Morality of politics
August 5th, 2007, search relatedRelated posts :: Morality of politics :: Morality of politics :: The Morality of Politics and The Immorality of Religion :: I’m waiting to hear what you have to say about Morality?
> > In general, war is not an occupation for normal people, and I guess,
> > this also may apply to politics. (If by normality we understand
> > refraining from killing other people.)
>
> “normal: adjective 1. conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or
> expected.”
>
> - Compact OED online
> http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/nor…
Well, the standard I was speaking of was refraining from killing other
people…
In general, that’s the funny thing about normalcy: it is as any person
understands and applies such a standard. Normalcy is not absolute, it is
relative to a definition of normalcy. And everybody may define normalcy
his/her own way.
I live in the Netherlands. Here if one person kills another person, that
comes like a shock; even policemen and policewomen are not usually allowed
to kill dangerous people. And, I saw people who fought in wars abroad
(mostly as peacekeepers or so). Some of them are so affected by their
experience in the army that if we draw the balance, the therapy for veterans
costs the Dutch society more than ten times the payment they received when
they were soldiers. Perhaps even more than the whole Dutch war efforts cost
for the operations they were involved in.
Some people may kill and go on smiling as if nothing happened, while some
are tormented by it for the rest of their life.
What Milgram showed, is that two thirds of the American people (in general,
of all people in this world) may be taught to kill their fellows in half an
hour of training. What is less obvious is what happened to one the subjects
for such experiment: he entered the lab as a self-confident businessman, he
gathered some self-knowledge therein, and when he had completed the
experiment he was a shattered man, in bad need for therapy. This happened
often enough in order to require serious debate with the ethics committee of
an university if a researcher would dare to repeat such experiment. “If I
knew myself I would run away.” Goethe.
Greetings,
Tudor
