When I woke up this morning, I heard a disturbing sound

This guy, and to avoid getting nasty comments, letters or being sued, let’s just call him Reverend Cleophus the Third...unless James Brown or John Landis is reading this... unlikely I know, but maybe we should call him Sid. Anyway, Sid made a troubling remark to me. He said “no one ever sues anyone for hundreds of thousands of dollars due to an attitude or dodgey look”, or something like that. I disagreed. I don’t think that he was right and the more I think about it, the more I think he is absolutely wrong. The more I think about it, the more I think that the only reason someone ever does something like sue someone else is due to a bad attitude or a dodgey look.  A few more well travelled solicitors I know would tell you that the reason is that the courts (especially family) are not about justice, fairness or even the law. They are about resolution. They are about getting two people who have a dispute and wearing them out, tying them up in procedures, process and paperwork until they get to a point where any solution, no matter how stupid, would be better than continuing with their dispute, and then sending them the bill. But do we learn from our pettiness, our inflated sense of self?  

There is a far bit of work going on in this area: exactly why and how do people disagree? Relational Contract Theory is fascinating, albeit American understanding of why people won’t disagree when they should. We’ve talked before about happiness and morality and how in the fight between emotions and reason, emotions will win. Especially emotions like disgust, vanity and pride. Then once we have made up our mind on that, we will stick with it way beyond the point of sanity. This is the point where our lovely confirmation bias kicks in and keeps us from re-evaluating the facts.

I live in this nice little quiet street, right on the beach where everyone , well, most people, get along really well. I’ve lived here for a few years now and the place was a clear change from my last abode, especially in terms of the neighbours. My last home was neighboured by druggies on one side and alcos on the other, so a street where most people say hello and are happy and look out for unusual or odd events is a wonderful change. The only problem is; it comes at the expense of the blue house.

The blue house is directly opposite us. When we first moved in, everyone in the street was welcoming and happy to talk to us. They all also warned us about those people in the blue house. They were not welcome. There were stories of having to call the police time and time again due to noise, swearing and fighting. The blue house’s cat was responsible for most of the ills of the street; from lounges and outdoor furniture being ruined to plants not growing properly.

I never had any issue with the people; they seemed nice and kept to themselves. I am not sure whether this is due to their character or that they knew no one liked them. There was only one night that I heard any fighting or yelling, and that didn’t last very long and wasn’t too intrusive, save for a radio being thrown on the road. But upsetting the neighbours on one occasion in over a year is quite alright with me. It’s a fair bit better than my usual average.

Then they moved out. There were stories that they were on the run from the law, that they were on the run from something else, had just run away, or that they had moved to the mines and the like. The house stayed empty for a while and then everyone was relieved when it was tenanted by ‘nice’ people.

Not long went by before the ‘nice’ people, while still being nice, this niceness had qualifications; they were nice, but drove a car that was too expensive. Then the teenage daughter left a light on overnight and was a little noisy. Another brief period of time passed before how they had acted on a particular occasion became who they were. “They did the wrong thing by upsetting...[well, let’s just call her Mrs Murphy]”

Another thing that has happened is that next door has been renovated and another person has moved in. The lady that lives next door is in her nineties and has lived in that house for fifty years. She still has an English accent that is almost too think to understand at times. She pays a grumpy old fool to mow the front lawn, but the back lawn is mainly overgrown weeds and clover. For a while now I have been meaning to spend a few hours mowing and then weeding the yard as it needs doing. This is not only cause I’m just that nice ... [cough] ... fine then... but it is also because it would save a lot of weeds coming through to our yard for a while. So while this was a helping-out-a-neighbour idea, there was also benefit for me in it.

But then her daughter moved in. And then her daughter swore at the neighbours for using a chainsaw too loudly. And then her daughter swore at me for using a sander one Sunday arvo.

“I’m just so sick of all this noise. Could YOU people make any more noise?”

Never ask an Aussie man if he could make more noise after you’ve annoyed him. You’re not going to like the answer. There may not be a valid reason for using a drop saw and a petrol powered pressure cleaner at the same time; come to think of it it’s probably a tad bit dangerous, but I do believe it answers her question.

But here’s the thing: now I am not inclined to help with the back yard at all.  

Why is this? Am I justified in just saying ‘well stuff them then, they can mow their own yard’ when I know that they clearly can’t? I lie to myself and say that I have too much on my plate as it is and couldn’t really spare the time.

I have witnessed the daughter have a partial tantrum at a council worker who was planting trees, prettying up the street; due to their being a palm tree there many decades ago (probably before this guy was born) that caused them some concern. So maybe I don’t want to be subjected to an onlooker. Maybe I don’t want to allow myself to be judged by an unwelcomed external source.

Maybe, and maybe not. But the point is that for some reason, I am a less kind person, I am a lesser person than I was and I can not explain why. If I say it was caused by her, I would have to admit that she has some sense of power to do that, which I don’t want to do. Maybe she’s just cranky and lonely and I should cut her some slack.

Australia has a fairly good track record at being able to turn the other cheek as a country. We don’t get all pissy when our leaders do something stupid. The closest we’ve ever come to civil war or rebellion was over rum and we didn’t throw a tantrum and dump a whole bunch of tea into a river or try and blow up parliament house with gunpowder, we just found him cowering under his bed and sent him back to England. “This one’s no good,” we said, “but no harm done, just send us another one.”  

By the way, sorry for all the cheesey Blues Brothers references and links... here’s one more to make a lie out of my apology. It’s my son’s new all time favourite movie. A while ago I lamented that the greatest joy in life is watching four children eat their breakfast and sway in time to ‘Love in an Elevator’. It’s been topped by those same kids not wanting to go to the school disco because the music is terrible... “I’d go if they played a little SRV or Beatles Dad.” ... you kids rock.

This post’s lame joke:

Most people don’t realise that Heaven isn’t above us and Hell isn’t below us, they are side by side. One day, Satan threw a huge kegger and ended up burning down a few sheds and the big fence that separates the two areas.

The next morning, God is out there and he is mad. I mean, he is really mad.

“You’ll fix up this fence and quickly.” He yells at Satan.

Satan, bleary eyed and hung-over, replies “yeah, yeah, we have tonnes of tradies here in hell. We have concreters, builders, builder’s labourers. It’ll be done in no time.”

A few hours later, God is surprised to see the fence has not only been completely rebuilt, but it is far more magnificent than the last one. When God inspects it a little closer, he notices that the fence is actually three metres on the heaven side of the boundary.

“You bum” God yells at Satan, “You won’t get away with this, I’m going to sue you for this.”

“Really?” Satan responds, “and where are you going to find a lawyer?”

This post’s groovy, identity seeking quote:

(you know the one I’m going to throw at you already don’t you dear reader?)

This is the Court...which has its decaying houses and its lighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give — who does not often give — the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!"

This post’s inappropriate over share:

Continuing on from the theme of pettiness, or a variation of it, I can’t stand people who say “for all intensive purposes”. What on earth does that mean? I know they meant to say ‘for all intents and purposes’ but what is an intensive purpose? What isn’t? Are they even listening to what they’re saying? Why are non-intensive or less-intensive purposes not allowed? I know it seems little but man does it get under my skin. It’s like all these bogans who slush out the supposed ANZAC poem and say “...age will not weary them, nor the years condemn.” What does that mean ? Why would the years condemn them? That doesn’t make any sense. The years may contemn them, that would make sense. 

I guess I’m just small minded and petty...

To be or not to be...That’s actually not the question...not even close

Something that has worried me of late is can you do a bad thing, that may have a bad consequence, and be showered in glory when a good thing happens as a result? This has come about as I have noticed what seems like an infestation of bogan pride on social media lately that proudly states that hitting a child in discipline in not wrong due to the person in question apparently being hit as a child ‘...and it never hurt them much hey.’ Do you ever wonder whether Hamlet was wrong, he was being deceived, but killing his uncle was a good idea as he would have been a terrible king...could that act be right while being ill-informed?Someone, Nagel I think, asked us how far we can torture a disobedient child while we are stuck under wreckage in a car that is just about to crash. Can we break their arm to get them to free us and save us both?

Can you do something terrible (hit a child) with a good intention (disciplining the child) and expect to be praised as a result of performing a bad act (child behaves according to expectations) ?

A friend of mine sent me a wonderful link on the subject – an add about children copying which is brilliant. If you are going to listen to one thing on Youtube today, well listen to Dazed and Confused, after all, it’s Friday and you need to get a groove on already. But if you’re listening to two things....well, you know.

 

We’ve talked about the Heinz Dilemma before and how it expresses whether a person is wrong to steal, over-charge and the like for medicine;

A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000, which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

But it can be complicated by a few things.

Firstly, is action more morally meaningful than inaction? Consider the two neighbours, Alf and Deb; both live in absolute luxury by virtue of the fact that they are the trusted protector of their very wealthy, multi-billionaire, two year old, orphaned niece. If Alf’s niece, or Deb’s niece die, Alf and/or Deb will inherit billions as the only remaining relative. Alf and Deb both absolutely hate their respective bratty nieces and resent looking after them.

One day Deb has had enough and, while her niece is in the bath, grabs her head and gently but forcefully pushes her under the water and her niece drowns.

As luck would have it, at exactly the same time Alf is bathing his niece and leaves for a second to grab a towel. When he returns, he noticed that his niece has accidentally slipped, fell, hit her head on the side of the bath and is currently not able to breathe. Alf doesn’t do anything. He steps back and waits for the bath to, of its own actions, kill his niece.

Both Alf and Deb are now billionaires and free from the trials of looking after their nieces. But is Alf’s conduct any less than Debs? Does it matter that he didn’t actually do anything to end the life of his niece?

Let’s warp the story a little more. Say neither niece die. Say that both Deb and Alf recanted at the last second and brought their kin back to life. But in this instance, their nieces both had book clots in their head which, being held under water for a little minute, were cured by the pressure of the water rushing in and blasting the clots out through their eyes. Should we praise either of them for curing the blood clots of their kin? Should Deb be praised more than Alf due to her actively changing actions?

Now, the more smarmy in our merry band will be shaking you fists at me screaming “This is the Doctrine of Double Effect and has been answered by everyone from St Augustine to Jerry Seinfeld.” And you’d be right, it has, but my favourite version of it; The Trolley Dilemma and the Kill Whitey Project, is where this blog is going today. And hey – if you already know the answer, skip ahead, but don’t spoil it for the person sitting beside you.

The essential question is – ‘what is the role of reason and emotion in moral questioning?’ We like to call ourselves advanced and say that emotion is bad and reason, devoid of emotion , equates to an advanced morality. Especially when you look at people like Piaget, Kohlberg and those following, there is this linear approach to moral development. The trolley dilemma and the kill whitey project present this wonderfully archaic, yet researched viewpoint that our morality is just as much a slave to our emotions, especially emotions like disgust, as they were to the hypothetical caveman who started the whole debate. It states that we are not further developed by our reasoning faculties at all.

The question is very much about Normative reasoning, of which there are two general schools of thought:  consequentialist and deontological, albeit there is a third school – virtue ethics which has a considerably better answer to these questions, but it’s not a task for us today.

The basic version of the trolley dilemma asks would you kill a man in a particular situation, and then presents a situation where this may be acceptable.

In the first instance, you are out walking one day and see a dilapidated train track. You follow it for a while and find two tunnels up ahead: one with five workmen in it, the other with only one workman. Then all of a sudden, an out of control train comes screaming down the track. You look down and, as luck would have it, you are positioned right beside the track changer which controls which tunnel the out of control train is headed. You notice that it is headed toward the tunnel with the five men in it. So do you act? Do you change the track to kill one man, deliberately and unashamedly just to save the lives of five?

Funnily enough, more than 90% of people faced with this dilemma would switch the tracks and kill one person.

In its second incarnation, the same situation happens, except rather than standing next to the track changer, you are standing on a footbridge on top of the entrance to the tunnel. You realise that you might be able to jump down in front of the train to stop it, but you would be way too skinny. Thankfully, standing beside you is a portly gentleman whose girth would easily stop the train. Do you push the man off the footbridge? Do you kill a man to save the lives of five?

In answering this question, most people say the exact opposite; almost everyone would let the five men die.

A third incarnation is where you are a doctor on duty in an ER, rushed and over-worked. A motorcycle accident victim comes in. He is pretty much dead, but there is a chance that an emergency procedure to open up his skull/brain area to relieve pressure has a 2% chance to save his life. It is a highly risky operation and no one would be the wiser if you accidentally slipped by half a millimetre and cut the wrong cord, killing the motorcyclist. You have five other patients, one who needs a lung transplant, one who needs a heart transplant, one who needs kidneys etc. And they need this within the next few hours or they will die. The motorcycle accident victim is a perfect match for all five patients and will most likely live in a brain-dead comma for a few days if left unoperated. Do you kill the motorcyclist? Do you perform the operation to the best of your abilities? Do you kill one man to save the lives of five?

There has been a great deal of research dedicated to trying to say why this is the case; from people being brain scanned while making these choices, to theories about our evolutionary background failing to come to terms with the significance of a switch.

Our sense of highly developed moral reasoning would say something like “the end never justifies the means” or perhaps “do the act that results in the least net harm” or something similar.

Then the Trolley Dilemma goes through a fat elvis stage; race and nationality are brought in. People are in a lifeboat which has one too many persons in it. You draw straws as to who has to leave (and drown). It comes up Tyrone Paton gets pushed off. Is this moral? Does saving the lives of the five men on the boat justify killing Tyrone. Almost all liberal voters would say no, almost all conservative voters would say yes.

In a second incarnation, you draw straws as to who gets pushed off and Chip Elsworth the Third’s name comes up. He gets pushed off the boat and drowns to save the lives of the five remaining passengers. Is this a moral choice? Is the killing of one man justified by the saving of five lives? Most liberal voters would say yes, most conservative voters would say no.

In further warps of the same logical problem;

·         is the killing of innocent civilians during a military campaign justified to end a war/restore peace in the situation where civilian casualties are minimised, but expected. In one setting, it is Western troops that are doing the fighting, and Iraqi civilians doing the dying; in another setting, it is Iraqi insurgence that are doing the fighting, Western Troops that are doing the dying.

·         is there a limit to the freedom of speech? Can someone burn an American flag? Can someone draw a malicious cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed? Which is freedom of speech and which has gone too far.

In these examples, the conservative/liberal divide comes through loud and strong: a liberal would have no problem killing Western Troops and burning the American Flag, but would see killing Iraqis and laughing at Mohammed as unacceptable. Conservatives go the opposite way.

Then something really interesting happens: people are given the same dilemmas to answer, but rather than political affiliation, they are first asked to unscramble a word. One group is given a word that is synonymous with patriotism, the other a word that is synonymous with multiculturalism. The findings, quite amazingly mirror the conservative responses in those given patriotism words, and the liberals in those given multiculturalism words.

What’s even more amazing is that people, when alerted to their moral inconsistencies: who will agree with the bombing of Hiroshima while at the same time being adamant that the end never justifies the means etc will change and adapt their understanding to new stimuli.

But irregardless, the findings of all this seems to be that we are not liberal, conservative, deontologists, consequentialists or the like; we have a morality like a bag of tricks, to be pulled out when we find it appropriate. This begs the question: why do we chose one moral principle in some settings, while find it abhorrent in other settings?

The answer, weak though it may be, is that we favour connectedness to a familiar view. We will do our best to preserve our own understanding of the world, to the point of absurdity at times, but we greatly exaggerate and over-estimate our own abilities. The confirmation bias, or as I’ve always said, “the one thing that unites us as humans is that everyone thinks that they are an above average driver.”

So is it right or wrong to hit children? I would say it is never acceptable...but why? Firstly, it doesn’t work, secondly it is violence, and violence is always wrong. Violence is always wrong. The only thing to be learned from it is to avoid it because it is the point where reason, thought...indeed humanity itself stops working. But then what about a situation where someone about my size was beating up a kid, an elderly couple or something and they weren’t listening to reason? Is it wrong for me to hit that person a few times...bugger, there goes that theory. What if the aggressor is considerably smaller than me?

What if it is the case that most people would pull the level to kill a person, but not push a fat man onto the tracks is because our evolutionary make up hasn't dealt with the concept of switches and buttons yet, however, we all know too well the effect of direct violence. Perhaps. Perhaps it is because we have never seen the effect of a switch, yet all of us have seen the effect of being pushed, in the school yard or in the workplace. Some of us know the effect of doing the pushing.

Then maybe it is because we have to see the man being pushed, we have to see the motorcyclist die. We see him watching us and dying. That breads the association that we fear and are disgusted with.

Is it just a case that I am not a pacifist, I see violence being used and chose to identify with the child that was hit, the child that will learn to mistrust these people, fear them, hate then and grow distant from them where other people would associate with the authoritarian parent figure and pretend that they learned respect from that action. Let’s just take that as a comment hey?

This post’s groovy, identity seeking quote:

'“People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.”

This post’s lame joke: `

A man and a woman who had never met before, but who were both "married to other people," found themselves assigned to the same sleeping room on a trans-continental train.

Though initially embarrassed and uneasy over sharing a room, they were both very tired and fell asleep quickly, he in the upper berth and she in the lower.

At 1:00 AM, the man leaned down and gently woke the woman saying, "Ma'am, I'm sorry to bother you, but would you be willing to reach into the closet to get me a second blanket? I'm awfully cold."

"I have a better idea," she replied. "Just for tonight, let's pretend that we're married."

"Wow! That's a great idea!", he exclaimed.

"Good," she replied. "Get your own damn blanket."

After a moment of silence, he farted.

You were right...tell your sister you were right.

More about Star Wars and Nazis

Have you ever noticed that during the final battle of Return of the Jedi, after one of the bad guy’s ships gets shot down and runs into one of the good guy’s ships, Lando says “Looks like they’re heading for the medical frigate.”? What would such a medical facility treat you for? Being blown up? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

I know, we’ve talked about Jung and Star Wars a recently, but still, it is a good topic because a whole generation grew up to know who was good and who was bad based on how good they looked in dressed in black.  Johnny Cash Ethics? The Emperor looked weird and kinda fat, Vader looked awkward and stunted, whereas Luke just looked freaken cool.

Yeah, I know, another lame post about identity and personality...well I wrote a novel, my first, a few years back now and while it had been on my bucket list for a while, the framing point of it came one sunny Sunday afternoon in Sunnybank Hills, pushing a pram and listening to the week’s pod-downloads. On one of them was an interview with a philosopher turned House of Lords Politician speaking about Sartre in an informative and nice way, but she made the most bizarre claim towards the end of the interview: that Sartre, Derrida and their ilk became “deliberately obscure”. I’ve heard this claim before and all, but she painted it to that wonderful Sartre statement that “Existence precedes Essence...Whatever that means...” she stated.

I was horrified. I rushed home and wrote this weird little story about music that afternoon, which spurned into a novel over the following few months.

Existence precedes essence. That’s just freaken cool. You get to choose who you are. You get to be before you get to decide. Isn’t that a wonderful dream?

So the question of identity. Does one get to choose their essence and what is the effect of this on their freedom, on their very humanity?

One thing that has always puzzled me about Star Wars is why the Dark Side of the Force call themselves the ‘Dark Side’. From their point of view, if they truly saw themselves as being part of the correct understanding of the use of the force, wouldn’t they just refer to themselves as the Force, and the Jedis would be the scrawny side of the force?

Darth Vader as a character is most pertinent at this point as he was both at different times. In the first movie, nothing much is known of Darth Vader apart from a brief description by Obe-Wan describing him as the person that killed Luke’s father, Anakin. Vader’s actions in the movie are portrayed as irrational, yet exceptionally strong and courageous. His understanding of being correct is solely concerned with a natural order to things that he is in line with; the Force. While choking one of other bad guys, he is reprimanded for acting irrationally, immaturely almost, and apologises. He represents the epitome of fear and dread in all who deal with him, a role that continues through the trilogy, except for Luke’s latter dealing with him. It is essentially Luke’s tuning in to this irrational course of action, in very similar vein to his father, which results in the good guys winning.

Also mention must be made of Han Solo’s intervention, a very irrational act that lands him in hot water later on, but is true to the understanding of who he sees as himself through the eyes of the very lovely Princess Leia.

In the second movie, Vader’s character completely changes. He is passionate, quite orderly and his potential association with his long lost son is a source of pride and angst for him. We see him understand things and pre-empt things that the Emperor does not, or cannot.

As he describes it, the dark side of the force is the true nature of the force and is also considerably stronger. This may be two points, or it could be the same point. As there is no considered discussion on this point, it leaves open the question that the dark side of the force is either the better side due to a truth it perceives and/or it is the better side solely because it is stronger. However one must be careful here to understand good as being anti-strong. This is hard to console with the idea of an all-powerful deity.

In the second movie, there are the beginnings of references to qualities like anger and fear being powerful tools for the human mind; however, these are also the path to the dark side as proclaimed by both sides of the force. Yoda, Obe-Wan, Vader and the Emperor all hint at this. 

The reason as to why the good guys win in the final movie is firstly due to the same point as in the first movie, but rather than Han Solo, it is Vader who has a reassociation with his son via his own perception of an internalised other. He acts completely irrationally, using emotion over fear as it were. Or at least he acts in line with the person who he thinks he should be in the eyes of his kids. His relationship to what is good is redefined and it is his relationship with his son that wins out against the dark side. There was still ‘good’ in him “...your were right...tell your sister you were right.” Quite disgustingly we see in the final scenes a Vader then is weak and useless...but good.

In the final movie, the character of Luke changes completely. Not only is he now wearing black, he goes from a definite wimpy and rationally composed character to a cold and emotive warrior. He changes without blinking as it were, from attempting to bargain with Jabba for the life of his friend to merely recognising that there is no existing relationship left, and killing everyone except for his friends. Is he still a good guy by doing this? He is now the epitome of strength, facing crippling odds and does not even flinch. His enemies now appear more an inconvenience than a real threat.

But the most important occurrence is the supposed final battle between good and evil, between the dark and the not-so-dark sides of the force. Luke defeats his father by becoming angry, but then controlling that anger at the most opportune time. It is Vader’s recognition of a similarity between his scars and those of his son’s that forms a certain empathy, which is then described as not having all the good drawn out of him by the dark side. So good, in Vader’s eyes, is only the want to repel the ever-present evil.

Most notably to bring out this point further is the actions of the Emperor in tricking the good guys to pit the two armies directly against each other in a way that the stronger side will easily win. Then it seems that either the stronger did not win, or that the Empire was not the stronger. The two questions that concern us are; does the stronger side always win and what makes the good guys into the good guys and the bad guys into the bad guys outside of issues of strength?

 

But how do we, as people, attempt to understand whether we are good guys or not? Put yourself in the shoes of one of the Imperial troops for a minute. It must have been a common occurrence for Imperial troops to ask themselves this, to look at their uniforms, they sort of look bad, Russian or Chinese almost; then look at the colours that people have painted their ships, not to mention that the big one is called the Death Star, rather than the Groovy Star, Star of Hope or something like that. They would have to notice the fact that they are being lead by a weird robot dude that chokes everyone, and a weird old guy in a black cape who laughs in a sniggering way.

Wouldn’t you, in this situation, ask yourself, ‘Hey, I’m not a bad guy am I?’? But in the Star Wars movies, the troops who asked themselves this question would have to also understand that they outnumber their commanders by tens of thousands. So regardless of whether you’re an evil-robot-choking-everyone kind of bad dude, or whether you’re a black-cape-wearing, lightning-out-of-your-fingers kind of bad guy, the real source of your power comes from the inability of people to examine their lives and their roles in the situations that face them. True power isn’t their ability to use ‘the force’; it is in the minds of the people they are oppressing. As Malcolm X said, the most valuable tool of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

Perhaps a huge part of the Nazi rise to power and the war that resulted was the German people’s Christian belief in ‘giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s, giving to God what is God’s,’ In this context, it is in not realising who their leaders were and where they were being led. Too many people see this as something belonging to the ghosts of Christmas past, but we would do well to always assume that this can happen, that this indeed is happening right now, all the time. This, of its own rationality is a weakness, a failing of the worst kind.

So to come back to the main point; what makes the bad guys bad? What makes the good guys so good? What makes the Nazis bad and the allies good? In the end, in both situations, the good guys win, without favour, from way behind, in a way that they really should have lost big-time. The only explanation that we are given in Star Wars is that the Emperor is overconfident, and that is his weakness, but this then eludes us back to the point where strength, or at least winning equals good, and weak or losing equals bad. God smiles on ‘the right’ to make them victorious. The problem with this is that it only happens when God exists. Thankfully, to come back to real life, we can sort out a reason as to both why the Nazis were bad, and why they lost.

Maybe one could just review the concept that Hitler belonged to the wrong century. Compare the actions of Hitler with that of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great or William the Conqueror. Is there really much of a difference in what these people did and how? Do you think that it is just that we are too close to Hitler today to remove ourselves from it? Everyone can still lay claim to having a relative, acquaintance or close association to someone who was directly harmed by the actions of the man.

With hindsight, especially given that at the time, maybe the difference is that Hitler wrote out what he was going to do and why. Perhaps this is the source of the fascination with him. It is also amazing that the political leaders of the west didn’t really take any notice until it was really too late.

The rationality of strength, that good equals strength equals winning, which allowed the rise of the Third Reich can also be seen as its undoing. It can be seen as a great comfort to the end of Modernism, and the beginning of Post-Modernism that cultures of violence and injustice such as the Third Reich fail by their own hand, hoisted on their own petards. They should have realised that the English academics had broken the Enigma machines, they should have realised that the English had a working radar system and they should have realised that the Red Army weren’t being beaten that badly. It is, as it were, necessary to an unjust system that it contains the seeds of its own destruction: violence, decentralisation and deskilling.

The main element that Hitler brought to the table in warfare was the Blitzkrieg, lightning war. The Red Army had time to respond to this: the scorched earth.

The Red Army were engaging the Nazis and essentially allowing them to break the line, but then retreating very quickly. The Nazis didn’t expect the Red Army to last long against them, and made huge advances into the USSR very quickly. The problem was that they weren’t really crippling the Red Army and the land that they were taking had nothing on it to support them, no buildings, supplies, machines, nothing. Everything had been either removed or destroyed. Stalin had been able to mobilise the whole country, not just the military, but the civilians as well. So many historical and cultural places, homes and farms were simply destroyed under the idea that it is better that they are burnt than fall into Nazi hands.

With all these examples what was happening was that the Nazis were being decentralised and deskilled. Why would you go find relevant intelligence when it is easier to torture someone? Why would you admit a failing to a superior who would kill you or choke you to death as Vader did?

Then by not admitting these types of day-to-day events, there is no reliable central intelligence formed. The Nazis should have known that the Red Army were not being beaten that badly, that England were not being bombed that badly, that they were facing an ever-stronger enemy. Having said that, everyone was acting purely and wholly reasonably and rationally. Everyone was acting in their own self interest, yet without honour, without reference to a natural order or external reasoning of some kind, the end result will always be to become weak and wrong.

Essentially the strong, by their failure to accommodate the weak, became the weak. Strength without honour is just weakness postponed. Perhaps this is what Luke Skywalker was referring to as overconfidence.

This post's lame jokes:

Q:  What side of an Ewok has the most hair?
A:  The outside.  

Q:  How many Sith does it take to screw in a hyperdrive?
A:  Two, but I don't know how they got in it.

Q:  How many stormtroopers does it take to replace a lightbulb?
A:  Two; one to screw the bulb in, the other to shoot him and take the credit.