The toddler thing wasn’t a red herring at all. It was extreme case reasoning. I didn’t even suggest the toddler was Russian or that the line or reasoning I was using only applies to certain places, so unless you think that I wish to infantilize literally every person in existence, using that example wasn’t that either.
The point I was trying to make with it was simply that societies (as a whole), are fundamentally, definitionally I’d even say, incapable of making choices. This is because societies are not people. They are made up of people, but a society is not a person unto itself.
A society isn’t even really an organization, because it has no mechanism for collective decision making. There are often organizations associated with a society, such as governments, but these do not have perfect overlap as not everyone in a societypeople generally be subject to the one associated with that society, nor do their decisions often align perfectly with those of many of the people within that society, nor do all societies even have one (if you wish to use Russia as the example, there are Russians that live outside the jurisdiction of the Russian state, Russians that disagree with, actively fight against, or simply do not know about that state, and for that matter people from other societies that do live within the jurisdiction of that state.)
What societies are is simply a box to sort people into, because people think in terms of labels. The nature of human psychology is such that we need to put everything, even ourselves and others, into various boxes, to understand who we are and what everyone and everything around us is. I bring up dehumanization though, because humans do not fit perfectly, into any of these, and insisting that the boxes do describe people perfectly dehumanizes them. It strips them of their individual differences and declares that anyone who can be fit in a certain box, is interchangeable with another who does. Insisting that a society can be responsible for something does just this, it ignores what any individual person has or has not done and reduces them to merely what language they speak or what culture they’re associated with or what set of arbitrary lines on a map they were born inside.
If Russia is to be the example, then I can use a personal one: I have a childhood friend from Russia. He hasn’t lived there since around elementary school age, but he was born there, has a mother who grew up there, speaks the language, used to visit family there (for obvious reasons he hasn’t been back in quite a number of years, but still). He considers himself Russian still, and ticks enough of the boxes that I’d imagine most people would accept that. Am I to go to him, ask him “Why did you invade Ukraine?” and then demand he face some kind of penalty? What was he supposed to have done differently? all, he hadn’t any say in the decision to seize Crimea and then invade the rest of Ukraine, he’s never served in Russia’s military or sent them aid, never worked their factories or even any kind of job there.
If 85 percent of Russians have done something worthy of punishment, or Israelis, or Americans, or Chinese or any other group of people you can think of, and you have the means, then by all means, punish that 85 percent. But why does the responsibility of those people transfer onto the other 15 percent? Because it is logistically easier than trying to figure out what each individual person has done?
If I can say “the people invading Ukraine are Russians, therefore Russian society is to blame and every Russian person can be punished” or “the people conducting a genocide in Gaza are Israelis, therefore Israeli society is to blame and every Israeli can be punished” (like the original post was talking about and which I disagreed with), can I also say “The people invading Ukraine are humans, therefore human society is to blame and every human person can be punished”? If not, is it because that box is too big, and includes people who are not involved? And if so, why can I not then say that about the Russian box, and insist on choosing instead the box that contains only the people actually responsible, even if the latter box should the majority of the former? If having the majority of the bigger box
I know that I’m not really very good at getting my points across, the frustration of that is why I tend to take hours responding to things, trying to phrase what I’m trying to say in different ways in the hope that at least one of them is clear to any given person, but this is one of those things that just seems so fundamental and blatantly obvious to me that I honestly struggle to understand how it is even possible to disagree with it, let alone to appear to take offense to it somehow (at least, that is the tone I get from some of your replies).
The toddler thing wasn’t a red herring at all. It was extreme case reasoning. I didn’t even suggest the toddler was Russian or that the line or reasoning I was using only applies to certain places, so unless you think that I wish to infantilize literally every person in existence, using that example wasn’t that either.
The point I was trying to make with it was simply that societies (as a whole), are fundamentally, definitionally I’d even say, incapable of making choices. This is because societies are not people. They are made up of people, but a society is not a person unto itself.
A society isn’t even really an organization, because it has no mechanism for collective decision making. There are often organizations associated with a society, such as governments, but these do not have perfect overlap as not everyone in a societypeople generally be subject to the one associated with that society, nor do their decisions often align perfectly with those of many of the people within that society, nor do all societies even have one (if you wish to use Russia as the example, there are Russians that live outside the jurisdiction of the Russian state, Russians that disagree with, actively fight against, or simply do not know about that state, and for that matter people from other societies that do live within the jurisdiction of that state.)
What societies are is simply a box to sort people into, because people think in terms of labels. The nature of human psychology is such that we need to put everything, even ourselves and others, into various boxes, to understand who we are and what everyone and everything around us is. I bring up dehumanization though, because humans do not fit perfectly, into any of these, and insisting that the boxes do describe people perfectly dehumanizes them. It strips them of their individual differences and declares that anyone who can be fit in a certain box, is interchangeable with another who does. Insisting that a society can be responsible for something does just this, it ignores what any individual person has or has not done and reduces them to merely what language they speak or what culture they’re associated with or what set of arbitrary lines on a map they were born inside.
If Russia is to be the example, then I can use a personal one: I have a childhood friend from Russia. He hasn’t lived there since around elementary school age, but he was born there, has a mother who grew up there, speaks the language, used to visit family there (for obvious reasons he hasn’t been back in quite a number of years, but still). He considers himself Russian still, and ticks enough of the boxes that I’d imagine most people would accept that. Am I to go to him, ask him “Why did you invade Ukraine?” and then demand he face some kind of penalty? What was he supposed to have done differently? all, he hadn’t any say in the decision to seize Crimea and then invade the rest of Ukraine, he’s never served in Russia’s military or sent them aid, never worked their factories or even any kind of job there.
If 85 percent of Russians have done something worthy of punishment, or Israelis, or Americans, or Chinese or any other group of people you can think of, and you have the means, then by all means, punish that 85 percent. But why does the responsibility of those people transfer onto the other 15 percent? Because it is logistically easier than trying to figure out what each individual person has done?
If I can say “the people invading Ukraine are Russians, therefore Russian society is to blame and every Russian person can be punished” or “the people conducting a genocide in Gaza are Israelis, therefore Israeli society is to blame and every Israeli can be punished” (like the original post was talking about and which I disagreed with), can I also say “The people invading Ukraine are humans, therefore human society is to blame and every human person can be punished”? If not, is it because that box is too big, and includes people who are not involved? And if so, why can I not then say that about the Russian box, and insist on choosing instead the box that contains only the people actually responsible, even if the latter box should the majority of the former? If having the majority of the bigger box
I know that I’m not really very good at getting my points across, the frustration of that is why I tend to take hours responding to things, trying to phrase what I’m trying to say in different ways in the hope that at least one of them is clear to any given person, but this is one of those things that just seems so fundamental and blatantly obvious to me that I honestly struggle to understand how it is even possible to disagree with it, let alone to appear to take offense to it somehow (at least, that is the tone I get from some of your replies).