I see myself in some of these words. I am by no means complicit in what is currently happening in the US as a US citizen, but I genuinely have no idea how to fight any of it. People want to throw words around like "resist" and "disrupt" and any other revolutionary buzz words, but the fact is I still have to get up every morning, pour my coffee and go do my job because that paycheck is what allows me to do anything else at all, in my life. I don't have the luxury of risking termination because I decided to call in sick to go to a march at my state's capitol.
I voted accordingly, I signed the petitions, I followed the rules and keep a strong moral compass to be a good human to other humans, upholding a "do no harm" policy that I take quite seriously. None of this was supposed to happen, and yet it did.
Reading this excerpt makes me feel like the Germans the book is about, the ones that history can look back on with a heavily judgemental 20/20 vision powered by the historical perspectives that came _after_ these people's lifetimes. I am not capable of being so self-righteous that I can look back on German citizens during the Nazi regime and say "well, they should have known better."
We never really know how we will react to circumstances until we are impacted by them. People go around thinking they won't fall for phishing emails and yet it is one of the most successful methods employed by predatory scammers. We might believe all our decisions are our own, while marketing has mastered the art of subtle manipulation and dark patterns that heavily govern our consumer habits. Our minds imagine arguments or stressful situations where we are able to consider multiple paths, choosing the one where we come out on top, but when we are actually in those moments, we fall back on irrational decision making and emotional reactions.
I think we got to now the same way the Germans did back then, pointed out in the article;
> It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about the fundamental things. One had no time.
We are busy, distracted, inundated with things that want to control our attentions and have been for years. We were primed for this exact thing to happen to us, and now we are in it. The story of the frog in boiling water comes to mind.
Thanks for sharing. I, and so many others, have much to think about and reconsider about what we want our lives to mean.
I see myself in some of these words. I am by no means complicit in what is currently happening in the US as a US citizen, but I genuinely have no idea how to fight any of it. People want to throw words around like "resist" and "disrupt" and any other revolutionary buzz words, but the fact is I still have to get up every morning, pour my coffee and go do my job because that paycheck is what allows me to do anything else at all, in my life. I don't have the luxury of risking termination because I decided to call in sick to go to a march at my state's capitol.
I voted accordingly, I signed the petitions, I followed the rules and keep a strong moral compass to be a good human to other humans, upholding a "do no harm" policy that I take quite seriously. None of this was supposed to happen, and yet it did.
Reading this excerpt makes me feel like the Germans the book is about, the ones that history can look back on with a heavily judgemental 20/20 vision powered by the historical perspectives that came _after_ these people's lifetimes. I am not capable of being so self-righteous that I can look back on German citizens during the Nazi regime and say "well, they should have known better."
We never really know how we will react to circumstances until we are impacted by them. People go around thinking they won't fall for phishing emails and yet it is one of the most successful methods employed by predatory scammers. We might believe all our decisions are our own, while marketing has mastered the art of subtle manipulation and dark patterns that heavily govern our consumer habits. Our minds imagine arguments or stressful situations where we are able to consider multiple paths, choosing the one where we come out on top, but when we are actually in those moments, we fall back on irrational decision making and emotional reactions.
I think we got to now the same way the Germans did back then, pointed out in the article;
> It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about the fundamental things. One had no time.
We are busy, distracted, inundated with things that want to control our attentions and have been for years. We were primed for this exact thing to happen to us, and now we are in it. The story of the frog in boiling water comes to mind.
Thanks for sharing. I, and so many others, have much to think about and reconsider about what we want our lives to mean.