![]() ![]() If you defend yourself, you may have to kill. If an army is crossing the border or a lunatic is coming at you with a knife, the policy alternatives are (a) defend yourself or (b) lie down and die. This looks to me like the deep-seated yearning for a one-sided policy debate in which the best policy has no drawbacks. It is a more inspiring battle cry to scream, “Die, vicious scum!” instead of “Die, people who could have been just like me but grew up in a different environment!” You might feel guilty killing people who weren’t pure darkness. Or maybe the fear is that understanding will lead to forgiveness. If it took a mutant to do monstrous things, the history of the human species would look very different. Very few people will understand that you aren’t defending the Enemy, just defending the truth. If you deny any aspect of this on merely factual grounds, you are arguing the Enemy’s side you are a traitor. Soon the Enemy has horns, bat wings, flaming breath, and fangs that drip corrosive venom. Everyone strives to outshine their neighbor in patriotic denunciation, and no one dares to contradict. And any argument that favors your side must be supported, no matter how silly-otherwise you’re letting up the pressure somewhere on the battlefront. If the Enemy did have an evil disposition, that would be an argument in favor of your side. If you try to construe motivations that would make the Enemy look bad, you’ll end up flat wrong about what actually goes on in the Enemy’s mind.īut politics is the mind-killer. ![]() The Enemy’s story, as seen by the Enemy, is not going to make the Enemy look bad. Realistically, most people don’t construct their life stories with themselves as the villains. Now why do you suppose they might have done that? Because they saw the USA as a beacon of freedom to the world, but were born with a mutant disposition that made them hate freedom? On September 11th, 2001, nineteen Muslim males hijacked four jet airliners in a deliberately suicidal effort to hurt the United States of America. This would allow us to hypothesize a less exceptional disposition, and thereby shoulder a lesser burden of improbability. Not as a moral point, but as a strict question of prior probability, we should ask what the Enemy might believe about their situation that would reduce the seeming bizarrity of their behavior. There seems to be a very strong tendency to blame evil deeds on the Enemy’s mutant, evil disposition. When someone actually offends us-commits an action of which we (rightly or wrongly) disapprove-then, I observe, the correspondence bias redoubles. We see unusual dispositions that exactly match the unusual behavior, rather than asking after real situations or imagined situations that could explain the behavior.
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