Friend: You think much of yourself.M.E.: I think about myself a lot, if that's what you mean...
I just watched a film about a young Jewish woman who "passes" in occupied France during the Second World War. It reminded me of a time that I was helping two elderly Holocaust survivors fill out forms for restitution funds. I had been instructed that the Germans are great record keepers and very wary of fraud. I had been warned of people being denied their benefits because of very small inconsistencies in documentation, e.g. spring 1941 vs. March 1941. With that in mind, I tried to be as precise as I could with dates. The man's papers seemed to be more or less in order, and he had the identifying tattoo to match. The woman's papers were more confusing. She had dates from a previous claim, but they didn't really make sense with the story she told me. She was in and out of camps, according to her paperwork, and there were other documents that contradicted both what she told me and what her previous forms said. I didn't really know what to do, so I told her I would ask for help. She panicked, grabbed my arm, sat me back down. Pointing to the form with the dates, she said "this isn't me." She told me in her stilted English about how with her blonde hair and blue eyes, no one suspected her of being Jewish. She was able to "pass" for the duration of the war, working as a seamstress. The documents corroborating her time spent in camps she had gotten from another young woman who had died shortly after liberation.
A reader sent me this link to a forum as an explanation of the differences between how empaths and sociopaths see morality. And, well, the thing about human history and nature is that a split morality is *natural* for us. Empathy within the family/tribe, sociopathic-like behavior to oursiders. Like, every tribe calls themselves "the People". What does that make outsiders? Not-people... And then there's the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments, showing how apparently normal people, socialized in modern societies to have unnaturally large "tribes", can still do atrocious things with a bit of social pressure.Another participant responds:
The sociopath doesn't care what he does to other people, or just doesn't respond to them as people. Normal people convince themselves other people aren't people, or deserve it, then do their atrocities.
Ah! Someone who truly understands basic human nature!
There is a descending scale of human empathy involved. Stronger loyalty to immediate kin, somewhat less so to clan, somewhat less than that to local social clique, and so on. Building large scale societies requires the creation of an abstract cultural structure (morality, religion, hierarchy, mythology), that gives humans some reason to act towards the success of the larger group instead of the smaller. When two abstract cultural structures compete without violent conflict, we call that peace. When they interact with violence and destruction, we call that war. An abstract cultural structure that can longer bind its members to its own survival is said to be corrupt and decadent.
Assigning members of different human groups a lesser moral status is as natural to humans as breathing. Complete extermination of a group happens less often than other kinds of conflict resolution only because it is rarely cost effective. Too much work, or destructive to your own cultural tropes, or because oppression and enslavement is more profitable than extermination.
Whatever we think of GENOCIDE!, it isn't crazy or even irrational to most people who practice it.
Hitler may have had serious emotional issues, but he was not an original thinker. All the terrible things he did were not the product of his imagination. He only collated ideas that had been floating around Germany for generations. He happened to have the imagination and political skill to weld those ideas into a popular governing philosophy, and didn't become clinically insane until he started losing the war and, along with it, his emotional stability and his grip on reality.