Quote:
Originally Posted by Ataros
It feels so good to blame and punish others for your own decisions like upgrading a PC, purchasing CloD or downloading spyware from internet. Blaming others implies that they are bad guys but I am a much better guy compared to them. This is why it feels so good. E.g. dictators like Stalin or Hitler usually blamed and executed their generals for their own mistakes.
It is much more painful to take responsibility for a mistake and admit to yourself: "I can not pay attention when needed. I can not control my anxiety. I can not clearly think when excited. I need someone else like forum members or admins to tell me what to do because I can not make responsible decisions myself. I am not a grown up man yet."
No one can "get" you to purchase a game, upgrade a PC or download a file from internet. It is always you who make a bad decision unless you have a gun pointed at your head when you make it. Children do not make their own decisions of cause as adults make them for them. Then most of children grow up and learn to take responsibility.
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I'm sorry, but while I believe that at an individual level people should indeed look long and hard at their actions and do everything they can to prevent mistakes, I also think that no one should act with malice and ill intent toward others and I don't subscribe to the kind of philosophy which tends to minimise the actions of others.
Yeah, it might sound nice to talk about liberty and agency (ignoring doubts about free will and determinism) and pretend you are an island impervious to all assault but in practice this ignores malice and ill intent on the part of others and actually CREATES SPACE for those misbehaviours.
It is both desirable in a practical sense and right that people should challenge the actions of others when malice or ill intent is suspected. It is what prevents and discourages those behaviours (alongside personal philosophies) and allows us to work toward a better world. There's nothing childish about that.
If anything is childish, it is trivialising and infantilising Hitler and Stalin. Those men did not commit the crimes that they did because they blamed others. They did so first because of profound personal corruption of their humanity and human values, and second because of certain truths about high public office that we do not like to admit (history does not always allow for being nice) and because of world views that they didn't create and we are embarressed to admit were held more widely (racism, geopolitics, our appetite for world domination).
If there's something to take out of the recurrence of war with WWII, it is not that the failure of individual men to take responsibility for their actions brings the world to calamity - it is that the failure of the collective to hold itself to account for its thoughts and actions spawns such men.
Let me ask you a question. If war is so unequivocally terrible, if it is only the deranged like Hitler and Stalin who desire it, then why are we sitting here replaying it? Part of holding yourself to account is holding yourself to account for a failure to challenge the actions of others.