RoR: Forum

[Csanad Szegedi] admits, for example, the difficulty he has in keeping kosher, especially because Hungarian cuisine frequently features pork.

Indeed! The so-called "goulash" from the Szeged region, Szegedi Gulyas features pork in sour cream. (One recipe here. Szeged paprika is also special.) Sour cream is pretty important for chicken paprikas and beef gulyas. Myself, I can do without it - except on potato pancakes. He'll survive kosher.

But as for the person in question, it is not unexpected that he would go overboard as a convert. He may be trying to atone in his own mind, but I think that you would agree that the realist response would be to abandon the racism and just be a rational person. However, he was not just prejudiced, but a committed ideologue. He needs the structure of a belief system.

What happens when you discover that the person you love is sleeping with someone else? Do your beliefs change?

Right now, I am reading books by Christopher Hitchens. He worked his through a lifetime of intellectual discovery. In god is not Great, on page 151, he writes:

When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith, but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered. The concept of historical and dialectic materialism was not an absolute and it did not have any supernatural element, but it did have its messianic element in the idea that an ultimate moment might arrive, and it most certainly had its martyrs and saints and doctinaires and (after a while) its mutually excommunicating rival papacies. It also had its schisms and inquisitions and heresy hunts. I was a member of a dissident sect that admired Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, and I can say definitely that we had our prophets...

... But there came a time when I could not protect myself, and indeed did not wish to protect myself from the onslaught of reality. Marxism, I conceded, had its intellectual and philosophical and ethical glories, but they were in the past. Something of the heroic period might perhaps be retained, but the fact had to be faced: there was no longer any guide to the future. In addition, the very concept of a total solution had led to the most appalling human sacrifices, and to the invention of excuses for them. ...

... There are days when I miss my own convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general, I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better, too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 11/04, 4:15pm)

Post 1

Monday, November 4, 2013 - 4:15pm

Most racists are racists because their very low self-esteem causes them to feel anxiety, fear or shame. They mitigate that with a pseudo-self-esteem built out a facade of racial identity. They pretend that they are not a shameful, fearful, anxious person by obsessing on the made-up character negatives they attach to the race they attack and wrap themselves in the made-up character positives they associate with their own race. They deny contradictions, repress signals that would tell them they are wrong, and fill their consciousness with obsessional material.

When this fellow is told he is a member of the race he has been hating, he can make use of denial (He's been there before - and just needs to reset what he denies), and he represses conflicting thoughts and feelings (also not a new thing for him), and he finds a new set of concretes to obsess over that will feed his pseudo-self-esteem by joining a new tribe. The faulty premise is that he will have values by joining a group and automatically acquiring their virtues and values.

That is the psychological view. Culturally and politically this is individualism versus collectivism. Psychoepistemologically this is independent thought versus social metaphysics. In sense of life terms, this is a benevolent view where other people are seen as potential values versus seeing a need to attack everyone that is different - that people are a danger - the sense of being under siege versus the enjoyment of finding people you like in groups you're new to.

Post 2

Monday, November 4, 2013 - 5:54pm

Michael - Good points. And I knew Hitchens and used some of that same, excellent quote in my remembrance of him:
http://www.atlassociety.org/christopher-hitchens-remembered

Post 3

Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - 12:23am

Steve,

Along the same lines... many racists are also so due to jealousy. They hate people who are more successful than themselves, want to attack such people and bring them down below their level.

Verses we share more of like a worship of people who have become more successful (via honest work) than ourselves.

So then racists don't really care about whether people do honest work nor want rewards and success to be related to the production of values. Instead, they want to group up with others who join them in focusing on some trivial feature like skin or eye color and claim that that trivial trait is what is actually deserving of rewards... and use that to murder and kill and enslave those who don't have the trivial traits in order to increase their own rewards at the expense of others... via the trivial trait.

Yea... this is the core of racism... to think that people deserve rewards or can be treated like property/non-humans just because of a trivial trait... rather than by an individual's productivity or crimes. Its just a philosophy of common thieves who want to say something other then "Lets kill them and take their stuff!" because in their group think they have all confirmed the idea of identifying the trivial trait in a person as being the scales of justice.

Post 4

Tuesday, November 5, 2013 - 1:58am