Had to break up my comments a bit.
Graydon:
Thank you very much for the comments explaining the neocon/fundie
humiliation basis for reconstructing a person's morality on their
outside instead of their inside.
It never made sense to me before why the extremist right wing want
to destroy the self-esteem of their converts--"breaking their will
for God"--while also building up the whole social unit's image as
monolithic, never wrong, a completely safe haven that will never be
questioned.
Manipulating people who will do anything at all for the unit
they're bound so tightly to.
Well, jellyfish rely on water to support them.
Take away the water, what's left?
In more extreme form, it's the same way that you create a torture
unit, as I understand from my admittedly limited reading in
nonfiction on the subject. I can barely handle the sf novels by
Susan Matthews on it--very stiff stuff, with the kind of moral
impact that makes Rumsfeld's answers to the Congressional hearings
all the more difficult to tolerate.
I have always been queasy around the kind of relativists who
clearly lack an internal skeletal structure on which to hang their
decisions.
Ask them questions about unconventional topics, and you soon notice
the goo simply oozing out in every direction.
Your comments explain exactly why I should be.
There in Iraq, somebody took away all the external structures those
people had ever relied on in their lives, and watched them go right
to pieces, like jellyfish on the beach.
Reading such uncomfortable books does make you well aware of the
theory that very few people's ethics, put to the test, would prove
to have genuine internal skeletons.
I'm not sure I agree with it.
There were plenty of ordinary people, during 9/11, who proved to
have calcium in those bones, and plenty to spare.
Doing this in their name is an abomination.
I can't think it's accidental.
Neocon/fundies know exactly how to create social units full of
these jellyfish. If you're right about this, they practice it all
the time. And of course they're perfectly comfortable with the idea
of the military bootcamp breakdown of civilians to remake them into
soldiers who will shoot other people on command.
But if the social unit provides the entire structure that these
jellyfish people lack, what happens when their social unit fails
them?
That makes me wonder if the way to clear out every last rat from
this rotten crib in the Pentagon is to prove that their social unit
is not safe. That it is leaking at every seam.
The troops in Iraq relied on their social construct so heavily, so
completely enmeshed in it, that those troops did and condoned
things against every law and ethical code they ever knew before.
The isolation of the unit made them fall all over to be adopted by
their new social unit. The crimes, and hiding the crimes, becomes
an important part of the meshes binding them together in a unit
full of secrets.
Well, *they've* found out it wasn't something to rely on.
It's about time the cynics in the Pentagon who created these
monster units should experience the same thing.
Let them learn that the social unit that has coddled them to this
unbelievable point is going down fast.
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