• ares35@kbin.social
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    6 months ago

    the venn diagram of those with a mental illness and people who support trump is just a circle containing a smaller circle.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      That sort of argument only works if you define being fascist as a form of mental illness. But that’s not true: being evil is not the same thing as being mentally ill. Specifically, evil people are culpable and deserve punishment in a way that mentally ill people are not and do not.

      Fascists deserve to be ostracized, imprisoned, or executed (depending on how heinously they behave), not treated for mental illness.

      • lennybird@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        That depends entirely on how you define evil: Are you using biblical evil? That is unscientific. Are you using “Evil” in the sense of psychopathy, scoiopathy, and a range of mental disorders that makes them deviant to mainline society? Then I believe most cases of evil can be summed up as such: a predisposition to doing something perceived by most as wrong in lieu of a mixture of nature & nurture and its impact on the physiological and mental state of the brain.

        We’ve seen evil acts committed by shooters who after autopsy have large brain tumors impacting their state of mind. We’ve seen evil acts commited by people under the influence of strong drugs. We’ve seen evil committed by people who themselves were abused as children (survivorship bias fallacy aside).

        After all, we can identify parts of the brain that deal with behavioral inhibitions; we can identify other areas of the brain associated with empathy.

        I do believe that if we looked at evil as a predominantly mental disorder we’d probably be able to identify and address “evil” before it becomes enabled and acts.

        People aren’t born fascist. There is no such thing as biblical evil. There exists simply broken minds.