The Psychology of Evil. Interesting prospect. "The Lucifer Effect" is really interesting. Turning the good bad, it only takes one crazy person with their finger on the trigger and nothing to lose to kill everyone. It seems logical that it can come down to the very situation of a good person being presented with a scenario where the person could either do what is "Right" or what is "Wrong", but it changes the question in my mind to what is "Right" and "Wrong"? How do we define these things in every day life?
In my mind we all need to be aware of our weaknesses in ourselves, and our strengths, and be aware of the situations that capitalize on our weaknesses and strengths. If we can do that, we can as a race of beings be better off. If we could learn to avoid the situations that put us in scenarios where we are forced to walk on our weak leg so to speak, and pursue our strengths in academia, social awareness, mental abilities, etc, we can change the course of our future, one situation at a time.
In my mind we all need to be aware of our weaknesses in ourselves, and our strengths, and be aware of the situations that capitalize on our weaknesses and strengths. If we can do that, we can as a race of beings be better off. If we could learn to avoid the situations that put us in scenarios where we are forced to walk on our weak leg so to speak, and pursue our strengths in academia, social awareness, mental abilities, etc, we can change the course of our future, one situation at a time.
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An eye opening talk by Philip. Much of the evil around us is systemic and the culprit is social indifference. But an investigation into war crimes is silly when war itself is evil. There was never a just war except in mythology. In our attempt to unroot evil from our system, we also need to examine why this evil creeped into our system in the first place. If we can't stop its inception, no matter how well we cleanup, it will keep coming back in. Where does evil begin is the right question!
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Agreed, to me it seems that when you give a person power, they become more lax on their moral codes. We see this everywhere in society.
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Now thats an interesting idea! But can we organize a system without empowering anybody? For millennia men were ruled by men despite the differences in how they came to power. And every human is susceptible to emotions and instincts, perpetuating exploitation in the name of ideology or diplomacy. Democracy gave us the power to choose but we are still reliant on the judgement and prudence of a few to govern us. contd..
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May be the solution to this problem is not just in choosing the apt but also in pinning the responsibility and making them accountable. For this we depend on some other men to enforce law and deliver justice. Ultimately the weakest link in our system is us, humans. So why do we create systems that we ourselves do not honor? Probably because when asked to decide as a group we tend to minimize adversity but individually we pursue our own selfish ends irrespective of the system we devised together.
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I think I'm going to have to disagree with your severity, while the pursuit of happiness can on one level or other be considered selfish, I think People as a whole suck, they are quick to scare and prone to knee jerk reactions. Individuals are where the magic happens. I think we as a race are short sighted in that we don't like to be aware of our flaws as a whole.
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Well I agree with your characterization of people but what you cite is an entirely different aspect to what we are discussing here. We are discussing about the systems developed by people, their motivation, their objectives and why in reality those systems seldom function in tandem with the ideology that gave birth to them in the first place! contd...
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"Individuals are where the magic happens!" - agreed, but such phenomenal personalities and leaders don't come by often! Our systems are not as worse as they turn out to be. Its we who screw the hell out of them. The objective of this discussion is probably to conceptualize a system that can overcome the shortcomings of the humans responsible for various parts of it.
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I love the fact that every subject is fair game to you guys!.
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