{"id":2795,"date":"2020-12-08T06:19:14","date_gmt":"2020-12-08T06:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/12\/08\/hospitals-and-torture-chambers\/"},"modified":"2020-12-08T06:19:14","modified_gmt":"2020-12-08T06:19:14","slug":"hospitals-and-torture-chambers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/12\/08\/hospitals-and-torture-chambers\/","title":{"rendered":"Hospitals and Torture Chambers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 13pt;\">We are strangely, insanely, conflicted.&#0160; We care lovingly, or at least dutifully, for the sick, the injured, and the dying. But we also torture people to death in ways that inspire envy in demons. The belief that humans are inherently good is one of the deepest of human delusions. Paradoxically, those who succumb to it excel in the theory and practice of hell, to borrow a title from Eugen Kogon&#39;s <a href=\"https:\/\/us.macmillan.com\/books\/9780374529925\">unforgettable book<\/a>.<br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 13pt;\">Limited government and checks and balances across the board help keep power dispersed, the power that goes to the head and makes of the half-way decent moral monsters. Prospects for limited government, however, are themselves&#0160; limited in a high-tech surveillance society in which soft totalitarianism can be expected to give way to the good old-fashioned hard variety.<br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 13pt;\"> <a class=\"asset-img-link\" href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/.a\/6a010535ce1cf6970c026bdeabcd08200c-pi\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Freezing torture\" border=\"0\" class=\"asset  asset-image at-xid-6a010535ce1cf6970c026bdeabcd08200c img-responsive\" src=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/.a\/6a010535ce1cf6970c026bdeabcd08200c-800wi\" style=\"display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" title=\"Freezing torture\" \/><\/a><br \/><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We are strangely, insanely, conflicted.&#0160; We care lovingly, or at least dutifully, for the sick, the injured, and the dying. But we also torture people to death in ways that inspire envy in demons. The belief that humans are inherently good is one of the deepest of human delusions. Paradoxically, those who succumb to it &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2020\/12\/08\/hospitals-and-torture-chambers\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Hospitals and Torture Chambers&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[180,39,47,443],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-decline-of-the-west","category-human-predicament","category-power","category-torture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}