• Tinidril@midwest.social
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    15 hours ago

    I’ll check it out, but it seems pretty straightforward to me. When a social class sits outside the rules the rest of society is expected to live by, they get entitled and they get bored. Since they aren’t entirely immune to public opinion, they also become easy targets for blackmail as they push towards more and more “exclusive” forms of “entertainment”.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      Exactly, also people tend to tolerate what their peers consider normal. We’re basically always checking reality off of how those in our circle react to things. This means that if your circle assumes old men always want to sleep with 18-20 year old women, and they do so regularly, then if suddenly a 17 year old girl shows up in the mix and nobody reacts it can be easily rationalized. And from there you can slip to a lot of 16 year olds. And while new people may not be comfortable with it, they likely have financial incentives not to walk away or cause a scene, because he wasn’t just a pimp, he was also a matchmaker, then in that case the rationalization engine that is the human brain can go to town.

    • Birds are not real@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      I advise you do and it may get a bit more difficult to follow but your comment is partly right yes. The only aspect of it that differs is that it is a form of acquiring knowledge, because knowledge of god means knowledge of the sins. Through sinning you acquire understanding of why sins are wrong and the more you sin, the more valid your faith is unlike the faith of someone who has never sinned and therefore has no innate understanding of why sinning is wrong. It is a very strange cult but it is the only one that explains logically why powerful entities choose to commit things like the ones epstein did and there is a lot of goddamn powerful maniacs that have been proven to be true frankist and believe the nonsense it is.

      • Tinidril@midwest.social
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        14 hours ago

        Sounds to me like a rationalization for what I suggested. I’m not saying they don’t believe it but, in my experience, the main predictor of what people believe is what they want to believe. People decide how they want to live, then construct a belief system to justify it.

        • Birds are not real@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          Your point reminds me of the logic behind certain religious psychologies that see this world not as an end in itself, but as a proving ground or a purgatorial space. Its morality is sometimes inverted for a higher, otherworldly purpose.

          Take public execution in medieval Christian Europe. While a spectacle of deterrence, some theologians (like Nicholas of Cusa aka who I picture rubbing my rod at night) grappled with a darker rationale: that the intense physical pain of burning could serve as a form of accelerated penance. The idea was that this suffering might pay the temporal debt of sin before death, potentially sparing the soul a longer, more severe punishment in the afterlife. The executioner, in this context, was performing an act of supposed spiritual charity, which is actually why executioners were often clergy or faith oriented men.

          This mirrors,the core doctrine of Frankism, an 18th-century Jewish heretical movement. Frankists believed in ‘redemption through sin.’ Their goal was at times personal regret, but a cosmological acquisition of a higher knowledge. The pleasure or suffering of the sinner was incidental to this divine path to regret and penance.

          We see a third variant in groups like ISIS. When they stoned Muslims for adultery, it was framed as enacting divine law to purify the community and offer the sinner ritual atonement. When they cut the throats of Western captives, the logic switched entirely to theater of terror, a spectacle for global distancing (stay in your country, as a result of the frequent invasions of countries from west asia), but also because in Islam, the act of cutting through the neck artery is seen as a quick and painless death. It causes death quickly because oxygen output runs out very fast and is why it is the mandatory way of making meat halal, part of it is to use a quick, simple and relatively painless death.

          The unifying, and strangely rational, thread is this: when reality is viewed through an eschatological or cosmological lens, worldly concepts of pleasure, pain, and even morality become secondary. Acts are judged not by their immediate human cost, but by their function in a grand narrative of spiritual war, purification, or redemption. It’s a logic that operates on a plane completely separate from humanist rationale because humans are not the end all be all.