[balamatom]

Mine weren't.

I see what you mean. But none of the people in question 'tried to inflict violence on others', they wrote books didn't they? Sort of extended lay takes on why they think this violence is so ubiquitous in their life, why they've been subjected to it, and what should "we all" do about it.

(The fools. Monkey see, monkey do, monkey comprehend, monkey turn into a giant finger pointing at giant complex problem over there, monkey gets covered in shit again by the other monkeys. Because that's not a problem, that's the feeder. "Silly book writing monkey! Pooh pooh, go suffer elsewhere!")

>If you experience mistreatment and then turn around and try to inflict it on others, you failed the test.

How certain are you of the legitimacy of the testing authority? Because that "test" sounds more like a cruel human experiment. I am instead reminded of another test, conducted by a certain old man on a certain mountain...

[jordanb]

> But none of the people in question 'tried to inflict violence on others', they wrote books didn't they?

Some will rob you with a six gun. Some with a fountain pen.

[balamatom]

Some with nary but the common smartphone. Choose wisely!

[api]

An idiot inflicts violence directly. A smart sadist tells others to do it with a convincing rationale. Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot probably never killed anyone.

It’s sort of like the saying: if an idiot wants to rob a bank he gets a gun and a ski mask. If a smart person wants to rob a bank they get a banking license.

As for the test: there is no authority. It’s implied by reality and by game theory.

[balamatom]

"Reality"? That was the thing they teach at uni wasn't it? Or maybe that was "game theory", and "reality" was the one that's on the telly? I'm confused!

Point being, not too cash money of you to posit the self-evidence of certain conclusions that feel morally authoritative and ethically certain, while simultaneously moving the goalposts on the parallel thesis. I kinda thought we were talking about people who stayed writers after their first book?

I don't think Marx or Rand were sadists, and even if we assume ill intent on their part, the question of what causes the thing you call "sadism" remains open (although I kinda answered it, but I can't know for sure how true is my answer without the output of others, right?). If, of course, you believe in cause and effect and all that in the first place... You'd be surprised (I know I was) at how many people think they do, but their tracing of causes stops at the first though-terminating cliche.

In fact, here's one (Godwin style):

Hot take about that Schicklgruber kid you brought up and his ilk: monstrous characters, antropomorphic salient points for Pax Americana's culture in the best traditions of ancestor worship and all that, proper antonyms to "Santa Claus" really... I don't know if H****r ever killed anyone with his own hands (other than his own sorry ass in the end) yet I still find it's rather the people who created the circumstances for his emergence or exploited its effects (my first cell phone was named after one of them); the people who voted for him (very fine moral ethical prosocial people); his nominal opponents, who enabled him to take emergency powers (some of which went out to found Communist parties sporting concentration camps well into the Cold War); and, most importantly, the people who obeyed the dicta of the system of which he was figurehead ("don't look at me just doing my job"): those were the real culprits of that shameful page of world history.

And while individual military dictators have so far been limited by the normal human lifespan, those other mfs that empower them are still all over the place, being not identifiable individuals per se, but one might say cases of self-reproducing character types and life scripts. It is those that the radical ideologues — who are, unsurprisingly, pariahs in pleasant company (of Westerners) — are useful in identifying and counteracting. But the Westerner, being a memetically vulnerable humanimal, apparently can't read a book without suspending disbelief...

Which is how you get edgelords who personally identify with the problem statement. You know the character type. May you never know the associated life script :)