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Sunday, July 15, 2012

Wherein I Am Proven Correct

The recent news about the Jerry Sandusky trial has caused many individuals to express their disgust and condemnation in speech and writing. Similarly the problems of various religious organizations whose figures of authority preyed upon young people caused great outcry.

Please note well that as individuals, we all of us speak out in condemnation.
Yet, the groups and organizations involved did little or nothing to put an immediate and absolute end to the abuse.

Let that sink in:  the groups wherein the abusers were members did not put an immediate end to the abuse; yet this is abuse which each and every member of the group, church, university, religious group, would have no qualms about openly condemning.
Yet, as a group, they could not.

I firmly believe that as a group they did not, because they can not. We have allowed public and private activity among numbers of people to dispense with any sense of morality. Once the glare of publicity is gone, groups go back to their own ways, and one of these ways is an inability to deny evil.

This inability to condemn evil openly and as a group to act against it is the source of our world-wide troubles, from a continuing meaningful arms control to all the other problems bedeviling us.

As individuals, we are angels; yet our groups and parties and committees are devils, and they will continue to be so until the group mind is rendered free to confront its demons.

The entire chain of events of the Sandusky Trial have demonstrated the bizarre split between our private morality and our public and group immorality. The fact that the University of Pennsylvania could not stop this continuing abuse - an abuse which each person involved condemned - is proof of the immorality of our present day groups.
Think of crimes beyond sexual abuse: think of the crimes committed in the financial sector, think of the crime of government officials condoning torture... think of the magnitude of the evil we as a group called Nation allow.
And it is not merely amorality: groups do not merely care nothing; groups enable evil and violence and discord, and will continue to do so until we find the answer to our dilemma.
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