Re: Up From Liberalism

On Sun, 19 Aug 2007 16:06:26 -0700, "Bob T." <bob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Oh? I fail to see where that has been established. On the contrary,
the only difference I see between the present and the past is that
some of us have learned from the Kitty Genovese incident. I myself,
because I have learned that crowds are not reliable in emergencies,
always call 9/11 when I witness an accident, even if it seems obvious
that somebody else should have already called for help.

The "point" of the Kitty Genovese incident isn't that any particular class
of people are evil, or that liberalism is evil, or conservatism leads to
heartlessness, or anything similar. It's just that people find it a lot
easier to do nothing when responsibility is diluted by a crime being
public where you could have dozens of people watching it and doing
nothing. All of them simply assume someone else is going to do
something. Combine that with the cost of being the one to act
(you have to testify and possibly get threatened or harmed yourself)
and people find it even easier to justify doing nothing). You're a lot
more likely to see this in cities, because in smaller towns, there won't
be that many people.

It's unlikely all those people were individually evil. Maybe a few of
them were real bastards, but there's no reason to assume that. I have
no doubt that if those people encountered a similar situation,
knew they were the one witness, and knew nobody else could or would act,
that most of them would at least have dialed 911 and possibly even
intervened.

Also people in large cities simply don't view others except those they
personally know or who are in closer-knit ethnic populations as being
in their "tribe" and so don't have time for them. If you intervened in
every single situation you encountered in a city, instead of operating on a
triage principle and ignoring most of them, you'd spend all your time
intervening (and probably get killed into the bargain). That's why we've
created an entire class (police and EMTs and so on) whose sole purpose
is to respond to crises that are no longer the responsibility of the
tribe itself but are instead regulated at levels controlled by much larger
groups at the local, state, and national level.

It's the same dilution of responsibility you saw in Milgram's experiment.
Make someone's individual role in a horrible act small enough, or put the
primary responsibility on someone else, and people will participate in
utterly heinous acts with little guilt. If you split up a horrible crime into
a few dozen constituent parts such that nobody has to do anything
all that awful themselves, you can routinize horrible behavior to the
point nobody even feels particularly guilty about it. (A la the Nazis.)
.

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