Re-education

File this under the failures of morality and neurodiversity (the process of thinking) but also diversity of thought (the result of the thinking -- the actual belief). Is it just me, or does it feel more like there's a thought police than even when I started the blog eight or nine years ago.

I was watching a Korean movie and saw a reference to re-education camps. I looked it up and found this NY Times article from 1981 about actual thought police:

This is the first time that the continuing large scale of what are known as ''purification camps'' or ''re-education camps'' in South Korea has been disclosed in a publication here. It is also the first indication that there have been deaths caused by beatings in the camps, a charge that has not so far been made by South Korean human rights groups in Seoul an d that has been deni ed by Seoul officials. Camps for 'Hooligans' Opened

Army camps for ''hooligans'' were first opened in the summer last year, after military leaders headed by Gen. Chun Doo Hwan took power. Between August 1980 and January 1981, a total of 57,561 people were ''warned or re-educated,'' according to The Korea Herald, an English language newspaper in Seoul. The paper said that 38,259 of these underwent ''correctional programs in military camps.''

Arrests were originally made under martial law decrees. But the newspaper account, printed in January, said that ''purification'' programs continued into 1981 after martial law was officially terminated. Some 6,506 people were to continue under detention in ''reformatory training'' and 6,852 ''hardened hooligans'' were given ''hard labor,'' The Korea Herald said.

Tolerance has been preached with some emphasis since the re-education camps, but even in the movie there were still some wishing for those halcyon days when people who did not fit a majority groups vision for human could be dismissed as being subhuman -- a deplorable. And nowadays, is it worse? Because people aren't just hating typical targets like sociopaths or pedophiles, everybody seems to be at everybody else's throats enforcing their standard of morality on the other. The one good thing about this is as more and more people find themselves on the receiving end of social justice warriors and others looking to remake the world more in their image (either in appearance in thought) normal people are realizing that the tactics that they often advocated as being fair and just for use by their side might be less noble or effective than they thought.

I wonder what would happen if people realized that morality is in the eye of the beholder and stopped trying to force others to comply with their own particular flavor or brand. 

On the outskirts

I remember being teenage age or maybe early college and hearing for the first time that homeless people aren't necessarily homeless because of some personal failings of theirs, but just that their particular society has excluded them out of necessity. The reasoning is that any society develops in largely arbitrary ways -- valuing certain attributes and devaluing others, having certain types of traditions or laws and rights or not. (Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of work on these different moral universes). If the entirety of humanity spans such a wide spectrum of variation, it's basically impossible to construct a society that could incorporate and use absolutely everyone's strengths. There will be winners and losers and any structure that you could come up with, but a lot of the selection of winners and losers is influenced by chance -- in obvious ways in our modern western society like owning property that turns out to have gold, being born to rich parents, being able to bilk naive natives out of their land by trading them worthless trinkets, etc. but also in less obvious ways like your culture being one in which ownership of land is recognized (or not) or in which gold is considered valuable (or not) or parental wealth is able to pass to children via inheritance laws and tradition. People are always going to slip through the cracks, even though it might have been just as likely that another society would have developed instead in which the losers and winners would have flipped flopped (I think of somewhat examples of this in the French Revolution and the Cultural Revolution and which cultural values, priorities, and legal entitlements were changed basically overnight).

I agree with the theory now, but I wonder if I would have come to the same conclusions by myself. I also wonder, do most normal people understand this to be true? That so much of our life successes and failures are determined by forces beyond our control? That the winners only get there by climbing over the backs of others? Or is it more difficult for them to step outside the structure of their cultural paradigms to see how precarious, unpredictable, random, and likely inequitable their status in society is. 

But this is what I thought about when I saw this somewhat recent comment:

Structure, society, uniformity, they serve a purpose. They aren't for everyone, and I think specifically work better for people who's fear sensors are in working order (over working even?) in order to give a sense of structure and stability, in a somewhat chaotic world. The problem with the structure is that it alienates otherwise good people who don't believe in the structure. Which I don't think there's anything wrong with believing (or not believing) in the structure. 

Is that what this is about?