The banality of systemic evil:
▻http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/opinionator/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil
Leaks, leaks, leaks... Has the younger generation lost its moral compass ? No - just the opposite.
’There can be no expectation that the system will act morally of its own accord. Systems are optimized for their own survival and preventing the system from doing evil may well require breaking with organizational niceties, protocols or laws. It requires stepping outside of one’s assigned organizational role’
As a HN commenter puts it at ▻https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6437272 :
’Welcome to the hyper-individualistic, hyper-critical, post-communitarian world, where neither tradition nor any existing social institution is taken for granted. Everything is now open to critical scrutiny, and nothing that fails such scrutiny will receive anyone’s respect. Gone are the days when “institutions” [..] were universally agreed to be valuable things in themselves. Now they need to prove their own worth [..] because if they have no intrinsic moral worth, you can’t blame others for eroding them’ - Here comes ’the first generation to ascribe absolutely no intrinsic moral worth to the System’ [..] its ’perks are now gone, and with it the last traces of the System’s romantic halo. All that is left is a rotting social infrastructure with questionable instrumental value at best. [..] The population won’t behave anymore - the only psychological bias that kept them at bay has dissolved away [..] another superstition trampled under the relentless feet of reason’
#Wikileaks #Manning #Hammond #Swartz #Snowden #Arendt #Ellsberg #Jackall