09-07-2016, 09:47 AM
(09-07-2016, 06:56 AM)Odin Wrote: Usually if everyone around you seems like an asshole, then the actual asshole is you.
Bingo!
What people say about the rest of humanity as a whole says what that person is himself. One of the simplest tests for trustworthiness among retail sales clerks (people surrounded by all the accoutrements of wealth on the job, large amounts of money going into the till, much fabricated glamour, yet so badly underpaid that they can never expect to get them) is to ask what proportion of humanity is generally trustworthy. The trustworthy people tell you that employee pilferage is done by very few people. The dishonest ones say in effect "Doesn't everyone steal?"
In mental wards many of the patients might tell you that they are the only sane person in the asylum.
I can only imagine what child molesters have to say about the 'normality' of their perversion.
If you really want people to expose the scorpions in their souls, then ask them about people of religion (especially Judaism) or ethnicity different from themselves.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.