FWIS3

"When dealing with people at an emotional distance, force yourself to act as if you love every one of them, deeply and personally."

Thoughts?

My thoughts are no thank you. That sounds like the garbage I was taught in the church, and it's a recipe for getting screwed over repeatedly.

People need to earn trust and love, not just be given it. It is possible to deal with people in good faith while being prepared for them not to do the same.

Perhaps I should have been more explicit. This isn't about personal honor codes but political ones.

e.g. one could order a bombing that would kill fifty or so civilians, but also decapitate the command system of a major terrorist network. Those civilian deaths are easily abstracted away in the name of a supposedly higher cause. But if the person expected to order the bombing were thinking in terms of each person as someone they might love, someone who might be family; they might be a bit less anxious to order it, no?

I'm sure normal people pause before ordering such things (the point of killing the terrorist leader is he can hurt thousands in the future, and how you rate that threat). Unless you're a sociopath in which case you're not going to care about such codes anyway.

Also honestly people are not hard wired to think of, say, an unknown baby in Africa the same way as they do for their neighbor's child. (You can argue that it's not right, but makes sense why you would be wired that way.) This is why journalists when reporting on a crisis often do not just cite statistics but rather write a long story about a "type case" person in the middle of whatever horror- people are much more likely to help the single person they feel they "know" than the unknown masses behind a statistic. I don't think you can innately change that either.

Gullible Jones wrote:Perhaps I should have been more explicit. This isn't about personal honor codes but political ones.

e.g. one could order a bombing that would kill fifty or so civilians, but also decapitate the command system of a major terrorist network. Those civilian deaths are easily abstracted away in the name of a supposedly higher cause. But if the person expected to order the bombing were thinking in terms of each person as someone they might love, someone who might be family; they might be a bit less anxious to order it, no?

I think it's a bit too simplistic to be honest.

Bit like an ant trying to work out how to understand humans. No offence intended.
One thing you have to understand is that there are different people in the world.
What works for you won't work for others.

Your example of the military is flawed.
You'd break the entire chain of command making you vulnerable to attack.
You don't think about the family of the person you are about to take down.
You do so because it's your job and because the chain of command requires you to.

While there are limits, Germany WWII is an example, any deviation will break that chain of command.
The military strips you of what you were and reforms you into a tool that will work when required.
That's it's job and it won't work any other way.

As SFC stated, your idea is a recipe for disaster.

I don't know... I guess this is one of my usual blind-foaming-rage-at-authority days.

The problem to me is that, when you get down to it, there are people to whom my family and friends are pawns. And for me that's a line you just don't cross. No matter how much one tries to tone down the nastiness of it, the fact is that those are real complex people who have lives, and will feel pain when you crush them out of existence.

I recognize that sacrifices are necessary in life. I recognize that the world is an ugly place. I recognize that ideals don't always hold; contrary to what some people think (and have often told me), I am an adult, not a naive child.

What bothers the hell out of me though is that
- People are usually forced to make horrible decisions by other people, not by natural circumstance. Not always, but most of the time, yes.
- The kind of thinking that enables people to make horrible decisions, and feel okay about it afterward, is what forces other people to also make horrible decisions; ad infinitum, in an endless vicious cycle. In the end it's all rationalization.
- Nobody admits that necessary evils are in fact evil. No matter how you slice it, you can't convince me that bombing a city is a truly ethical act, even if it stops a war. Not as unethical as failure to do anything, but very, very far from being ethical, even if you have no choice. Binary logic is not the logic of reality.

...

Of course, the thing that really gets me foaming at the mouth has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with emotion. I recognize that people have to do their best in an inherently unfair world, and that forcing a semblance of fairness on that world is hard, nasty work. What never fails to piss me off is how some people take pride in that. Not in having tried their hardest, but in Having Done What Needed To Be Done, At Any Cost. Not pride in effort, but pride in victory. And that sickens me.

At least have the decency to feel a few shreds of guilt, for God's sake.