Seems to me that people who say they don’t want submission often actually want an approach even more “submissive” than submission itself—instead of merely overriding your opinions and desires, they want to overwrite them. A quote from 1984 comes to my mind:
The first thing for you to understand is that in this place there are no martyrdoms. You have read of the religious persecutions of the past. In the Middle Ages there was the Inquisitlon. It was a failure. It set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. For every heretic it burned at the stake, thousands of others rose up. Why was that? Because the Inquisition killed its enemies in the open, and killed them while they were still unrepentant: in fact, it killed them because they were unrepentant. Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were the totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from the mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches, confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy. And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again. The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten. Once again, why was it? In the first place, because the confessions that they had made were obviously extorted and untrue. We do not make mistakes of that kind. All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. (...)
Did I not tell you just now that we are different from the persecutors of the past? We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation. In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. (...)
Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.
It’s funny how when you remove the torture and death from this picture, what remains is considered pretty normal these days… I mean, if you want to keep a well-paying job.
I’m not so sure. Would your underlying intuition be the same if the torture and death was the result of passive inaction, rather than of deliberate action? I think in that case, the torture and death would make only a small difference in how good or bad we judged the world to be.
For example, consider a corporate culture with so much of this dominance hierarchy that it has a high suicide rate.
Also:
Moloch whose buildings are judgment! … Lacklove and manless in Moloch! … Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
… Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
Doesn’t seem like a difference of kind, and maybe not even of degree. (The suicide rate is a couple percent, and higher in industrialized countries if I recall. What percent of the citizens of Oceania are tortured to death? ~2%?) I think 1984 is mainly shocking because of status quo bias. (But I haven’t read it, so I’m probably missing some stronger points against that world.)
Most of the badness seems to be from the general state of both worlds, rather than from the occasional person tortured to death on the side. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a small, but obvious, part of much deeper problems. That’s why EA doesn’t use suicide rate or incarceration rate as their primary metrics to optimize for. They’re just symptoms.
Seems to me that people who say they don’t want submission often actually want an approach even more “submissive” than submission itself—instead of merely overriding your opinions and desires, they want to overwrite them.
The whole point of the OP is that this never works. (Yes, even when it appears to work, it’s because the people involved have learned to guess the teacher’s password—not because they actually share your views!) Sure, it’s great when people eventually come around to your POV, but this is not something you can expect, much less demand from anyone.
Seems to me that people who say they don’t want submission often actually want an approach even more “submissive” than submission itself—instead of merely overriding your opinions and desires, they want to overwrite them. A quote from 1984 comes to my mind:
It’s funny how when you remove the torture and death from this picture, what remains is considered pretty normal these days… I mean, if you want to keep a well-paying job.
An excellent observation, but I remark that removing the torture and death does make quite a big difference.
I’m not so sure. Would your underlying intuition be the same if the torture and death was the result of passive inaction, rather than of deliberate action? I think in that case, the torture and death would make only a small difference in how good or bad we judged the world to be.
For example, consider a corporate culture with so much of this dominance hierarchy that it has a high suicide rate.
Also:
— Meditations on Moloch/Howl
Doesn’t seem like a difference of kind, and maybe not even of degree. (The suicide rate is a couple percent, and higher in industrialized countries if I recall. What percent of the citizens of Oceania are tortured to death? ~2%?) I think 1984 is mainly shocking because of status quo bias. (But I haven’t read it, so I’m probably missing some stronger points against that world.)
Most of the badness seems to be from the general state of both worlds, rather than from the occasional person tortured to death on the side. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a small, but obvious, part of much deeper problems. That’s why EA doesn’t use suicide rate or incarceration rate as their primary metrics to optimize for. They’re just symptoms.
The whole point of the OP is that this never works. (Yes, even when it appears to work, it’s because the people involved have learned to guess the teacher’s password—not because they actually share your views!) Sure, it’s great when people eventually come around to your POV, but this is not something you can expect, much less demand from anyone.
Sure. What one wants, and what one actually gets, can be two different things.
that last sentence. Great.