's call it mass psychosis.
Now given that this happened, how in the world is it irrational to assume it might happen again? I think there's a hidden moral assumption, which is that the Nazis were sub-human - we in the modern, clever, technologically advanced liberal democracies are better people than the Nazis, we are inherently immune to behaving as they did, and as such it is in fact immoral and crazy to even compare us.
Which if course is precisely one of the underlying psycho-social conditions that led to the behaviour of past mass psychosis; othering another group of humans.
As soon as you rule out any hypothesis about the world a priori you've lost the rational argument.
Maybe we should look at it like this: "given the risk of mass psychosis and the difficulty of detecting a mass psychosis before it develops to the point where atrocities are committed, the burden of proof is on the person claiming we *aren't* in a mass psychosis at any point in time". It certainly can't be assumed at the outset that *we* would never turn into the monsters that *they* did.