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Wow. Amazing comment. Brilliant. I love the Gorgias. How do we expose and stop these demons in human form? We don’t seem to be winning at the moment. It seems to be getting darker and darker and darker.

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Such powerful and disturbing writing. Thank you.

It seems that the best strategy is actually to be the perpetrator of violence, but to disguise oneself as the scapegoating victim, along the lines of the disingenuity seemingly advanced by Polus and Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias.

The strong, wicked man, such as the ruthless tyrant Archelaus, is happy, according to Polus, so long as unpunished. And convention must be superficially respected in order to escape punishment. Callicles traces the contour of this problem of the many versus the strong man:

“The reason, as I conceive, is that the makers of laws are the majority who are weak; and they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves and to their own interests; and they terrify the stronger sort of men, and those who are able to get the better of them, in order that they may not get the better of them; and they say, that dishonesty is shameful and unjust; meaning, by the word injustice, the desire of a man to have more than his neighbours; for knowing their own inferiority, I suspect that they are too glad of equality. And therefore the endeavour to have more than the many, is conventionally said to be shameful and unjust, and is called injustice (compare Republic), whereas nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker”. [483]

Today, the real perpetrator of egregious societal violence can escape retribution and punishment by wresting away the rightfully “accusing finger” which points at them, and with a great deal of supercilious moral indignation then turning it to point anew elsewhere. The perpetrator creates the new scapegoating victim, as you note, by means of such as selective "government identifications of ‘hate crimes’”.

Among us today are indeed “strong men”, who are gifted with intelligence, who are wicked and ruthless in wreaking multimillennial injustice, yet who conceal their vice in the sanctimonious cloak of pretend-scapegoat-victim. They direct the inexorable and damning “accusing finger” of society at the government-narrative-created scapegoat victim - at the ones who actually believed in the reality of justice and honesty - at the ones who were blind to their Callicles-like anti-ethos of predation of the powerful, and of duplicitousness, in place where Christian cooperation was expected.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1672/pg1672-images.html

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