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this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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politics
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I hope someday, at a minimum, some really impactful social science comes from the timeframe we are experiencing right now.
I'm just constantly baffled by people's capacity for evil, in the name of a good. Also, people's willingness to intentionally share delusions with people they unquestionably believe in, frightens the hell out of me. There is a very obvious a conscious choice happening when people are choosing to accept lies as truth.
As horrific as it all continues to be, its also fucking really morbidly fascinating. I remember being a little boy and reading about the horrors of the Holocaust, and failing completely to wrap my mind around how an entire Society could allow things to escalate that way. I want to be somebody who says they still don't understand it, but I can't. Because it's happening right here in front of me, and I see why and how. And I hate it.
Back in college (which is longer ago than I like), I went to the Holocaust Museum in DC. The most impactful exhibit was called Daniel's Story. You enter a room and go back in time - into the life of Daniel. He's a Jewish boy growing up in Germany around when Hitler came to power. Everything looks just fine in Daniel's house.
Then you go to the next room and time has skipped forward a bit. There are slight changes, but it isn't anything too bad so you walk on.
In every room, time moves forward slightly and the changes always seem "not too bad."
Then you get to the final room which is the entrance to a death camp. Suddenly, you realize just how all those "tiny/just fine" changes accumulated. But by now, it's too late to stop it. You're at the gates.
Had the Germans launched the full blown Holocaust on Day 1, too many people would have objected. But after a slow burn of tiny steps for reasons that sounded plausible enough to not be widely objected to, dehumanization, and other such tactics, the Nazis created an atmosphere where "kill all the Jews" seemed like a reasonable outcome. At least to most of the general populace who weren't Jewish. Or LGBTQ. Or political dissidents. Etc.
Damn that sounds like a fantastic exhibit.
It was gut wrenching.
The other exhibit that hit hard (well, they all did, but this one was notable to me) was the train car. You can walk around it or through it. I walked through and paused in the middle.
The plaque outside had said how many Jews were put in this car. I tried to imagine sticking that many people in the car, but I couldn't. Then I realized my problem.
I was trying to put PEOPLE in the car.
Even though the "people" I was mentally putting in were imaginary, I was still treating them like people. If I switched to putting that many people shaped objects in the car, it became easy.
It was a huge lesson in the power of dehumanization.
Brenda Romero made an experience called Train to visualize this and educate.
-cries in spatial reasoning-