Can Jared Loughner help us get beyond good and evil? - 0 views
-
Feeney's piece is worth reading in its entirety, as is Beyond Good and Evil. It's a lot to sum up in a blog post, but Nietzsche basically says there are two types of moral systems: master-morality and slave-morality. His best summary is section 260. In master-morality, the ruling class makes the rules and thus considers itself noble, while in slave morality, there is a suspicion of those in power and in what they consider "good."
-
In other words, it's all a big misunderstanding based on your point of view, kind of like how you might see Palin as evil when your neighbor sees her as good.
-
What's interesting in relation to mass murders like the Tucson incident is that people can rationalize their way into an internally consistent logic that normalizes their thoughts and actions.
- ...2 more annotations...
-
When Giffords gave an apparently unacceptable response to Loughner's obtuse question about language not being real, she seems to have caused him some cognitive dissonance. He apparently expected her to recognize his intellectual superiority, and when she didn't, he became fixated on what he saw as a slight that threw his self-assessment into question.
-
Everyone, myself included, probably has a delusion or two in their belief system. Once in a while they combine with other factors in a person to create a lethal combination: anger, incompetence, rejection, isolation, lack of empathy, drug-induced hallucinations, participation in economies of violence, unthinking behavior, production of a flawed script. That's not evil. It's simply a tragic nexus of human flaws that can culminate in what is too easily dismissed as evil.
-
"Nietzsche is frequently a fave of angry young men who might qualify as what Pesco called confident dumb people. Nietzsche works well for the modern kook with web-induced attention deficits: The fourth chapter of Beyond Good and Evil is a series of 122 Twitter-length aphorisms, and his work is snarky and occasionally humorous. Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil to criticize earlier philosophers who made assumptions about morality based on pre-Christian and Christian beliefs about "evil." Below I discuss why we need to steal Nietzsche back from these people, and I look at a couple of other writers who have examined what gets called "evil" and have attempted to explain it in more nuanced and rational terms."