Ideology and friendhip

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Starr:"do you think it is possible for some people to be without flaws of character? Would that not make us more than we are - human and subject to instincts etc. It would mean that these 'flawless' people are approaching the level of a god?"

No, absolutely not. I think we are all flawed, there are no godlike humans, but there also no totally devilish men. Even if many approach absolute evil, that is rarely complete absence of human qualities even if that happens perhaps more easily than the reverse (nearness to perfection, which would be even a worrying condition). We are "thrown into existence", as a philosopher would say) to acclomplish a limited task and a temporary mission, with equipents of character often inadequate, but then for some predetermined time (some 60, 70, or 80 years for us, a longer time for turtles or elephants, a shorter time for a wolf or a bee). Then the whole burden of duties is off and the task will be on the shoulders of someone else. I see life is a relay business.

Starr:"I am interested in Stangl I have not read the book and am wondering if he presented some kind of justification for his actions?"

"Into that darkness" Sereny book is probably more revealing than Arendt's book on Eichmann (The banality of evil”). Stangl was much more a cog than Eichmann. He was a common policeman who was assigned first to the "external" security of the place in Germany where the "euthanasia" programs took place. Then he was assigned to Treblinka. When answering to a stringent question of Sereny, "he looked old and worn and real." ‘you didn't feel they (the victims) were human beings?’ ‘Cargo,’ he said tonelessly. ‘They were cargo.’ He raised and dropped his hand in a gesture of despair. Both our voices had dropped. It was one of the few times in those weeks of talks that he made no effort to cloak his despair, and his hopeless grief allowed a moment of sympathy."
And what about the pilot of Hiroshima who suffered no pangs after droppin the "bomb". He had named the airplane after his mom (Enola Gay) and became a CEO in some corporations after the war. (But his crew went mad).

Perhaps I wasn't quite clear about ideologies, earlier on, in time. What I've meant to say is that I've had a friend that I went to elementary and high school with. Our ideologies were different to the fact that I was very mature for my age, and she was very immature. We were rubbing each other the wrong way, because she was in to girly things and I was into manly things. We also had a different viewpoint of friendship and meeting people. I was the type who always wanted to go out and have fun. I was brash and bold. She always wanted to stay home. She was timid and shy. That's what I was getting at, earlier on.


Oh and by the way, Tequila, we will always be old chinas.

As for the nature-nurture question, There is a wide consensus now that both are important. Although I think that ultimately nature, that is the genetic inheritance, is decisive. If a character is genetically well shaped, it has an exceptional resilience, and can survive maltreatments and deprivations. Moreover, some of the vicious circles that develop in a family originate in a rejection of the child by the mother, because she blames him/her for his/her unresponsiveness to the mother’s expectations and demands and this for an autistic streak present in his/her character. The child withdraws and becomes hostile and the mother in turn increases her disillusionment and stinginess; the child reacts to this and so forth in a spiral.

CockneyRebel, you are a very warm hearted, tolerant person who makes everyone here feel welcome. Your heart is as large as a Routemaster

I find that incredible that he felt no pangs after dropping the bomb. Maybe he had to fight very hard to keep up this barrier to his feelings. I don't know of course, but I am assuming he must have, somewhere deep down, have felt so terrible about it, even if he had justified it to himself by thinking that he saved thousands of lives by bringing the war to an end. What a horrendous burden to have that one one's shoulders!

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I would agree with that. Also, often one child becomes a scapegoat for all the other members of the family. Unfortunately, this is usually the child who is 'different'. This happens unconsciously, and the child 'feels' the pain of rejection unconsciously, as alienation and rejection, although in some families it will actually be a conscious bullying of the 'different' child by his or her siblings. Thank goodness that as adults we can understand and work through some of this inherited crap!

Starr: "I find that incredible that he felt no pangs after dropping the bomb. Maybe he had to fight very hard to keep up this barrier to his feelings. I don't know of course, but I am assuming he must have, somewhere deep down, have felt so terrible about it, even if he had justified it to himself by thinking that he saved thousands of lives by bringing the war to an end. What a horrendous burden to have that one one's shoulders!"

Apparently he had no pangs, "General Tibbets always enjoys meeting people who are interested in the history of the Enola Gay", he accepted medals, promotions, continued to work for aviation companies as CEO, and has a site on the Web where he gives all informations about his mission to people interested, with photos of himself and the crew and the Enola behind him and offers his availabiliy for speechs.( http://www.theenolagay.com). Another pilot on another plane of support to the mission went mad, and tried to committ suicide.

I've had this situation occur.
It was with a girl who wanted me to be her boyfriend.
At the time she was like a ultra left wing who was dedicated to all kinds of charity stuff and animal right.
While i was at the time verry dedicated to the nationalist cause of stopping immigration.
To be quite honest i never considered having a relationship with her as it was doomed to fail.
We just totally disagreed on every subject.

However we always stayed good friends.
Poltical opinion never stood in my way for friendship.
I just knew it could never get past that.

The world is become such a complicated business that no one is empowered to interpret it by hymself. We must all rely on second hand interpretations.

Take the case of some apparently cruel crime, like the killing of a family in Kansas related by Truman Capote's “In Cold Blood”. Was the killing perpretated in cold blood or in panic and haste? And was not the execution of the killers by the state of Kansas’s judicial burocracy a killing committed in cold blood (in a way all "executions" are committed in “cold blood”). The death penalty is for me unaccetable and the most gruesome of crimes, if such thing as “crimes” really exist. How can the jurors evalute such garbled universes as those of a killer? After all they can rely only on police records, second hand testimonies, the harangues of prosecutors and attorneys.

Ideology is a crude procedure to simplify judgements. You don’t really know what the complex multifaceted problems are: war, peace, rearmament, construction of new weaponry. Few people can understand the subtleties of diplomacy and power politics. So we delegate professional politicians or career judges to be the decision makers in businesses too complicated for us to understand, and we “align” to their decision, except to discover after some time, perhaps never or too late, that the wrong decisions were taken. The most dramatic and fraught with tragedy of these decisions is the one of going to war of course. But there are many other decisions entrusted to a single man sometimes.

Not many in the common walks understand the intricacies of foreign policy, often not even the real deciders do. So people align themselves on the base of political catch-all principles. Ideologies are often shortcuts to take sides.

The antecedent post resulted rather obscure. I hope the revised edition is a little better.

Oh I don't think it was paolo...I am enjoying this thread. I've got toothache today so my brain is not functioning very well but I hope to get some thoughts down tomorrow

When I read the post regarding Tibbets, I was going to write about how he had been told that dropping the atomic bomb had shortened the war, that some pilot had to fly the mission, and so forth. But upon reflection, I'm not going to write that... I've been watching videos of American Servicemen who fought the Japanese in the Pacific, and it's quite common to see one of these old chaps break down and cry over killing a Japanese soldier all those years ago. The island by island conquest was brutal, and happened over and over for every island. You might think these ageing Marines would say it was a long time ago, and so on. But they still remember details, and confess they are still to this day haunted by the killing they did.

It's difficult to say what would have happened had the Trinity Test gone wrong. The US might have blockaded Japan, and kept up with incendiary bombing. Imagine Japan having twenty or more cities bombed like Dresden?? It could well have turned out as horrific as the Atomic Bombs.

Or if the US stormed ashore like D Day?? Pouring thousands of troops onto the Japanese Mainland, having to kill civilians??

How people can kill one another, and not feel remorse is a mystery to me.

I was trying to figure out about Tibbets, and then I remembered about Milgram's experiments. He proved that people do what they are told to do by a figure of authority. Hence the often used statement 'I was just following orders'. I guess that removes any feelings of guilt and responsibility.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

There are built in, hard wired (as the cognitivists would say) inhibitions to kill and to harm. No one likes much even killing animals.

In meat factories the job of killing is assigned to the most desperate workers, immigrants, illegals, parole people who have no other choice. You may get accustomed to killing or you may have a strong personal motivation, extreme hate, and above all desire for vengeance. People who have had a kin murdered want to kill the murderer, to remove from the earth the doer of their loss, and when this is not possible they want the public authority to execute them. They are normally invited to be present at the execution and often they are present.

But then there is the fact that we all belong to huge machineries (burocracies, corporations) where all resposibility is diluted a and legitimized (like in the army) and harming others (like in the Milgram experiments) is even encouraged by people in power or authority. Then there are also sadists, serial killers and sociopaths. Sociopaths don’t feel inhibitions or remorse.

And: are the tobacco lobbysts responsible for people who die for smoking? has anybody seen "Thank you for smoking"?

Perhaps that is one of the functions of organized religion, to encourage us to be humane? (Or threaten us with damnation if we aren't).

I've not seen 'Thank you for Smoking' but I've heard it's very good. Have you seen it?

I don't see really how tobacco lobbyists can be held responsible for people who die from smoking-related diseases. It's not a good product to sell, or promote, certainly, but if we know the dangers and still choose to smoke, it then becomes our responsibility. Horribly addictive substance, nicotine. The government seem to have a duplicitous attitude to smoking though, one one hand they tell us not to smoke because it's so harmful, on the other, they make so much money from the tax on cigarettes (here in the UK anyway, not sure about other countries)

If it was banned from sale I guess it would go undercover and you'd have young men hanging around on dark street corners..."want a ciggie?"

There are so many degrees of responsibility in our life and I think we are all inevitably responsible of something, there is some place where we collude with some evil done somewhere afar. I buy Nike shoes made in China probably in some child exploitig factory. One of the constant themes of Coetzee’s novels (I like very much Coetzee) is that of the ubiquitousness of unfair suffering, suffering of coloured people in South Africa, but also of white people and also of animals used by men (he is a vegetarian). He goes probably too far, but there is something true and deeply felt in his fiction. I don’t feel so much guilty for eating meat once in a while. It’s the system. And it’s difficult to establish the treshold where responsibility begins to be some burden you can’t bear.

As for tobacco lobbyism I wouldn’t choose to work in it, especially in advertising. But every one has his personal history and background. Here there is a real point I would like to make later. I think that everybody is split in his actions and behaviors. Some piece Dr Jekill some piece Mr Hyde: when Dr Jekill is irretrievably submerged by Hyde?

The film is an ably manufactured film, but not such a great thing for me. I have seen it because I am addicted. I see one each day nearly, but I avoid comedy, action, horror and I like intimistic movies, drama. There is an ample choice in the city where I live. Some museum of cinema. Perhaps this is the only reason I live here.

We sometimes collude with our negative inner characters in our own downfall..I think we do. It's almost as if positive and negative are in constant play, doing a balancing act, like a see-saw. I suppose there are different ways to think of this opposition. I tend to think of them as archetypes, Apollo versus Dionysos, I just find it easier to understand them 'personified' in that way. This is a very intersting article (but only if you're in the mood and have time for a very long read )

http://www.theorderoftime.com/science/s ... nysus.html

Thanks for the article which I will print and read in due time. I have Nietzsche’s works here and he is the philosopher whom I have liked most, and probably one of the few I have read at some lenghts. As a little piece of gossip I live some 100 meters from the house where he lived his last year before going mad. One day he saw before his house a horse being whipped by his keeper (probably there was a tramway). He scolded the keeper and hugged the horse. He was taken in custody and ended his life in a horrid bedlam.
As for the originary subject of the thread, about the importance of cognitive consonance or dissonance for staying together or being friends or for mating I want to add that the problem may be very serious in the case of religious affiliations. It’s not so important if one is catholic and the other anglican (Tony and his wife). I don’t know much about other affiliations like presbiterian and baptist. It’s certainly serious between christian and muslim, also because of dietary observances. Christian and Jewish is possible, and happens (my grandfather and my grandmother). Then there is the fact that in continental Europe until some time ago, with high involvement and high electoral turnout, difference in political alignment often resulted in couples separating when their parties split, which happened all the time on the left. Friendships also were very difficult across party lines.

Thinking it over, my grandfather was only nominally Catholic and met my grandmother in the socialist party were they fought battles together for labor and women rights.