Posted: Jul 18, 2021 2:39 pm
surreptitious57 wrote:I cannot see how a non psychopath could commit genocide
Greed, ideology...
This is what Weinberg was talking about when talking about getting good people to do bad things. Weinberg was wrong, of course, but only in a quite subtle way, namely that religion is only a subset f the real enemy, the real enemy being doctrinal imperatives and the blind adherence thereto. Psychopaths have no discernible conscience. Ideologues have programmed (or had programmed) their conscience with a set of values that differ from what we'd deem the 'norm'.
In reality, there's no difference in mindset between a genocide and a suicide bomber. They're mostly driven by what they'd deemed rational, moral reasons. They don't lack morality or empathy, they have different ideas about what their empathy motivates them to. Id' bet that the Venn diagram between psychopaths and genocides is actually very small in terms of intersection.
Remember, conscience reflects your social mores, not anything objective. It's trivial to change somebody's ethos by psycholinguistic programming. Two minutes on twitter will provide you with voluminous evidence of that.
One of the traits of psychopathy is zero empathy which is why psychopaths can commit such immoral acts
That tells you that psychopathy is sufficient, but it doesn't say anything about necessity.
ETA: I'd forgotten to talk about greed, but then realised I didn't need to because, in some circles greed is a moral obligation. Selfishness is desirable. See Ayn Rand for more.