The Illusion of Moral Superiority

[AerisVahnEphelia]

You're not better than Trump or Hitler; you're just not them.

You're not “selfless” or “spiritual.” You're simply not living under the conditions that would lead you to commit violence and rape in the same manner as other forms of life. You're not ethically superior or better.

If you're full of “empathy,” it's because that's how you survive. You're Netanyahu and Hitler; not metaphorically, but as a raw, direct realization.

Every day, your life is sustained by killing and death, indirectly through your country. But you'll passively say, “It's not my fault; I'm earning a salary.” Yet if you support the state that kills or does evil for you instead of fighting it, you're not condoning it. That means you survive through its absolute, unchecked violence. And why won't you question it? Because you survive through it. In fact, you may be worse than Genghis Khan: you won't rape or kill yourself, but you'll condone it. You'll also remain biased about it and be VERY LAZY about questioning it; for survival reasons.

You're as evil as everyone else. Trump isn't some stupid, magnificently awful embodiment of evil; he's just extremely evil toward YOUR survival strategies. Or maybe not?!

You're evil, your mother is evil, your country is evil, and you're no different from Hitler or Netanyahu. No matter how much you soothe your ego with nice stories, your brain is a survival machine that will use every tool at its disposal to rationalize its own evil.

And the only reason you're not murdering or raping isn't that you're some angel or an ethical person; it's mainly that you're weak and lazy, and someone else does the killing and raping for you.

Everyone who lives through the state is a rapist. Your country sells weapons used to murder people so it can stay rich, let you rent cheap housing, and steal resources cheaply from other countries.

Remember: everyone around you is equally evil, just with a different flavor of it.

Edited 2 hours ago by AerisVahnEphelia

[Leo Gura]

1 minute ago, AerisVahnEphelia said:

everyone around you is equally evil, just with a different flavor of it.

Be careful with over-relativizing things.

If I wanted to be evil in my position, I easily could be.

[AerisVahnEphelia]

4 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Be careful with over-relativizing things.

If I wanted to be evil in my position, I easily could be.

Could you !? 

But you're right, maybe this topic is a bit of an actualized.org -> advanced ragebait. ( or is it ? )

Maybe it's absolute or maybe I m just delusional and coping.

( I don't think I m evil at all, weirdly. I think I m a very kind & chill person to be around, so I m suspicious . . maybe my evil is to trick people in believing those kind of things )

Of course "evil people" will absolutely use this kind of mental trick to justify being mean & evil. ( everyone is, so why not me ? )
 

Edited 2 hours ago by AerisVahnEphelia

[Leo Gura]

5 minutes ago, AerisVahnEphelia said:

Could you !? 

Don't ask me to prove it to you.

[AerisVahnEphelia]

Just now, Leo Gura said:

Don't ask me to prove it to you.

[Jirh]

It took me a long time to realize that there are genuinely good people and genuinely bad people. Some people have rotten core. There is just no way around that.

And it can't all be reduced down to genetics or environment or upbringing. It's a combination of all those, and probably other factors that make up one's conscious and unconscious selves.

Edited 1 hour ago by Jirh

[Schizophonia]

@AerisVahnEphelia 

That is what the Marxists say in your own words.

But actually in line with your theory people don't commit rape out of "laziness" lol; rather it’s because social structures have conditioned us (to the point of genetic imprinting over the long term) to reject that particular possibility. Framing it as laziness or a fear of raping is in itself essentialist and inconsistent with your theory.

I assume this idea comes from Nietzsche, though he likely wouldn't have thought that someone liberated from "moraline" would gravitate toward particularly barbaric acts.
On the contrary it is precisely those constraints that ultimately give rise to strange or even bellicose urges, like a pressure cooker that eventually explodes.

[Lyubov]

I think you sort of conflate two things together that don’t need to be. 

I agree with you in terms of judging people. We will often times judge people and create a hierarchy of being “being better” than someone. I think looking at people and the world this way where it’s about good vs bad, etc makes it difficult to stay open and spiritually connected.

This shouldn’t be conflated with looking within though and making judgements form what you believe to be true and allowing that to shape your life. You can look within and see if someone hurting other people aligns with yourself and decide then on the actions you will take. So in that regard we can decide what we believe is right for ourselves and by extension other people, but this can be done without a sort of overarching fundamental judgement or hierarchy of making yourself morally superior and thinking you are better and more special than anyone. 

You can recognize someone who is abusive to people is dangerous to society and take appropriate action to remove them from it without judging their spiritual worth and the fact that they exist here and now. You don’t need to hate someone or think you’re better than someone to do right. 

Edited 1 hour ago by Lyubov

[Elliott]

I think for most people, @AerisVahnEphelia  is right. Empathy can be a survival strategy no different than exploitation, but, some people are self sacrificing @AerisVahnEphelia, so i think you're being too simplistic.

Edited 1 hour ago by Elliott

[Jirh]

Evil is more than selfishness. Evil includes malice. Genuine intentional malice. Some people are genuinely bad. They seek harm. They enjoy doing evil, just like most people enjoy doing good.

[Leo Gura]

4 minutes ago, Jirh said:

Genuine intentional malice.

They do that under the impression that it is good.

Look at the genocidal Zionists. They have malice because they think they are doing good by killing demons.

You are not appreciating how relativistically twisted it gets. A selfish person thinks that malice is good.

Edited 1 hour ago by Leo Gura

[AION]

The physical reality is amoral but in the metaphysical morality exist. It is real as anything else. Morality is actually the backbone of value models like spiral dynamics. To say morality doesn't exist is to break the backbone of the spiral.

Edited 1 hour ago by AION

[Jirh]

13 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

They do that under the impression that it is good.

Look at the genocidal Zionists. They have malice because they think they are doing good by killing demons.

You are not appreciating how relativistically twisted it gets. A selfish person thinks that malice is good.

I get that. You're talking about collateral damage caused by selfishness. It's innocent evil because it feels relatively good to them but bad to others.

But I'm pointing to genuine evil. Not just relative innocent collateral damage. Some people like to see suffering. For no particular selfish reason, except the enjoyment of seeing it happen. They are built to harm and destroy. And the only reason they're not as obvious or effective at it is because society doesn't allow it. It gets jumbled up with criminals who act from innocent selfishness.

[Leo Gura]

@Jirh Zionists are not doing innocent collateral damage, they take joy in killing Gazans as the devils they see them as.

They do like to see suffering.

Edited 35 minutes ago by Leo Gura

[Nercohype]

@Leo GuraI do agree with you, but I also think there are people who know that what they do is wrong and enjoy it. They embrace it. They welcome all the depravity and malice. Not everyone, of course, but there are definitely some people like that. And I also think that even those who believe they’re doing good have that little voice deep down inside that tells them otherwise.

[Jirh]

11 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

@Jirh Zionists are not doing innocent collateral damage, they take joy in killing Gazans as the devils they see them as.

They do like to see suffering.

Yes, but that's not what I'm pointing to.

[Jirh]

4 minutes ago, Nercohype said:

@Leo GuraI do agree with you, but I also think there are people who know that what they do is wrong and enjoy it. They embrace it. They welcome all the depravity and malice. Not everyone, of course, but there are definitely some people like that. And I also think that even those who believe they’re doing good have that little voice deep down inside that tells them otherwise.

Exactly. Some people are just destructive for no obvious reason.

I think there are degrees to this, so no one is 100% evil, just like no one is 100% good.

Also, probably most of them are not evil all across the board, but perhaps within select areas according to their upbringing or habitual formation.

[Leo Gura]

12 minutes ago, Nercohype said:

They welcome all the depravity and malice.

Sure. I don't deny that. At the lowest level you enjoy torturing others. This is sadism. Sadism is peak selfishness though.

Edited 16 minutes ago by Leo Gura

[Jirh]

6 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Sure. I don't deny that. At the lowest level you enjoy torturing others. This is sadism. Sadism is peak selfishness though.

It is in part selfish, as it feels good for the sadist to torture others.

However, evil in this case lies underneath the good feeling. It's something you cannot explain or question or change. The sadist cannot stop loving sadism no matter how hard they try. Well, except maybe if it becomes too dangerous or costly for them to be sadist. Or if they adopt a self-hating mindset, like a religion that forbids sadism and promises hell for sadists.

Edited 9 minutes ago by Jirh

[Zigzag Idiot]

39 minutes ago, Jirh said:

I get that. You're talking about collateral damage caused by selfishness. It's innocent evil because it feels relatively good to them but bad to others.

But I'm pointing to genuine evil. Not just relative innocent collateral damage. Some people like to see suffering. For no particular selfish reason, except the enjoyment of seeing it happen. They are built to harm and destroy. And the only reason they're not as obvious or effective at it is because society doesn't allow it. It gets jumbled up with criminals who act from innocent selfishness.

Schadenfreude (/ˈʃɑːdənfrɔɪdə/ ⓘ; German: [ˈʃaːdn̩ˌfʁɔʏ̯də] ⓘ; lit.Tooltip literal translation "harm-joy") is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of the troubles, failures, pain, suffering, or humiliation of another. Schadenfreude is a loanword from German. The closest word in English would be gloat. Schadenfreude has been detected in children as young as two years old and may be an important social emotion establishing "inequity aversion".[1]

 

There is no word in English precisely comparable.

IMO- I would argue that we all have a degree of this and it sits in one unconsciously. It's in one's shadow. Just add some extreme stress and the vast majority of people will exhibit this to some degree. It's more common with the immature. It's not socially acceptable to be honest about it,,,, You may become a target of insecure people if you admit to observing this phenomenon in oneself. 

Awareness is curative.

Edited 8 minutes ago by Zigzag Idiot