Because no one see's themselves as the villain of their story. All the tyrants of history saw themselves as the good guy doing the right thing and some even believed they were doing it because a high power was telling them to do it.
It's always done in service to a declared "greater good."
Buck v. Bell. "Three generations of imbeciles is enough" case law that stands today as US law. Cited as justification by Nuremberg defendants for their crimes against humanity. Law based on pseudoscience that purifying the gene pool serves the greater good for humanity:
Buck v. Bell. Guides Newgenics biotech today. Found in experimental vaccines, genetic editing, transhumanism. An interesting discussion of how the case law that guided the Final Solution is now guiding the future of humanity...again:
After bearing witness to pandemic health decisions declared for a "greater good," the drive for genital mutilation of children, destruction of food and energy supplies for a declared climate "greater good" do you believe these newgenics biotech efforts are being led by good or bad men?
"V. The Bad Man Test: Putting Limits on Newgenics in the 21st Century
Numerous authors have addressed the ethical issues surrounding “newgenic” practices, and, similar to bioethicist Julie Aultman, encouraged “collective moral deliberation” to address the challenges they present: “[t]o avoid unjust eugenomic practices that discriminate, segregate, disrespect and avoid issues of confidentiality and privacy, subjecting persons to unfair and intolerable treatment, we need to understand which moral principles ought to guide our decisions and actions.”
However, as Aultman points out, typically “ethics lags behind” science, and “this division creates obstacles for serious moral deliberation and critical developments in policy-making involving the social and economic implications of genetic research and technology.”
Maybe we will find that there is too much profit, speed, and power in genomics to keep everyone focused on ethics and morals once someone discovers the secrets to turning humans into non-human species or supermen, creating alien life, achieving immortality, or wiping out entire populations with a single genetic tweak, for example.
Will conversations about ethics and morality be enough to protect society from its own excitement when that happens, or will a stricter approach be warranted?
For inspiration, we might turn back to Justice Holmes. In The Path of the Law, many years prior to his decision in Buck, Holmes described the study of law as a prediction of how the courts will respond to a given action, and suggested that this is how a “bad man” naturally unconcerned with ethics or morals (and only concerned with whether he will have to pay a fine or go to jail) would approach the law. With this, Holmes laid the foundation for American Legal Realism and gave birth to what would be famously known as the “Bad Man Theory” of the law.
With this “bloodless and detached view of the law,” he may also have left for posterity an important insight into how we might need to restrain those who, like Holmes, Priddy, Strode, or Whitehead, while either not concerned with whether what they are doing is right, or fully believing they are doing the right thing, occasionally make widely consequential, harmful choices in the name of science and the greater good."
You're correct, evil people never see themselves as doing evil. Their greatest atrocities are just rationalized and justified by declaring a greater good is served by, "breaking eggs." As the New York Times did in its fawning praise of Stalin:
"Even then, Duranty dismissed more diligent writers’ reports that people were starving. “Conditions are bad, but there is no famine,” he wrote in a dispatch from Moscow in March of 1933 describing the “mess” of collectivization. “But – to put it brutally – you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”"
And those justifications aren’t mere internal to one head, but reinforced across the network via the mechanisms within reputation networks. It’s THEN that one becomes unbudgable, and willing to do crimes against humanity level acts.
Correct. I've shared this with you before, but fits in this context, too. The head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler, wasn't a particularly depraved, evil man. Yet he was responsible for the worst evils of the Nazi regime. He was the epitome of a professional, efficient bureaucratic administrator. Who's supreme skill was organizing job holders and good family men to commit great evil given the appearance of routine jobs. Men who wanted to protect their status in society within their reputation networks. Men who would sacrifice their beliefs, honor and dignity in single-minded devotion to safeguarding their families and private lives. The recipe for crimes against humanity level acts.
Pro tip: There are those atop our societal power centers today who know this history, too. Who read this history as a "how-to" guide. Not as a warning. But I suppose that gets too close to notions of conspiracies that you often caution against. But if it quacks like a duck...
"From "The Origins of Totalitarianism" written in 1951 by Hannah Arent
"Yet totalitarianism in power learned quickly that enterprising spirit was not restricted to the mob strata of the population and that, in any event, such initiative could only be a threat to the total domination of man. Absence of scruple, on the other hand, was not restricted to the mob either and, in any event, could be taught in a relatively short time. For the ruthless machines of domination and extermination, the masses of coordinated philistines provided much better material and were capable of even greater crimes than so-called professional criminals, provided only that these crimes were well organized and assumed the appearance of routine jobs.
It is not fortuitous, then, that the few protests against the Nazis' mass atrocities against the Jews and Eastern European peoples were voiced not by the military men nor by any other part of the coordinated masses of respectable philistines, but precisely by those early comrades of Hitler who were typical representatives of the mob. Nor was Himmler, the most powerful man in Germany after 1936, one of those "armed bohemians" (Heiden) whose features were distressingly similar to those of the intellectual elite. Himmler was himself "more normal," that is, more of a philistine, than any of the original leaders of the Nazi movement.' He was not a bohemian like Goebbels, or a sex criminal like Streicher, or a crackpot like Rosenberg, or a fanatic like Hitler, or an adventurer like Goring. He proved his supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men.
The philistine's retirement into private life, his single-minded devotion to matters of family and career was the last, and already degenerated, product of the bourgeoisie's belief in the primacy of private interest. The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything — belief, honor, dignity— on the slightest provocation. Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives.""
I talk about the Karpman Dreaded Drama Triangle in my substack. It consists of the 3 roles: Persecutor, Victim, and Savior/Rescuer. From what I have seen all the authoritarian persecutors view themselves as the Savior/Rescuers. They see themselves telling the "noble lie" or trying to protect people from some "evil."
Because no one see's themselves as the villain of their story. All the tyrants of history saw themselves as the good guy doing the right thing and some even believed they were doing it because a high power was telling them to do it.
It's always done in service to a declared "greater good."
Buck v. Bell. "Three generations of imbeciles is enough" case law that stands today as US law. Cited as justification by Nuremberg defendants for their crimes against humanity. Law based on pseudoscience that purifying the gene pool serves the greater good for humanity:
https://sci-hub.se/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/106591295300600409
Buck v. Bell. Guides Newgenics biotech today. Found in experimental vaccines, genetic editing, transhumanism. An interesting discussion of how the case law that guided the Final Solution is now guiding the future of humanity...again:
https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1622&context=lawineq\
After bearing witness to pandemic health decisions declared for a "greater good," the drive for genital mutilation of children, destruction of food and energy supplies for a declared climate "greater good" do you believe these newgenics biotech efforts are being led by good or bad men?
"V. The Bad Man Test: Putting Limits on Newgenics in the 21st Century
Numerous authors have addressed the ethical issues surrounding “newgenic” practices, and, similar to bioethicist Julie Aultman, encouraged “collective moral deliberation” to address the challenges they present: “[t]o avoid unjust eugenomic practices that discriminate, segregate, disrespect and avoid issues of confidentiality and privacy, subjecting persons to unfair and intolerable treatment, we need to understand which moral principles ought to guide our decisions and actions.”
However, as Aultman points out, typically “ethics lags behind” science, and “this division creates obstacles for serious moral deliberation and critical developments in policy-making involving the social and economic implications of genetic research and technology.”
Maybe we will find that there is too much profit, speed, and power in genomics to keep everyone focused on ethics and morals once someone discovers the secrets to turning humans into non-human species or supermen, creating alien life, achieving immortality, or wiping out entire populations with a single genetic tweak, for example.
Will conversations about ethics and morality be enough to protect society from its own excitement when that happens, or will a stricter approach be warranted?
For inspiration, we might turn back to Justice Holmes. In The Path of the Law, many years prior to his decision in Buck, Holmes described the study of law as a prediction of how the courts will respond to a given action, and suggested that this is how a “bad man” naturally unconcerned with ethics or morals (and only concerned with whether he will have to pay a fine or go to jail) would approach the law. With this, Holmes laid the foundation for American Legal Realism and gave birth to what would be famously known as the “Bad Man Theory” of the law.
With this “bloodless and detached view of the law,” he may also have left for posterity an important insight into how we might need to restrain those who, like Holmes, Priddy, Strode, or Whitehead, while either not concerned with whether what they are doing is right, or fully believing they are doing the right thing, occasionally make widely consequential, harmful choices in the name of science and the greater good."
You're correct, evil people never see themselves as doing evil. Their greatest atrocities are just rationalized and justified by declaring a greater good is served by, "breaking eggs." As the New York Times did in its fawning praise of Stalin:
https://www.nytco.com/company/prizes-awards/new-york-times-statement-about-1932-pulitzer-prize-awarded-to-walter-duranty/
"Even then, Duranty dismissed more diligent writers’ reports that people were starving. “Conditions are bad, but there is no famine,” he wrote in a dispatch from Moscow in March of 1933 describing the “mess” of collectivization. “But – to put it brutally – you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”"
And those justifications aren’t mere internal to one head, but reinforced across the network via the mechanisms within reputation networks. It’s THEN that one becomes unbudgable, and willing to do crimes against humanity level acts.
Correct. I've shared this with you before, but fits in this context, too. The head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler, wasn't a particularly depraved, evil man. Yet he was responsible for the worst evils of the Nazi regime. He was the epitome of a professional, efficient bureaucratic administrator. Who's supreme skill was organizing job holders and good family men to commit great evil given the appearance of routine jobs. Men who wanted to protect their status in society within their reputation networks. Men who would sacrifice their beliefs, honor and dignity in single-minded devotion to safeguarding their families and private lives. The recipe for crimes against humanity level acts.
Pro tip: There are those atop our societal power centers today who know this history, too. Who read this history as a "how-to" guide. Not as a warning. But I suppose that gets too close to notions of conspiracies that you often caution against. But if it quacks like a duck...
"From "The Origins of Totalitarianism" written in 1951 by Hannah Arent
https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism/mode/2up
From pages 337-338
"Yet totalitarianism in power learned quickly that enterprising spirit was not restricted to the mob strata of the population and that, in any event, such initiative could only be a threat to the total domination of man. Absence of scruple, on the other hand, was not restricted to the mob either and, in any event, could be taught in a relatively short time. For the ruthless machines of domination and extermination, the masses of coordinated philistines provided much better material and were capable of even greater crimes than so-called professional criminals, provided only that these crimes were well organized and assumed the appearance of routine jobs.
It is not fortuitous, then, that the few protests against the Nazis' mass atrocities against the Jews and Eastern European peoples were voiced not by the military men nor by any other part of the coordinated masses of respectable philistines, but precisely by those early comrades of Hitler who were typical representatives of the mob. Nor was Himmler, the most powerful man in Germany after 1936, one of those "armed bohemians" (Heiden) whose features were distressingly similar to those of the intellectual elite. Himmler was himself "more normal," that is, more of a philistine, than any of the original leaders of the Nazi movement.' He was not a bohemian like Goebbels, or a sex criminal like Streicher, or a crackpot like Rosenberg, or a fanatic like Hitler, or an adventurer like Goring. He proved his supreme ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good family men.
The philistine's retirement into private life, his single-minded devotion to matters of family and career was the last, and already degenerated, product of the bourgeoisie's belief in the primacy of private interest. The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything — belief, honor, dignity— on the slightest provocation. Nothing proved easier to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding their private lives.""
I talk about the Karpman Dreaded Drama Triangle in my substack. It consists of the 3 roles: Persecutor, Victim, and Savior/Rescuer. From what I have seen all the authoritarian persecutors view themselves as the Savior/Rescuers. They see themselves telling the "noble lie" or trying to protect people from some "evil."