(January 27, 2020 at 3:04 pm)AtlasS33 Wrote: But you have to make somebody "ostracized" if they are causing harm to others.
This is a kind of punishment that is good for the society and even essential: some people are in for the harm, they want to cause harm, they believe in harm culture too. The best solution would be to isolate them from the public, and their psychological harm would stop too when they can't practice it on anybody.
Yes, and I think the people who do the harm usually think they are doing a good thing. In fact they probably feel they are justified in ostracizing someone who doesn't conform to the group norms.
Every year in Japan several high school kids commit suicide from bullying. When the news media interview the bullies, they always say the same thing: that kid was kind of strange. He needed to be more normal. Anyway, life is tough, if he couldn't take a little bullying it was good for him to just check out.
We see exactly the same justification in operation in American society, and on this forum. Personal insults are justified; if you can't put up with bullying from the group you are the bad one, and you should just leave. On this forum they mean you should just leave the forum, but of course none of us knows what is going on in anyone else's private mental life. No one here knows who is on the brink.
So I think that in traditional Muslim societies people who will scold women who don't wear headscarves, and people on this forum who feel justified in typing personal insults at those who express difference, are really operating on the same principles. The scale is different, but that's only due to the numbers involved.
I do think that discipline is good in some cases, and that harmful people should be stopped from doing harm. The self-righteousness of those who feel the duty to attempt this, unofficially and with often counter-productive methods, is the problem.