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Fmr Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz laments to Jewish Federation that people are finding content from “Al Jazeera and Nick Fuentes” on social media and seeing videos of “the carnage in Gaza.”
Holocaust education has backfired in part as people see Palestinians as Jews’ victims, she adds.
“They think the lesson of the Holocaust is…you fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.”
I agree with you. The system was created by psychopaths and will actively seek out other psychopaths to continue on.
It was not, and this is an idealist analysis. The system is a product of specific material conditions and relations of production.
The system is still produced by people, though, and there have been some people who have been more instrumental to implementing the system than others. Sure, their actions have been guided by material forces, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t deliberately and with forethought exercise agency to bring about a desired end.
The point is that most were not psychopaths and didn’t need to be because the system was shaped by material conditions. Any analysis that rests on armchair diagnosis of “psychopathy” is not only a bad analysis, but could also easily veer into ableism (“people are bad because they have mental conditions”). Let’s leave the psychiatry to people who are qualified to do it and actually have extensive contact with the person being diagnosed.
Maybe I’m giving the original comment too much leeway, but my interpretation is that he isn’t necessarily assuming a clinical diagnosis, just observing that there are people who have an easier time discarding empathy or exhibiting other traits that we commonly associate with psychopathy and that those people tend to be the ones establishing or perpetuating the system because it’s easier for them to adapt to the system they create.
I personally waffle back and forth on this - I agree that it’s both inaccurate and damaging to the discourse to assume the capacity for cruelty (or massive or extreme cruelty) is the product of genetic abnormalities or some other traits that render the perpetrator somehow exceptional compared to the baseline human condition, but there are also observable qualitative differences between the people that fall in line and those that don’t that haven’t been fully explicated and might have underlying dispositional components. The idea that the system is purely an emergent phenomenon and that those who perpetuate it are essentially a random sample of the population also feels reductionist to me. I don’t think that we’re generally equipped with a common vocabulary to discuss the differences among the active/passive participants and the active/passive opponents, so there’s a tendency to fall back on clinical language without an explicit intent to apply a formal classification.