12/ By this theory, most "good" people are actual bad: they define "evil" to dehumanize, to justify causing pain for pleasure
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13/ Our penal system implicitly assumes shades-of-red theory. Prison guards and cops I suspect have at least a small streak of sadism.
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14/ Stanford prison experiments: almost all of us are capable of finding pleasure in causing/witnessing pain
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15/ If this is true, my original definition of civilizing project is nonsensical and most people are NOT on board with it
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16/ Worse, most moral philosophy is obsessed with defining evil primarily to find targets for justifiable pain-causing.
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17/ Enemies give life meaning and purpose. Moralizing is overtly about trying to do good, but covertly about prepping victims for pain
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18/ The most common form is NIMBYism/tribalism. For many, the ingroup is _formed_ in order to create an outgroup it's ok to hate and hurt
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19/ As a mostly-apathetic, I only came very reluctantly to this conclusion: that many actively enjoy causing/witnessing pain
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20/ It's an ugly theory of humans, but unfortunately very plausible evolutionarily. Finding pleasure in pain is adaptive in scarcity.
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21/ Note that feeling others' pain (friends, kin, ingroup, random others) is not mutually exclusive with finding pleasure in pain
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23/ Which means the feel-good theory of civilization I opened with is a theory of, by, for freaks who can't find pleasure in others' pain
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24/ Which brings us to the dark question: if finding pleasure in others' pain is central to psyche of "normal" humans, what is civilization?
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I remember the first time people tried to explain the emotion of schadenfreude to me, I couldn't believe it was a thing.
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