1. You see others do it and feel compelled not to be taken advantage of
2. You start with small things as escalate
3. You normalize the behavior in one context and then it expands to other context.
This feels like it's following similar patterns of normalization
Even if it's not direct death, which, with at 4000lb car is certainly a possibility, it can indirectly cause severe repercussions. If you ruin someone's car they might not be able to get to work. They lose value in their car even if repaired. Repairs are never 100%. They also have to deal with all the time dealing with the time dealing with accident itself and time dealing with repairs etc. Time they could have spent earning a living or taking care of loved ones.
Yesterday I was at a 1 lane road where there's enough room on the right to squeeze in for a right turn. A driver squeezed to that right turn area on the red. Then on the green they went through the light and illegally passed all other cars. I see this kind of stuff daily.
Another one I see regularly. There's left turn lane with a left turn arrow. The lane to the right of the left turn lane is NOT a left turn lane, yet random drivers turn left from it. It's more common to see them turn left when there's the green turn signal but I've seen them turn left when the left turn signal is red.
Another that escalated over the years is cutting across multiple lanes of traffic and the painted barrier to take a freeway exit at the last second.
"The abuse of entrusted power for private gain"
Jaywalking is breaking the law, but it is not corruption.
Civil disobedience is also typically breaking the law, but is not corruption.
It is important to recognize that just because a system is codified in law does not mean that it is not corrupt.
This is well evidenced in the development of asian countries in the 20th century. South Korea has plenty of corruption at a high level. But it’s clean at the lower level, and as a result it’s been able to become a rich society. By contrast, India has crippling corruption at lowest levels of society that imposes a huge drag on routine transactions and daily life.
Combined with this elected King George III presidential nonsense (not just king in general either, specifically the powers George III had in the 1780s) and I despair sometimes. Get yourselves a decent parliamentary system. If you avoid proportional representation it works fine. Unfortunately the US population is somehow convinced the current US system is modern and up to date. They'll probably still think that in another 200 years.
So, if you want PR you have to either: Have two distinct classes of MP: Some were directly elected and represent an area, others are just to make the up proportions - but obviously these are just worse right? Second class MPs.
OR Abolish the constituencies entirely, now nobody represents your area and its particular concerns, or everybody does, which as we know amounts to the same thing because of how dilution works.
Unlike other electoral reforms a PR system has deeper implications far beyond the elections themselves. Historically the UK actually didn't have a single electoral system for every constituency, and that was fine†, indeed it works fine in the US today, the thing which needs to be coherent is what happens after the election and PR meddles with that.
† Well, not "fine", this is the era of the famous "Rotten Boroughs" but the fact that the system varies from one place to another wasn't key there.
From dissent of disagreeing SCOTUS justice: "absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love."
IMO that's not the case, because if a legislation looses its intended focus, it gains a lot of arbitrariness in return. The more interpretations you consider valid, the more options you can choose from when applying it.
So, obviously, the legislation had to be returned to a single interpretation, the one Congress intended (or the one the court thinks is the best if you believe courts should hold legislative power).
Which leads directly to the second issue: Which was the interpretation Congress intended?
> From dissent of disagreeing SCOTUS justice: "absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today’s Court could love."
The majority opinion analyses this issue with 6 different approaches, including a textual one, arriving at similar conclusions from each.
The dissenting opinion on the other hand argues, that all other approaches but the textual one should be rejected.
The dissenting opinion's textual interpretation strongly asserts, that Congress intended with "accepts or agrees to accept, anything of value from any person, intending to be influenced or rewarded" to address both bribes (intending to be influenced) and gratitudes (intending to be rewarded).
The majority opinion argues that if you were to divorce the concept of a reward from the prior intent during the influenced/rewarded actions in a statute that criminalizes accepting something of value rather than the intent itself (because how would that even be possible?), you end up with a situation in which being promised something of value, but only receiving it after the influenced actions have been completed, would no longer fulfill the requirements to be considered a bribe.
Basically the majority argues that if they are correct (666 being a bribery rather than a combined bribery + gratitudes statute), Congress still would have had to use language at least equivalent to the one at hand and therefore additional tests to deduce the intent of the 99th Congress can not be disregarded.
This is unfathomably ridiculous and you know it. Profoundly bad faith argument.
And when I was a teacher that was strict guidelines on what gifts you can receive. Usually under a certain limit it’s fine. If it is too expensive you have to report it.
The question the court looked at: Did Congress intend "receiving gifts as a bribe" and "receiving gifts as gratitude" to be two separate crimes for non-federal employees as it is the case for federal ones (In which case handling the issue would have been left up to the states)?
The majority opinion refused to consider the moral argument (although they snuck it in in their argument on a lack of fair notice), but IMO that's by far the most intuitive one, when you allow yourself to look at the problem from the legislative perspective. By looking at the extremes it becomes very clear that there are two very different problems:
Imagine a group of students doing much better than their peers on their final exam thanks to the efforts of their teacher and they gift him a "Best teacher ever" mug.
But now reverse the causality:
Imagine a teacher demanding to be gifted a "Best teacher ever" mug before putting extra effort into preparing his students for their final exam. The group that gifted him the mug does much better than their peers as a result.
IMO these should be two very different crimes, but there is also a valid argument that they are about equivalent, as pursued by the dissenting opinion.
But that's not something a court should legislate.
A gift as a thank-you, post-hoc, where the prosecution cannot prove the gift was part of an effort to "corruptly" influence a prior decision, was always fine under any interpretation.
If students said "if you give us a good grade, then we'll give you a Best Teacher Ever mug," that is functionally identical to a bribe but is now legal.
The majority opinion argues that this is one of the primary differences between a bribe and a gift of gratitude.
> A gift as a thank-you, post-hoc, where the prosecution cannot prove the gift was part of an effort to "corruptly" influence a prior decision, was always fine under any interpretation.
No, which is a large part of this whole argument. The interpretation the government used and was (indirectly) backed by the minority opinion, was, that the statute would not cover "innocuous or obviously benign" gratuities. But what counts as "innocuous or obviously benign" was never established. And this "innocuous or obviously benign" line is EXACTLY what distinguished between whether a gratitude was accepted with a corrupt state of mind.
And that's where we arrive back at the core of the problem.
For a bribe, the question of whether or not a corrupt state of mind existed can be judged at minimum by if the official act was corrupted. Usually this standard doesn't exist for gratitudes. These do not require a corrupt state of mind to be criminal, but their criminality derives solely from the heightened standard of responsibility of an official when performing official duties. Just like a heightened standard of responsibility when operating a motor vehicle or carrying.
> If students said "if you give us a good grade, then we'll give you a Best Teacher Ever mug," that is functionally identical to a bribe but is now legal.
Not really a good example, because unless that's something like a theater performance there is basically no way forward from this, which could end with the teacher handing out good grades and receiving a mug from these students without this scenario becoming bribery.
And gratitudes do not become legal in general. It's just that the involvement of the federal government ends and states are now free to handle such cases however they think is appropriate.
Easy: someone would complain and a court would decide based on the specifics of the situation. Most laws work this way and cannot actually resolve based on a programmatic list of facts.
> Not really a good example, because unless that's something like a theater performance there is basically no way forward from this, which could end with the teacher handing out good grades and receiving a mug from these students without this scenario becoming bribery.
Are you arguing that grading (outside of "something like a theater performance") is fully objective? Because... it's not.
One can even consider the never ending Ethics classes in college an ironic form of corruption that never teaches anything we don't already know by secondary school, but used to pad credit numbers and tuition revenue.
Astute. When the average person is asked to imagine how corrupt leaders operate, I think they tend to overemphasize the effectiveness of simple violence. To foster a corruption that will last, you have to mold the circumstances so that corruption is the only option that makes sense.
You need only look at the bureaucracies in countries which rank high on the corruption index. Most join to just earn a livelihood but are soon "socialized into corruption".
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption#Causes
Per R. Klitgaard corruption will occur if the corrupt gain is greater than the punitive damages multiplied by the likelihood of being caught and prosecuted.
Since a high degree of monopoly and discretion accompanied by a low degree of transparency does not automatically lead to corruption, a fourth variable of "morality" or "integrity" has been introduced by others. The moral dimension has an intrinsic component and refers to a "mentality problem", and an extrinsic component referring to circumstances like poverty, inadequate remuneration, inappropriate work conditions and inoperable or over-complicated procedures which demoralize people and let them search for "alternative" solutions.
The references section has lots of links for further study of which Robert Klitgaard's Controlling Corruption is a classic with case studies.
One thing i would like to know more of is how Technology either reduces or exacerbates corruption.
On the whole, i feel technology has been a corruption mitigater since it reduces the human factor (i.e. the motivation/cause) from the process chain. This has been validated in my own personal experience.
On the flip side, when used by people-in-control it concentrates power in the hands of the few and its non-linear disproportionate effects can exacerbate the problem tremendously eg. various Internet based scams.
PS: Are emerging technologies helping win the fight against corruption? A review of the state of evidence - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016762452...
Systems Thinking provides a holistic view of the interactions contributing to an outcome expressed as a Causal Loop Diagram (CLD). The CLD developed using Systems Thinking shows the full complexity of the problem at hand, and then simplifications are necessary to create a working quantitative System Dynamics simulation. Figure 1 was developed based on 43 in-depth interviews and 155 survey interviews with government officials, aid agencies, civil society organizations, business people, lawyers, and the general public in Pakistan. It shows the complete set of relationships considered to represent the problem of corruption in a nation.
In the CLD, connections with directed arrows imply that a change in the tail variable leads to a change in the variable at the head of the arrow. An arrow labelled with polarity ‘+’ means changes in the same direction. Increasing the tail variable increases the head variable, and decreasing the tail variable decreases the head variable.
On the other hand, ‘-’ implies changes in the opposite direction. For example, increasing the tail variable decreases the head variable, and decreasing the tail variable increases the head variable.
These connections create highly non-linear behaviour because feedback loops develop where a change in one variable in the model will ripple through the cause-and-effect structure to return to its source and either reinforce or inhibit the change.
The reinforcing feedback loop is labelled with an ‘R’ and inhibiting or balancing feedback loops with a ‘B’.
Connecting these loops often leads to emergent and unexpected behaviours in the system.
For example if the organization is self-financing it breeds corruption.
If an entity mediates between buyers and sellers it can't be financed by sellers.
It should be fairly easy to compose that list by observing corrupt and underperforming setups that are already entrenched.
Corporate crime generally can coexist with a functioning system, even while it drains the prosperity of society, but street crime will just dissolve the society overnight. People physically abandon locations with high street crime.
A corrupt system is still a system, meaning that in theory it operates to produce something of value for society (e.g. in addition to lying about climate change, causing cancer, and blocking renewable energy via lawfare and propaganda, BP provides a colossal amount of fuel for society) but street crime produces nothing and destroys community outright at the local level.
You can list these connected problems all day.
Exactly. Which is why
> ... street crime will just dissolve the society overnight
is false. Street crime is also generally limited to poor areas and people who can't move out will be the first victims. Street crime does not dissolve trust at the societal level, it just dissolve trust of everyone into a few segments of the population (whose members are also now the first victims of that loss of trust)
Whereas corruption is a cancer that takes hold of all institutions as anyone and you might need to leave your country altogether when it becomes a third world hellhole.
"How can a group hold a worldview so at odds with the wider culture and not appear to be greatly conflicted by it? The answer may lie in the distinction between particularism and universalism. An individual develops social identities specific to the social domains, groups and roles – and accompanying subcultures – that he or she occupies (e.g. manager, mother, parishioner, sports fan). [...]
In the case of corruption, this myopia means that an otherwise ethically-minded individual may forsake universalistic or dominant norms about ethical behavior in favor of particularistic behaviors that favor his or her group at the expense of outsiders. [...]
This tendency to always put the ingroup above all others clearly paves the way for collective corruption."
"To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”"
https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud
Empathy, while important in my opinion personally, often doesn't matter to certain people. So you have to decrease the prestige associated with unethical behavior, above and beyond it being unethical per se.
That will result in feigned virtue and Pharisaical letter-of-the-law sophistry. You can't secure morality by system and incentive alone, as important as these may be (the law is a teacher). Indeed, if you try to attain virtue by appealing to crooked desires, then you've already subverted the very preconditions of the moral life.
But I will say this: today, we often view morality as some made-up "rules" and artificial constraints that usually don't have anything to do with much of life. Being intelligent is often seen as opposed to being good: the good man is imagined as a chump, while the intelligent man is crafty. But that's just an expression of ignorance, including ignorance of what is actually good for human beings. It is not good for a man to be immoral. Immorality is self-harm.
Morality is a matter of every decision we make. Ethics is practical philosophy concerned with how one lives. Every decision is a matter of morality. When making a decision, why choose one way or another? Well, at the very least, we make what we take to be a good or the best choice. Of course, the immoral man presents something bad or worse as good or better in his own mind in order to be able to choose it. That's why people rationalize the evil choices they intend to make. But the aim and orientation of the will is the good, and so the evil man must first bullshit himself.
In that sense, to choose the good is to choose wisely which is indeed a kind of competence that requires knowledge, wisdom, and humility (which is to say, a sober view of reality, and that includes oneself). Indeed, the first classical cardinal virtue is prudence, which is the habit (as in possessed and actualized excellence) of being able to determine the right decision in a situation. And the right decision is always a moral one.
Prudence itself is the cornerstone of the remaining cardinal virtues: one cannot be just without first being prudent; one cannot be courageous without first being just; and one cannot be temperate without first being courageous. You need to know what is right before you can be just, as what is wrong is never just; you need to be just before you can be courageous, as bravado or recklessness are not courage; and you need courage to be temperate, as you cannot act as you ought if you don't have the courage to do so.
So, what we really need is an authentic moral education and a culture that ceases to fear a robust and sound morality rooted in the objectively real, because it sees it as a threat to its misguided notion of "liberty". We must reconnect with classical tradition so that we can profit from its insights and its wisdom and return to a dialogue spanning centuries and millennia. We cannot do it alone, and things will never be perfect, but this will give us strength to face the immorality of the world - and above all, in ourselves - and a foundation for a healthier culture.
Perhaps morality is just the playpen boundaries of enfeebled apes, playing amongst themselves in luxury, thinking they've overcome some aspect of their nature since they barely need to move around at all.
Structured interactions lead to better results, chaotic actions lead to chaos. Ethics/morality is part of that structure that lets us achieve more together than individually.
if you think living in that structure is enfeebling: I highly question what you desire to do that results in that feeling.
Raising the stakes just increases the pressure to cheat (and not get caught).
https://www.niskanencenter.org/are-we-overproducing-elites-a...
You may be supremely competent but unlucky enough to be born at the wrong time, to the wrong family, competing with the wrong people, to rise to the level that you feel you deserve.
1. What are elites?
2. What are elites for? Why do they exist?
We can't really talk about "overproduction" of elites without knowing the answers to these questions.
Elites are meant to be guardians and servants of the common good. This is why traditionally, we spoke of the nobility: they were supposed to protect the common good for the good of society and model virtue so that others had a point of tangible reference. In order to do that, you needed to be properly educated. Not technically trained, but educated, which is something relatively rare in proportion to the vast numbers who are pushed through compulsory schooling and even university.
So, are we "overproducing elites"? Given how mediocre our "elites" generally are, I would suspect that we have rather an underproduction of them, and instead an overproduction of the vacuously credentialed.
One obstacle, of course, is that in a modern liberal culture, we are forced into a kind of impotence when speaking about the common good. On the one hand, modern liberalism imposes its own measure of the good life that elevates liberty for its own sake - divorced from any tradition and any objective measure - as the end of human life. Indeed, tradition is caricatured as an obstacle that impedes liberty rather than as a liberating dialogue spanning centuries and millennia that helps us orient our lives by sharing with us the wisdom of out predecessors.
On the other, this very hostility toward tradition or any objective normative claims (which are unavoidable; see first point) acts as a corrosive agent that impoverishes and constrains the scope of legitimate political discussion. Over time, this scope has been whittled down to economics. Everything else is privatized. Of course, the inevitable effect is that economics them begins to swallow up everything else. Everything is recast as an economic issue, and the human good is confined to economic categories. This explains the rise of consumerism, because a society whose common good can only be a matter of economics, and one that recasts all of life and reduces it to economics, can only comprehend the good life as a matter of consumption. This is a recipe for misery and delusion, of course, but the is the necessary result.
In such a culture, wisdom and what counts as elite are measured in economic terms. Universities become institutions not for liberating human beings by developing reason, virtue, and understanding, but ostensibly tickets to "economic success". Billionaires are our aristocracy, not because they are excellent or virtuous or duty-bound to serve in that capacity by virtue of their rank, but because in a consumerist society, money is magical. This is interesting, because traditionally, the nobility was often prohibited from engaging in trade and commerce. It was seen as beneath their position. If an aristocrat was wealthy, his wealth was not what conferred onto him his rank.
An elite only exists in order to serve the common good. That is its only legitimate reason for being.
Now let us return to the original question...
Is prestige the number one motivator only statistically?
In other words is it the number one motivator for 31% percent of the college students that were tested and lets say empathy was at 29%?
Misanthropy and bald self interest gets overplayed I think. Often times because it allows bad actors to normalize and justify their own misanthropy.
Presenting this kind of unbacked, unqualified anecdotal data is great for "edgy truthtellers" but also deeply poisoning the well.
These studies indicate that because prestige provides a mutually beneficial social structure, humans are heavily driven to obtain it through the demonstration of valued skills.
-T.S. Eliot
Join my networking group, pass on some info in return for money or vice-versa, turn a blind eye to abuse even if you are not involved....
And at least according to Wikipedia, Acton's positions on the Confederacy and slavery were very mainstream for English Catholics of the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)
And Britain's record on slavery is both far more complex, and far less bad, than many modern ideologues might have us believe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron
"I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo. "
Particularly when in context, the war was caused by the South acting to usurp abolition in the North via the legal system (i.e. Dredd Scott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott)
The importance and applicability of "states rights" is always oddly narrow.
You see this with political opinions. People generally don't think very deeply about politics. They generally reflect the political sensibilities of the in-group they aspire to remain part of or aspire to join. It's a signal. A reasonably intelligent person can make the distinction between signal and genuinely informed opinion, but often, and especially among the poseurs, it's not about the truth value of an opinion. It is about the signal. This is the very definition of bullshit: something said with total indifference to its truth value, and only valued for its instrumental usefulness.
But as I bank years in the adult world, as a worker and a neighbor, I've been progressively disillusioned. I don't find universalism to be a common viewpoint. I've found it to be very rare that anyone wants to be my "brother" or "sister". And sometimes those that seem to, end up being exploitative, callous, or strictly fair-weather.
I'm not resentful or anything. I have a happy family and a few close-ish friends, and life feels full. But I can understand how the loneliness and coldness of the world makes people more particularist. People may think: "if the world acts like it owes me nothing, then what do I owe the world?"
Also, according to psychologists, one negative experience outweighs roughly five positive experiences of the same magnitude. So, as we get older, we might have tendency to accumulate negative experiences, and as a result become more cynical and less idealistic. And so it kind of perpetuates.
It's still worth it to try - I find it difficult to give up completely. Most people I meet are not evil, and it's not like you're going to make it out alive at the end regardless.
I am like that, I stand more on the disillusioned/disappointed side but on the other hand let's not for forget that individuals diverge quite a lot from one another and that for some "Everyone's in it for themselves" has not been a sad conclusion but happy justification for their behavior.
Underneath, people are overwhelmingly just in it for themselves, and judge others by how closely they align with their personal set of "whats best for me" ideals.
Collectivism means the subordination of individual autonomy to the governance of the collective according to the needs of the collective. You’re a cog in a machine and your purpose is to serve the collective—starting with your family and radiating in rings out from there. I’m not sure Americans can even understand the collective mindset, much less practice it.
In my collectivist culture, the answer to those questions is "just deal with it." That's the bargain of a collectivist society. The collective will support you, but in return you owe the collective a complex web of social obligations from birth. I happen to think it makes sense,[1] but I'm not trying to persuade you to live in a collectivist society. I'm just explaining the concept.
[1] I'm married to someone from the polar opposite culture: an Anglo-Protestant from the west coast of the U.S. She once explained to our kids that they didn't have to give family members hugs if they didn't want to. She called it "bodily autonomy." I found this concept extremely bizarre.
I'm speaking about 20 years ago, when getting any kind of peer or social circle respect had the prerequisite of subscribing to socialist utopian ideals, and it wasn't something that was hard to foster in America's dead-end job work culture (which is where you work when you are young). This is urban/suburban America, where most people live.
From what I can tell this was the same with Boomers (they were the OG hippies afterall) and I see the same ideas in today's crop of young people.
The youth however hold little sway over the direction of the country, they're not actually that invested, so by the time they are having an impact, many have already received their first shots of the euphoric side of American capitalism, a career that gives them power and money (after years of wading through dead-end/entry level hell).
American millennials were hyper-individualistic and rejected socially prescribed roles even when they were young. What they wanted wasn't collectivism, it was a higher status within capitalism. Which is why, as you observed, the sentiment evaporated once they achieved that status. I'd make the same point about Gen Z. They want to think they're socialist and collectivist. But they all want to be online content creators and influencers--jobs that only exist in hyper-consumerist, capitalist societies!
This is not a criticism either of collectivism or millennials, by the way. I think Republicans screwed up the concepts during the Cold War era by successfully labeling Democrats as collectivist. What you have in the U.S. is more accurately described as two strains of libertarianism, one that emphasizes social liberty and the other that emphasizes economic liberty.
You define your own notion of collectivism and make claims about how it is necessarily in conflict with other principles, when in reality millennials aren't a monolith, collectivism isn't a monolith, and individualism isn't a monolith. Cultures and subcultures renegotiate the meaning of every -ism they import, and they practice these -isms only as bundles of other, historically correlated -isms.
When the American youth say they want collectivism, they are not saying they want a return to authentic rice farming culture. Most of the time, they are mourning the systematic loss of third places, they are mourning the obliteration of social safety nets, they are mourning the lack of public projects, they are mourning the death of individually influenceable local politics. At the same time, they do not want rigid social roles ordained from above (because "above" is powerful and corrupt). They also do not want a parochial existence taking care of grandma (because the elderly are in greater number and need than ever, and our infrastructure and way of life is ill suited to efficiently meeting these needs). None of this is contradictory cosplay. It is simply a fusion of individualism and collectivism that is unlike that which has existed before, as a result of cultural factors that are themselves unlike that which has existed before.
We can just be people. Don't hurt anyone, no one gets a pass to hurt you. Hurt someone, someone gets a pass to hurt you. Just you, not your "brothers". No matter the status of anyone involved.
Severity, intent, and priors must play a factor in the level of returned hurt, but should never end with none, and death should be a last resort, but never completely off the table.
That's the good-faith interpretation of the golden rule. Instead of the popular abuser and enabler (turn the other cheek) interpretations. They both call anyone who dares hold anyone accountable, a hypocrite for supposedly not following the golden rule.
I don't care what story book it's in, or who said it, or when. It's a good rule on it's own merits. Doesn't mean everything that comes form the same source is equally valid.
Moral sentimentalism is a fool's errand, because it isn't morality. It's a superficial emotional ersatz, not something rooted in sound reason and reality. And so "universal brotherhood of Man" was always farcical. It's like those people who "love humanity", but can't be bothered to feed the homeless guy on the corner, or treat his wife decently and with due care. It always has to be something "grand" and "out there". It replaces authentic, concrete local allegiances - all relationships are local - with abstract, impersonal "brotherhood", which ultimately destroys real social cohesion.
Yes, there is a "human family". But family and community are not some undifferentiated, homogeneous mass. Society is ordered and composite. While we can love all as a matter of general disposition and wishing them well, love as such is manifested in the concrete and the active, not mere affect or the abstract. Our priorities and duties of love must concern concrete persons. They radiate outward and diminish with distance (by nature, but obviously there is an obvious impracticality to "loving everyone" in any meaningful and substantive way). Your duties toward your wife are greater than those toward your brother; toward your brother greater than your cousin; toward your neighborhood than the next one over. This priority is not either/or, and they do not preclude aiding more distant siblings in an hour of need. Loving one person more than another does not mean hating the other or some kind of license to disrespect the dignity as that person. It does not give permission for jingoism or chauvinism.
In the hyperindividualistic, consumerist liberal developed world, the trouble is that we've become atomized. We have denied our intrinsically social nature (just as collectivism warps it and denies our individuality). In doing so, the social order has been thrown into chaos. That's the chief reason for our social ills. In our misguided desire for "liberty", we have throw away objective morality and the notion of pre-consensual duties. We live to consume, and even our relationships are reduced to transactional conduits of consumption. Our culture is nihilistic; all it knows is consumption. There is no greater horizon. It cannot understand the social truly and in a healthy way, only according to the language of consumption. And all that obstructs unbridled consumption is taken to be opposed to "liberty" and therefore something that must be destroyed.
It's the revolutionary ethos of destruction.
The key here is that favoring doesn't need to mean excluding anything else!
I think the belief of ordinary people most likely to dispose them to atrocity is that of prioritizing the ingroup. Once we believe that the members of one's own family, or company, or country, carry more moral value than others, we're doomed to a descent limited only by our ability to make these world-worsening trades.
When I was a child, my dad would sometimes engage in small acts of corruption to please me or my brother. Taking somebody else's spot, telling white lies to get more than his share of a rationed good, that sort of thing. It never sat right with me. "Family first" has a very ominous ring to me.
See also:
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
Newspeak by George Orwell - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
Verbal Behaviour by B.F.Skinner - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbal_Behavior
I think they're easily convinced we're living in constant state of war, even on a slow Tuesday at Costco. The propaganda they often parrot would seem to suggest it.
Or maybe they see there are scenarios that is considered noble, and generalize it to be the case for all scenarios. The people I know like that also have a habit of over-generalizing every aspect of life. Cliches, aphorisms, etc. are a huge part of their vocabulary, but they are rarely applied in the original spirit of the sayings.
In my opinion, there is another tendency even more significant in that regard. Namely, the visceral desire to see "bad guys" deservedly suffer. Once people are in that frame of mind, they strongly resist any attempts to understand and maybe prevent whatever the "bad guys" did, let alone questions whether it was actually bad.
This is what fuelled lynch mobs, it's what makes MAGA types cheer when ICE murders immigrants, and it's what makes certain leftist circles chant "eat the rich" along with images of guillotines and wood chippers.
When you point out that poverty causes crime, rightists get mad at you for "excusing" or "justifying" crime, and when you point out that poverty causes support for far-right politicians, leftists get mad at you for "excusing" or "justifying" racism.
Of course, this interacts with your point: when someone from the ingroup does something bad, people are willing to look at their reasons and if found lacking it is only the individual that should be punished, whereas the outgroup is never afforded the luxury of complexity, and the entire group is held responsible for each individual's sins.
> The more different the genetic material is, the less you care - individuals of different culture, of different race, of different species, of different kingdom of life, and finally viruses that are just strings of RNA floating around and nobody advocates about their rights because fuck that
The type of mental model that ignores 50% of the world's population due to having that same proportions of chromosomes not matching one's mental heuristic of what constitutes a human is what I'd say "fuck that" to, personally
Given the diversity of social models which have emerged globally, I have no idea how you could possibly make that claim.
This is sort of true but it misses that we don't actually have DNA sensors built into our eyes. Instead we rely on heuristics like the Westermarck effect where we will (normally) tend to not find someone we lived with as a child attractive regardless whether they're a blood relation or not.
We influence who (or what) is in our group through our behaviour, thoughts and associations. Look at the vast number of people who value their dog or cat over other human beings. It's unlikely their dog is closer to them, genetically speaking than any single human on Earth but they spend time and invest emotionally in their pet so they form a bond despite the genetic distance.
If you see a child being hurt it likely invokes a slightly stronger emotional response if the child reminds you of someone in your own life. Often this will be someone who looks like you/your family (i.e. is genetically similar to you) but it might be some other kid you've grown attached to who is not related at all.
So yes, we are driven by a calculating selfish gene mechanism but we're also burdened/gifted with a whole bunch of emotional and social instincts and rely on imperfect sensors not tricorders. It's why people can form group identities over all sorts of non-genetic characteristics (e.g. religion, nation, neighbourhood, sports team affiliation, political ideology, vi vs emacs, etc).
The one that conservatives keep claiming shows that liberals care more about out-groups than in-groups, but actually shows that either 1) many conservatives are illiterate and can't read a survey question, or 2) many conservatives literally don't care if right or wrong happens to acquaintances, strangers, their countrymen, humans in other countries, non-human animals, living things, etc?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/moral-circles-heatmap
What children do you think have a better future on average: Those whose parents love them or those whose parents hate them?
What companies do you think succeed in the long run: Those with people who love working there or those with people who hate working there and want to jump ship?
What countries become the best to live in: Those whose populace dream of moving abroad or those whose populace love their native land?
Oppression would be quite impossible throughout history if people weren't willing to oppress their own kind to the benefit of others.
Even those arguing for loyalty to the in-group are rarely those who would themselves make any sacrifices for that group.
No what's far more common is that people change their perception (or have different perceptions) of who is "their own kind."
You can actually see this happening in real time in the US with the emerging concept of "Heritage Americans." It's a way for losers and crybabies to narrow the scope of who is "their own kind" without having to openly declare that they simply don't love their countrymen.
> losers and crybabies
Luckily, for now, at least, it appears to be your side that is losing and crying.
Isn't the opposite far more common? When oppression happens, it is typically people oppressing the out-group for the benefit of the in-group.
Those are people I know very well because I have been to so many parties, dinners, and other events with them. I've seen the same thing with people from India, China, Sri Lanka, etc. I'd assume that it's the normal condition of immigrants.
You should look into what Conservatives have actually done.
It wasn't Liberals that took children out of factories, mines and chimneys.
Clearly you've never read Hayek.
Sure, post memes as proof.
Also it sounds like you're referring to the British political parties Liberals and Conservatives, not the lowercase-l and lowercase-c political philosophies by the same names, which the study is actually about.
Conversely, radical universalist regimes—even bad ones like the Taliban—can cut down on corruption. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tackling-corruption.... It’s possible that the low levels of corruption in New England, compared to the rest of the country, is the legacy of the radically universalist Puritans.
In my personal experiences with corruption with organizations, ingroup membership often becomes increasingly narrowly defined, and defined in such a way as to benefit a certain group of individuals at the expense of others. The underlying rationale is a narcissistic entitlement or rationalization for why one person or small group of people is deserving of disproportiate benefits or flexibility at the expense of others. It starts with some kind of distorted egocentric schema about others in a more distal way, and then becomes increasingly strict and more proximal. Narcissistic egocentrism is at the core; it only manifests more weakly at first, and then becomes stronger. The ingroup boundaries never stop shrinking, because there always has to be some justification for why that particular group — which was never really defined by the initial ingroup boundaries, the ingroup was only a proxy for themselves — is more deserving than others.