Comment by idermoth

Every week since she was about six months old, I've taken my daughter with me to get groceries. She's absolutely fascinated by the grocery store: the rolling cart, the colors and textures of produce ("ta-to!"), the other shoppers, the illustrations on packaging ("bear!"). I hand her items and give her their names. She shakes them, rotates them, repeats their names back to me.

But every time we go, I see at least one child my daughter's age or younger staring mindlessly at a phone or tablet, oblivious to their environment and the parent pushing their cart. It just seems sad.

People talk about kids being addicted, but I had to deal with my dad constantly showing me some Instagram video. Not necessarily a dumb video, but still not something I cared to watch.

>my wife and I don't use social media, except in very limited doses for work reasons

do you not consider HN to be social media?

Oh ok, I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds those things idiotic, not fun and not useful

How old are your kids?

These type of people are the people who haven't realized they've been indoctrinated, addicted, and tortured.

They have been induced towards a corruption by dependency scheme in subtle ways, and as a result their rational thought has diminished without them realizing it.

This naturally happens in any totalitarian state where you become dependent on the state for your decisions and values.

Religion in a way used to help protect against this, but with the spread and rise of nihilism and pacifism, religion has taken a back seat especially given the recent controversy and destructive path orthodoxy is taking.

These are the values that are so widely promoted and embedded in things today, following a War and Peace philosophy, which is acceptance of evil, or rather towards inducing a wilful self-inflicted blindness towards evil.

You may find the book "On Resistance to Evil by Force", by Ivan Ilyin, an enlightening read, written around the early 1900s, near the dawn of modern psychology. It discusses the topic of evil, in a objectively tied way (not delusion or mere opinion). It does this in a fairly refined way properly following rational principles, first with definition, and then building from there following Method, and the Hyper-rational practices of that generation. A translation to English only recently became available, it was originally written in Russian prior to and through the Bolshevik/Communist takeover.

There are aspects discussed that you can see were used incompletely in the design of the modern day prison system in the U.S and many other insights.

The book was published to refute War and Peace, since the philosophies written about in that book induce evil over time which follows in line with the Banality of evil (the complacent/slothful) becoming the radical evil (related to the Nazi's, and the Wannsee Conference). A semi-recent movie was produced in 2001, that uses the minutes taken at that conference to depict how it happened (quite excellently, albeit dark). Conspiracy(2001).

The problem with totalitarian regimes is people in these societies will attack those that threaten their belief systems, and that threat might include the imposition of the responsibility of deciding things for themselves.

See these authors for more material on the torture/menticide aspects: They are all experts in their fields, or have been recognized by established experts for the excellence of their published works.

Joost Meerloo, "Rape of the Mind" (1950s) Robert Cialdini, "Influence" (1990s) Robert Lifton, "Thought Reform and the psychology of Totalism" (1950s)