Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice…
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I’m broken, the first thing I think is “whoa, look at that outstanding vintage denim.”
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Yeah… I think that in the post-war period there was a lot of dark scholarship done trying to come to terms with what had just happened (think like the work of Hannah Arendt or the French school of philosophy in that era or even some of the stuff coming out of the Frankfurt school, etc - lots of it focused on trying to understand authoritarianism, mass society, and how agency fit into that - they all seem to come to the conclusion that it wasn’t very much)… so it’s not a huge surprise to me that psychology tried to delve into the dark parts of the human mind - which is understandable, because if you understand why stuff happens, you can try and do something about it. I do think that some of those experiments ended up with a more robust set of parameters for ethical experiements in social sciences. I know that for doing oral histories there is a strong set of guidelines that you need to abide by when taking them.
That’s fine…
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Yes, so much this. Everyone was understandably desperate to figure out what just happened and somehow understand it, perhaps with an eye to preventing it in the future. Unfortunately in their rush to do that, psychology researchers came up with a lot “just so” explanations that were satisfying but based on shoddy science. Psychology has an unfortunate tendency to do this because proper controls are difficult to establish. There were a lot of post-war studies showing how we’re all monsters deep down or we all want to be in cults, or we all need acceptance from authority so badly we’ll do anything, etc. all depserately trying to explain Nazis. Over the decades those studies have pretty much all been picked apart and discredited. It was probably harmful, because as a culture there was a lot of dusting off of hands and people thinking, “well good, we know what happened, so we don’t have to worry about that anymore. Meanwhile fascism slowly rebuilt itself over subsequent generations.
Honestly movements like Trumpism probably do a lot more to explain Nazi Germany. We can see a populist fascist movement starting in real time. See how all pieces fit together- culture, media, echo chambers, protests, racism, etc. If we survive it this time, maybe we’ll really learn something.
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They also made heavy use of Nazi imagery like swastikas, iron crosses, and totenkopfs just because they thought they looked cool.
Funny enough this biker inspiration would come full circle in many cases.
The landscape for many street gangs changed pretty dramatically in the early 1980s with urban renewal and the so-called “war on crime”. A lot of the old school street gangs (or clubs as they would call themselves) such as the Savage Nomads and Savage Skulls would go on to become motorcycle gangs (I mean clubs).
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Yeah, as a historian, I am always a bit sus of the psychological explanations… though I think there is a lot to like about Ordinary Men by Robert Browning - that does get into some psychological explanations, but nothing so universal and pat as what some of these 60s-70s experiments were trying to show. Merely that the men who participated were motivated by a diverse set of contexts, not just blind hatred of Jewish people (although that was certainly at play for many).
Exactly! There you can look and see similarities with such movements in the past and they are strikingly similar in nature. Of course there are differences based on the particular historical context, but there are enough similarities that draw some conclusions about what’s happening. I think what can be more powerful about looking historically, is that more often that not, historians are certainly seeking to use evidence to support our findings, but we’re also aware enough to realize that we’re also making arguments based on that evidence. It’s true that that means it’s often about interpretation, but if you’re source base is strong enough and you address possible concerns, you have helped people to understand why things happened as they did, which can help us to make better choices… of course, for that to happen, people have to fucking listen to us, and we all know about the right wing attack on academia and even history, despite the field being pretty conservative-minded over all (little c, not big C).
But as Eugene Hutz once said “nobody learn no nothing from no history!” Let’s hope he’s wrong on that!
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I sat down and watched this documentary, finally. Or at least, I tried to. I made it about a third of the way through before giving up because it’s just too much of that 1960s/1970s patriarchal psychology oversimplification bullshit that plagued the first half of the tenure of the profession.
His equating things like hermit crabs fighting over a rock to underprivileged kids engaging in gang turf wars is incredibly dismissive of the generations of complicated socioeconomic factors that put kids in those shoes and those situations. Equating them to hermit crabs acting on genetic instinct is so intellectually insulting that I flipped all the tables in my house.
Thanks for giving me a big mess to clean up here, Milgram.
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What kind of Jordan Peterson shit is that?
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