The Overarching message - Caning

[sigurd at eclipse.net]

No: HPFGUIDX 191691


Dear Alla

Alla:
"Basically your argument {speaking of a third party) is that I am imposing my moral norms on WW? Kind of but not quite,"

Otto Says :
Impose away. It shows you have strong morals beliefs as opposed to others who have entirely expedient or at least indifferent moral beliefs and even those -- but lightly held.

All people hold beliefs. The degree to which we wish them universalized (that everyone believe them) is the degree of conviction we hold them buy. The degree to which we would wish them applied to ourselves is the degree to which they are correct.

So impose away, there's far too much moral ambivalence and excuse making for people who want to do horrible things to their fellow men and be honored for it.

Alla : You also point out that.
"I always felt that in many way WW is the twisted reflection of our world especially because it happens in "our" world, just with addition of magic. For this reader JKR was portraying the world which needs to be radically changed, because there are some people that have some good in them. Hopefully I am making sense."

Otto Says in response.
Do not equivocate. You ARE making perfect sense, in fact too much sense for many because you are saying simply "My eyes see what they see, my ears hear what they hear" and no amount of linguistic legerdemain or subtle argument is going to convince me that I am a fool and reality must be "reinterpreted," "redefined," or "reconstructed" for my poor mentally challenged condition." Therefore for the many you are refuting "the party line" which tries to tell you your eyes do not see what they see or your ears hear what they hear. That is, that you are incapable of evaluating reality on your own. And THAT is perhaps the greatest mind-rape of all.

The world makes perfect sense and people who are in pain know they are in pain and they KNOW where their best interest lies, and in the vast and overwhelming number of cases they know when they are doing wrong, but they will like many here, devote an ocean of words to try and make the most heinous crimes seem honorable simply because they wish to do them.

Alla:
But even if I was simply imposing my moral norms on WW, what is wrong with it?
Say she was portraying a world where she explicitly shown rape (not mind rape, body rape) and nobody was saying it was horribloe. Yeah, you bet that as an outsider I would condemn it with gusto, but for me with Potterverse is a bit more than just that.

Otto Responds:
You are correct. But I don't think J.K. Rowling was trying to show that, though she did seem to indicate the dangers of it. J.K. Rowling's whole story is grounded one of the most common infantile fantasies. That within the shell of the dumpy, skinny, fat little kid with busted eyeglasses, and a strange way of talking who wears funny clothes, who stands before you is a very special individual with secret powers far "stronger than you can possibly imagine" and not a mere victim. It's what all kids male or female dearly wish for, to be the wizard in the wimp, the sword in the stone, the once and future king,  the child of destiny- that they are simply not powerless, weak, and vulnerable. That they are in fact a fairy-princess, a great King-Hero, enchanted for now-- in a toads body. But there is a dilemma in that as well.

The bullied or fearful child is simply reversing the event- that is, he wishes he had superior powers, magical powers, super-hero powers so he can bully the bullies. That is-- that turnabout is fair play.

But it is NOT fair play is it???!!!

Exposing the bully to bullying enacts retribution, but it does not change. It makes the bully see what it is like, but it merely CONFIRMS him or her in their "bullydom" and teaches only the lesson that in order to avoid being bullied one must bully themselves.

Phillip Hallie one of the noted philosophers of the twentieth century wrote his magister opus "Cruelty" on the existence of cruelty in the world. Hallie's provocative, and disturbing theory is that cruelty arises from a power imbalance. That is,--- it is impossible to be cruel to people over whom we have no power, that seems obvious, but that he also asserts that if we have power over other persons WE CANNOT BUT BE CRUEL to them. That is, the more power we have over them, the more superior we become, and the more weak they become and there very quickly comes a point where we have so much power over them that they cease to be on such a plain as we, and since they are on such a lower plain than we they cannot be human, and hence it is impossible to be inhuman to something that is not human. Hallie asserts that it is at this point where we get brutalization, torture, murder -- Auschwitz. He says that  we cannot help this, that it is inevitable so long as there is a power imbalance.

This all sounds quite far out to most of us, but the sad fact is that it has all been proven perfectly true by experiments and science.

In the famous Milgram experiment, performed by Yale Psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1961,it was designed to test persons obedience to authority, an "experiment" was set up in which there was a "proctor" sitting in a room with a very scientific looking panel with switches and gauges. There was a "subject" in an adjacent room, clearly visible to the proctor through glass windows. The purpose of the experiment was to "Test the effect of negative reinforcement on testing." The subject was restrained in a chair and had various electrodes wires and contacts hooked up to him. The subject was then asked a series of questions and if he gave a wrong answer, the proctor pushed a button which passed a mild electric current to the subject and giving him a small painful shock. The questions would then continue with increasingly stronger shocks given for subsequent wrong answers. There was a part of the dial which was turned to increase the shocks intensity that was coded in red, complete with the words danger and on one mark the legend "DO NOT INCREASE BEYOND THIS POINT."

Ok. Now let me tell you what was REALLY going on.

There was no electricity, no shock, no danger, and the man in the room was merely an actor who was cued by a light when the proctor had pushed the button. The "proctor" was in fact the subject and the whole experiment was testing him, to see how long he would continue with the experiment.

At the first wrong answer the actor jumped and gasped with "pain" and as it went on his responses with each increase of voltage was more violent than the last. The man in the room screamed at one point and begged to stop, said he had a mild heart condition. The real subject, "the proctor" became agitated and begged to stop also, but most often went. It went on even after the actor had slumped in the chair and seemed dead with the proctor continuing to ask questions and increase the voltage past the "do not go past this line).

In the whole experiment of all the subjects put in the proctors seat only 5% of the people stopped and refused to go on. 95% continued to where it was obvious the "shocks" were not mild or harmless" and 50% of them continued past the point of death. The proctors at one point were screaming themselves and begging to stop, but the "managers" of the experiment who stood there in labcoat with clipboard and scrubs blandly insisted they HAD to continue.

Now-- if you think THAT was horrific, now I will tell you about the Zimbardo experiment.

The Zimbardo Experiment was performed at Stamford University in August of 1971 by psychologist Phillip Zimbardo. It was to test prison behaviour of prisoners and guards. It was conducted over the summer from volunteers who had decided to stay there for the summer and was made up of people at random. Some were guards, some were assigned roles as prisoners. The "guards" only task was to "control" the prisoners, but the prisons were simply student rooms and basements in the normal college facilities.

It was supposed to last 14 days. It lasted six and was abruptly ended when the guard had become so brutal, so monstrous, all on their own without any prompting that the safety and sanity of some of the prisoners was feared for. The prisoners were forced to wear hospital gowns and skull-caps as uniforms, and sing degrading songs about themselves. The guard fitted themselves out with black clothing and sunglasses to distance themselves from the prisoners. Some took to carrying truncheons, baseball bats and bill clubs and to brand his them. They refused to allow prisoners to use the lavoratories and forced them to defecate in buckets in their rooms and then would not allow them to empty the filled buckets. The prisoners were subject to surprise roll-calls, sleeping with lights on, disturbance of their sleep, endless bullying, and on the sixth day the guards were using physical violence against the prisoners.

By the way, those are EXACTLY the things the guards did to prisoners at Auschwitz only in a far greater degree.

When it was ended-- the guards were extremely dissappointed and wanted to continue it for the full two weeks. Many of he prisoners needed some psychological help and many blamed themselves for the excess' of the guards.

In both Milgarm and Zimbardo the "proctors" in the former and the "guards" in the latter excused their behaviour with the same answers- a shrug and an "I was only following orders." or "Well they were all volunteers!""or "they got what they deserved."

ALL of the participants, ALL OF THEM had been subjected to rigorous psychological testing to screen out any with pathological, sadistic, or criminal impulses and tendencies.

Remember this took place at one of the most liberal college campus in America, and was from ordinary people No Nazi's, no skinheads, no George W. Bush's, no extremists, no Tea-Partyists or Occupiers,  just ordinary people. These experiments are absolute proof of Hallies thesis of the inherent evil of power and how it must be hedged in.

In the movie "Lion in Winter" with Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn there is a scene where Hepburn, as Eleanor of Aquitaine, rails out at her three adult sons who are at daggers drawn against each other. "Of course he has a knife! We all have knives-- it's the twelfth century and we're all Barbarians! Oh my little piglets make no mistake WE are the causes of War, WE!!! Not economics, or systems of government, or ideas, or societies, or customs or justice or the lack thereof- we carry it in our blood like syphilis- dead bodies rot in field and stream because the living are rotten. We breed war!"

It's a movie, and the actors and screen writers are modern, but it's all true.

"By their fruits ye shall know them" the handy-man from Nazareth said.

So you go right on Alla, imposing your values. They're good ones.

Otto

ELF NOTE:
Please note, replies to this post need to stick to HP, rather than
solely comment on any of the OT content.  Thank you.