I don't believe that evil exists.
At least, not in the way that word typically is used, as someone or something with wholly negative qualities that border, if not actually inhabit, a dualistic metaphysical realm where Good is inherently opposed to Evil as opposite cosmic forces.
I do believe that sometimes people do really bad things. Not because they are evil. Because they are people with both the capability and the intention to do those bad things.
Murder. Rape. Torture. Whether those who carry out horrendous acts like these do so of their free will, or via deterministic causes, doesn't affect the pain and suffering they inflict on their fellow humans.
Hitler frequently is cited as the epitome of evil, or as I prefer, of acting really badly.
Yesterday the Salon discussion group my wife and I have belonged to for many years held our monthly meeting at the home of one of our members. Politically we all lean in the leftward direction, so Donald Trump featured prominently in our conversing.
Not in a positive way, of course, though I did say that I hoped Trump would find a way to save TikTok, something I wrote about on my Salem Political Snark blog last night. And several of us noted that it made sense to deport undocumented migrants to the United States who have committed serious crimes.
After we'd talked quite a bit about the danger Trump poses to our country and the world during his second term as president (which begins tomorrow), a woman who was a young child in Germany during World War II said:
A German friend who I keep in touch with told me, "If Germany survived Hitler, the United States will survive Trump."
Well, while I appreciated the attempt to assuage my concerns about Trump, that statement didn't do much to reassure me. I replied with, "But millions of Germans died in World War II along with six million Jews; though Germany survived Hitler, those people didn't."
Some Googling just revealed that Germany had 5,553,000 military deaths in World War II and 6,600,000-8,800,000 combined civilian and military deaths -- which I assume doesn't include the 6,000,000 Jews killed in concentration camps.
Yes, Germany now is a prosperous democracy. That's great.
However, the blunt fact remains that an autocratic ruler, Hitler, did tremendous damage to Germany and the entire world. I understand the desire to look upon history as being on a long-term positive course, but a more realistic view is that history can take a dark turn lasting hundreds of years in which human progress toward prosperity, democracy, and equality first stalls, then reverses.
History, it often is said, is written by the winners.
Though I'm no expert in the history of World War II, my understanding is that absent some blunders made by Hitler (such as invading Russia, and an inability to construct an atomic bomb), the Axis could have won the war -- obviously with far-reaching negative consequences. Our history books now would look upon Hitler with admiration, not criticism.
On a personal level, we humans seem to have a bias toward negativity, since evolution primed us to see danger lurking even where it wasn't, given that a single failure to recognize a mortal threat would leave a prehistoric human dead, while reacting to unreal threats just ended up being a waste of time.
However, when it comes to long-term historic trends, I sense that nowadays most people (including me, usually) have a bias toward seeing things steadily improving, albeit with inescapable temporary downturns along the Way of Progress.
I hope that outlook is correct. But I suspect that it isn't. The Dark Ages lasted a long time in medieval Europe. The Renaissance eventually occurred, thankfully. Now we live in times that are much more fast-moving, volatile, and unpredictable.
Hopefully the United States will survive the next four years of another Trump presidency. There's a chance, albeit slim in my decidedly personal opinion, that my country will not only survive, but thrive.
And yet... some paragraphs from the Wikipedia page, "Adolf Hitler's rise to power," concern me, because they show how an autocrat or dictator can come to power through a democratic process, then undermine democracy in a highly scary fashion.
Hitler ran for the presidency in 1932 but was defeated by the incumbent Paul von Hindenburg; nonetheless, he achieved a strong showing of second place in both rounds. Following this, in July 1932 the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag, albeit short of an absolute majority. 1933 was a pivotal year for Hitler and the Nazi Party. Traditionally, the leader of the party who held the most seats in the Reichstag was appointed Chancellor.
However, President von Hindenburg was hesitant to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Following several backroom negotiations – which included industrialists, Hindenburg's son Oskar, the former chancellor Franz von Papen, and Hitler – Hindenburg acquiesced and on 30 January 1933, he formally appointed Adolf Hitler as Germany's new chancellor. Although he was chancellor, Hitler was not yet an absolute dictator.
The groundwork for the Nazi dictatorship was laid when the Reichstag was set on fire in February 1933. Asserting that the communists were behind the arson, Hitler convinced von Hindenburg to pass the Reichstag Fire Decree, which severely curtailed the liberties and rights of German citizens. Using the decree, Hitler began eliminating his political opponents.
Following its passage, Hitler began arguing for more drastic means to curtail political opposition and proposed the Enabling Act of 1933. Once enacted this law gave the German government the power to override individual rights prescribed by the constitution, and vested the Chancellor (Hitler) with emergency powers to pass and enforce laws without parliamentary oversight.
The law came into force in March and by April, Hitler held de facto dictatorial powers and used them to order the construction of the first Nazi concentration camp at Dachau for communists and other political opponents. Hitler's rise to power was completed in August 1934 when, following the death of President von Hindenburg, Hitler merged the chancellery with the presidency and became Führer, the sole leader of Germany.
In retrospect, Hitler's rise to power was aided in part by his willingness to use violence in advancing his political objectives and to recruit party members willing to do the same. The party engaged in electoral battles in which Hitler participated as a speaker and organizer. Street battles and violence also erupted between the Communists' Rotfrontkämpferbund and the Nazis' Sturmabteilung(SA).
Once the Nazi dictatorship was firmly established, the Nazis themselves created a mythology surrounding their rise to power. German propaganda described this time period as either the Kampfzeit (the time of struggle) or the Kampfjahre (years of struggle).
I'm not impressed with NotebookLM or weird notions of oneness
I do my best to accept the diversity of opinions expressed by people who leave comments on this blog. Diversity is good. If we all believed in the same things, life would be super boring.
However, I'm also big on coherent conversations. While I understand that it is difficult to accomplish this via blog post comments, there's much more value in comments that can be understood by other people, as understanding is the foundation for agreements or disagreements.
Here's an example.
A few days ago I wrote "Some thoughts about what oneness is, and isn't." It wasn't one of my best blog posts. Adequate, but not more than that. I was hoping that someone else would have something wiser to say about oneness.
Because I've found that Osho Robbins, a regular commenter on this blog, often makes good sense, I did my best to understand what he was getting at in his comments on my oneness post. I failed. Here's quotes from his comments that seem to summarize his position on oneness.
I have not claimed the existence of ONENESS.
What I have done is shown that ONENESS cannot be known or experienced.
ONENESS is non-existent because it ticks all the boxes for a non-existent thing.
ONENESS has NO CHARACTERISTICS hence it does NOT exist.
OK. I can understand those statements. Oneness doesn't exist and, not surprisingly, it can't be known or experienced. What I can't understand is how Robbins says a whole lot of other stuff in his comments that apparently he considers to be related to nonexistent and unknowable oneness.
Look, over the years I've been fond of saying that existence exists, and wow, isn't that amazing, that there's something rather than nothing. I readily admit that in one sense, existence can't be known or experienced, since all we can know or experience are entities that exist.
So when I say that existence exists, I'm not claiming that existence is something that stands apart from what exists. This appears to be similar to Robbins' statement that oneness can't be known or experienced, just the unity of things that can be known or experienced.
However, the difference is that Robbins seems to have a lot of fondness for oneness that doesn't exist. He isn't expressing admiration for love and other manifestations of the unity that undergirds reality, as manifested in universal laws of nature, ecological interconnectedness, and such.
And that's what I don't get. His take on oneness isn't that it is beyond speech, reason, perception, and other human ways of knowing and communicating. That would put oneness in the sphere of Zen. Rather, it is that somehow we should care about oneness even though it doesn't exist in any fashion.
I can understand the appeal of mysticism, even though I've fallen away from embracing it. What I don't understand is talk about oneness that doesn't exist.
I also don't understand the appeal of NotebookLM, which is capable of fashioning "podcasts" from videos, recordings, or writings, creating two personalities from the thoughts communicated by a single person.
Previously I shared a NotebookLM podcast from Osho Robbins. Then Jim Sutherland, another regular commenter on this blog, emailed me about a NotebookLM podcast fashioned from reports of his about a 2017 visit to the Dera, the headquarters of Radha Soami Satsang Beas in India.
I listened to about a third of the 17 minute audio podcast. I guess I have a low tolerance for NotebookLM, because I found the artificial intelligence generated voices so irritating, I wished that Sutherland that simply shared a written version of what the podcast is about, rather than having those reports filtered through Notebook LM.
The way I see it, NotebookLM simply is regurgitating a communication that already exists in a podcast form. Nothing new is added by NotebookLM. It merely fashions a pseudo-dialogue between two AI generated "people," each of whom reflects the content of the original communication.
Sure, I can understand the appeal of having the NotebookLM personalities gush over the wisdom contained in something a person has created, be it a video, audio recording, or document. But for me, the listener/watcher of NotebookLM, I don't see what benefit there is in having the original communication fashioned into a "podcast" with the same content.
If I'm wrong about NotebookLM, I'll be pleased to be corrected. That's just how I see it at the moment.
Posted at 10:10 PM in Comments, Reality | Permalink | Comments (50)
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