Compassion is more dangerous than sociopathy. Sociopaths are transactional, and often follow the rules on a transactional basis.
To conduct a genocide, one needs compassion. In the way people are here having fantasies of dangerous dogs biting children, likewise similar fantasies of danger abound -- compassion for imagined victims driving overwhelming oppression.
I dont consider this morality, quite the opposite. Morality is deliberative, it takes into account the particular, it is a response to the concrete reality not the imagined.
I would love to know how compassion was used to cause the holocaust.
But I think I see. I think I see your mistaking compassion for the self as compassion for the other. It’s easy to cause a holocaust if you cause people to only have compassion for themselves or their own kind. It’s very hard to create a holocaust if you have a universal compassion for all humans.
So your answer is “well let’s get rid of all compassion” instead of making our compassion even greater.
You see the germans imagined the jews a threat (and of course some were, as some of all people are -- just as some dogs are dangerous). Now all you need to do is make headlines of all the times a jewish person murdered someone and the like. Indeed, imagine it on youtube: all these videos of jewish criminals. Now you have waves of compassion for the victims of these criminals. It's trivial.
I take it in this case people here are making an identical argument that were made by those racists who imagined so much danger.
Of course when looking at the actual stats the german jews were no less or more violent than anyone, indeed, often a little less -- and often a little more patroitic in fact.
How here do we imagine dogs? Well 56 deaths from dog attacks in a decade -- far less than from people in that same time, of course.
Dogs, it seems, are incredibly well-behaved compared to people. Perhaps we should leash young men, or ban them from parks. That would have a much more dramatic impact
You see, you don’t even know what compassion is. if people were able to believe that the Jews were a threat then they were not compassionate. They were afraid. And we can be sure if they started killing people they were not compassionate. So you still did not explain how compassionate people can kill other people.
No, they were compassionate for the victims of jewish criminals. Ex hyp., they did not feel any fear towards jewish people.
When you have compassion for victims, that makes you intolerant of their attackers. And if you imagine victimhood, then the anger and intolerance is just the same.
Compassion is an incredibly dangerous emotion for this reason; and is at the heart of a great amount of war and conflict. If people were afraid of an enemy, the won't attack them. But if they have compassion for their (possibly imagined) victims, then my god: they'll punish them to the ends of the earth.
Emotions are not moral things. Actions are. Any given emotion leads to both moral and immoral outcomes: anger is moral when it enables self-defence; fear is moral when it enables protection; compassion is moral when it enables protection to the needly.
But as with all the others, compassion becomes a profoundly immoral force when it motivates a desire to protect non-victims from their non-attackers. This "protection" is a form of self-righteous oppression -- and vastly more common than sociopaths pulling strings.
It is trivial to form a mob to lynch whomever you like if they feel it would protect some innocent -- it is compassion which drives the excess of all mobs
To conduct a genocide, one needs compassion. In the way people are here having fantasies of dangerous dogs biting children, likewise similar fantasies of danger abound -- compassion for imagined victims driving overwhelming oppression.
I dont consider this morality, quite the opposite. Morality is deliberative, it takes into account the particular, it is a response to the concrete reality not the imagined.