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Posted on 05/23/2026 5:08:36 AM PDT by MtnClimber
We humans are disturbingly malleable and conformist, and the digital age has made it exceptionally easy to turn us into banal, evil creatures.
History’s worst crimes are not usually carried out by cartoon villains. They are carried out by ordinary people who tell themselves they are only following orders, only keeping the peace, only doing what the moment requires. Jonathan Miltimore’s excellent piece The Science of Manipulation gets at a hard truth people do not like to face: evil does not usually arrive with horns. It arrives through weakness, fear, and conformity.
A lot of people prefer the idea that evil is confined to a small class of monsters. It is a comforting theory because it makes evil feel rare and contained. If only a few mutant outliers are capable of atrocity, then we can relax. But the more frightening likelihood is that under the right circumstances, most of us can become cowardly, obedient, cruel, and yes, monstrous.
How Evil Works
The 20th century already taught this lesson. Adolf Eichmann, the administrator who organized the logistics of the Holocaust, was not a comic-book villain. In her discussion of the “banality of evil,” Hannah Arendt paints him as rather boring, bureaucratic, dutiful, and unimaginative—which is exactly what made him dangerous. Her framing was disturbing precisely because it stripped away the fantasy that evil must always be dramatic and obvious.
Psychologist Stanley Milgram’s classic experiments made the same point from another angle. Ordinary people, told what to do by an authority figure, kept administering what they believed were painful electric shocks to another person—even when that person was screaming in pain or appeared completely unresponsive. The shocks were fake, and no one was actually hurt, yet 65% of participants believed they were administering the maximum 450-volt shock.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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That is what makes big government so dangerous. The government employees are just following orders.
Democrats are commies. Oh wait…we all know that. Just common sense. Democrats are Nazies. Oh no. Inflammation of the brain. Socialism is socialism. Nazi and commie are identical twins.
Reminds me of the “Animals” album by Pink Floyd and how it sounds like music from hell.
A long quote from my profile page:
Although our modern socialists’ promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under “communism” and “fascism.” As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939, “the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of un-freedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.”
No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.
— F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
“We humans are disturbingly malleable and conformist...”
Well, covid sure made that abundantly clear.
Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever thought so many Americans were such weak minded sheeple.
Stay 6 feet apart....OK 😵💫
Only walk in one direction in a grocery store isle...OK 😵💫
Cover your face with a mask that does absolutely nothing...OK 😵💫
Take an untested shot that there is no idea what its gonna do to you.....OK 😵💫
Unbelievable SMH
#Pureblood
Covid was an intelligence and compliance test.
+1.....and you bet it was!
"...just doin' my job."
Nazis, commies and democrats . Two wings and a tail of the same buzzard. Too bad you won’t believe the actual words of your nasty natzys.
NATIONALIST SOCIALISTS and COMMUNIST SOCIALISTS to the core! Birds of a feather stick together! No wonder the SOCIALISTS call everyone they don’t like after a third rate Italian Political Party(fascists) of the 1930s.
Goebbel’s own words...”Lenin is the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between Communism and the Hitler faith is very slight.”-Joseph Goebbels
And...
“Controversial problems [between Germany and Russia] did not, in my opinion, exist anywhere along the line from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and to the Far East. In addition, despite all the divergencies in their views of life, there was one thing common to the ideology of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union: opposition to the capitalist democracies in the West.”—Julius Schnurre, Nazi trade rep to Russia.
And...
Communist Party USA Chairman Vows Cooperation With Democratic Party(from 2015)
Problem is, if YOU DON’T FOLLOW ORDERS you get shot.
If you do FOLLOW ORDERS to keep from getting shot and lose the war, you are tried and hanged for FOLLOWING ORDERS.
I think the most important point that most people ignore is how the majority of “citizens” allowed one person in the state - the governor - to shut the entire state down. No meeting of the legislature. No debate. Just one person shutting everything and everyone down. Closing businesses. Restricting travel. Nearly everyone went along, including the churches - even though there was proof in front of everyone’s eyes - other states remaining free and open with less deaths than in states that closed down.
Even here in Florida it was nuts for a while.
I had to meet my barber on the sly a couple of times just to get haircuts.
At home depot for a while you could only go INTO the store through one door and OUT through a different door...they actually had an employee posted at the exit telling people they could not go in that way.
How the hell does that make any damned sense at all?
And she was being a real nazi about it.
The Quest diagnostics office we used to have our blood work done had a black guy that had apparently anointed himself as the mask police. If you didn’t have your mask covering your nose he wouldn’t let you in.
Some people have absolutely NO business telling anybody what to do no matter how trivial.
I think today a lot of the people today would want to administer the shocks because they have permission, I also think that a lot of the government’s left-wing activism among the bureaucracy employees isn’t just a reflection of the employee’s personal politics but also a passive aggressive lashing out within the safety and cover of their position, a lot of people are angry and want to hurt, and seek little ways to do it in modern American society.
Hostile cops, hostile fast food workers, hostile everyone, even a lot of the trans-crossdressing stuff is a passive aggressive lashing out at everyone, even politicians lash out with silly laws as a concealed release of anger at people they want to anger, or cause problems for, disrupt their lives.
Some of this was done by compliance with at least what we thought were orders. Some of it was just said for what they thought was “common sense” Here where I live, this was not generally complied with but by a few....unless we HAD to comply in order to accomplish our business. Of course, in the end, most of this pure crap that some of us felt we had to suffer through to get to our needed objective. We (in most cases) learned that masks & other “stuff” was of little to no help whatsoever. Some, however weak-minded, just “followed the rules”.
Oh it’s even worse than that. In many places, the local health commissioner can become the ultimate power. They have the power to close down commerce, education, and travel. You had these people who were likely political appointees finding themselves welding incredible, unrestrained power for the first time in their lives. Most of them had no training or idea of what to do.
I had just left my job where I was involved in the Emergency Management side of the healthcare system in town. We had drilled and written policies on “pandemic/epidemic” scenarios for years. When the time came, the people who were in charge were the ones who never attending any of those meetings or drills. We used to joke that they had to be shown where the “binders” rule of policies were kept in order to figure out what they were going to do.
The county was under the control of functional idiots.
Retirement did not come fast enough.
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