| ▲ | praptak 6 hours ago |
| CS Lewis has a speech about the ingroups and corruption. His thesis is that the mere desire to be "in" is the greatest driver of immoral behavior: "To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”" https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/ |
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| ▲ | PaulHoule 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I'd note that it is common for fraudsters to prey on members of ingroups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affinity_fraud |
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| ▲ | bsenftner 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In undergrad I did a formal Philosophy / Sociology study, where we were looking at human motivations. The research indicated that prestige is the number 1 driver of human motivation. Gaining prestige "trumps" ethics. Nobody likes to hear that. |
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| ▲ | derbOac an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I think this is one reason it is important to cast unethical behavior in terms of lack of competency — that someone has to break the rules to get ahead because they're not competent enough to do things fairly or ethically. Empathy, while important in my opinion personally, often doesn't matter to certain people. So you have to decrease the prestige associated with unethical behavior, above and beyond it being unethical per se. | | |
| ▲ | neutronicus 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | In my opinion you've drawn exactly the wrong conclusion. Raising the stakes just increases the pressure to cheat (and not get caught). | |
| ▲ | DFHippie 34 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | This. I think so much of the fascism and corruption afoot in the world comes from people who believe they deserve things they are incompetent to get. Their sense of entitlement is in conflict with their competence and unrestrained by concern for others. To soothe their ego wound they project their faults onto the person who has what they want. "It isn't my failure; it's your trickery!" Now instead of shame and impotence they feel righteous anger. | | |
| ▲ | bsenftner 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I think you are correct. I've spent extended time in uber wealth circles, and this describes the offspring mindset of the generations after wealth acquisition. Their incompetence matches their entitlement, and then they walk into nepotism. | |
| ▲ | macintux 27 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't know that it's necessarily incompetence. The idea of "overproduction of elites" pops up frequently: https://www.niskanencenter.org/are-we-overproducing-elites-a... You may be supremely competent but unlucky enough to be born at the wrong time, to the wrong family, competing with the wrong people, to rise to the level that you feel you deserve. | | |
| ▲ | bsenftner 20 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I look at this re-occurring overproduction of elites concept, and feel like it has good points but seems to be welded like a weapon, soon followed by statements like "you're just unlucky, get over it." |
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| ▲ | sigwinch 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No, but I don’t think ethics is #2. Someone intrinsically motivated might be technically competent, autonomous and self-confident about his/her goals. I might skip your meetings about ethics; I might be too busy. | |
| ▲ | fellowniusmonk 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Did that ever replicate? Is prestige the number one motivator only statistically? In other words is it the number one motivator for 31% percent of the college students that were tested and lets say empathy was at 29%? Misanthropy and bald self interest gets overplayed I think. Often times because it allows bad actors to normalize and justify their own misanthropy. Presenting this kind of unbacked, unqualified anecdotal data is great for "edgy truthtellers" but also deeply poisoning the well. |
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| ▲ | ChrisMarshallNY 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > "Half of the harm that is done in this world Is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; But the harm does not interest them." -T.S. Eliot |
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| ▲ | rramadass 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Also Lord Acton - “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.” |
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| ▲ | spigottoday an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Corruption empowers, and absolute corruption empowers absolutely. It seems to me that some people adopt this perspective. | |
| ▲ | brazzy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Acton was, by the way, an ardent supporter of the Confederacy. In his opinion, the federal government curtailing the independence of states was a more significant act of oppression than slavery. | | |
| ▲ | bell-cot 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you're familiar with English history, then it's more understandable that Lord Acton (Catholic, and born a mere Baronet) was against powerful central authorities. And at least according to Wikipedia, Acton's positions on the Confederacy and slavery were very mainstream for English Catholics of the day. | | | |
| ▲ | delaminator 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think there's a war about that wasn't there? | | |
| ▲ | brazzy 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, and he didn't like the outcome. Salient quote (from a letter to Robert E. Lee): "I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo. " | | |
| ▲ | sigwinch 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There are several lies in this. The objective of a Confederate victory was to enforce slavery farther south. Mexico was a few years away from collapsing. Brazil would emancipate within 20 years. Would the Confederacy last 20 years as the last slave state in the western hemisphere? | | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Slavery would not have lasted, as the mechanization and industrialization of agriculture would soon make slave ownership uneconomical. Same with draft animals. |
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| ▲ | delaminator 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well, he wasn't wrong. | | |
| ▲ | XorNot 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Whining about States rights to enslave people is certainly a take. Particularly when in context, the war was caused by the South acting to usurp abolition in the North via the legal system (i.e. Dredd Scott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott) The importance and applicability of "states rights" is always oddly narrow. | | |
| ▲ | b40d-48b2-979e an hour ago | parent [-] | | The importance and applicability of "states rights" is always oddly narrow.
It's also always ignoring the declarations of secession that all explicitly name slavery as the motivation. |
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