Yes exactly! That moral compass was just not there. I'm afraid of this stuff spreading. What a terrible future that would be if I could not expect sympathy from a passersby if I had just been hit by a car or fallen from a ladder.

Yet, even now, brown people are being kidnapped by the people who are supposed to defend our country... And nobody around defends from the kidnappers. We are afraid.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

In all fairness, I think it's a mix of what @loonsun@sh.itjust.works wrote and those people having a much weaker moral compass, rather than them being full-blown sociopaths with no moral compass.

Or to put it in another way, even in people with a moral compass, if its a weak one, tribalism can override and even swith it off, so that even when faced with outreageous displays of what a normal person would feel is Unacceptable Evil they'll take the side of Evil if their "tribe's chiefs" are taking that side.

I think this justifies even more strongly your fear that this stuff spreads - a lot more people than just Sociopaths have both weak moral compasses (we live in an age were Society deems Wealth as the measure of the greatness of a person, not moral behaviour) and tribalist thinking is both more prevalent and more subtle.

Certainly that would explain how in some countries like the US there is still a majority (or at least a large minority) of people justifying and even supporting (usually by parroting "Hamas, Hamas, Hamas") the mass murdering of Palestinian children by Israel.

[–] altphoto@lemmy.today 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah I hope things calm down a little around here. And then a little more. But that's just hope. We need kids to take over with new ways of thinking.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

In my experience in a small leftwing party were the old-generation decided as a group to pass power over to the newer generation some years ago, the kids by themselves are just manipulated by more recent propaganda instead of old propaganda (for example, the new young leadership, having grown up under Neoliberalism, saw many elements of it as "natural" and hence part of the "structure we have to work within", rather than seeing those as just political choices like the rest) and end up fucking shit up in new ways (that party has pretty much collapsed to non-existence since) rather than being wiser than the older ones.

Beware of fetishising youth.

As I see it, you need a mix of all kind of people of all ages and all origins influencing politics, rather than just people with a very narrow range of life experiences. Also regular change is important - dishonest people using positions of power for their own ends, entrenched control of power and unchallenged groupthing becoming unquestionable dogma, are all things that get swept away by regular change.