What is it about German culture that makes authoritarianism so popular?
replies(5):
It very much is though. Plenty of other countries in EU like France or Romania for example but probably many more, don't have even remotely as many authoritarian and invasive BS laws as Germany does.
But the worst part is that Germans have gaslit themselves to think that their authoritarian laws are there "for their own protection". They don't even realize they have a problem, until they move and live abroad and learn you can run a country without your government have so many surveillance and speech control powers over what you can do or say in public about their leaders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#List_o...
At village scales, authoritarianism is given more credence by the individual because ones life boundaries are reduced to the immediate environment, which is not really sustainable without structured hierarchy.
Incidentally, this is also a factor in why American’s adopt authoritarianism so rapidly as well - spending 3 hours of ones life in a bubble, on the freeway, commuting, is extremely damaging to ones psyche. Road-rage and neighbor hatred abound in such circumstances.
The solution to authoritarianism is travel beyond ones bounds. The roots of totalitarian-authoritarianism grow deeply in the desire to be free of the ‘filth of others’ - once you expand your horizons to embrace that ‘filth of others’, through travel and cultural interaction, that ‘filth of others’ becomes ‘the flavor of others’ instead.
This is easily demonstrated: talk to a German who has never left their home town/talk to a German who regularly visits vastly different parts of the world. You will see the authoritarian in the former, but the libertarian in the latter.
It couldn’t have arisen just randomly or on a lark.
Germans seem to have a cultural thing going on where they think the way they do things is the most logical and correct way, and think they're doing everybody else a favor by telling them how things are meant to be done. In fairness, so do Americans. But, for instance, I never hear this shit from the French.
Look at it critically - whenever you encounter a totalitarian-authoritarian personality bloviating about “those people over there” (others), its usually based on the totalitarian mechanism of ‘avoiding affinity with attributes considered unsavoury’ (filth).
This concept has other applications. If you have two villages, separated perhaps by a near-insurmountable mountain or lake, or if one of those villages raises cows while the other raises goats - this is usually the basis of the formation of a new dialect, accent, or indeed entirely new language. However, when civilization occurs and those two villages merge into a broader community, that language changes to become a unity.
This is observable at an individual level, too. Any unacknowledged or under-recognized similarities/identities/differences between two or more entities will inevitably be used to justify segregation of those entities. The solution, as always, is to identify similarities/identities/differences in a cohesive manner - this is anathema to the totalitarian-authoritarian personality, who is usually pretty stubborn about enforcing, in totality, those under-acknowledged facets.
Any scientist will tell you to not to look at the end data, but to look at the formula used to calculate the result and the way in which the data for the study was gathered. That's what's most important.
Depending on what your formula and data is, you can get to any arbitrary result you want, which is how scientists also had studies in the 1950s saying that smoking was good for your health.
Of course the reason then subsquently can be inflated, conflated, mixed together strangely, contorted, etc… I’m not doubting that.
The most effective antidote to totalitarian-authoritarianism is a one-way ticket to somewhere distant.
German villages, as comfortable as they are, don’t really promote this antidote.
> Any scientist will tell you
That said, why would anyone think such scores could be a reasonably accurate representation? You are aggregating such complex situations and with that you kill off nuance. It doesn't mean the scores are useless, but need to be used carefully. I mean even look at the chart and you'll see weird things pop out. Ireland is ranked 5th by the "Freedom in the World" Index and falls into the highest binning for all 3 categories: economic freedom, press freedom, democracy. Yet New Zealand is 3rd, falling into the second bins for economic and press freedom. Further down you see the US below Argentina yet the US's scores are significantly higher than Argentina in each other category and the US is tied with Mongolia (who has a major problem with Press Freedom).
It should be quite clear that these scores are missing a lot of important details. Like the US definitely has problems with Freedom of Speech (and growing) but you can call Trump and Clinton pedos on the internet all day and nothing will happen to you[0]. Nuance is needed and treating these indexes as black boxes is just harmful to a conversation about freedom.
2. An alpine train was coming by and I was doing the fist pump in the air to get them to honk the horn. A random stranger said that my actions were unwelcome and that trains are serious business.
3. When on bikes I did a skid stop to make my wife laugh, a random stranger said I shouldn’t do that.
4. At the airport, I had to pour out water before going through the security checkpoint. There was no bin to pour out water so I just poured it out in the garbage. A random stranger got quite upset and said the water does not go in the garbage.
Not to mention all of the very unfriendly interactions I had with locals. Honestly will probably never go back, people are so much more friendly and laid back elsewhere which is more my style.
But 1-3? You must've really gotten unlucky...
1 I could only imagine in expensive restaurants,
2. I am seriously surprised by, because while the person manning the train would almost always ignore you, so would everyone else - no matter what kind of gesture you do.
And 3... While I cannot fathom doing that on purpose myself, I'm extremely surprised anyone would bother interacting with anyone about that? Definitely doesn't reflect my experience living here for roughly 40 yrs
And it's funny, because the first thought they have if you get fined (say you didn't include the impressum in your personal website, or nosy neighbor found you mowing the lawn on sunday), it's that you must have done something wrong, not that the law is unfair.
It’s a Rechtsstaat with hardcore legal-positivist brain. Rules aren’t guidelines, intent doesn’t matter, context doesn’t matter, fun definitely doesn’t matter.
I think that is the biggest disconnect for me. To me rules are guidelines and I will break them when they do not make sense. Following the rules just because they are the rules doesn’t fit my style, although I live in a place when population density is very low so I understand that people bending the rules here has less of a consequence than bending the rules in densely populated areas.
And how do you know this? What’s the actual argument for why that must the case?
To what is this referring?
I got the Hitler reference, but not this one.
This doesn’t seem relevant to making an argument for the claims in the quoted text.
Plenty of rules are actually retarded and sometimes harmful if you follow them blindly. This is precisely how they got Nazism, and they like to pretend that it was only the bad guy Hitler's fault and a few other people's. If you know Germans well enough, it becomes pretty clear that a large part of the population was actually responsible in a small but meaningfull way.
I had a German exchange partner who refused to use the crosswalk unless the traffic light was absolutely green, even if there was absolutely no car or traffic around. That's just beyond stupid, and mindlessly following rules like that is how you get tyranny…
For most Germans the rationale is "even if there was no car or traffic around, and no child could see me doing this", where the latter part is the most important one.
If you do it with friends and nobody is around, no problem. I often cross the street over a pedestrian crossing when the pedestrian light is on red and there are no children around, and I got scolded (very rarely, like less than 1%) but I don't care because it just might have been an unhappy or intolerant person, but that's definitely not the rule that people scold you for this. I don't think this is a German problem. I'm pretty sure if I'd do that in France it would have the same effect (maybe not in Paris).
In regards to your Nazi-comment: Of course we are aware of that it takes the majority of people to enable a slipping into Naziism, which is why we are so strict about it: No signs nor expressions used in that period are allowed to be used today, an Americans even scold us for caring about not "forgetting" what had happened (because we don't allow the signs or expressions, "freedom of speech").
So you saying "they like to pretend that it was only the bad guy Hitler's fault" indicates that you have no clue about how most Germans are.
From the 4 points he mentioned, the only one which would piss me off would be the last one, where he decides to spill the water in the trash bin. Who does that? What do they think when they do this? Why not just ask the security person where he can dispose it?
But the other 3, I can't explain why they scolded him; it's not normal.