Re: POTUS 45.30: "Stormy Weather...It Keeps on Rainin' all the Time..."
Because ideologies make good people believe terrible things. The scary thing that we've never really come to grips with is there were probably a lot of good people who became Nazis, and not just as a way of laying low. A lot of good people kept excusing what Stalin did, too, so it's not limited to the right.
I propose that whether or not you fall for a hateful ideology may have nothing to do with what kind of a person you are. Hanah Arendt thought differently: she thought there were risk factors for totalitarianism, and that's become the conventional wisdom. But what if that's not true? What if it's like a plague and it can hit anybody? And, remember, the first thing the ideology does is reach into your head and flip the self-criticism mechanism off switch, so the infected never know.
Now that's a horror premise. It removes all control not just at the societal level but for self-protection.
Originally posted by alfablue
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I propose that whether or not you fall for a hateful ideology may have nothing to do with what kind of a person you are. Hanah Arendt thought differently: she thought there were risk factors for totalitarianism, and that's become the conventional wisdom. But what if that's not true? What if it's like a plague and it can hit anybody? And, remember, the first thing the ideology does is reach into your head and flip the self-criticism mechanism off switch, so the infected never know.
Now that's a horror premise. It removes all control not just at the societal level but for self-protection.
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