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Viliam comments on "3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism" - Less Wrong
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There is probably some clever "ethnic cleansing = ethnic cleansing plus privilege" argument that makes it okay. :(
This is called "horseshoe theory". I suspect the reason behind this observation is that there are some psychological traits that make people enjoy extreme versions of political opinions, regardless of the political direction, so all extremes will be inhabited by people who are psychologically similar to each other; and then they will converge on similar ideas about what should be done.
Alternatively, this is simply our corrupted hardware which is programmed by evolution to manifest in situations where we have sufficient political power. But because the society today is much larger than in our ancestral environment, this behavior may appear prematurely -- when we are surrounded by a group of fellow believers sufficiently large than in the ancient tribe of 150 members they would be a knockdown force. Then we suddenly realize that the best course of action would be to kill our opponents and threaten all neutrals into submission.
The horseshoe theory (also known by a variety of other names) can be explained simpler by pointing out that some people are really interested in power and both extreme left and extreme right share that interest.
If you arrange political movements by their degree of statism, for example, you'll find anarcho-libertarians on one end and both communists and nazis bunched up on the other end.
Yeah, I like horseshoe theory too. Like most good ideas, it isn't new. It's a rediscovery of Voegelin's "political religions", Eric Hoffer's "mass movements", etc. You can probably find it in Plato if you dig hard enough.