The Hook: No We Can’t Just “Agree to Disagree” Anymore.
The Social Contagion of Evil
They say there is a special word in German for people who joined the Nazi party not out of ideology but for some other reason that seemed good to them at the time — their church, their friends, their grievances about the past…
Belonging is a powerful need. If your neighbors, your church, your social circle (and nowadays your news station or social network) are affiliated with a cause, a person, an identity, you are likely to follow along so that you can belong. Of course, maybe you are an ornery fascist bastard, just waiting for the signal to attack, but more likely you started somewhere else. Maybe you are single-issue “pro-life” voter and otherwise a “nice person” who loves animals and brings soup to sick friends. Or maybe you are a doting husband and father who coaches Little League and who is anxious and depressed because you are feeling marginalized in a rapidly changing society — unable to keep up with work demands, technology, etc. and just want to feel better about yourself. Maybe you are a young single person seeking company and validation because you are lonely, socially unskilled and frustrated. Maybe you got hooked on Faux Nooz, and your adrenal glands are in overdrive, or ditto for some social media fringe group that keeps giving you squirts of dopamine and providing you with a false sense of community. Maybe you are entranced by a pastor, a televangelist, a conspiracy theorist, a talking head…
Now, like any habit or addiction, the hook becomes a lock and the chain becomes stronger the longer it hangs on you. But when your ideological peer group is not empowered to act on its worst instincts, the chain remains slack. That allows a situation where families can agree to disagree on politics and you can be friends with a people who vote against everything you believe in and still think of them as “nice.”
BUT THEN as has happened, their leaders, their cause gain traction and have the power to act out their evil in the real world. That chain jerks taut and begins to drag them inexorably into a moral death spiral, ignoring, excusing, even celebrating and eventually committing escalating atrocities along the way. They may never have gone there under other circumstances, but the lock is fastened and the chain is strong, and the cost of trying to unhook gets higher and higher the deeper in they get. So that nice person who had to be “pro -life” because they just love the poor little babies now are ok with kids dying in cages. The “Christian” with Jewish “friends” is now ok with or in denial about violent anti-Semitism. The “nice person” who is “without a racist bone in their body” is chanting “Send her back!” The person with gay friends and relatives excuses violent, hateful rhetoric because “they don’t really mean it.” The “fiscal conservative” is no longer worried about massive deficits, and so on. That chain is hooked tight, pulled taut and dragging them to the point where eventually, if Dear Leader tells them, they will line people up at a ditch and machine gun them without question, because once they’ve gone so far, there’s no turning back.
No, I can’t stay friends and just “agree to disagree.” (Honestly, it’s hard enough for me to do that with die-hard Hillary fans and people still longing for the halcyon days of the Obama administration.) It’s just too hard to have to watch what I knew was going to happen. Think about it. In a Zombie apocalypse, who would be the hardest zombies for you to have to fight? It would be the people you knew and loved who were afflicted with the disease and were now coming to eat your brain. Better to mourn them now and focus on disempowering the engine that is dragging them and us to destruction.
Oh, the special word in German? It’s NAZI, because wherever they started, that is what they became.
