I suggest you observe others in this forum, say people who are delighted to see vigilantism, say the Sikh in a recent thread who beat the legs of a would be thief. What is it about vigilantism that is antithetical to real liberals. Is it not the fact that we are all in danger when judgment of guilt or innocence is put into the hands of some random individual. It could be Trump. So why are people so delighted to see vigilantism in action? Isn't it because they are full of hatred and fear that some evil person will, out of his or her own psychopathology, do them unjust harm? And note how this becomes all the more true when the fear is increased by the fact that the police don't seem to be doing their job. Increased insecurity, the growth of the perception of a dangerous world, causes (creates) illiberal thinking, the feeling that extrajudicial retribution is justified and that leads down that dark path to self justification of any evil. The only answer is personal moral restraint, liberal frontal lobe thinking, the truly human part of the brain. Liberalism is the unfolding of the human within, the part that made God in its image. Fear is the mind killer but really only the human part of the brain, the part that can see others as mirrors of the self. The only time that should be properly suspended, is when faced with imminent threat. You have a right and a duty to protect innocent life from the insanity of others when that insanity reached the level of intention to kill. You have the right to prevent that any way you can.
Before the invention of somewhat humane prisons, that like anything else become corrupted, a thief in Islam would lose one hand and the next and then his head, because theft put the life of others, the innocent, at risk. Now we can separate pathological people from society where they can be exposed to the potential for reform, had we not this need to desire the suffering of others and contempt for spending a dime of our own money fixing problems we imagine we will not personally have to worry about. Who cares if children go hungry. Who is not guilty of this?
The facts are that our being condition, the self we imagine ourselves to be, is the product of all the influences that were present around us in our formative years. And none of it was written on a blank slate, but on the human nature that we manifest as a product of our human evolution, the capacity for thinking, for empathy, for love of our children projected outwardly as the love of life itself. There is only love or the madness of conditioning. Societies problems will never be solved by the projection of hate. Just look at what hate does.
You want me to show you a Nazi. I want to show you where to go to evolve. Have we been taught to hate evil? Have we been taught to behave? Were you threatened, do you fear consequence? Do you want to see evil punished? Who taught you all of this? Isn't it those who you yourself have become? What you never had as a child was a choice. Have you grown up carrying the same belief, that you have no choice? Perhaps you can let go, at least of the certainty of that faith.
What you fear is becoming what you were taught never to be, but, the moment you feared, that was the moment it happened. We are want we fear and we hate it, any knowledge of that as our condition. And we will do anything to prevent becoming conscious of that fact. I think it's better to know. It opens the door to challenging the certainty of everything we know.
So I didn't say exactly you are becoming what you hate. I said we become what we hate but it already happened because we were taught to hate. Where there is hate, there is the Nazi. We are all goosestepping morons proudly parading our conditioning.
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