How Can Decent People Behave Callously?

Post Reply New Topic

It's hard to know how to deal with people who hurt others, whether bigots, criminals or whatever.

There needs to be a pathway to rejoin society when people find themselves being cast-out for wrongdoing.
You also need to be sure they're actually willing to stop whatever antagonism got them cast-out in the first place.

At some stage reconciliation needs to be the priority. Not necessarily between the victim and perpetrator, but at least between the community and the perpetrator. Why? Because if you're completely unwilling to allow them to return to society, why not just kill them?

Ah, that's too callous. Just ensuring they're never able to effectively rejoin, that's the Goldilocks level for telling oneself they're still a good person, because hey, they're bad guys, they deserve it.

When in doubt, check The Lion King.

We must avoid the shadowy place, and respect all creatures in the great circle of life.

The truth is that none of us are perfect. We all, inevitably, have blind spots - we cannot possibly know what exactly everyone we meet will be sensitive about. We all get stuff wrong. We make mistakes sometimes. Some of you may find this hard to believe (joke), but sometimes I can be rude, dismissive, and condescending - maybe even all at the same time!

The very fact that we feel difficult emotions like guilt is evidence that we aren't entirely flawed.

I read the OP a few days ago and didn't comment, it was very well written and I'd agree with what's said.

In my own case I shift the emphasis a bit to what John Gray illustrated in Straw Dogs, that a lot of people (maybe most to some degree) are something like voicemail or press secretaries for their unconscious, that there's a thin veneer of 'human' in the secular humanist curious and truth-seeking little gods sense, and below that thin veneer in the unconscious it's almost completely animal. In that context so much of what people do, and then backward rationalize in some way that makes them feel better about themselves, is their genes doing the dirty work of domination, eliminating threats, etc. and since it's below the level of conscious awareness they get to see themselves as wonderful people who'd 'never ever do a thing like that'.

The argument you seemed to be making that I found interesting was the degree to which some of the cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy might actually be in the structure of the social rules themselves. Rules clearly establish incentives and incentives drive human behavior, equally though the darker or more seemingly absurd incentives where one wouldn't typically think that a person would actually do it maybe are some combination of... I don't know what to call these people because they're not out-and-out psychopaths but they're shallow and small enough to think algorithmically in a very immediate short-term way... them as well as people acting unconsciously.

It seems like multipolar traps are a structural, mathematical part of life and you can have better or worse incentive systems but no matter how well you try to architect the incentives someone will find loopholes to exploit to where they can rack up all kinds of gains by externalizing costs to the commons or to people who society just doesn't care about (eg. the global south or in a case mentioned in another thread the 'homelessness industrial complex'). That's the whole thing Scott Alexander / Slate Star Codex was on about with his 'Meditations on Moloch' essay. The fact that we're Darwinian and thus constantly trying to best one another in competition for higher status and access to higher quality mates seems to suggest that even if we solved certain problems like food, water, or energy shortage that we'd still be fighting over status and the quickest way to win status games is to find cost externalizing games and forms of exploitation, particularly when being a world class inventor or entrepreneur not only isn't in most people's wheelhouse but think of someone like Edison who might invent the lightbulb but who'd be a social nobody into their 50's or 60's and thus lose the status race anyway even if their name went into the history books.

There's more I could say about the specifics of our current environment, like atomization of individuals both through neoliberalism, fossil fuels, the pill but at least the second and third we can't go back on (obligate technology) and we're stuck figuring out how to make civilization work again when the pressures that kept it together in the past fell away.

Let's see...
Ignorance, beliefs, upbringing, normalization, necessity, knowledge/skill/ability gaps, immaturity...

One thing I add is actual lack of sympathy. Especially while being empathetic about it.

At best, a form of concern concealed by some form of insult or whatever people's worst way of saying 'I made that mistake, don't do it too'.
At worst, spreading self loathing all the way.

Doesn't matter how mature the person was, doesn't matter if this person is basically a saint.

To some, in their minds, it's 'whatever, figure it out yourself'. Or some form of tough love, believing that one would understand someday.


Or? Denying one's own sympathy by being apathethic or hostile. Probably because they themselves don't see sympathy as a good thing.
They believe that being nice or even kind would meant enabling.

Gained Number Post Count (1).
Lose Time (n).

Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.