Discussion with a lib today and this came up, again. This experiment where people will just kill each other on command and how this in their worldview partly explains why the world is shit.
I was able to explain a bit about the way our surroundings shape us from the moment we come into the world and how this experiment would likely give different result if done in a society less driven like our Western hellscapes, but am not sure if I am talking bs on that. However I think psychology is in general very sus and the way human behavious has been explained by it is also sus, so I just don't buy this.
It becomes a problem when these Late Stage Capitalism Libs use things like this to hate other people and turn this "it is known because science" into misantrophy and nihilism. And it helps them not see any alternatives to the way things are, because if humans are shit then they must be shit in all circumstances. We know this isn't true, just by looking at the societies indigenous peoples had.
So isn't this just another way to use "human nature" as an argument for riding humanity of the cliff and be complicit in it? Is there any critiques of these experiments you know about. Thoughts on the whole Milgram experiment thing? It's very popular lore in the West after all.
I also think these experiments and the discourse around them are used to drive home the boogeyman that is authoritarianism. Or the way it is framed. In peoples imagination a kind of imagined one ruler would turn us all into killers.
Looking at the way people in this moment are complicit in fascism is also probably the real way people were during WW2, they benefited from the status quo and chose to avert their eyes from it for a decade or longer. But this was never all of the people, only those in power.
I don't think people who have it relatively cozy in any society realize they are doing the fash until they have been doing it for some time and it starts to have a real impact on them too, the whole "first they came for the communists...". Also nobody has to press a button to kill other people, one just needs to be complicit to it. Just like the West is all the time. But is that the same as killing someone when somebody tells you to, not sure.