Neuroimaging studies have shown that the amygdala, the tiny almond-shaped brain structure that mediates fear, is larger in people with more rightwing views
Neuroimaging studies have shown that the amygdala, the tiny almond-shaped brain structure that mediates fear, is larger in people with more rightwing views
I read once that Holocaust research causes three distinct traumas. One is where you realize that it really happened to real people. Two is when you empathize with the victims and can visualize yourself of loved ones in that position. Three is when you empathize with the perpetrators and can visualize yourself or loved ones in that position.
It's natural for children to believe that good people do good things and bad do bad, but that opinion can't survive into adulthood without profound lack of self awareness.
Wasn't the gas chambers planned because German soldiers kept going crazy executing people directly. Even if you're trained and brainwashed shooting a child in the back of the head is gonna mess you up (especially more than once). Dehumanising the victims, putting them into work camps, moving them to a room where the overseer can flip a switch. It was all to make you see them as less than human and make it easier to not connect the act of killing them to taking a life. Of course there were a whole lot of absolutely f*cked up monsters but I feel really bad for all the nazis who got sucked into a brainwashed cult and by the time they realised what they were doing they had no out left.
Not too new of a concept, "Kill the cop in your head" has been a common phrase among the left since the mid 90s and possibly originates from the late 60s.
The small nazi phenomena can be modelled by a perturbative expansion
N = 1 + a1 + a2 + a3 + ...
As long as the relative smaller nazi size, represented by 'a', is smaller than one the series converges and you are not a nazi. When 'a' is larger than one, the smaller nazi in the small nazis is actually bigger, e.g. a2 > a, and you are in the nonperturbative regime of the small nazi model, and you'd be called a "full blown nazi". AdS/CFT postulates you can model the nonperturbative regime with a tankie-description, but the theory is controversial.
No we fucking don't all have a nazi in us. We all have a thing (fear response) that nazis and other authoritarian propaganda love to take advantage of.
I know that the person who said this was trying to get that point across, but decided to go for shock value over clarity.
I noticed something for the first time, likely due to social conditioning that I'd missed it before: we have to stop dehumanization when speaking of large and small scale humans. They are not monsters, they are humans, like us. Perhaps if they'd been treated in s humane way, they would have enjoyed some happy coincidence of nature and nurture and not gone on to such egregious acts. "In the beginning was the word," and abuse starts with thoughts, progresses to belittling, dehumanization and then physical abuse.
As someone on the spectrum, I've been ostracized, humiliated, and dehumanized all my life, yet I did not become a Nazi. It only made me angrier at the people who want to put their boots on your neck.