「上梁不正下梁弯」 - When the upper beam is crooked, the lower beams are bent.
It's been months since this scandal, but I'll offer a few more thoughts for anyone who happens to read:
If you asked them why they did all this, they'd say: "Why not? Because it's fun." That's the fundamental ethical question: "Why do you commit evil?"
"Why not?"
And you'll have no argument against "Why not?" When someone doesn't believe in certain norms and values, you have absolutely no way to convince them otherwise.
Referring to such people, Yuri Bezmenov said:
“They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern [alluding to Pavlov]. You can not change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.”
Demoralization is a process that is “irreversible.” Bezmenov actually thought (back in 1984) that the process of demoralizing America was already completed. It would take another generation and another couple of decades to get the people to think differently and return to their patriotic American values, claimed the agent.
In what is perhaps a most striking passage in the interview, here’s how Bezmenov described the state of a “demoralized” person:
“As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore,” said Bezmenov. “A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his balls then he will understand. But not before that. That’s the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.”
If you think you can decide your own truth, you are no different from someone who thinks they can decide their own pronouns, literally.
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. Because the simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the whole world." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago