Lack of re-examination SPOILERS for Corambis and Tigana

[a_svirn]

No: HPFGUIDX 186600

> A_svirn
> > Honestly I'd take a murderer at heart who abides the law in practice over an innocent at heart who's running all over the place plotting and executing murders with various degrees of success any day.
> 
> Pippin:
> 
> It would take courage to put your trust in Draco's nascent and wavering sense of human dignity rather than in The Establishment.

a_svirn:
It would. And even greater self-confidence and belief in self- infallibility. But I don't understand what you are saying about the Establishment. Dumbledore was *the* Establishment – at least within the Castle's walls – and you know what? He had an uncommon degree of trust in his own abilities. 

> Pippin:
 But laws seldom protect everyone equally even when they are supposed to, and they would have to be draconian laws indeed for your murderer to fear them more than he fears  Lord Voldemort. 

a_svirn:
I don't know what they are supposed to be. I think "murderer at heart" is an absurd construct. Just as absurd as "not a killer at heart" is. If you murder then you are a murderer. If you attempt a murder you are a would-be murderer. Your inner qualities cannot be defined by a totally occasional circumstance of your victims being saved by someone else. 

> Pippin:
Nor will laws to protect human life endure  if people cease to believe that life is worth protecting.

a_svirn:
Amen to that. Where it applies to the matter at hand though? Dumbledore might have believed in protecting human life, but Draco? Not so much. And still he wasn't "a killer at heart". 

> Pippin:
> Snape is a sadist with a lot of self-control, Harry is a non-sadist with much less -- whom do you trust more?

a_svirn:
Erm. How do you diagnose Snape's sadism? He hasn't tortured anyone that we know of, has he? How do you identify a sadist-at-heart? But, yes, I appreciate his restraint. And he seemed to have proven himself as being trustworthy. Of course not as far as Voldemort was concerned.

> 
> A_svirn:
>  I also think that when a non-sadistic person like Harry indulges in sadism --it's just plain wrong. It feels even worse somehow than when a sadistic person does it. Precisely because Harry can restrain himself, but chooses not to. And because it rather blurs the line between those two types of persons, if only momentarily. What baffles me is that no one in the series apparently thinks so. 
> >
> 
> Pippin:
> 
> 
> I didn't get the impression from canon that Harry could restrain himself but was choosing not to. The blood was "thundering through his brain." It was "pounding in his veins" when he was considering transfiguring Dudley. 

a_svirn:
I was only going by your words that a sadistic person doesn't have a choice about liking inflicting pain. If we agree, as I believe everybody on this list does, that Harry is not a sadist, then he had a choice. Didn't he? 

> Pippin:
And I get a sense that this is what Snape feels much of the time when he is confronting Harry. How many times have we been told that Snape's temple is throbbing or that he is turning dark red?

a_svirn:
And how many times did Snape's restraint crack? Once, when they duelled in the end of HBP and when he'd just damned his own soul anyway. Pretty impressive for someone you call a sadist. 

> Pippin: 
> But despite this Snape does not ever use the cruciatus curse, or ever punish anyone in any way that is forbidden by law or Hogwarts rules. So he may be a sadist at heart, in the sense that his cruelty has become habitual,  <snip>

a_svirn:
Right. But should we use the word in this sense? When you stretch words' meanings like this they may eventually cease to mean anything at all. 

> Pippin:
> But I think what Harry understands from The Prince's Tale is that Snape's habits of cruelty were formed in childhood, before he had any control over them, forged out of the same kind of trauma that  provoked Harry to be cruel, ie, seeing someone he loved being abused, and feeling powerless to do anything about it. 
> 
> Does that make sense?
> 

a_svirn:
Yes, definitely. But I still think it's wrong to divorce peoples' inner nature, so to speak,  from their actual behaviour. At best it's confusing, quite often it's just a way to avoid accountability.