Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark17
Problem is.... it's not stupidity at all, if you're a psychopathic megalomaniac.
World War 2 doesn't happen if you could remove about 4 people before it all began: Tojo, Adolf, Joe, and Benny. Your average German and Brit would've rather played a friendly game of cards over a pint or two than try to kill each other, and the average Italian wanted nothing to do with that war in the first place. They weren't bad combatants - they just weren't killers (and I've been to Italy and believe me, they love Americans and everyone else generally.)
Japanese and American people had respect for each other before the war (baseball was becoming a huge part of Japanese life in the years before the war, and still is the basis of a strong cultural bond between that country and ours.)
Generally, populations don't hate each other and wouldn't choose war; it is governments. In the case of Russia, their government tends to consist of one man - the one brutal enough to eliminate his rivals.
So when Putin gives the order to bomb hospitals and kill women and children, it isn't a matter of stupidity. The problem is, he simply doesn't care.
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Absolutely agree with a lot of what you're saying Mark, but the bottom line is people were stupid for originally putting such psychopathic megalomaniacs into positions of power to do the crap they do in the first place. And even if they may not have started out being psychopathic megalomaniacs, once they started exhibiting the telltale signs, people were still too stupid to remove them from power, and still dumb enough to believe and follow them. So yes, it ultimately is our own overall stupidity that allows this to happen.
As I had said before, humans almost always think of themselves, but rarely for themselves. So when one crackpot comes along and says and does things a lot of people think will benefit them in some way, they generally go along to adopt similar beliefs and follow them, blindly in a lot of cases. And once they do make such a connection, another common human trait often kicks in, the one where we don't like to admit to others, and ourselves, that we were wrong about something or someone. So even if the person they were following starts to do things their followers may not think are that great, as long as those followers themselves aren't directly getting negatively hurt or impacted, they're likely to just dismiss, or even outright ignore, whatever not so great things the person they're following has done or is doing.
In the end, it all comes down to overall human stupidity for the majority of us allowing a select few to be able to tell us what to do, and then not doing something about it when we finally realize some of those select few leaders shouldn't be leading anymore. The only real differences between people like Trump, Putin, Biden, and the likes of Charles Manson, is the number of people they were able to sway and otherwise coerce into believing and following them. They've all had people following them go out and hurt and kill others for them and in their names. Except some are viewed as world leaders, whereas others are considered as crazy cult founders and insane criminals. Guess it just depends on how many people you can get to drink your own personal flavor of Kool-Aid as to which option such people end up falling under.
To me, the one thing that does make sense is the Golden Rule, it is an extreme pity that it seems to not be truly followed by many people on this planet. It would certainly be a lot better place if everyone did.