The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

"Don't let your mind speak louder than your heart" - I think many have this so very wrong. Is support for fascism is a sensible, logical, well-thought-out policy? No, it's a heart-felt, emotional appeal to scared, proud, paranoid, crude, brutal people (who seem to be about half of our neighbors). surely the mindful decision is empathetic, constructive, and wise - not just base.

I don't think it's so simple. Support for fascism can seem sensible and logical if you let yourself think that between you and greatness stands a minority whose sole purpose is to prevent you from becoming great. You could argue it's not emotion but a calculation coming from struggle and an easy explanation for that struggle. Not every wrong assumption comes from emotion and we have the whole history of science to prove that.

You are effectively describing an appeal to emotions, not reason.

Every ideology appeals to emotions—liberalism, democracy, fascism, communism, etc. This is why we seldom see academic professors, who deliver lectures on TV, winning elections based solely on their lectures.

Ideologies aim to harness people's emotions to gain support. Democracy, fascism, and communism all possess underlying logic. By analyzing these ideologies dispassionately, without moral judgments, one can discern the logic in each of them.

When encountering opposition, there are numerous ways to resolve conflict and achieve one's goals. These include discussion, compromise, and litigation, but also extend to extreme measures like murder and genocide. While one cannot deny the existence of these methods, their acceptability depends on individual values.

Every ideology does, but it's question of how and how much.

Popular support for fascism is almost exclusively predicated on strong emotions felt about vague/changing subjects. Fascist speakers excelled at driving their audience into a frenzy.

Democracy is not consistently about this, and there's also rational debate about it. Rational debate wasn't the focus of fascism, and in fact it was actively shunned -- fascism was about sacrifice, blood and belief, not reason.

Someone else linked to the reflections on the language of the Third Reich, and how it was meant to drive emotions and irrational thinking.

Fascism cannot coexist with reason. Other forms of evil might, but not this one.

You seem to be confusing propaganda with the fundamental principles of an ideology. Can you specify which aspects of the defined fundamentals of fascism lack logic?

I'm not confusing anything and much has been written about how fascism wasn't a particular coherent or logical set of principles. There's not much you can point at and say "this is the logical core of fascism", because there is almost none. It's all very ad-hoc. "Propaganda" is almost all there is to fascism, if you take it away there's almost nothing left.

I hope you can understand this is a topic that exceeds the scope of an HN comment. If you want to read about this, there's tons of literature.

It seems that you are indeed conflating the two if you're unable to provide arguments to support your thesis. What you've offered is an opinion colored by your moral judgment. I asked you to identify which of the main fundamentals of fascism lack logic. This request doesn't exceed the scope of an HN comment. The logic of fascism is grounded in the belief that authoritarian leadership, nationalism, collectivism over individualism, militarism, use of propaganda and mass mobilization are necessary for creating a strong, unified, and powerful nation. It posits that individual freedoms and democratic processes can be sacrificed for the sake of national unity, strength, and revival. So, I ask again: Where exactly do you see a lack of logic? I'm not seeking a moral judgment about the methods, but a purely logical analysis.

It seems that you are indeed conflating the two if you're unable to provide arguments to support your thesis.

I'm sorry you don't like it, but I stand by what I said: go read about fascism, there's plenty written. There are no shortcuts and I won't provide a history lesson for you here.

Where exactly do you see a lack of logic?

Nothing you described is "logic"; it is a set of axiomatic beliefs. "Might makes right" is not logic, it's a belief. There's very little that is logical about fascism. In fact they had to reject and persecute science because the world wasn't what fascism described.

I mean, they did have a bunch of contradictory foundational ideas, is that what you mean? But there was hardly a logical core to it.

It's important to distinguish between the logical structure of an ideology and the moral or ethical implications of that ideology. Your argument appears to hinge on the assertion that fascism lacks a coherent logical framework, dismissing it as primarily propaganda without a logical core. However, identifying the logical structure of an ideology doesn't necessitate endorsing its moral standing.

Fascism, as historically understood centers around certain key principles such as the ones I provided above (authoritarian leadership, nationalism, and collectivism over individualism etc). These principles form a coherent, if morally contentious, framework. The logic in this context refers to the internal consistency and the cause-and-effect relationships within the ideology. For example, the fascist belief in authoritarian leadership is logically connected to its emphasis on national unity and strength, as authoritarianism is seen as a means to achieve and maintain this unity.

Your reference to "might makes right" does encapsulate a belief system, within the context of fascist ideology, it also follows a logical pattern. The ideology posits that strength (might) is necessary for national revival and dominance, and therefore, actions that lead to increased strength are justified (right). This is a form of logic, albeit one that many find ethically objectionable.

Regarding the rejection and persecution of science, this was not a reflection of the inherent logic of fascism but rather a consequence of its authoritarian nature, where any dissenting ideas, including scientific ones, were suppressed to maintain control.

Moral and ethical criticisms of fascism are valid, but they are distinct from an analysis of its logical structure. The logical coherence of an ideology is separate from its moral standing, and it's possible to examine the former without endorsing the latter.

Your argument appears to hinge on the assertion that fascism lacks a coherent logical framework, dismissing it as primarily propaganda without a logical core.

It's not my argument alone: a lot has been written about fascism and its lack of logical core! There isn't a lot of "logical structure" to it. I don't think "as historically understood" fascism forms a self-consistent logical core; I think it is well studied that is amorphous, illogical and inconsistent, and that's the historical consensus.

However, identifying the logical structure of an ideology doesn't necessitate endorsing its moral standing.

To be clear, I'm not making a moral argument. I don't believe you support fascism either, and I understand what you're trying to argue. I just think the consensus of people who studied fascism is different to your opinion.

Fascism (regardless of whether it's right or wrong -- and I believe we both believe it to be wrong) is highly illogical. There's not much to it beyond its propaganda. It's riddled with inconsistencies, it's not just "wrong" but there's not much to it beyond appeals to emotion.

Your reference to "might makes right" does encapsulate a belief system, within the context of fascist ideology, it also follows a logical pattern

We both agree it's a belief system. I disagree it's logical. Not everything with an "idea" (or a bunch of ideas) is logical. "Ideas" are not enough for something to be called logical.

Again, this is not my argument alone. A lot has been written about fascism espousing what I'm saying here.

It bears repeating again, just in case: I'm not making a moral argument. I don't believe you're "defending" fascism either; that's not what I'm disagreeing with. I'm rejecting your assertion that fascism is logical (if mistaken). I'm asserting it's both illogical and mistaken. I would accept something evil and logical can exist, it's just that fascism is not it!

Appeal to authority does not constitute an argument. Your response continues to emphasize the perceived lack of a logical core in fascism, while also pointing out that this perspective is supported by a consensus among those who have studied the ideology. You need to dissect the nature of the argument you're presenting and the distinction between logical structure and ideological content. To effectively argue that fascism lacks a logical structure, provide specific examples of its internal inconsistencies or contradictions. Simply stating that experts agree with your view does not address the core question: What specific elements of fascist ideology lack logical coherence?

I am not aware of any experts who have studied this ideology and concluded that it lacks logical structure. If you maintain that such experts exist, could you please provide citations for their arguments along with the relevant sources? Assuming you reference these experts, you should be able to accurately cite their specific arguments and sources. So please provide precise citations relevant to the context of our discussion, along with the sources.

I will argue that you are still conflating between the ideological content of fascism and its logical structure. An ideology can be logically consistent in how its principles interconnect and support each other, even if those principles are based on fallacious premises or lead to unethical conclusions. The fascist emphasis on nationalism and authoritarian control logically leads to policies that suppress dissent and prioritize state power over individual rights. This is a LOGICAL progression of ideas within the framework of the ideology.

You assert that not everything with an "idea" is logical. While this is true, the logical coherence of an ideology is not just about having ideas but about how these ideas are systematically interconnected and rationalized within that ideology. Fascism has demonstrated a certain internal logic in how it articulates and rationalizes its principles, such as the belief that a strong authoritarian leader is necessary for national unity and that individual rights can be sacrificed for the greater good of the nation.

You mention that fascism is riddled with inconsistencies. If these inconsistencies disrupt the internal logic of the ideology, then please identify them.

So if you want to effectively argue that fascism lacks a logical structure, then go beyond stating the consensus of scholars (appeal to authority) and to specifically identify where the ideology fails to maintain logical consistency. Without these specifics, your thesis relies too heavily on an appeal to authority and a general dismissal of the ideology without addressing its internal logic.

Appeal to authority does not constitute an argument. Your response continues to emphasize the perceived lack of a logical core in fascism, while also pointing out that this perspective is supported by a consensus among those who have studied the ideology.

Appeal to authority is only a fallacy when the authority is arbitrary, not when they are experts on the topic.

In any case, this has gone on long enough. I have nothing against you, I've explained my point, and I'm not going to give you a history lesson here, "explain" anything to you, or keep reading your walls of text. HN is not suitable for this.

Have a nice day!

Throughout this conversation, I have repeatedly requested specific arguments or evidence regarding the logical structure of fascism. These requests were made in the spirit of understanding and critically examining your viewpoint. Despite these requests, you have not provided concrete arguments or examples that directly address the logical structure of fascism, which was the core issue at hand.

Appeal to authority is only a fallacy when the authority is arbitrary, not when they are experts on the topic.

Your responses emphasize a reliance on expert consensus without offering specific examples or references to support your stance. While it's true that an appeal to authority is not fallacious when the authority is relevant and credible, the essence of the argument still requires substantiation beyond just stating that experts agree with a viewpoint. Merely stating that experts agree with a position, without providing any direct references or examples is akin to saying "Trust me, I'm right because experts say so" rather than, "Here's the evidence or arguments presented by experts that support my view."

In any case, this has gone on long enough. I have nothing against you, I've explained my point, and I'm not going to give you a history lesson here, "explain" anything to you, or keep reading your walls of text. HN is not suitable for this.

Stating that you won't provide a "history lesson" or implying that the other person's efforts constitute mere "walls of text" came across as dismissive and disrespectful.

If the conversation isn't aligning with your expectations, it might be more productive to articulate this directly and respectfully. You could say something like, "I appreciate the depth of your inquiry, but I feel that this platform isn't the right place for such an in-depth discussion, or I don't have the resources/time/depth of knowledge to provide the detailed response this topic deserves." instead of writing that you will not teach someone history or "explain" anything to that person.

Every ideology appeals to emotions...

I can't find the source right now, but someone said that believing in democracy is like believing in the metric system.

And there's another (Churchill's?) one saying that it's the worst government system, except all the others. Not very exciting definitions, more like cynics' choice.

..someone said that believing in democracy is like believing in the metric system..

I have no idea whatsoever the hidden meaning here.

I found it, it was "dying for democracy..." instead. The meaning? Democracy is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Humans can die for freedom. Democracy doesn't sound as such an epic thing to die for.

I really like Churchills sentiment here.

Democracy is very flawed in many aspects in my opinion, starting with the fact that it is the rule of majority over minority.

Yet all other systems of governance seem much worse to me (any rule of minority over majority system like monarchy or dictatorship for example). Monarchy for example is great as long as your monarch is a sensible, smart, and empathetic person - but terrible when the ones after them aren’t.

I really can’t come up with a better alternative to democracy (aka majority rule) even if I think many of the problems in contemporary western society stem from that majority rule.

Of course there are many more devils in the details and democracies can vary widely across the spectrum.

To me a socialist (as in social, as in having the interest of „the people“ as guiding principle) democracy seems to be the best system humans have been able to come up with so far - the best as in resulting in a good outcome for the biggest portion of people. The Nordic states seem to have gotten it right in most aspects, even if there are many problems even there.

I wonder if there are any other good propositions or systems of governance that have been tried and proven that I have been missing (Spain's anarchist or Mexican syndicalism comes to mind, but I know too little about them to pass any judgement - plus they have been very localised systems afaict)

"X can seem sensible and logical if you ignore sense and logic and believe your emotions instead".

Yes, that's true for everything, and it is exactly what believing your emotions over facts means.

But that's just ad absurdum considering we don't have straight answers when it comes to socio-political issues.

It's absolutely straightforward to uphold Democratic principles over Fascistic enterprises. People who get this wrong are simply wrong, and it's likely emotional and psychological forces that got them there, not rational, historiographic, or empirical ones.

The current headwinds are a result of ill-equiped individuals being manipulated by other ill-equiped individuals.

It's absolutely straightforward to uphold Democratic principles over Fascistic enterprises.

That may be, but it also seems perfectly logical to claim democracy is broken because a voice of an educated person carries same weight than that of a high school dropout. All you need to do is extend this logic a bit. I think it is because of our emotions, empathy or maybe something else that we see that this "flaw" in democracy isn't really a flaw.

ill-equiped individuals being manipulated by other ill-equiped individuals

Except fascism wasn't only a manipulation. Had fascism succeeded it would've made the participating states extremely rich, powerful and influential throughout the next (maybe) hundreds of years.

to claim democracy is broken because a voice of an educated person carries same weight than that of a high school dropout

Is not logical.

fascism wasn't only a manipulation

No successful ideology is only a manipulation.

Had fascism succeeded

I doubt anyone really knows why, but the historical fact is that it didn't.

Is not logical.

How so?

No successful ideology is only a manipulation.

Depends on how you define success. We can say "fascism didn't succeed" but it certainly didn't blow over as a trend. Not back then, and not now.

As a common meeting ground between Hobbes and Rousseau (and probably Locke, which I confess I have not read), anyone can hold and fire a gun. Considering the original context in whence Greek democracy flourished, I'd say that's a fair extrapolation to modern times.

Considering the original context in whence Greek democracy flourished, I'd say that's a fair extrapolation to modern times.

I don't think so. Even "democracy" in the lens of 18th is century America is rife with various prejudice that shouldn't existing in a pure democracy. I wouldn't extrapolate anything accurately from millenia ago if it degregates in a matter of a few centuries.

It's very easy to protest "equal vote for each person" when the ruling body gets to define "person" (or more accurately, "citizen") in their own emotion way

I appreciate your contribution to the conversation, but have to disagree : "Had fascism succeeded" is kinda of an impossibility. it's bad at doing things and internally eats itself as soon as it gets power. Fascism is not just <Alternative Government Style> as if it was a choice of haircut, it's cancer

It's true. Fascism is something to die for... Not something to live for.

"Had fascism succeeded" is kinda of an impossibility.

Depends. If you assume succeeded indefinitely then this is a trap because such a thing is impossible (can only be deemed indefinitely successful at its end at which point it cant). Fascism could've been the new feudal era with the masters and slaves clearly defined but yes, I don't think it could've lasted forever if that's what you're saying.

This strikes me as begging the question.

It is always straightforward to uphold what you already believe in.

Like isnt it the famous line of the communists that communism is a historical neccesisty? I think all ideologies have something similar.

We do though,

We've had them since the first time a group of farming monkeys decided to post day/night guards on the granary.

Those posts have been filled around the clock ever since.

To my knowledge the first ones to formalize this were Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau but, in all cases, very little has changed since.

To me, that's as straight an answer as you're ever going to get

Since then a single farmer feeds thousands of people. We are producing more and with much less effort than we did before we have started farming and had to post the guards.

Yet the guards remain and insist that they are still needed.

By my understanding, the definition of granary has changed since.

That seems to be perfectly consistent - it's pure hubris and ego to believe that you are great or that a group of people would care enough about you to dedicate themselves so. That's not for you to judge, but for the rest of us. Pure emotion, no logic.

There are plenty of exceptions to recall here. People who thought of themselves as great but were diminished by others for being fools are easy to find in history of science in particular. I'd say if you invoke hubris or ego then you yourself are reacting emotionally - then who is right and who is wrong would probably only rely on the outcome of my endeavors (successful or not).

I'd say if you invoke hubris or ego then you yourself are reacting emotionally - then who is right and who is wrong would probably only rely on the outcome of my endeavors (successful or not).

Ah yes - "I am rubber, you are glue". Given that this is a hypothetical, and I have no stake in the outcome, I think it is reasonable to conclude I am not being emotional about this.

People who thought of themselves as great but were diminished by others for being fools are easy to find in history of science in particular.

And how many claimed to be great that are not in the history books?

Given that this is a hypothetical, and I have no stake in the outcome, I think it is reasonable to conclude I am not being emotional about this.

And why would you assume that ? If you hand no stake then I'd say it's far less likely to go for descriptions like hubris or ego. I have no stake in chess and I wouldn't call Kasparov anything like that but people more invested in chess certainly do because it's closer to heart for them.

And how many claimed to be great that are not in the history books?

We don't know, because they're not in the books. But seriously, how exactly does this matter if you are just searching for logical support ?

My point, which you seem to have missed, is that N people can claim to be great "if only X wasn't in my way". In reality, an infinitesimally small number of people will be judged as great by history, and half of those will be largely by accident, many will not realize it, and some will only achieve it post-mortem.

Therefore, logically, if someone claims to be great, they are mostly likely riding high on hubris and ego. It's statistically the most likely outcome for anyone claiming greatness.

Because that wasn't your point. You claimed it's hubris and ego because greatness is in the eye of the third-party beholder. Now you argue it is necessary that greatness must be unlikely, which is of course true but changes nothing. History of science, maybe history of progress is the history of (at that moment) unlikeliness prevailing.

My point is exactly what I said it was. It's ego to believe yourself great - that's for others to judge. Greatness is unlikely, which is why it's ego to believe yourself great.

Not every wrong assumption comes from emotion

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Every assumption right or wrong comes from emotion. The problem tends to come when people let their emotions are left completely unchecked. "Bankers are taking advantage of me. My banker is an X minority. Therefore, we need to exterminate X minority" indeed has a nonzero degree of logic, but it's not the sort of reasoning 99% of people would come up with in a vacuum.

A counterpoint is that sometimes an irrational degree of emotion may be required to do extraordinary things like soldiers being brainwashed to fight even a defensive war, building a cathedral that fitting of the magnificence of god, or even a lot of cult-like startups.

Every assumption right or wrong comes from emotion.

I disagree. Wrong assumptions are often just a conclusion of limited or false knowledge.

Well, if you remember how not every one wanted to learn in school and realize those people still "grew up", you realize how impractical it can be to make sure everyone has sufficient knowledge.

If you reduce fascism to "let's genocide everyone else", of course the ideology doesn't make sense. I would say the idea of fascism is more about doing what's best for the nation or people, guided by a strong centrally led state, and a belief that imperialism and war can be appropriate tools to further this goal. It's adjacent to ultranationalism (though it doesn't have to be about the nation).

For example to name the most well-known example, Hitler's goals were:

- unite the German people under one country

- more lebensraum (space to live) for said German people

- get rid of undesirables who hold the Germans back (Jews, disabled people, Gypsies, homosexuals, etc)

If you start from the axioms that the German people are the best and should be elevated and all other people don't deserve compassion, it's not hard to arrive at those goals by pure reason. Of course those are bad axioms from our point of view, but you can't reason yourself away from your axioms.

It's very easy to get to fascism from Darwinism: the best are destined to prosper and rule, everybody else is doomed to servitude and eventual extinction, and that's how progress is made.

In fact, all sorts of eugenic and racist ideas were popular in the West until the Nazis took them to their obvious conclusion.

One of the main motivators of people looking for strong leadership is fear and mostly a purely emotional need. Mostly fear of being taken advantage of. But yes, it also doesn't have to be irrational, it just was for the most prominent instance of fascism.

Using your mind and getting some distance and perspective would be quite beneficial here. The heart can follow the mind or the other way around. There isn't a clear cut and there cannot be a general answer which direction is the better one.

What probably is true in almost any case is that if you have an image of an enemy to put all the blame on, he probably just looks at you from the mirror.

I've been wondering lately how much fascist ideas derive from the time of Julius Caesar and imperial Rome. Fascists seem to love Roman architecture, huge buildings with lots of pillars and pediments. They love massed ranks of marching soldiers, and imperial conquest.

Caesar was murdered to stop him becoming a King; but the process continued, and Octavian became the first emperor. Murdering the tyrant isn't enough, and imperial Rome lasted 500 years.

I've realized that my knowledge of Julius Caesar is sorely wanting, consisting mainly of vaguely-remembered quotes from Shakespeare's play (which, I realize, I've never read through, and never seen on stage). I evidently have some reading to do.

I think the initial assumption comes from emotion. Humans are not dual creatures with frontend and backends that must communicate through an API between their emotions and thoughts. Emotions and thoughts are actually phenomenon in simultaneous occurrence-- your thoughts can trigger emotions (planning what to do after being laid off can trigger anxiety) and your emotions can trigger thoughts (you're anxious, so you consider putting planning off and binge a show/movie).

Fear of the "other" is clearly an emotion, but all the justifications, reasons, and overall narratives about the "other" are thoughts.

I think the fascist sells the idea that our feelings of weakness can be hardened into solid, rational, scientific, truths. This almost seems like… a horrible promise to a wounded man, that he could be a machine-man, and that’s the best he could ever be, and that will give him strength.

Maybe the fascist must appeal to mechanical-ism because his philosophy is fundamentally emotion-driven.

The transparent, meritocratic democracy is naturally pretty rational in the first place. The pitch is that we’re already part of a machine, and we can bend it to serve us.

World war 2 was very much not over, when he gave this speech…

The film was released in 1940, I feel you are understating it’s timelyness.

I certainly I didn’t mean to!

It is a doubly-interesting speech because he was giving a counterpoint to the idea that men should sell out their hearts and become cruel machines when it was still up in the air, whether or not that Faustian bargain would pay dividends (it didn’t work out so great for them).

Maybe the fascist must appeal to mechanical-ism because his philosophy is fundamentally emotion-driven.

I don't feel like this is the case. Fundamentally all philosophy that has moral prescriptions is emotion-driven.

That is to say, this is the case in all philosophies that say that something "ought" (or "ought not") to be. To say that something "ought" to be a specific way, you can't just rationally and objectively look at the material world. That only tells you how things are, not how they ought to be. You have to cross Hume's Is/Ought gap at some point, and that can't be done objectively. Any philosophy that does this can be undermined by the average two year old asking "Why?" enough times.

You have to start with some fundamental moral assumptions in order to get an ought, and those are just absolutely dripping with emotion.

Fascism was in large part a reaction against communism and socialism, which were the dominant alternative at the time. Many people who had a lot to lose from the rise of the worker's movement, the Weimar Republic, the SDP, etc. very "rationally" supported the Nazi party. Look up e.g. Fritz Thyssen. Similar story in Italy, and very explicitly strongly so in Spain.

My point isn't that fascism is a good or reasonable ideology. But that many people's reasons for supporting it weren't just emotional. Also that their support for it wasn't necessarily or primarily racial in origin, but based in strong anti-communist, nationalist beliefs, instead.

Fascism was in large part a reaction against communism and socialism

Not really. Many of the founding fascists were socialists, including Mussolini. It wouldn't be wrong to call fascism a type of or derivative of socialism.

They were ex-socialists, if really holding those convictions at all. Mussolini was only interested in himself.

Nobody believes this line you're spreading other than right wingers in the US.

"Don't let your mind speak louder than your heart"

The "heart" has always symbolized goodness, kindness, love and benevolence.

That's the intended message here: always infuse your decisions with 'humanity'.

Agreed the "heart" means kindness and love, but the opposite in the metaphor from the speech is "machine men with machine hearts", which in my mind conjures an image of cold-heartedness, emotionless, robotic people.

But fascists were cold and cruel, but also highly emotional. I mean, listen to their speeches, shouting, spitting saliva, calling for raw strength, sacrifice, honor -- it's all emotion. Emotion used for evil, but not robotic.

(I think however a degree of detachness must have been needed for say, people running extermination camps, gas chambers, etc. You must stop seeing your victims as people, you must detach yourself to be able to sleep at night. But that's different to the rallies and the support for fascism from the masses; that was highly emotional).

Romanticism of 19th century can be thought of as rationality winning over less rational religion. The 'God is dead' sort of thinking. Yet in the midst of all of this rationality and scientific progress we end up with 2 world wars?

Romanticism of 19th century can be thought of as rationality winning over less rational religion.

Quite the opposite: Romanticism was a reaction to (and rejection of) the rationality of the Enlightenment. Romanticism celebrated strong, overwhelming emotions, such as nationalistic zeal.

surely the mindful decision is empathetic, constructive, and wise - not just base.

As your heart is, if you listen to it.

Listening to your heart is different to compulsive thoughts or reactions; getting swept up in a mass hysteria of the times; or a spasm that can tear through a crowd.

These types of revolutions, or crowd motions, are more often based on intense intellectual ideas and expressions of subconscious motivations rather than the present intelligence of your actual heart.

So I think the original comment has it very right: if people actually tuned into their heart and listened to that they’d find their way much more surely in the world. I encourage you to try it!! :)

The untrained mind in its raw state, for most people is not the cool, rational, dispassionate instrument of your imagining, (though you may have been blessed with such a faculty, most are not! Including I). Most peoples minds are chaotic places and can usually be swept up in these movements. But even if yours is the cool instrument you speak of, I encourage you to develop your heart sense and listen to its intelligence—it’s vital and a different perspective.

I think most peoples’ hearts are innately sensible, than their minds are in fact. The heart also seems to require less training to make it so—you simply need to listen to it well.

“They say home is where the heart is / but what a shame / that everybody’s heart / doesn’t beat the same.”

"Follow your heart; but take your brain with you." ~Alfred Adler

Heart can be understood as a metaphor. It doesn't speak, so it can be a metaphor for love and empathy. A metaphor with an appeal to power is usually associated with the gut.

a society where people are blind to the cruelty of one half while denouncing the cruelty of the other half. that seems to be one of the ingreedience for violence. each side will justify their violence by pointing at the other side. i have seen it before - its not a very original story

No, it's a heart-felt, emotional appeal to scared, proud, paranoid, crude, brutal people (who seem to be about half of our neighbors)

Is “about half” an empirical, dispassionate observation? No, it’s a heart-felt, emotional...

I’m pretty sure that Jesus had something to say about seeing the [fascism] in everyone else but yourself.

"Don't let your mind speak louder than your heart"

I always thought he was referring there to compassion.

More than that! Fascism was deliberately, consciously anti-rational. "Reason over feeling" was always the liberal and communist line, not the fascist one, on WW2.

Two faculties are listed and the phrase implies the good working order of both.

This then leads to the conclusion that the meaning is “reason alone can not determine all decisions”.

Now a mind in good working order may be confronted with a matter that his or her heart of good working order is objecting to. This phrase reminds us to listen to our heart in these cases.

In many instances (both historically and in the present), support for fascism is in part a product of fear of communism—fighting fire with fire, hoping that one totalitarian system will protect against a different one.

"Don't let your mind speak louder than your heart". In tech we value data and being right so much, we may be too often missing the important part of being a decent human being.

This could help balance Amazon’s leadership principles.

Yet Jeff Bezos in his podcast appearance yesterday which was a 2h talk said that when data and anecdote disagree to trust the anecdote and gut feeling

It’s easy to focus on philanthropy and feelings after your monolithic megacorp has ground your competition into dust.

Hi, hello, I work here, google is down the street, as is microsoft. I can assure you they are not dust. All amazon has done is build more data centers, they havent taken some kind of hostile action towards the competition. The money was on the table, those companies didnt want to spend the time or take the risk, so amazon will gladly hoover it up.

Glad you have a job and stable employment! When I think of who Amazon has "ground into dust," it's not Microsoft and Google. It's Barnes & Noble, Borders, Waldenbooks, hundreds of thousands of small independent bookstores, small businesses that once worried about Walmart moving into the neighborhood now contending with the omnipresence of Amazon. Some of them adapt, yes. Some were going to close anyway, of course. But you can't deny that retail looks a lot different now than it did ten years ago, and most of that is because of Amazon.

The nostalgia for Borders, B&N etc. is amusing considering they were blamed for the demise of independent bookstores before Amazon showed up.

Amazon didn't grind anyone into dust. All they did was build a better book store. We ground them into dust by choosing to buy from Amazon.

Books are an interesting topic. The cost of publishing through amazon is far more accessible for authors, and the cost of the books themselves has decreased. I dont have enough time in my day to keep up with how many credits I receive from my audible subscription. Digital distribution has made both writing and reading more accessible, its the middle man that got cut out. That is in the nature of innovation, it frees the average person up from more menial tasks and allows them to create higher orders of value using a greater bredth of their creative inputs. That process can also be seen in the wide variety of goods offered on the amazon store, many of which are from those small businesses, the creative and productive factors remain without needing to take up physical real estate.

Amazon !== AWS, I think what's being referred to is smaller retailers, not other FAANGs.

My brother's store is slowly folding, largely due specifically to Amazon selling cheaper than he can purchase wholesale.

So Amazon is a more efficient business model. Why should I drive to your brother's store when I can just order it right to my door on Amazon? They have done nothing wrong here.

I guess, though if "more efficient business model" means giant corporation can buy and sell in such huge quantities that smaller competitors can't even buy products for same, let alone add small margin for rent and employees, that seems unhealthy. There's no efficiencies they can even attempt at that point.

(Let alone the Amazon shoppers who waste their time demoing and trying products in store, then act like they've caught some scammer if it's a few dollars more than online.)

Im sorry for your brother, that sucks. Ill grant this, amazon being a large and well connected company allows them to secure exclusive and vast financing that provides their ability to engage in otherwise unprofitable (anticompetitive) strategies that shouldnt otherwise be possible.

Unfortunately that battle is with our banking system, and until its won you will continue to see the proliferation of companies engaging in this behavior. That said, amazon will eventually be the dinosaur that walmart has become, and its very obvious from a ground level prespective that we dont have the right foundation for the infinite scale we seem to desire; too many "leadership principles", too much reworking of company policy, too much switching us from database to database.

As a thought experiment, is there anything Bezos could do or say that wouldn't merit a hostile and snide comment in response? Is he unforgivable?

If he actually changed Amazon's behavior so that it wasn't a horrible place to work for? If he donated an actual, significant portion of his wealth that required real sacrifice on his part?

Basically, if he did something that had a positive effect on the world that also had real consequences for him. Something that actually shows he _means_ it, actually _wants_ the world to be better even if it hurts himself.

If Bezos or Musk or Zuckerberg or Gates(1) did any of that, I'd be thinking differently.

(1) The Gates foundation has done a LOT. Bill Gates is still worth ~$135,000,000,000. A quick search says ending homelessness in the USA would take less than a quarter of that.

You do realize there's people who want to be homeless?

I don’t know why you got downvoted. “Smoke your rent, live in a tent” is their motto in Portland.

Him acting altruistically now with his vast resources is the best we can hope for I suppose.

Isn’t that a definition of success in our current society ?

Then why ever gather the data? The truth table of this is:

  data | gut | out 
    0  |  0  |  0
    0  |  1  |  1
    1  |  0  |  0
    1  |  1  |  1

The data variable is irrelevant here, so you might as well not waste all the resources it takes to collect and analyze it, right?

Gathering the data might change the gut feeling.

Yeah, interesting, good answer! I think that is the answer, and it actually does make sense to me. Often while gathering data I develop a better intuition for what I'm unable to gather data on, which definitely impacts my gut feel for things. The available data might point in one direction, intuition about the unavailable data might point the other way.

we may be too often missing the important part of being a decent human being.

"decent human being" is too vague and easily manipulated term, so it could be better to follow hard metrics and data.

Showing unselfish concern for the welfare of others.

Will that do as a definition?

Be altruistic.

I would add: self accountability and willingness to work hard for self improvement.

Some stereotypical American who is nice to others, visits church, serves Thanks Giving food to homeless can be considered as decent human being by local community.

But at the same time, material damage on others lives from say driving V8 truck and blindly voting for local politician can be significant, but he is not interested in learning about this.

And self improvement and self accountability are not considered critical by most of sociaties.

So voting for the 'correct' local politician and driving an eco-friendly car are more important than being nice and helping others less fortunate? How very blue.

So voting for the 'correct' local politician and driving an eco-friendly car are more important than being nice and helping others less fortunate?

if you do some calculations before jumping to your prejudgment, you may find that it is more important, and people are less fortunate because someone burns too much gasoline and votes for 'wrong' politicians.

But it was simplified example, privileged people utilize more complicated schemes.

But “unselfish concern for the welfare of others” doesn’t necessarily make those other people better off or help them. As someone from a poor country, I’d trade a million gentle, well meaning western feelers for a single Lee Kuan Yew.

Selfless altruism is a red flag. Be suspicious of anyone who wants to apply a different standard to you than to themselves—even if they think they’re being altruistic about it. The golden rule is better: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

No, it won't, because that concern often leads to polices that have unintended consequences that in the end hurt the welfare of others.

Practice empathy towards others and altruism follows in due course

That's like saying calories can't be counted with 100% certainty, so we should eat integers instead.

What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary questions of morality — as if an instinct in such matters were truly the last thing to be taken for granted in our time.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"

That's like saying

I disagree with "that's like that". I think your analogy is very far.

Calories metrics are actually much better researched and measured compared to human decency.

Human decency has been investigate, discussed, analyzed, dramatised since millenia, however not by using numbers.

There's some interesting evidence suggesting there are 4 basic personality types with very different outlooks on life. If you're in a hurry, skip straight to the caption for figure 3.

Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451

"decent human being" is too vague and easily manipulated term,

I don't think so. I believe the most common conclusions about what defines a decent human being are good ones. That is, the qualities that come to mind most naturally and frequently are truly benevolent.

Because they are defaults, they outlast efforts to slant and curate understanding.

I tried to explain my point better in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38675446

Completely disagree. The tech industry is much more tolerant of mistakes and failure than any other industry. And that is a huge advantage given that such things are inevitable.

These aren’t mutually exclusive though. The tech industry can over-index on data driven decision making while also being reasonable about accepting failures.

I think the heart vs mind is not really a good metaphor. Hate is something of the heart too. It’s not something of the (logical) mind. If everyone was very logical, I doubt Hitler would have gotten this big. He literally spoke to the heart of the people, with passion, not reason.

I'd wager it's more like we don't think at all and feel only anger. At least online that is.

This is more indicative of where one chooses to spend most of their time online.

It applies to HN too, the vast majority of comments probably don't have more than, at most, a few minutes of serious, focused, thinking behind them.

And with how good LLMs nowadays, probably a numerical majority don't even contain anything worth noting.

Do you have any sort of data to support this, particularly the second claim? It seems particularly absurd to me.

The comments are the data?

I'm not really sure what your asking for.

Well I suppose you're making your own point.

You are helping me prove the point with conveniently placed examples, so thanks. But why embarrass yourself?

I think it's insulting to say that human opinion or observation is worthless because a small program with a neat dataset can answer a lot of questions.

It's like saying that talking with friends about history and engineering is boring because wikipedia has the answers.

Why did your mind immediately jump to 'worthless'?

Plenty of things in this world have some small value but are not noteworthy. In fact most conversations in daily life fall into that category.

Let's not forget about the feed algoritms that will prioritize anger and only anger because this is what drives impressions.

That's still indicative of choosing to spend your time in an environment where content is algorithmically controlled.

Which is most of the mainstream ones, but following along with the mainstream is a choice.

I mean, as an individual it is a choice. But as a society it’s not a choice (or, maybe, a better way to phrase it is the “mainstream” is a reflection of the choice society has already made)

I feel like we're getting into "the raindrop doesn't feel responsible for the flood" territory here, and I like your second interpretation better.

It's absolutely the choice society has made, but society is the individuals that make it up. The idea of the group is a semi-useful abstraction we use because our brains have trouble conceptualizing numbers over ~17.

The style of algorithmic feed was created and popularized by individuals about a decade or two ago. A lot of the users of this site (including me) were pioneers in that area, either creating these things, or being the first users to turn our lives over to the feed.

But, if you want to create long-lasting societal change (either good or bad), that's how you have to do it. One individual, or a group of individuals start something. A few individuals (usually weirdos) join up. And at a certain point, the increasing number of people give other more mainstream people some sort of social permission to make the same choice.

At some point, it becomes socially acceptable enough to become the default and people who don't have the time or energy to put a lot of thought/research into things start doing it without really thinking (this is generally where I consider the bounds of true mainstream).

Which environments today aren't? Everything online is to a degree, and the offline ones are heavily influenced by online ones.

Given the amount of bad encounters I've had driving post-2020, and interacting with strangers, I think it's seeping into the real world as well.

The way people act and speak in public feels noticeably different than even a few years ago, let alone 10-20. People are very short with each other now.

Even more disturbing, I think I can feel the change in myself too at times.

Driving brings out the worst in people. You're all trying to get somewhere, you're all a danger to one another, and, critically, you can't see faces well. So, you end up receiving offenses against you as if they're personal (because you're you!) but commit offenses as if they're impersonal (because others look like cars, not human beings).

Would you rudely shove youself in front of someone at the market to get the next spot at the cash register? Probably not. But, would you block oncoming traffic by tailgaiting the person who took a left in front of you, instead of just waiting one more light cycle? Absolutely.

Yes and the others specifically look like large and aggressively styled combatants. The aesthetic of the automobile and the embodiment of that automobiles essence clearly has an influence within the sensitive and suggestible human experience. Design drives behavior.

Trump Fans Harass Biden Bus in Texas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWjK_Eu8uME

The FBI is investigating an incident of alleged harassment by Trump supporters of a Biden campaign bus in Texas, the Texas Tribune reported, citing a local law enforcement official.

The campaign bus was en route from San Antonio to Austin on Interstate 35 on Friday when a caravan of vehicles with Trump signs and flags veered close to the bus and yelled profanities.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, were not on the bus and no one was hurt, although local law enforcement was called to help the bus get to its destination. The campaign scrapped an event scheduled in Austin for Friday after the incident.

President Donald Trump tweeted a video of the incident on Saturday night with the comment, “I LOVE TEXAS,” and briefly mentioned it during a campaign rally in Michigan on Sunday.

Tariq Thowfeek, Texas communications director for the Biden campaign, said the Trump fans “decided to put our staff, surrogates, supporters, and others in harm’s way” rather to engage in a conversation about the candidates’ different visions.

Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said Sunday she hadn’t seen the whole video and couldn’t comment on the part where one of the cars appears to almost crash into the bus.

“Certainly we don’t want harm and we shouldn’t be hurting other people. The president would not endorse that,” McDaniel said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

The White House and Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Donald Trump Jr, the president’s son, appeared in a video on Twitter last week encouraging supporters of the president to show up for one of Harris’s events in Texas.

“It’d be great if you guys would all get together, head down to McAllen and give Kamala Harris a nice Trump Train welcome,” Trump Jr said.

It's always someone distracted by his phone, trying to find first gear, stuck in reverse. I despise people blocking you from doing what you need to do. So yeah I absolutely will show myself in front of you if all you're doing is blocking the way. At the same time I'll be very courteous to people behaving correctly and give right of way every time I'm required to.

I have a theory that the covid experience is behind this. We all got used to being implicitly afraid of people because of social distancing. We also became so incredibly angry about people either forcing us to do things like wear masks or about people not doing those things. On top of that we were encouraged to drive our personalities into the internet even further, and we became even more used to being isolated from other people and being able to have all of our needs fulfilled without having to actually connect with a human being. In short we were encouraged to dehumanize each other and we really haven't stopped thinking that way because it's way more convenient to not have to take other people's feelings into consideration.

I think it certainly exacerbated it, but the trend started long before.

yeah I should have qualified it with that. definitely it didn't start with covid. but I myself have noticed this kind of strange general coldness that is persisted since and I have noticed many comments on Hacker News about it too.

I’ve found drivers way way more rude now. Jumping red lights is epidemic. Drivers regularly wait on crossings. I had to literally put my hand out today to stop a taxi driver edging towards me when the crossing light was green. It’s really common. There has definitely been a shift in driving behaviours since the pandemic. As a pedestrian in the UK I’ve never been so afraid of cars

I can relate to this point of view. The highways have been somewhat of a barometer for mental health weather.

The best thought leaders can do is not participate in the hate. Drive the speed limit, let cars out, be courteous and non reactive on the roads.

Each small good example plants a seed that won’t immediately resolve our worldly issues but will lead others to water in due time with persistence.

I feel in my heart a deep sense of empathy after watching that. Like the quote from National Treasure, “People don’t talk like that anymore.” But the response from Nicolas Cage is, “But they feel it”.

As I understand it, Hitler used an economic narrative to build his team of supporters and eventually, desperate times cause people to vote with their wallets.

Does anyone else feel like the advent of modern online interactions is different from the early web? And maybe, just maybe… the economic incentives of the web shifting are what caused us to begin feeling angry and desperate?

Why not rebuild a better web, based on old principles of feeling? Web3 is really just about trust and decentralization of it, so why not rebuild the entire economic stack?

AI is great at many things, but great at feeling it is not.

The only way the internet has a chance at recovery is to eliminate all financial incentives. No monetization, share information because you want to

What was great about the early web was largely the parts that weren’t economically driven. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to build a better web with economics as the primary concern. It’s the drive for profits that fostered the bad aspects of the modern web in the first place.

Does anyone else feel like the advent of modern online interactions is different from the early web?

idk about that. I remember being appalled at the political atavism on Usenet in the 1992 election. Douglas Adams was right to describe telepathy as 'that most cruel of social diseases.'

I'm not convinced the Web has gotten worse (or Web interactions worst necessarily). Maybe.

I kind of think it's the web itself that has trapped people indoors and into un-social lives when, in the past, boredom would have sent them out into the world to find some kind of entertainment or actual companionship.

(And I speak as someone who thinks I also needs to get out more.)

Youll find a lot of like minded people on nostr. While they have an issue with momentum, thus far they at least have a plausible strategy for decentralizing the web.

It just occurred to me that anger is favored online because of a UX quirk. To build is complex; to destroy requires only a single bit! So the objects of our ire, those people, things and ideas we want gone from the world, those things that require only that we express our hatred and ill-will toward them, naturally become the most popular and shared content. As a corollary the people who are clearest and most concrete in their list of hates, the ones who constantly edit that list in real time according to audience response, they become the most appealing.

Isn't it then not very surprising that those who build prefer to do so in silence.

"To build is complex; to destroy requires only a single bit!"

Love this.

Entropy. There are many more ways to destroy something than to create it.

Quit social & news media and the world seems at peace (it's not, but it will seem that way)

I think the other factor is there are 'types' of people that will comment online, and also only conditions in which some people will comment online, so we get a weird filter.

It's easy to think that you'll get a general cross-section of the population posting, and that they're relatively stable when commenting. But we can't see when people are drunk or under the influence of things, who the bots/psyops bad actors are, or the ages etc. Makes for a frothy mix. But I agree, much healthier to just avoid it and just interact in the real world where possible.

I find it ironic that "We think too much and feel to little" appears to contradict the conclusion at the end "Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness."

I don’t see the contradiction. Humans can be emotional and at the same use science to make all humans life better! In fact why would we ever develop any technology that makes life better for others if we don’t have any feelings for them?

The contradiction arises because the user "flashback" depicts it as an either-or scenario. It shouldn't be interpreted as an exclusive OR statement; instead, there might be a nuanced interplay between thinking and feeling.

I think feel isn't precise enough, maybe compassion is better? In the speech, Chaplain opposes the Nazis, yet the main tool the Nazis used to gain and hold power in Germany was by emotion, distributed thru speeches on the radio especially. Hitler was a highly emotional speaker. WWII didn't occur due to a lack of feeling.

Was there more emotional rhetoric than is otherwise used in politics?

Personally the “hitler mind controlled everyone with his speach” theory that I was told in the 90s just isn’t convincing. Facism was in the zeitgeist around the world.

No mind control, he said what people wanted to hear after losing WWI

Mind control was how Yuri helped the USSR win the Cold war in Red Alert 2 (joke ;)

he said what people wanted to hear after losing WWI

In other words, they believed it. It wasn’t a false manipulation.

They believed the "stabbed in the back" narrative like the US establishment believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Irak.

It was a motivated belief, thoroughly uninformed by rational thought, and maintaining and spreading that belief took no small amount of blatant lies and cynicism.

It's weird that we live in a time where my initial reaction upon reading your comment was "this guy is definitely an AI bot". "That" phrasal structure + freshly created account? I'm simultaneously thinking that maybe I'm being unfair to a real human being and that I'm not really sure if I should care at this point... maybe the new machine men with machine hearts will be more humane than the machine men with machine hearts we have today.

I apologize if my tone seemed off.

It doesn’t sound like an either or. One could potentially think too much

Too many policies are based on too little reason, with too much feeling, all while thinking they're scientific, but without taking human feelings into account, they fail harder each time they are tried. But who am I to know better; Surely with the right person in charge, this time it will work…

"It would not be much of a universe if it wasn't home to the people you love."

-- Stephen Hawking

Some facts are dangerous.

I can’t think of a single fact on its own that presents any danger. If anything, facts through the lens of ideology may become dangerous, but data on its own is like technology. Neutral without application, good or evil depending on situation.

Hypothetically if the world's scientists were to all prove that blacks were inferior to whites, what good would come out of that? I can't think of a single good thing that would come from that- the world would be worse for knowing such a fact.

Does “inferior” mean statistically less likely to be good at logic games? Because I don’t believe people’s claim to humanity is defined by that.

Right. Humanity is not defined by IQ or knowledge, and it's perfectly okay for people to prefer the company of some without denying the humanity of others.

If this were proven, we would be forced to set a rigorous foundation for our values where all people have the same rights and worth regardless of how smart they are. Instead of saying people are only equally worthy if they are equally smart, and hoping no one proves the latter wrong.

First you would need to define a measure of inferiority.

I'm pretty sure we have measured some very spicific things, and found that different races on average have some genetic advantages and disadvantages. Is saying that Asians are disadvantaged in milk drinking competitions making society worse? Also, because humans are diverse, differences between individuals within any racial group can be far greater than differences between races.

And if you compare men and women, the differences are much much bigger, and the comparisons much more frequent - you can barely turn on the TV or open up any social media without seeing them.

So, ultimately - so what?

People would have to think further than just assuming that blacks are less well off purely because of systemic oppression.

I disagree. Science would suggest that separating a human from their emotions (like via emotional suppression) is illogical — a one-way ticket to mental health disorder. Thus, to obey reason, one must feel enough (and regulate vs suppress those feelings).

On the other hand, following the teachings of Surak, which you effectively reference here, would be seen as highly logical by some. Though perhaps hard to practice by humans.

I would say that's a straw vulcan. Emotion are data and drivers of our actions.

A Vulcan would not say "emotions are illogical." They would say "What does this emotion says and does it make sense in this situation?" Or "how would I feel more appropriately for this situation?". Or "this emotion doesn't make sense for this situation."

Sometime, it's more appropriate for us to rely on intuition and instinct and it would be more rational for us to do that instead. Imagine someone's about to be hit by a car. You have only seconds to move them out of the way. You don't have time to ponder so you just do it.

Thinking and logic is a general problem solving tool that's very useful in certain context, but they are very slow to use. By itself it is not a complete toolkit for dealing with emotional issues. Can't exactly make yourself less angry using just logic alone. You need some emotional tools to dial down counterproductive emotions.

Paying attention to our feelings is probably how we become more 'logical'.

It's interesting how statements can sometimes seem contradictory on their own. The first statement may highlight the importance of emotions, while the concluding one emphasizes reason and progress.

Together they might suggest a balance between thoughtful reflection and the hope of a rational and progressive world.

This reminds me of “The Wise Mind” from DBT sessions.

To find the balance between emotion and reason for wisdom.

https://www.therapistaid.com/therapy-worksheet/wise-mind

Interesting read.

Paradoxes are beautiful!

It's only a paradox under the widespread myth that reason and feelings are opposites. People who know their science understand that all rational thought is grounded on emotion and deep-rooted feelings.

Maybe "reason" means thinking and feeling at the same time. Because if you think hard enough, you start thinking about what is important in bigger and bigger ways, and that eventually leads you to fundamental human values, which involve feelings.

There is no contradiction - it is reasonable to feel more than we do.

I like Captain Disillusion’s motto: “Love with your heart; use your head for everything else.”

Reminds me of Zizek's video "Don't act, just think"[1]

And yes, Zizek is a charlatan[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgR6uaVqWsQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5yoqjABeBM

I don't think that it's a contradiction.

Too much of any of those is bad. Four year olds are driven by feeling only. Psychopaths are driven by thought only. You don't want the world in the hands of any of those.

It's a good mix of both feeling and reason that we should strive for.

I always liked this version with music added:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WibmcsEGLKo

I remember sharing a jail cell with a 19-year-old Mexican kid once and we were talking about the guards being assholes and he said "they're like machine men"; and I said "with machine minds and machine hearts?" and he was like "YES! You know it?!" -- it was a good moment, we spent the next few days trying to remember the whole speech.

While this was a pithy comment, I'd totally upvote and read an article on how someone who frequents HN found themselves in the scenario you mentioned.

HN has more variety when it comes to posters than you think. There's one guy here who spent time in prison for eco-terrorism.

I spent 3 months in prison for getting drunk, stealing a row boat, and escaping from the police on said boat. My cellmates called me a low budget pirate.

That was 10 years ago now. I've met tons of people like me who are otherwise in fields you'd associate with intellect. Some of us just have a knack for testing the limits of society.

At probably a similar level of intoxication we found a boat and used it to enter a military compound in the city center of a small town called Delft. Me and my companion who were in the military at the time thought that would be a good idea.

The boat however was leaking quite a bit and sunk right after we arrived. We managed to get into the building, which had a museum, and found a nice spot to sleep. It was not a difficult choice, either that, a forced exfiltration or a nightly swim.

The next morning the person who opened the building did not even try to contain 2 x 2m young men.

a military compound in the city center of a small town called Delft

You mean like, the military museum?

Why is your username for everything not "low_budget_pirate"?

Great story :)

Ughhh.. I hate that word, especially when it refers to the protest acts like spaghetti on art, or slow march on a road delaying traffic etc... I think partly because it smells like a society that has started worshipping "traffic" or "business as usual" instead of doing that by deliberate choice.

If I recall correctly he waged harassment campaigns against individual people and their families that included death threats, showing up at their house in the middle of the night, and mailing them dead animals.

Maybe this is splitting hairs but those just seem like classic non-violent protests instead of terrorism. Ecoterrorism is something like spiking trees so that loggers will get blasted with chainsaw shrapnel when they try to cut through a 1000 year old tree. Terrorism is of course a loose term but it generally requires some element of violent coercion. Throwing soup at a painting is obnoxious but children will not have nightmares over it.

I'd imagine the intersection of "intellectually curious" and "dealing with the consequences of interesting life choices" is far greater than most of us would suspect at first. I'd also imagine the variety of circumstances in the latter category easily rivals the former.

There's a long story which I hope soon to be able to document.

One thing I learned was never, ever, ever to judge people on first impressions. I think I thought "Oh no" when they put that kid in my cell, but he was an utterly fantastic cellmate. His case was fascinating; he had stolen approximately $60,000 over several months as a night cashier at Target by managing to pick the lock on the safes next to the register using a pen during hours of boredom. He burned through every penny flying around the country staying at nice hotels every weekend to fuel his burgeoning MMA career. He was finally called to the office by a manager at Target and two detectives were there. He didn't get a chance to deny anything as a roll of $3,000 cash fell out of his pants leg as he was stood right in front of them.

My partner is very partial to this version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouzKl0oD6sU :)

No disrespect, but to me that thing just gave me the same emotion as when I saw that meme about the person who couldn't connect to the holocaust until an MLP pony was edited into it.

Raw humanity just isn't enough any more? Have we become so devoid of imagination and empaty?

Godwin's law has been invoked...

I think you mean you prefer the spoken word to a song? I think they serve different purposes. You can connect to either, or both, but spoken word (or a speech) isn't always appropriate in situations where a song is. :)

Raw humanity just isn't enough any more? Have we become so devoid of imagination and empaty?

This seems like quite a jump.

Clever remix!

So am I. It packs an extra emotional punch. I consider it the reference version :).

This speech reminds me of the anarchist Errico Malatesta. Some of his comrades tried to call him the “Lenin of Italy” and he said he never wants to be the ruler of others, and that no matter how good his heart is if he were put in that position he would be corrupted by power just as everyone else would be. This video covers it: https://youtu.be/KYI-Bra-hP0

That's great. It's true though, it would be hard to go from an anarchist to a ruler just because people think you would be good in that position. Humans find it very hard not to be corrupted by power.

Humans find it very hard not to be corrupted by power.

I will say yes, and also anarchists would argue that corruption of power is basically a simple function of the system. A ruler living in the capital will be unable to make appropriate decisions for rural farmers or urban factory workers. That those people should decide for themselves how best to operate, and they should do so by vote or elected and re-callable delegates. As a ruler is isolated from the functions of the people, they will be unable to see what decisions are appropriate, and they will lean in to what is in front of them.

Yes and sometimes I think “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others that have been tried” is especially true in providing voters a put option. That is - we are pretty good at removing bad governments.

I don't think I would argue that democracies produce the best candidates, political class and leaders. However it provides voters the ability to remove candidates at the polls every X years, and in some cases (recalls) more frequently. While negative partisanship may make it hard to produce great leaders, it also helps limit bad ones.

So democracies don't generally end up with leaders for life who become more and more disassociated from the populace and reality.. as we see in most dictatorships and direct monarchies.

There’s an excellent capital, capitol, Das Kapital, capital pun in here somewhere.

He is a machine, everything with him happens.

He cannot stop the flow of his thoughts, he cannot control his imagination, his emotions, his attention.

He lives in a subjective world of 'I love,' 'I do not love,' 'I like,' 'I do not like,' 'I want,' 'I do not want,' that is, of what he thinks he likes, of what he thinks he does not like, of what he thinks he wants, of what he thinks he does not want.

He does not see the real world.

The real world is hidden from him by the wall of imagination.

He lives in sleep.

He is asleep.

What is called 'clear consciousness' is sleep and a far more dangerous sleep than sleep at night in bed.

"Let us take some event in the life of humanity.

For instance, war.

There is a war going on at the present moment.

What does it signify? It signifies that several millions of sleeping people are trying to destroy several millions of other sleeping people.

They would not do this, of course, if they were to wake up.

Everything that takes place is owing to this sleep."

---

In Search of the Miraculous - Ouspensky

Wow, I immediately recognized the text. I am very positively surprised in seeing Gurdjieff referenced here.

The name sounded familiar so I looked in my spotify playlists and sure enough: https://open.spotify.com/album/2j51awurPD6ZDE0JdRliUc?si=J-r....

https://youtu.be/XbUvDTMkjwA

Yet another good version.

Yet another music version: https://www.jamendo.com/track/967547/the-last-dictator (and with the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8mGEbxm6WI )

My personal favorite is by Hugo Kant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsWrU9h9WGI

And so long as men die, liberty will never perish

Over the past ten years, the [longevity research] industry has grown in financing from $500 million in 2013 to a peak of $6.2 billion in 2021.

Everytime I read about longevity research and how many people are in favor of it I can't stop thinking about this speech. And one of the endings of Cyberpunk 2077.

I think people generally, and the Silicon Valley set in particular, have a hard time abstracting from “would I like” to “would the world be a better place if”.

Would I like to live a thousand years? Yes, with the obvious caveats.

Would the world be a better place if the technology for living a thousand years existed? Absolutely not, at least not at first, and certainly not today. There’s a great many people around right now who’s primary redeeming quality is their impending mortality - it’s not just science that advances one funeral at a time.

There’s a great many people around right now who’s primary redeeming quality is their impending mortality

Ha ha, that's funny (but not nice — but I like it).

Sadly, it's true in some cases.

Most notably Rupert Murdoch- while I do not wish death on the man, it's certainly true that he has a grip on the hearts and minds of people and often uses his media empire to convince people to go against their own interests.

He will be replaced by someone similar, but seldom are people as effective as their predecessors.

uses his media empire to convince people to go against their own interests

Well, yes, that’s his job. Do you think that news media exists to inform you?

The fact that you would even make this joke shows how absurdly far we have fallen.

Obviously they exist for that purpose, studying the foundations of news media and journalism... for even a day... shows concisely that it was painfully created for this reason.

He will be replaced by someone similar, but seldom are people as effective as their predecessors.

I'm not a real believer in the "Great Man" theory of history - I think the ground needs to be set for an event for it to happen, I don't think the will of one person is truly sufficient to bend history - but there are certain people who you would have a very, very hard time replacing in a given scenario.

Rupert Murdoch is definitely one, and Donald Trump is another - without getting into specific judgements of the man, there's nobody else within easy reach who could do what he's done, and I don't really see his movement surviving him. He's a particular person for a particular moment, and it's hard to see anyone else doing what he has.

“All men have an emotion to kill; when they strongly dislike some one they involuntarily wish he was dead. I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.” – Clarence Darrow

“a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” – Max Planck

How many times has your life or someone close to you in your life not died from something they would have died of 100yrs ago? If you're happy medical tech saved their lives then you're arguably for life extension because all it really means is saving more lives from more things that kill them.

I don’t know if this is supposed to be a dunk or something, but - yes, my grandma lived to 93 because of modern medicine. I was happy she did. That’s the tension: things that are good for me personally can be bad for the world at large (I mean, not my grandma’s longevity specifically - she was a lovely woman), and a big part of emotional and intellectual maturity is recognizing that indeed the world is full of tradeoffs and I can’t have everything I want.

Specific to:

all it really means is saving more lives from more things that kill them.

No, that’s not all it really means, not in our society, not in our time. As Ted Chiang put it, “Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us,” and that’s also the case here: the outcome of this technology isn’t that my grandma lives to 150, it’s that Vladimir Putin lives to 150. If my grandma needs to die at 90 so we don’t have immortal god-emperors - if I have to die at 90 - then so be it. Some day we may live in a world where longevity technology is an unalloyed good, but until that day, we don’t get to just put the good stuff on the ledger and ignore the bad stuff.

Not everything that’s good remains good when you take it to an extreme.

Would the world be a better place if the technology for living a thousand years existed? Absolutely not, at least not at first, and certainly not today

If you want to sacrifice your life for a better world, that is your decision. But do not force that decision to other people.

I think it's important to remember 2 things

1) Possible solutions aren't binary (true vs false) but trinary (true vs false vs indeterminate)

2) The devil is always in the details. The world is fucking complex and and a first order approximation isn't going to get you there anymore. We've had 100kyrs to solve problems, we got most of the simple ones down (appearing simple does not mean simple)

2.5) A clique wouldn't be a clique if it wasn't something practically everyone knows and can recite but is not something people demonstrate an actual understanding of by observing their actions. (Just like LLMs: just because you can repeat some knowledge does not mean you're able to (ineptitude), or have the will to (malice), use the knowledge in any meaningful way)

Imagine if Henry Kissinger could continue to advise US Foreign Policy for 10 centuries, given all the horrors he accomplished in just 1.

We could live for 20 years or 200 and it wouldn't matter - entities will emerge that will attempt to consolidate and abuse power. Those may be individual dictators, tyrannical governments, or global conglomerates. The answer is the same, and it doesn't involve hampering scientific progress.

I think also in some respects Altered Carbon, the Netflix series (at least the first season).

Altered Carbon also.

Death is God's greatest safe guard to counter human evil. Nobody escapes it.

It is also for keeping man from misery ..

Longevity doesn't mean men won't die.

"Greed has poisoned men's souls"

Greed used to considered a sin. Now it seems to be seen as a virtue by some. It's not enough to have a Ferrari - you need to have a whole garage full. It's not enough to have a yacht - it's got to be a super yacht.

I think he is not referring to an individuals greed, for example an actor buying a few Ferrari's to satisfy their desires or a business person buying a yatch.

He is referring to political/country leaders greed. Only their greed can cause violence and bloodshed at the level he is talking about.

Ambition and greed both refer to the intense desire to achieve success. Sucess includes money, power, or status.

The difference is a major one. Greed is to achieve those for themselves at the cost of depriving others. Ambition is to do for greater good of others.

I think all the leaders(democratic,communist,fascist) understand this, and they are all likely ambitious. The path to achieve success forces them to define boundaries.

They seem to define others as their country people - during the war times. In peace times, it is their party supporters.

Convince someone buying a new iPhone to buy last years model or half the GB of what they can afford.

That's the greed that's ingrained in all humans. "Humans take the perceived path of the most pleasure." is true in every human interaction I've witnessed or can think of.

We're all greedy by default. I think Agent Smith was right when he was talking to Morpheus, humanity is a virus that consumes all the resources in the local environment until they're depleted without thought for the greater good.

We're all greedy by default

Perhaps, but we’re also all generous by default. Which wins out is determined by some combination of upbringing, circumstance and individual nature. There are many people in this world who will give away things they dearly need to those who also need them.

Maybe bc they fighting they own greed. Maybe it works!

We're all greedy by default.

That is a pretty bleak view of human nature. Maybe try reading "Human kind" by Rutger Bregman for a counter view.

I think we are highly social creatures who care a lot about our status. If society looks up to people having a garage full of super cars as 'successful', then that is something to aspire to. If society looks down on these people as greedy and taking more than their fair share of the world's resources, then it isn't something to aspire to. I hope society soon changes to the latter attitude, for the sake of our children.

He very certainly meant this was economic greed as well.

Even the worst people in history somehow believed they were the good (or at least the needed) guys and they deserved their riches. Political power always was a vehicle to maintain, defend, multiply those riches. This is why in the best version of that spiel the royals would understand that their position/riches came with very real duties attached. Duties towards those who had it worse than them. But this was already a forgotten idea, even in Chaplins time.

As someone whow grew up around both poor and very rich (including very old-rich) people, I can assure you that the poor people would often share their last penny while the rich ones were mostly afraid that someone might be after their money. Greed is buying a Lamborghini when your neighbour/employee/sister/village starves. Even when you totally earned it using your superhuman work ethic.

Everybody wants to be the good guy in their own story, so everybody will come up with their own reasons why they deserve it (they worked harder than a single mom with three bone breaking jobs) and why doing a good thing is actually a bad thing ("they will waste it on drugs and alcohol"). If you care about your real true self lies like these are a danger to ever discovering it in your life. And you only get one of those.

In the end the question is very simple. Do you care primarily about yourself or do you more care about the people and nature around you? Everybody likes to say they do — and so they lie to themselves why buying that Lamborghini is actually a totally selfless act. But if you realize the world would be a worse place if everybody decided like you, you might be the baddy all along.

So if you want to stay rich you have to somehow get the fact that tou don't do what is needed into balance with your own image of a good person. Aa result you become that attavistic kind of rich person that believes being good is naive and a luxury (no pun intended) they cannot afford. People who want to make the world better are idiots, only you know the world as it truly functions (let's ignore the fact that you profit from that believe). This is a quite common stance among the rich and powerful. Everybody is out to get you. Your game is not doing meaningful things, it is doing things that look meaningful to other rich people. Things become very symbolic. Actually meaningful is naive and dangerous so it must be avoided. These people are rarely ever happy and in the short moments they are, it is because they fell for the lies of their own greatness. We grew up in a world that told us money buys us happiness. To a certain degree it can give us safety and freedom, but after that it comes at a mental price. Greedy people are people who are willing to pay that price, no questions asked. And there are many of them. Remember, you get only this life.

I'm not sure there's a distinction here. Especially when personal greed often informs how one votes and what political causes one supports financially.

This may surprise you, but people were in fact greedy previously as well

Yes, but it gnerally wasn't considered a virtue.

That holds up pretty poorly against historical scrutiny to very obvious examples

Certainly in western/Christian culture greed was traditionally been seen as a sin, not a virtue[1]. I'm not sure how much this applies in other cultures. Perhaps you could cite some examples?

[1]Not that this stopped the clergy being greedy of course. The grossly overweight priest is very old trope.

You are citing some dickheads with Ferraris as evidence that greed is a virtue now but disregarding the fact that people had similar gross displays of wealth in the past as evidence of the same.

But was it regarded as virtuous?

I think the "greed is good" speech represents a sort of counter movie speech along the lines you're pointing to:

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechwa...

I think some people don't realize that speech was intended to be satirical. Possibly the same people that think Ayn Rand was a great thinker and writer.

Meanwhile:

Trump tells rally immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’

Given that he's married to an immigrant, I highly doubt he said that.

I mean, you can just look this stuff up; it’s not like what ol’ Mini-Hands says at campaign rallies is secret or anything: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-im...

What you have to remember is that he’s not, you know, a smart guy. And the base he’s appealing to with this stuff are also generally, well, probably not in the running for any Nobel prizes.

https://www.c-span.org/amp/video/?c5098439

He was talking about illegal immigrants. You can disagree with that of course, but why leave that out?

At some point, the dogwhistles become so loud that the only ones claiming not to hear them are either intentionally plugging their ears or simply concealing their delight.

Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus

Still, that kind of language is extremely divisive, and will only lead to bad.

I know a lot of people here are missing the mark - the issue here is EMPATHY not -feelings-.

"We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness - not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. "

"We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness."

Please take in the WHOLE message before dissecting a single sentence.

Empathy is not the problem everyone has empathy for their own social groups. The problem is the division between these social groups. There is no grey anymore just black and white. You either hate me or love me.

Empathy is not the problem everyone has empathy for their own social groups. The problem is the division between these social groups.

From this I'd say limiting empathy to our social group leaves a hole where the empathy for everyone else should be - and that divisions grow in that hole.

I agree but I also think its more complicated than either hatred or love. Conversion therapy is, I think many people would agree, a form of hatred on gay people. But a parent trying to force their child to be straight would argue they love them dearly and that, if the parent was gay, they would happily undergo therapy to become straight and normal, so they are also empathetic. It's hard to argue about empathy and hatred and care when logic is twisted like this.

Maybe if so many people are "missing the mark" it is because of poorly chosen words?

It is important when writing such a long speech to keep in mind that at best 1 or 2 sentences, slogans, et will be remembered or used as extra short summary of the essence of the speech. If the idea was empathy and not feeling then that's the word that should have been used.

If you watch the news it should be clear that we feel too much and think too little. Everything is a rage fueled garbage contest.

But those awful feelings follow negative thoughts and ideas.

The alternative would be awful feelings appearing out of nowhere.

They follow negative experiences. The thoughts and ideas mostly just serve to justify the feelings that are already there.

Yes, true. And I say this as someone on the right—we complain about “feelers” but that’s Trump’s whole MO.

Yeah this is so unfortunate, we need to reverse this trend as a civilization

It would be really cool if people stopped being gullible marks for psychopathic pedophiles.

‘Perverted, degenerate and indecent acts’

http://archive.today/2020.07.25-172048/https://www.telegraph...

Pls add Shakespeare. Add Carrol. Add Faulkner. Add Poe. Commit -m "people I despise for some strange reason, not for their work"

Hating someone for manipulating minors into sex isn't a strange reason, weirdo

That's a hard read. A lot of new info for myself. Separating the art from the human is difficult. Would that I be so innocent* as to be able to cast dispersions on another.

*regarding other things, not chaplin in nature.

Perhaps a better way to phrase this is "We think too much and care too little" - feelings, by themselves, are not some fountain of wisdom and insight. You can have feelings of revulsion or repulsion, feelings of disgust and anger.

Feelings are ephemeral and easily manipulated.

But the same applies to caring, don't you think? You and all the others (not me tho ;]) can - and indeed do - care about anything. Caring, I believe, is just as ephemeral and easily manipulated and to some degree the result of emotions and input. Emotions on drugs are always a wonderful example, and people who keep going back to that guy who always has cocaine, which is of course, meant literally and figuratively.

Chaplin always reminds me of myself and those days when I wonder how it is, that people prefer the comfort of some culture or crowd vs. becoming an individual and unique being. I used to grind my teeth into this until hierarchies and pointers started to make sense to me.

"We think too much and feel too little" isn't one of those quotes and bits of wisdom that is meant for everyone. I believe what Chaplin hoped to achieve was to give some outliers a way to integrate themselves into the crowd, to carve out a little space that would be as protected as all the spaces where obedience and conformity reign. "We think too much and feel too little" is an inspiration to the people who have ideas and the ability to make us feel, to become aware of our emotions whenever we seek out exactly that. It's a stimulation for people of all kinds, especially the stranger kind, to go out there and do magic and art right there on the street, in the circus, on stage, on TV and of course this wonderful little prism we call the internet and any other expansion of the spaces that become accessible with time and effort of those who like to think a lot and get enough opportunities to calm their minds to avoid inflammation.

Holy shit, for a minute my writing felt like that of Maria Popova.

Chaplin always reminds me of myself and those days when I wonder how it is, that people prefer the comfort of some culture or crowd vs. becoming an individual and unique being. I used to grind my teeth into this until hierarchies and pointers started to make sense to me.

Can you explain how they started to make sense to you, and what sense they make?

It is said that Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraged Chaplin to make the The Great Dictator. Indeed, around the time the film was made, the two men shared political views on a lot of things. When Churchill and FDR saw a pre-release private screening of the film, they liked it. (Incidentally, Chamberlain had vowed to ban it in England for fear of angering the actual dictator.) FDR even invited Chaplin to read this very speech on his inauguration in 1941.

Ironically, this is the film that made Americans turn against him. Later that year, he was subpoenaed by a congressional committee investigating pro-war propaganda (this was a few months before the US entered the war.)

In the following years, Chaplin was extremely vilified by the Americans mainly for his pro-Soviet and communist views (or rather, for his refusal to be anti-Communist). This led to politically-motivated prosecutions, and culminated in him being exiled from the US when the president Harry Truman(!) canceled his re-entry permit while away on family vacation. (Chaplin was never an American citizen, despite living in the country for over 40 years.)

There’s a recent good book review summarizing this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/charlie-chapli...

There’s a recent good book review summarizing this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/charlie-chapli...

It's also a good example of how not to defend someone like Charlie Chaplin. I knew next to nothing about Chaplin other than I had greatly enjoyed some of his movies and he was the Little Tramp, but I come out the other end of this attempted defense convinced he was a fellow-traveler Communist and probably not a very good person aside from the communism part; and I wish I had never read that review, because there was no need for me to know any of that.

Indeed, around the time the film was made, the two men shared political views on a lot of things

Roosevelt did object to Jewish emigration in the nineteen thirties. He also had some rather racist opinions. https://www.timesofisrael.com/historian-new-evidence-shows-f...

However Chaplin had different opinions on the matter. He donated part of the profits from his movie to facilitate emigration. https://www.jta.org/archive/charlie-chaplin-reported-giving-...

Obligatory link to Melody Sheep's version of the speech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouzKl0oD6sU

Arguably the best version.

I prefer this turtabalist trip-hop version that samples it:

https://youtu.be/LOypHvuSDIo

It's just chill and sets the mood.

I prefer the Inception - Time version: https://youtu.be/dX25PDBb708

This part is very interesting. "Even now my voice is reaching millions"

Chaplin knew this message was for future generations. When he says "even now" it means, hey im long dead but this message is finally being herd around the world.

Chaplin & Nikola Tesla were friends. Tesla told Chaplin what was to come down the line like the internet, what he called "the transmission of intelligence" I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Tesla himself didn't write this speech.

"The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result. He does not expect that his advanced ideas will be readily taken up. His work is like that of the planter — for the future. His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way." - Nikola Tesla

The bits about "doing away with greed" and science and progress leading to rich life and happiness for all, they kind of read like he's predicting the United Federation of Planets. Alas, we've still got ways to go, we got stuck at the part where we double-down on greed to use it as the engine that makes the world go.

Chaplin was an anarchist he was against capitalism & it will fully fail soon probably due to AI ect.

Interestingly enough, this speech ends up in Japanese High School English textbooks quite often. Like, for the last 10+ years at least.

I always find japanese curriculum very interesting with how much you are talking of western literature where other asian nations don't even know or care.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Then again, the whole point of "scientific power" is to compensate for our innate weaknesses. Guided missiles may be new and perhaps not the best of inventions, but people are just as misguided by nature as they were at the dawn of history.

Helplessly naive but that's the best the cinematography can do about anything - a happy end.

" The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish ..."

If there was a good argument against the arrogance of billionaires who think they should have technology that lets them live forever, here it is.

Colored with better audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCXdxFPCqfk

Surprisingly nice website.

A great discussion on the same, emphasizing on silent film history and what this movie means in Chaplin's legacy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo4nSHRaxB0

This speech is, in a nutshell, a call for humanity, peace and tolerance.

It pains me to see a world where our centers of education have become almost precisely the opposite. They have distorted the minds of our young to the point that they are full of hatred, intolerance, bigotry and, yes, racism. All underscored by a solid foundation of utter ignorance.

There's a video somewhere of an interviewer asking university students to list the Great Books they have read. The vast majority of them had no clue what the interviewer was talking about at all. Not a clue. Because our centers of education are indoctrinating, not educating. Those engaged in indoctrination don't want young minds to be exposed to the vast world of thought and reason represented by these works.

Note that this comment isn't about the US. I think I can say this wave of ignorance and hatred has travelled the planet, taking many forms.

A friend often says that humanity is one good power outage away from reverting to cavemen behavior. Frankly, it is hard to disagree with his view. We have seen this time and time again, no power outage required.

This reality makes me wonder what Chaplin's speech might be if he had to write it in today's context.

It goes well with this (truncated) version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PNV6Lg_ajA

For making this speech, and the anti-fascist film in which it takes place, Charlie Chaplain was surveilled and persecuted by the US government (FBI, CIA, HUAC, and more). He was effectively exiled out of the country that had been his home for decades by the time this film came out in 1940.

In this speech he mentions 'a system' that generates war. That was enough for him to be branded a communist, hounded, smeared, and exiled.

A great song that features this passage: Iron Sky by Paolo Nutini

We fought for liberty and freedom but unfortunately instructions unclear and we ended up dropping 500000 tons of bombs on Cambodia.

Was that speech not made to show the audience how susceptible they also were?

https://hntelegraph.com/post/the-final-speech-from-the-great...

This film is currently streaming on the “max” platform. I watched it a few days ago. It was quite controversial at the time it came out.

Obviously you should not torrent a copy of this 85 year old film as that would further diminish any incentive Chaplin might have to make any more films.

Got the opportunity to watch this film on a big screen at a local film festival last week. I think he wrote the whole film around this speech. Also there's this wonderful scene where he(Hynkel) dances with a globe in it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jj-PaqFrBc

Just a reminder that the Three Stooges did the mocking-Hitler thing months before Chaplin.

Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little.

Just look around to see how true these words still are.

I hate being such a fault finder but his sentiment about people and resources is just wrong. The WW2 generation became so peace loving after the war not before. Prior to then, war-lust was a popular sentiment, some viewed war as an adventure or a rite of passage even, especially before the first war.

We humans in general don't want peace, we find it boring I guess. He talks about people being treated equally and living on peace and how the greedy few are causing war and conflict, that sounds nice in a movie but in reality regular everyday people are hateful. In the west, we're living in a time of excess and luxury and have weaned off all that tribal hatred to the most part now, but what scares and frustrates me is that most people don't realize the rest of the world isn't so nice. They look at people burning american flags for example and think that's the minority lol, they think if we were nicer to them they wouldn't hate us so much. How naive!

What he said about the good earth being abundant is false too, technically correct but abundance exists for some and not others. Like in america just about every resource is abundant but in sub-saharan africa not so much. Not that the Nazis were using lack of resources in their propaganda.

The fear of our own destruction and misery is the only practically effective means to achieve peace. That's why nukes have been so effective so far, else we would have had more world wars.

So long as we crave violence in our every day lives there will be war lust and so long as that is true militaries must exist and continue to pursue various means of killing people.

The problem is in the human soul and how it is raised and our attachments to culture, tradition and history.

Action movies aren't popular with men because we're so peaceful. We crave the violence, we just want the situation to be framed so that we are the good guys and our violence is justified.

This thread has some debate about whether thinking or feelings lead to the bad mindsets that nurture bad behavior.

For me, bad mindsets typically arise after some thinking. Often effortlessly.

Conversely, my best mindsets happen after being engaged in a positive effort and/or being in a safe, enriching environment. In these conditions, my better self just forms, seemingly without me exercising any will.

Charlie Chaplin did not say that 'it depends on the context'.

i think that the fact these five words were said is a sign. It shows that the collective memory of these events is waning.

Dickens' "Ghost of Christmas Present" to Scrooge, visiting the Cratchit home:

“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”

https://www.owleyes.org/text/christmas-carol/read/stave-thre...