> They can see with their eyes. They can understand what they are doing in the moment.

Its not about seeing, its about perception, and to change or adapt the first thing you need to be capable of doing is recognition, which doesn't happen in people who have blinded themselves.

They don't perceive anything being wrong with what they are doing, and so they continue doing so, they may even structure things so they can plausibly deny these things when the reality is they did those things.

You can do great evil and not know you are doing it, through structured indirection. The Nazi's started this, Mao continued it, the Stasi perfected it.

The strategy is called a separation of objectionable concerns, the gist is you limit information so no one has a clear picture of what is happening, and while they all work together towards one goal, only a few people know what that is.

For a concrete example, say there is a set of two or three buttons with two colored lights that light up, and your job is pushing buttons in a closed room. You are told you need to push that button, wait X minutes, then push the second button when the light is green, wait X minutes, and then press the reset and do it again. You are told what these buttons do, but what you are told isn't the truth, and you are encouraged in fact to beat your best metrics.

That button unbeknowst to you operates a gas chamber, and a cremation chamber in order, and what you aren't told is 100s of people get sent into those chambers with each button press. Sure you might see workers, but few know the truth, the rest are simply told this is a transfer point and they go somewhere else, which is strictly true in isolation. Quite evil, and similar things happened during WW2.

You don't know or control any of that, but you actively participate without your knowledge, just doing the job you are assigned and getting paid for it. You don't ask questions because you are just doing your job. You don't know any better, but are the decider of those people's fates. This is how separation of objectionable concerns allows great evil without you ever being aware of it. Structure and indirection.

This strategy has been used almost everywhere, and worse every human has psychological blindspots which can be taken advantage of through structured responses as well where they don't perceive and can't recognize things. You see this today with misinformation, where truth may be said but everyone thinks you are just crazy despite you having incontrovertible proof to the contrary. They simply follow a fixed action pattern to remain consistent internally.

One example of these type of blindspots may be tricking someone into agreeing with you by asking them a leading question, and then using a similar follow-up question to elicit the same response even when you know they disagree for the second item. By drawing the structured comparison and eliciting the agreement in the former it applies to the latter either immediately or over time.

Our psychology warps us to remain consistent, and those people will soften up through repeated exposure without even noticing, and eventually change to remain consistent. This is the danger of subtle blindspots and torture techniques.

Mao discovered things in the 1950s that effectively break many of the core beliefs most people hold and think to be true about free thought, and those elements have been used to people's detriment ever since.

> If its for protecting society, that's different Who decides what's protecting society, and what is society to you?

A thing is what it does, and a society may be based in slavery and abuse, or in self-determination, realization, and growth. Protecting the former type of society may or may not be different. That's the danger with ambiguity indirection, and the potential for deceit/lies.

> That sounds neat, but it lets people off the hook.

He wrote the book to refute many aspects of Tolstoy's War & Peace which promote destructive behaviors, because what Tolstoy wrote has been used in policy in a lot of places towards destructive ends.

Illyin takes a very rational principled approach in addressing this very difficult subject matter, tying what he's saying to objective measures, and reiterating a lot of common knowledge at the time it was written. His reasoning follows his experience which included living through the White Army and Bolshevik uprising and famine, albeit in exile. He touches on mental compulsion and coercion as well and a lot of people have used these ideas beneficially.

His material is even touched upon within the design of our modern day prison system albeit, the implementations today fail because some of the material he covers is actually ignored.

The book was previously only available in Russian, but recently it was translated from Russian to English and is available from Amazon.

The author lived and wrote the book around the turn of the century (1900s). He wrote it as a refutation of Tolstoy's philosophy which included a hodgepodge of pacifism towards appeasement with elements of sentimental moralism and nihilism.

People can blind themselves simply by putting layers of indirection between the thing they do and its effects, and using false justification, refusing to resolve those layers of indirection down to reality (what philosophers refer to as an element of identity in subjects on metaphysics).