Immortality is granted to the individual through social identification. Transcendence, through social identification, alleviates thoughts of one’s death and reduces the ambiguity of the world. Moreover, social identification facilitates counterfactual thinking and denial of responsibility. Defense-motivated group members cannot be persuaded with evidence. Fur-thermore, group members forego personal control to the group. Thus, the group protects members from accepting responsibility. Group members often in accord with group behavior even when conscious motivations are absent. It is possible that the tendency to obey is so strong that it operates at an unconscious level. Deindividuation, promoted by the group, can foster dehumanization. …show more content…
Fascism is the epinephrine for the new minority, threatened by their descent. Feeling threatened and eager to reinstate their high group status, the new minority cannot be swayed by even the most persuasive argu-ment. A threat to the group is a threat to the self. These individuals may be so deindividuat-ed that their personal identities will dissolve without a group identity. Furthermore, existen-tial angst may partially explain the use of defense motivations in the processing of infor-mation.
As defined by the heuristic-systematic model, people have two primary motivations when it comes to processing information: defense and impression (Chaiken, Giner-Sorolla, & Chen, 1996). Defense motivations allow for selective processing of information, and oppos-ing messages are never received as intended. Contrary to how it sounds, cognitive conserva-tism is not the same as someone identifying as a strong conservative and going on the de-fense. Instead, cognitive conservatives do not utilize much cognitive effort (Chaiken et al., 1996). To put that in perspective, even a liberal can be a cognitive conservative. When de-fense motivations are active, people disparage the validity of arguments contrary to current beliefs. In this sense, the family is a group from whom a child receives their beliefs. To ques-tion one’s own beliefs would be to question that of the family, and in doing so, the group would become weaker with ambiguity afloat.
It is not that the
The next stage in the R/CID model is Introspection. The individual begins to discover that this deep seeded hatred of the dominate group is psychologically draining. Moreover, the energy used to hate the dominate group is not conducive to their understanding neither themselves nor their own racial-cultural group. The resistance and immersion stage tends to be a reaction against the dominant culture and is not proactive in allowing the individual to use all energies to discover who or what he or she is. The minority shows concerns for the basis of the self-appreciation. Self-definition in the previous stage tends to be reactive (against White racism), and a need for positive self-definition in a proactive sense emerges.
Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism that came to prominence in early 20th century, influenced by national syndicalism. Its movement is based on nationalism and militaries, combining more typically right-wing positions with elements of left-wing politics. Also, it emphasizes the importance of the state and individual’s overriding duty to it. Fascism opposes to liberalism and communism and it seeks to regenerate social, cultural and economic life, by installing strong national identity and complete loyalty to the state and the leader. Secret police and propaganda were used to manipulate the citizens and the suppress opposition.
In response to Bernard Williams’s The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality, I will argue in agreement with Williams’s claim that immortality, where humanly conceivable, is not desirable. In order to do so, I will first discuss categorical desires and the two conditions for an immortal life to be desirable, as defined by Williams. Next, I will assess Williams’s illustration of Elina Makropulos and consider why categorical desires are vital to the value one finds in life. Finally, I will recognize the theist’s objection to Williams’s argument and explain how Williams would respond.
This theme of suffering can apply to the social identity theory. The social identity theory proposes that a person's sense of self stems from the groups in which they surround themselves with. According to Tajfel and Turner in 1986, we think well of and act similarly to the groups we belong to, and we are sometimes motivated to go against competing groups (as cited in Harwood, 2007, p. 44). Social identity theory is validated through in-groups (person perceives themselves as part of the group) and out-groups (person does not identify to a group). Through the in-groups and out-groups there lies three processes: social categorization, social identification, and social comparison.
And, therefore, fascism and the governing and publicising industry, moreover, exploit individualism and the masses, which accept their fabricated destinies. This mental depravity while it antagonises free singularity and personality of the mind promulgates sham hopes as hierarchical superiority; furthermore, it advocates hostility and war when fear prevails.
As human beings, each person on earth possesses a desire to belong. In order to meet this need, one must find a way to fit in with a group. Yet somehow, once a group has been joined, humans tend to take on the ideas and opinions of the group without analyzing the situation for themselves. Doris Lessing, in her essay, “Group Minds”, proposes the idea that humans spend their whole life going along with the group because they fail to analyze the reasons behind their actions. While Lessing’s idea is valid, no one has yet successfully implemented her plan.
The Nazis, short for National Socialists, are sometimes considered to be the most infamous people in history. They managed to utilize an immense, young, nationalistic population to carry out their plans through the notions of mass suggestion (O 'Shaughnessy, 2009). Nazis, who were composed of half World War I veterans and half young adults around college age, used many different tactics to have a strong appeal towards the latter. First, the young person’s brain is not fully developed, and was therefore manipulated in various ways by the Nazis (Pauer-Studer & Velleman, 2011). Second, at this stage in life, adolescents’ emerging identities can be compromised by their environment (Feldman, R.S., 2015, p. 281). Finally, most humans, especially adolescents, constantly seek conformity to a group while maintaining some individual differences (Pagaard, 2015). Therefore, the perpetrators of Nazi crimes often aimed many aspects of their campaign towards teenagers and young adults in order to take advantage of their vulnerable positions in society.
The Holocaust is one the most notable examples of the psychological phenomena known as groupthink. As a result of the human instinct to adapt to the people and their culture, individuals begin to think and act in a similar manner. When many different elements such as discrimination against racism come into play, groupthink occurs. Unfortunately, many disastrous events soon follow. The Nazi regime utilised anti-semitism to unify Germany, propaganda to control society’s way of thinking, and fear to oppress individualism and encourage collectivism. Anti-semitism, propaganda, and fear all contributed to the subconscious occurrence of groupthink, that ultimately set the stage for “The Final Solution”, the Holocaust.
485). Immigrants who are legitimized as “white” within the racial definition can be seen to have greater access and considered a lesser threat than those who are considered non-white immigrants (p. 507). The ideology can be construed, the more a group’s ethnic appearance conforms to the perceived whiteness of society in the United States; the less likely they are to suffer from obvious institutionalized bias. The work of Hagan, Shedd and Payne: Race, Ethnicity, and Youth Perceptions of Criminal Injustice (2005), makes an argument of the correlation between the amount of encounters with law enforcement officials and adolescent minority groups, and the psychological effects of those encounters. Events, based on the frequency and outcome of those encounters, which leads to a continuation or hypersensitivity to the feelings of bias and discrimination. The recall of these events, which may in actuality be an exaggeration of the contact, brought on by the experiences in early childhood, serve as a reminder of the individual’s lack of “whiteness”. The basis of the internal conflict would be continuous, even if the non-white individual were able to change their socio-economic status, the effects of their social ethnic stratification in early life formed their world view (p 385). Changing minority social location, being located within a multi-diverse or white communities with whom non-whites
My name is… well I suppose my name is irrelevant. What does matter is the truth. People these days will tell you anything and everything they think you want to hear just so you’ll buy their crap. They would even tell you that if you could live forever you would be the happiest person on earth. Well they’re wrong. How do I know? Here let me tell you how I came upon this knowledge.
We become more vulnerable to social influences and the impacts of social rules when we are deindividuated. In a certain study people were given different rules, guards, and inmates. When put to the “task” of acting their new identity, many people became violent, harsh, and acted out of their original identity. This study is known as the Stanford Prison Study: Chaos in Palo Alto. Although indidvual differences in personality do play a key role in conformity, many people still showed signs of aggressive change in their personality like others. in conclusion deindividuation does not make us initially bhave badly, we are more likely to conform to the situation that is at hand. A loss of identiy is likely to make people engage in prosocial or helping behavior when others are too helping. Despite being anonymous sometimes we are more likely to assist others. deindividuation helps us to nderstand why crowd behavior is so unpredictable. In most cases the actions of crowds depend largely on wehther others are acting prosocially or antisocially. Inittally depending on prevalling social nomalitys, deindividuation can in contex make us less aggressive or more
The Nazi and communist movements in Europe after 1930 exploited this phenomenon, of which the rise of these movements included the recruitment of members straight from the masses, thus, creating a situation in which the majority of members were people who had never been involved in politics before, allowing Nazi leaders to introduce new desired methods into their political propaganda (Arendt OT, 311-12). As a result of the increase in unemployment that followed the loss of World War I, the numbers of the masses of desperate men increased accordingly in Germany and Austria however, a development can be seen in the attitude of the mass man into a feeling of selflessness, in which the main characteristic of the mass man became his isolation and lack in normal social relationships (Arendt OT, 317). “The old adage that the poor and oppressed have nothing to loose but their chains no longer applied to the mass men, for they lost much more than the chains of misery when they lost interest in their own well-being: the source of all worries and cares which make human life troublesome and anguished was gone” (Arendt OT,
In a 2012 article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, University of Kansas researchers, Daniel Sullivan, Mark J. Landau, Nyla R. Branscombe, and Zachary K. Rothschild, explored the effect of threats made to an ingroup’s moral identity on defensive strategies for restoring the ingroup’s moral image. Before delving into their experimental findings, the researchers begin with an epigraph by Vamik Volkan, Turkish Cypriot Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia: “They began by reciting past injuries…as if competing to see who had suffered more.” This quote effectively introduces the experimental research by setting a tone for the concept of “competitive
Plato has roused many readers with the work of a great philosopher by the name of Socrates. Through Plato, Socrates lived on generations after his time. A topic of Socrates that many will continue to discuss is the idea of “an immortal soul”. Although there are various works and dialogues about this topic it is found to be best explained in The Phaedo. It is fair to say that the mind may wonder when one dies what exactly happens to the beloved soul, the giver of life often thought of as the very essence of life does it live on beyond the body, or does it die with it? Does the soul have knowledge of the past if it really does live on?
The concept of life after death has been around practically as long as life itself. Our beliefs about life after death can have a profound effect on our attitudes toward life. Most individual's beliefs about life after death are directly related to their cultural or religious affiliations. According to Montagu, "Of all the many forms which natural religion has assumed none probably has exerted so deep and far reaching an influence on human life as the belief in immortality" (1955, p.15).