Yup. His crimes are the most heinous I’ve ever read about.
I would argue that piles of shit like him or Peter Scully are on a different level of harm magnitude than pretty much any capitalist politician or billionaire, to be honest. As horrific as their crimes are, they ultimately affect a much smaller group of people.
This is really the philosophical conundrum this thread poses. Dictators and sweatshop overseers hurt many more people than a rapist, but to commit a rape is so much more visceral and personal. It’s one thing to know your actions are hurting someone or even many people; it’s quite another to look your victim in the eyes and inflict the torture. That’s an evil I cannot comprehend.
People in seats of inscrutable power who hurt and exploit others are often able to, through ideology or abstraction, frame themselves as morally righteous or as working towards some greater good. There's a kind of psychological distance that allows for plausible deniability even to themselves. But someone like Watkins can't claim that. There's no framework, no illusion, that makes what he did anything other than pure, conscious malice. That kind of evil is direct and undeniable, which makes it especially horrifying.
If we're judging by scale of harm, people in power (dictators, exploitative billionaires, architects of war or systemic oppression) will always top the list. But if we're talking intent and personal depravity, Watkins and his ilk represent a kind of evil that's more intimate and psychologically shocking because he has nothing to hide behind, he has no way to lie to himself or anyone else.
See, for me, it's the other way around. Intimate, one-on-one cruelty is pretty easy for me to understand. That stuff doesn't shock me. That, I expect. What I have always had trouble understanding is the mentality that drives the ruling class to be so profoundly evil. The "fuck everyone else as long as I get mine" mentality. I've always had difficulty understanding that kind of thinking. Maybe it's because I've been exposed to the former kind of evil since I was young but I only really became conscious of the scale of the latter much more recently, so I've had less time to think about and process it.
Something that did make me understand a bit more was the movie Welcome to New York. The way it locates the loss of idealism and embrace of hopelessness that informs the ideology of political realism kinda made me think, "Shit, is this really all that's driving these assholes?" Extremely depressing but probably accurate.
I have a hard time with moral judgments about this type of stuff these days, I just hate cruelty in itself. I think psychopaths and sociopaths exist in higher numbers than we think and are basically mentally retarded even though some of them may be highly successful. They have a part of their brains missing. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be removed from society - guilt has little place in my worldview - bad people have to be removed.
Insert another opportunity for me to futilely recommend Blindsight.
Crazy how an actually very interesting debate emerged in this thread.
I sort of like Jorge's logic and I want to agree except I think he's wrong on something. People like the Watkins guys I think do have their own convoluted narratives that they hide behind. As inconceivable as it is I think most of them view their actions as in some way justified. Probably partly through some delusional entitlement narrative, and maybe also partly because they believe the victims deserve it.
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Yup. His crimes are the most heinous I’ve ever read about.
I would argue that piles of shit like him or Peter Scully are on a different level of harm magnitude than pretty much any capitalist politician or billionaire, to be honest. As horrific as their crimes are, they ultimately affect a much smaller group of people.
This is really the philosophical conundrum this thread poses. Dictators and sweatshop overseers hurt many more people than a rapist, but to commit a rape is so much more visceral and personal. It’s one thing to know your actions are hurting someone or even many people; it’s quite another to look your victim in the eyes and inflict the torture. That’s an evil I cannot comprehend.
People in seats of inscrutable power who hurt and exploit others are often able to, through ideology or abstraction, frame themselves as morally righteous or as working towards some greater good. There's a kind of psychological distance that allows for plausible deniability even to themselves. But someone like Watkins can't claim that. There's no framework, no illusion, that makes what he did anything other than pure, conscious malice. That kind of evil is direct and undeniable, which makes it especially horrifying.
If we're judging by scale of harm, people in power (dictators, exploitative billionaires, architects of war or systemic oppression) will always top the list. But if we're talking intent and personal depravity, Watkins and his ilk represent a kind of evil that's more intimate and psychologically shocking because he has nothing to hide behind, he has no way to lie to himself or anyone else.
See, for me, it's the other way around. Intimate, one-on-one cruelty is pretty easy for me to understand. That stuff doesn't shock me. That, I expect. What I have always had trouble understanding is the mentality that drives the ruling class to be so profoundly evil. The "fuck everyone else as long as I get mine" mentality. I've always had difficulty understanding that kind of thinking. Maybe it's because I've been exposed to the former kind of evil since I was youngbut I only really became conscious of the scale of the latter much more recently, so I've had less time to think about and process it.
Something that did make me understand a bit more was the movie Welcome to New York. The way it locates the loss of idealism and embrace of hopelessness that informs the ideology of political realism kinda made me think, "Shit, is this really all that's driving these assholes?" Extremely depressing but probably accurate.
Shit, man. I’m really sorry. I can’t imagine. I’m not going to try to have a Good Will Hunting moment here, but I hope you know how appreciated you and your openness and viewpoints are here.
BurtReynolds wrote:I have a hard time with moral judgments about this type of stuff these days, I just hate cruelty in itself. I think psychopaths and sociopaths exist in higher numbers than we think and are basically mentally retarded even though some of them may be highly successful. They have a part of their brains missing. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be removed from society - guilt has little place in my worldview - bad people have to be removed.
Insert another opportunity for me to futilely recommend Blindsight.
