I don’t see how this follows from what I said, but desensitisation is as bad or worse than oversensitisation, yes. And escalating violence is often undesirable. But not always.
What you read in the news is nothing to go by. The news has no interest in giving you an accurate portrayal of society. Certainly not where crime, sex, violence is concerned. The news is not reality.
I think you’re wrong. If you’re in a restaurant and someone starts shouting aggressively at someone else, everyone ignores it. But watch them, they are tense, anxious, they don’t just carry on with things. They quieten down, they keep an eye on things - but not directly. It’s a natural adrenal response. Go to a few bars, people-watch a bit. If a fight breaks out, most people are shocked, a few people (usually friends) step in to break things up. It’s not like people sit like they’re watching a film. The reality of violence is shocking and intimidating, and most people don’t have the tools to deal with it. So they don’t have any option of moral choice when confronted by it.
One can think and rationalise all one like, but it doesn’t help the guy getting his head stamped on. Or help rationalise afterwards what one would have done, should have said, while watching it all with a sick feeling in the pit of ones stomach.
I strongly disagree. However, if you can’t trust the news, all you have to do is look at the world around you. Mass shooting, unnecessary and unjustified military aggression, bombings, gang violence, domestic abuse, ad nauseum.
Here I want to bring in eternal questions, ideas like the public good, social welfare, morality, and justice. A great one to look to for examining these questions is Dostoevsky. In Part 6 of Book XII of The Brothers Karamazov, entitled “Bread and Circuses,” the prosecutor Ippolit Kirillovitch makes his final speech in order to doom the innocent Dmitri to conviction as a parricide. However, the speech itself really gets to the heart of the problems we face here right now, so I’ll quote some of it.
That’s cute Jonquil but until you can address inequality and confront it those fitting words and terms you have there are useless without any substance or meaning at all.
I’m the pessimist. You will never get rid of inequality therefore were always going to be screwed with conflict in the world where occasionally you are just going to find people that gain pleasure out of preying upon the weak.
But that doesn’t stop you dreamers of imagining a bright better tomorrow no matter how unrealistic it may be…
Ermm … whether you take Dostoevsky optimistically, or pessimistically and cynically as you do, there is no way that those words he put in the closing speech of Dmitri’s prosecutor could ever be thought of as “cute.”
What’s interesting is that the questions and problems that we face today have so much in common with those of feudalistic czarist Russia.
The ultimate question is this then: is it also possible that Americans think like feudal owners and serfs or slaves? Is that the way our politico-economic system is trending, with our feudal corporate fiefdoms designed to turn people into pawns and peons, many of them ignorant and suffering affect disorders and cognitive dissonance, relegating the consideration of serious issues to “cuteness”?
Do you see those in the world around you? I’d move house. Or do you form your impressions of the world around you from the parts of it that the media deem newsworthy?
Eternal question? Eternal complaint - when is the golden age of history when humanity was better than the generation before, when the youth really did respect its elders, when no-one complained about political corruption? Compared to 30 years ago there is less violent crime, less international strife now, but the news won’t tell you that.
This all distracts from the original discussion; if you are not equipped to deal with violence on its own terms, you are not equipped to make moral choices in the face of it.
If the world around -me- consists only of my immediate vicinity, then I live in a very small world… but perhaps a much nicer one without having to look at those pesky problems I mentioned. Maybe in my little world, there is no violence so horrible that one must become desensitized or suffer ptsd. Solipsism can be a wonderful thing.
Or maybe I now live in a global community, connected through satellites and cables, full of interesting cultures and places, and one that is more open to inspection and knowledge due to those connections. If I am brave and strong enough to look at all the pictures, then indeed many of them show me cruelties and atrocities that I could never have imagined or dreamed possible on my own. I don’t like learning about such things and being exposed to such inhumanity, but I live in a human world among humans and I feel that an unexamined life truly is not worth living. That of course is predicated on the idea that this world is now a global village and there is a way that everything that happens anywhere impacts everyone everywhere. Implied in that notion is responsibility. Even simple things I do here in my corner of the world has a big effect worldwide, like driving a car that uses gas for instance. I can recycle, avoid drugs, gm stuff and boycott BP and so on, but essentially I am still a consumer, and sadly consumerism is driving much of the horrible violence in the world.
The fine psychologist Sam Keen once did a workshop on Questions, derived from the western meme of The Quest, in which he quoted Rilke, who said: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”
He also quoted Warren Molten, who said: “I need one answer to one question: What should I be asking now that the world is burning?”
Keen went on to say:
He ended by saying, along with Rilke: Love the questions.
Ironically, the bolded portion ought give us hope and help us realize how far we have come. When violence, much less atrocities like those described in the OP, are the norm then they aren’t newsworthy. We don’t regularly see reports about old ladies falling in showers and drowning or infant pneumonia. Because those are mundane, they are boring. But a rare act like this? Now that is newsworthy!
In addition (I’m Googling now) there’s a recent study showing that reporting of crime has changed considerably from a dry, factual reportage of the events, a courtroom sobriety, to a more empathic stance stressing the victim’s loss and pain. More empathy is not a bad thing, but you pick up the victim’s fears (which are stronger than the non-victim’s - ‘everyone’s a liberal until they get mugged’, of course) and it changes the dynamic.
People have strong cognitive biases to confirm what they already believe, to notice disproportionately what causes fear, and this reinforces itself (in my view) unhealthily.
Yes because beyond technology from the time period of czarist Russia to today nothing has changed when it concerns human nature.
Possibly. ( I feel like a miserable serf myself of the working poor variety not to mention a borderline psychopath and to be honest quite possibly a potential future criminal or offender of the dangerously deviant mindset.)
( I’ve committed a thought crime. )
What’s cute is that you think much has changed from czarist Russia to today when it concerns human nature.
Why people think homo sapiens will change their behavior patterns someday is beyond me…
This world will always be one of people’s cruelty against each other with a us and them mentality being dominant centered around a ruthless measure of self preservation fixated on a contradictive yet effective existence of enforced inequality.
The reality is that civilization thrives on inequality where it will never do away with it…
Why would civilization give up that which allows it to exist in the first place?
The reality is that human civilization cannot exist without inequality where it will do everything to maintain it.
Human societies in all reality thrive on inequality too where they too will do everything to maintain such practices.
That inequality of course creates many variables of conflict and many individuals that are prone towards violence like your 3 guys with one hammer reference of course with them they probally just were a bunch of sadistic guys that got bored one saturday afternoon and found a hammer having nothing to do with inequality at all but having everything to do with a environment based off of conflict that finds shelter in states of inequality where individuals learn to be violent all the more in such enviroments of constant conflict.
If civilization and the human species wanted to get rid of inequality somthing of which that breeds and fosters violence it would of done so a long time ago but it hasn’t because inequality is a favorite human traditional past time.
If human civilization refuses to end inequality ( Assuming it could) than it must deal with the consequences of such a enviroment that fosters violence. ( Like building thousands of more prisons across the globe.)
Absolutely. There are very good news sources. The question is this, why would you want to advise me of something that I don’t need advice on. Everything I have spoken to regarding violence and my view of the world is based on good information. Why would you think otherwise?
My real issue is with desensitization, as I’ve already made very clear. I don’t think that the existence of horrible violence itself is an issue.
Because you offered the opinion that the reason people don’t step in to potentially violent situations is a lack of empathy and objectification of the victim, rather than fear of violence. That seems to me to be a very long way from my experience of such situations, to put it lightly, and it is borne out only by “what (you) read in the news”. Which in turn suggests to me that your news sources do not reflect the reality of violence and the social response to it.
Emotions are a part of reality, as uncomfortable a truth as that may be for some people. They are a fuel for decision. Desensitisation is undesirable insofar as you remove a significant barrier to the use of violence and increase the tolerance for violence as a method of solution - as an intelligent, thinking person, violence is a suboptimal decision strategy. There’s no merit in a bridge that was designed by the architect with the biggest guns, you want a bridge designed by someone who knows how to build reliable bridges to time, money and aesthetic demands. Violence removes any meritocracy of skill or thought.
However, oversensitisation to violence is also undesirable, as it removes your capacity for moral choice in the face of violent threat. When a fox breaks into a henhouse, the chickens aren’t eaten because they’re pacifists; they have no choice in the matter. Once avoidance of violence becomes the end rather than the mean, it becomes a lever with which the potentially violent can manipulate people.
Looking on violence as it really is does not require that we ignore the unpleasantness of it.
It is legitimate from the standpoint of Truth. Those who believe murder is always wrong are living a lie, and most likely are hypocrites as they also believe in a society that is addicted to murder under various guises. These beliefs you mention, such as karma, are simply lie-based delusional constructs. Guilt and payback are nothing to do with it.
And what you would rather see is not a basis for Truth nor rational investigation.
Does not matter. I am not in the example.
I don’t disagree with you here, at least on a collective scale (what an individual considers is a matter of True Reality) . However, sensitization only leads to emotion - and thus reason is put aside. Agape’s disturbance only hinders any progress he might make on his quest. Also, his reason as to WHY he found it disturbing was wrong. The lesser disturbance in his second example was not because of the actions, but because of the analogous similarity to the motivations of his own lie-based society.
That is a very key point on this issue.
Strawman. It was “depresses”. That proves that he is broken by society. It should not be allowed to harm him at all.
You are just plain wrong here. “Humanity” is an unnatural expression of human derangement and Truth-rejection. That is not to suggest that one cannot be sensitive to such societal violence. You miss the point entirely, as most humans do.
Wrong!!. And he never said that it was hard to fathom - that was not the point being made. Strawman (again).
It is hard to fathom for inferiors who reject Truth and listen to the lie-based and deranged brainwashings of society. For Me, it is as easy as tying My shoe-laces. I reveal that the “cause for dismay” he experiences in his True Reality was not for the cause he thinks it is. Your reply does not address that.
Again you are wrong. You need to stop questioning Me, stop staying in your comfort zone, stop with the societal lies, and start listening to the world’s second-most known expert in these matters.
They have NOT lost their humanity. The precise reason why they are doing these acts is precisely BECAUSE THEY ARE HUMANS. BECAUSE THEY ARE BRAINWASHED BY MALEVOLENT SOCIETAL LIES AND MYTHS. Got it now? Probably not.
Then you are wrong. In the first video, it is a perfectly healthy, sane and logical outcome of the attacker’s True Reality to launch a hammer attack, which makes a reflection of the extreme injustice and trauma he has endured. Therefore, the target of the attack acts as his poison container.
Have you read about that on My website yet? If you did, the explanation for the behaviour would be apparent (presuming you can handle Truth).
Finally we some some Truth from you, even if it is tainted and unclear as it should be. However, the motivations of the hammer-kids are NOT irrational. This is the fault with your inability to understand, and seek understanding.
Examining one’s life is the pinnacle of what the Superior does. But only if done so from a Forbidden Truth standpoint.
Yes, that represents Truth.
Sigh. You all have no clue as to what constitutes Truth. Your rather sad attempts to make the Truth some kind of spear against violence - or a weapon to change the world are one of the reasons you fail to grasp the very Truths you would need. But those who have the Truth know better than to try so!
Humanity is a BAD thing. It represents lies. It is a product of society, and this humanity is exactly WHY these problems occur. The so-called “good intentions” are nothing more than delusions that delude one to violence that reflects a distorted image of the insane societal ideologies.
Only a Seer of Forbidden Truth is capable of looking deeply into any event or issue, others just have more complicated delusions and errors than some more simply delusions and errors.
There is no such thing as a “greater good”. To solve the problems of violence and oppression, one needs to realize that it was only ever a problem in their minds to be cherished and guarded.
Comfortable for Me. You are spot on that emotions are fuel for decisions. Correct.
But you must also realize that one must be also able to be cold and analytical when seeking Truth. One should not be sacrificed over another. Rather, they should remain in their optimum realms - True Reality and Forbidden Truth.
Achieve that, as I have done, and the battle against societal lies is well on the way to being won.
Ability to recognize Truth.
Ability to live a life based on an accurate reflection of My True Reality and appreciate same.
Mental Freedom.
Personal Untouchability - No external attack event by society could ever have a negative effect on the Superior’s life experience.
Sanity.
Wisdom.
Realizing one is Superior to society and the loyal citizen-slaves.
PS Is there really a need to quote the whole series of replies if you don’t wish to make in-depth commentary?
To desensitize, a person has to suppress or give up an essential part of their humanity, their heart. To lose the ability to empathize, to feel love and compassion for others, is a great loss.
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