Nitwit? - Remus John Lupin

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 167975

> Alla:
> 
> I am sorry, but **I** saw nothing of Lupin's arranging for Snape to 
> be publicly humiliated in PoA. I saw Lupin trying his best to 
> restore Neville's self confidence after **Snape** publicly 
> humiliated him.

Pippin:
So you are saying the *only* way for Neville's confidence to be
restored was for Snape to be humiliated? It would speak
poorly of Neville, IMO, if the only way he could be built up
was to see Snape run down.

We can contrast the way that McGonagall dealt with Harry's
experience with Trelawney. Harry was terrified by the prediction
of his death, but McGonagall did not find it necessary to terrify
Trelawney in order to restore Harry's confidence. She simply
made it very clear that she did not put much stock in such 
predictions, that Trelawney had a habit of making them and
that none had come true and that --well, it wasn't her policy
to speak ill of her colleagues, implying that there might be
something to say otherwise. Not all sweetness and light, of
course, but nothing to put the whole school in an uproar either.

Lupin might have dealt with Neville's loss of confidence in
a similar way, and arranged for Neville to deal with his 
boggart privately, as he did for Harry (but not for Hermione,
who flubs her exam thereby.)

> 
> Alla, for whom the strongest point in favor of Lupin never being 
> evil or Voldemort servant always will be JKR's remark that she would 
> want Lupin to teach her daughter.
>

Pippin:
Why not? Lupin in our world might never have faced the choices
he has in the WW, where he's been deprived all his life of rights
and freedoms which many of us take for granted.

 Is social pressure and an instinct for compliance enough to turn 
people who aren't notably cruel or malicious into collaborators with 
evil? I'm afraid so. And if you don't believe me, there's the Stanford
Prison Experiment.

http://www.prisonexp.org/


Pippin