Tegularius wrote: ↑March 12th, 2021, 6:38 am
Everything you describe and worse, has happened countless times throughout history. Human nature is responsible for ALL the inhuman crimes of humanity and not just those perpetrated against each other. Man is at heart a monster needing only the right reasons to prove who he really is.
It depends on how you look at it. I recently listened to a podcast that said '
While humans can be the great destroyers of the planet, they can also be the saviours of the planet'.
There have been cults that drove people collectively to commit suicide. People are capable of a lot for a belief or idea. Beliefs and ideas can be wrong. Sound philosophical development might prevent errors so in my opinion a solution is to be sought in philosophy.
I have investigated the Nazi ideology as precursor to my study of GMO (eugenics on nature) and it was discovered that the true origin of the Holocaust was not hatred but an at that time developing status quo of the international scientific establishment that believed that the human mind is meaningless and causally 'originates' in the brain.
The ideal that arose was for humanity to self-control evolution (eugenics) which in practice at that time resulted in an attempt to kill off weak parts of humanity starting with psychiatric patients.
German psychiatry started killing psychiatric patients systematically countrywide using starvation diets 20 years before the Nazi party was founded. The following German book by a well known author provides an example:
Euthanasia by Starvation in Psychiatry 1914-1949
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/H ... 0ab29306d2
The idea behind eugenics – racial hygiene – that led to the Nazi Holocaust was supported by Universities around the world. It started with an idea that was not naturally defensible and that was thought to require trickery and deceit.
It resulted in a demand for people with the capabilities of Nazis.
The famous German Holocaust scholar Ernst Klee has described the situation as follows:
“The Nazis didn't need psychiatry, it was the other way around, psychiatry needed the Nazis.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Klee
The Holocaust started with the killing of 300.000 psychiatric patients and the starvation practice that was later discovered in the camps originated from psychiatry.
The Holocaust was performed by people that believed that what they were doing was 'good' and the justification for their idea of 'good' originated from the international scientific establishment of that time.
The German extermination program originally had a scientifically acceptable basis and was supported by Universities around the world, including in England and USA. The USA started with mass sterilization programs for psychiatric patients based on the same eugenic ideas and similar programs have also taken place in several European countries.
In 2014, New York Times journalist Eric Lichtblau published the book
The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men, which showed that more than 10,000 high-ranking Nazis emigrated to the United States after World War II. Their war crimes were quickly forgotten, and some received help and protection from the US government.
People weren't being a 'monster' or doing evil from their own perspective. They were fulfilling a honourable task for the status quo idea of 'good' of the scientific establishment at that time. A status quo that demanded barbaric practices as a 'necessary evil' to cleanse the human race from what was deemed a true evil for humanity's evolution and future. They were serving a 'greater good'.
The personal hatred of Hitler might be the reason that certain groups of people such as Jews were included in the originally psychiatric extermination program. While that might be considered pure evil so that the reasoning in the OP is still valid, in practice for people on the ground it might not have been easy oppose the propagated idea that the status quo of the scientific establishment - a greater good - was being served.
How could people in that dark time oppose a force such as an international scientific establishment?
Questioning the fundamental idea's of the Nazi ideology
The advertisement for the first eugenics congress shows a link with psychiatry or people who believed in it, which can help explain the origin.
Psychiatry is based on
determinism (a belief that there is no free will) and the idea that mind originates in the brain causally. The flyer for the first eugenics congress shows how the brain causally explains mind.
- Eugenics is the self direction of human evolution
The idea at the foundation of psychiatry, the idea that there is no more to life and the human mind than what can be shown to exist using empirical science (determinism), is the same idea that lays at the basis of eugenics. For a desire to 'stand above life' to arise, one has to be convinced that life is meaningless.
“
What is the meaning of life?” is a question that has driven many to atrocities, against themselves and against others. In a wicked attempt to overcome the 'weakness' resulting from the inability to answer the question, some believe that they should live with a gun under their nose.
An often cited quote from Nazi Hermann Göring:
“When I hear the word culture, I unlock my gun!”
It is easy to argue that life has no meaning because empirical evidence is impossible.
In science the inability to define the meaning of life has resulted in an ideal to abolish morality.
(2018)
Immoral advances: Is science out of control?
To many scientists, moral objections to their work are not valid: science, by definition, is morally neutral, so any moral judgement on it simply reflects scientific illiteracy.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg ... f-control/
Morality is based on 'values' and that logically means that science also wants to get rid of philosophy.
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in Beyond Good and Evil (Chapter 6 – We Scholars) shared the following perspective on the evolution of science in relation to philosophy.
The declaration of independence of the scientific man, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the subtler after-effects of democratic organization and disorganization: the self- glorification and self-conceitedness of the learned man is now everywhere in full bloom, and in its best springtime – which does not mean to imply that in this case self-praise smells sweet. Here also the instinct of the populace cries, “Freedom from all masters!” and after science has, with the happiest results, resisted theology, whose “hand-maid” it had been too long, it now proposes in its wantonness and indiscretion to lay down laws for philosophy, and in its turn to play the “master” – what am I saying! to play the PHILOSOPHER on its own account.
It shows the path that science has pursued since as early as 1850. Science has intended to rid itself of philosophy, which includes morality.
When science is practised autonomously and intends to get rid of any influence of philosophy, the 'knowing' of a scientific fact necessarily entails certainty. Without certainty, philosophy would be essential, and that would be obvious to any scientist, which it is not.
It means that there is a dogmatic belief involved (a belief in uniformitarianism) that legitimises autonomous application of science without thinking about whether it is actually 'good' what is being done (i.e. without morality).
The idea that the facts of science are valid
without philosophy results in the natural tendency to completely abolish morality.
This might explain why in that dark time before the Holocaust morality was stand to lose ground in the face of an international scientific establishment that was reaching its heights.
The root of the problem that led to the Nazi holocaust and barbaric (immoral) practices therefore has been the preceding evolution of science that resulted in the suppression of philosophy and morality.
There are indications that the eugenics ideal is wrong.
With eugenics, one is moving 'towards an ultimate state' as perceived from an external viewer (the human). That may be opposite of what is considered healthy in Nature that seeks diversity for
resilience and strength.
A quote by a philosopher in a discussion about eugenics:
blond hair and blue eyes for everyone
utopia
-Imp
Eugenics resides on the essence of inbreeding of which it is known that it causes fatal problems in evolution. Evidence is the fact that cows in the USA are being driven to extinction through eugenics.
(2021)
The way we breed cows is setting them up for extinction
Chad Dechow – an associate professor of dairy cattle genetics – and others say there is so much genetic similarity among them, the effective population size is less than 50. If cows were wild animals, that would put them in the category of critically endangered species.
https://qz.com/1649587/the-way-we-breed ... xtinction/
While there are 9 million cows in the USA, from a genetic perspective, there are
just 50 cows alive due to the nature of eugenics that resides on the essence of inbreeding.
“It's pretty much one big inbred family,” says Leslie B. Hansen, a cow expert and professor at the University of Minnesota. Fertility rates are affected by inbreeding, and already, cow fertility has dropped significantly. Also, when close relatives are bred, serious health problems could be lurking.
Overcoming problems is essential for progress in life. Some perceived defects may be part of a 300 year evolutionary strategy that is essential to acquire solutions for longer term survival. The fight to overcome the defects or diseases makes a life form stronger in the future. Filtering out genes (eugenics) would be like fleeing instead of overcoming problems and thus logically results in increased weakness over time.
An easy life or offspring with genes linked to social prosperity (financial, career, etc) may not be what is good for longer term evolution.
My conclusion after my study of eugenics and GMO is that it may be best to
serve life instead of trying to stand above it. People like Stephen Hawkings with a hereditary disease can prove of exceptional value to humanity.
The following logic shows what I mean:
“An attempt to stand above life, as being life, logically results in a figurative stone that sinks in the ocean of time.”
The principle of eugenics resides on the essence of inbreeding of which it is known that it causes fatal problems.