{"id":32262,"date":"2017-03-14T01:00:55","date_gmt":"2017-03-14T05:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32262"},"modified":"2017-04-15T11:10:10","modified_gmt":"2017-04-15T15:10:10","slug":"qotd-individual-conscience-and-collective-guilt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/03\/14\/qotd-individual-conscience-and-collective-guilt\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Individual conscience and collective guilt"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m sure there are good men in Saudi Arabia who find it abhorrent and painful that women can\u2019t drive, for instance. I\u2019m also sure they enforce that rule on their women because they don\u2019t want them fined or imprisoned or worse. They can\u2019t DO anything. Not as individuals. And they\u2019re too busy feeding their families to organize and run campaigns [to] free women. Also, there have been some men who have organized and tried to make a difference, but there weren\u2019t enough of them. That \u201cgrain of sand\u201d stuff only works dramatically in movies. In real life, it\u2019s more one generation raising the other; one friend talking to the other \u2013 until the balance TIPS.<\/p>\n

And once it does making them feel guilty would be a counterproductive. Sorry for breaking Godwin\u2019s law, but did we persecute ALL of the German people for Hitler\u2019s crimes? No. Could any of them have spoken up? Many did. But most people who were alive at that time were good people caught in a social mechanic they couldn\u2019t break out of \u2013 not individually. And they weren\u2019t connected enough to form cohesive groups.<\/p>\n

While we\u2019re speaking of Germany, look at collective guilt and collective punishment for \u201ccrimes\u201d that people supposedly committed which no individual could have stopped. If you\u2019ve studied the mechanics of the avalanche leading to WWI (I have. There\u2019s a novel about the Red Baron and time traveling started, and it will eventually get done) there was a certain unstoppable force to it. It was going to start sometime. Someone was going to fire the first shot.<\/p>\n

It was Germany. They invaded other countries. The \u201cHun\u201d entered European mythology of the early twentieth for reasons both good and bad. (Google WWI Belgian Nuns, for instance. Much of it was propaganda, but a lot of it, doubtless, happened.)<\/p>\n

When they lost the war, they were treated as if they and they alone and they collectively were guilty. The penalty levied was so high they could not and would not pay and that it was crushing the man in the street.<\/p>\n

There were other reasons leading to the rise of Hitler. However, THAT punishment facilitated it. It might not have happened without it. The \u201cin for a lamb, in for a sheep\u201d is a normal human reaction. If you\u2019re held constantly guilty of things you did NOT do and could not have changed, you\u2019re going to DO something anyway. I mean, how can it get worse?<\/p>\n

To a certain type of woman \u2013 or man, though we\u2019re only giving some tenured college professor males that kind of power \u2013 it is sweet to be able to play the victim ad nauseam.<\/em> Particularly when you\u2019ve never actually been victimized. And it is great to be able to make men squirm with stories of past injustice and feel guilty for things they are either way too young to have done (anyone born after the fifties, pretty much) or could not have changed if they tried, but which many of them mitigated in small ways.<\/p>\n

And to a certain type of man \u2013 or woman, but in this case it doesn\u2019t apply \u2013 it\u2019s a great feeling to go around apologizing for the crimes of your ancestors. If you feel your accomplishments are diminished by theirs, apologizing gives a quick leveling. You recognize they did wrong, therefore you must be better than them. It\u2019s a stupid feeling that ignores that you\u2019re probably also doing things that your descendants will apologize for, but hey, it\u2019s much better than actually trying to achieve something. Less work. Instant boost.<\/p>\n

This dynamic gives power to passive-aggressives and bullies, the exact type of person you don\u2019t want to have any power. And it makes good people feel like they\u2019re bad and if they\u2019re bad they might as well act it. It can, for instance, make young men very attracted to religions that DO oppress women (and no, sorry, that\u2019s not most main line Christian religions, where you can leave if you want to.) Frankly, I think it\u2019s a miracle more of my son\u2019s generation hasn\u2019t converted to one of those. I think it\u2019s a witness to their essential decency, given the books, the movies and everything else designed to make them feel guilty for crimes they never committed.<\/p>\n

Sarah Hoyt, “The Sharp Edge of Guilt, a blast from the past March 2010”, According to Hoyt<\/em><\/a>, 2015-06-05.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m sure there are good men in Saudi Arabia who find it abhorrent and painful that women can\u2019t drive, for instance. I\u2019m also sure they enforce that rule on their women because they don\u2019t want them fined or imprisoned or worse. They can\u2019t DO anything. Not as individuals. And they\u2019re too busy feeding their families […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1118,7,246],"tags":[371,303],"class_list":["post-32262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-germany","category-history","category-ww1","tag-saudiarabia","tag-sexism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8om","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32262"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32263,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32262\/revisions\/32263"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}