Robert Sand > Robert's Quotes

“[P]eople cannot be influenced by ideas to which they are not exposed.”
― Leonard S. Newman, UNDERSTANDING GENOCIDE

“The social nature of anti-Semitic beliefs is substantiated by the fact that dur­ing the late nineteenth century, most Germans had little, if any, contact with Jews. Jews made up only about 1% of the total German population (Goldhagen, 1996). Because of the general anti-Semitic social representation associated with Volkstum, many Jews had left Germany for safer havens elsewhere. Thus, most of what people knew (or thought they knew) about Jews was based on social consensus, not actual experience. As Festinger’s (1954) social comparison theory argues, social reality becomes paramount when physical reality provides few, if any, cues upon which one can base an opinion.”
― Leonard S. Newman, UNDERSTANDING GENOCIDE

“Often we believe certain things to be true simply because most, if not all, of the people around us believe and/or assert them to be true. With­ out any direct means to assess the validity of such beliefs, we infer their va­lidity based on consensus. Once we have these beliefs, and find that they are shared quite liberally within our social networks, we take them for granted and rarely think about them as needing validation. Moscovici (1984) has re­ferred to such generally shared beliefs as “social representations.” Such shared beliefs form the basis of a social aggregate’s shared reality and are often used to justify or substantiate other related beliefs or opinions.”
― Leonard S. Newman, UNDERSTANDING GENOCIDE

“Thus, social repre­sentations are believed because they are shared, not because they are inher­ently valid outside of our social reality.”
― Leonard S. Newman, UNDERSTANDING GENOCIDE

“[S]ituations do not only interact with dispositional factors to affect behavior, they
also shape and change those dispositions.”
― Leonard S. Newman, UNDERSTANDING GENOCIDE

“Clearly, it is difficult for an observer to disentangle all the reciprocal influ­ences that people and situations have on each other. Perhaps more surpris­ing, though, is just how poorly people appreciate how their own behavior can shape their social contexts. Social actors do not always appreciate or acknowl­edge the extent to which they affect situations—including how they affect the
other people in those situations—even when their influence would seem to be obvious.”
― Leonard S. Newman, UNDERSTANDING GENOCIDE

“[R]esearch on perceiver-induced constraint reveals that people do not always account for situational constraints on behavior, even when they themselves have constructed the situation. Thus, perpetrators could have focused on the degraded and pathetic state of their victims as justifica­tion for both their past and their future victimization, even though the per­petrators were actually responsible for their wretched state.”
― Leonard S. Newman, UNDERSTANDING GENOCIDE

“Neoliberal victim theory does not in fact ‘move beyond’ or ‘let go’ of the category victim. Instead it redefines victimhood and reorganizes the perception of who can and cannot be seen as a real and legitimate victim.”
― Rebecca Stringer, Knowing Victims

“Neoliberal victim theory is characterized first and foremost by a victim-blaming conception of victimization as subjective and psychological rather than social and political. According to this conception, victimization does not so much happen ‘to’ someone as arise from the self – through the having of a ‘victim personality’, through the making of bad choices, through inadequate practice of personal vigilance and risk management, through the failure to practise the rigorous discipline of positive thinking. This way of knowing victimization transforms social vulnerability into personal responsibility, erasing the social foundations of suffering in order to mask rising inequality, and making it seem logical to regard victims of poverty, inequality, discrimination and violence as the authors of their own suffering.”
― Rebecca Stringer, Knowing Victims

“In derogating the notion of ‘victim’, neoliberalism promotes a conception of victimization as subjective rather than social, a state of mind rather than a worldly situation. As a result, victims of poverty, inequality, discrimination and violence are discursively constructed as the authors of their own suffering, or as genuine victims of incomprehensible crime.”
― Rebecca Stringer, Knowing Victims

“Central to neoliberalism as a form of governance is the establishment of a personal responsibility system, by which the sphere of state responsibility contracts in the same measure as personal responsibility expands, privatizing social risk. ... This philosophy marks a significant shift in the liberal discourse of citizenship, supplanting the historical emphasis on rights with new emphasis on citizens’ responsibilities.”
― Rebecca Stringer, Knowing Victims

“Bartky’s theory is concerned with the consciousness or knowledge women can develop about sexist injustice. She draws what may appear to be an esoteric distinction between benighted victims, who do not recognize that they or others are being victimized, and knowing victims, who recognize the workings of injustice in their own lives and in the world. Yet this distinction is compelling as it situates experiences of victimization as sources of knowledge about power and ethics, rather than as mere individual episodes that are best downplayed or forgotten, yielding nothing of value for political and ethical reflection.”
― Rebecca Stringer, Knowing Victims

“Probing Wolf’s construction of rape crisis feminism as victim feminism also shows that Wolf ignores an important aspect of victim identity that rape crisis feminists acknowledge centrally. Namely, the much-examined tendency of victims of rape to engage in self-blame and ‘experience only self-directed anger’ (Alcoff and Gray, 1993, p. 284). Wolf espouses a version of survivorship called power feminism, without carrying through rape crisis feminism’s cautions about forms of agency that centrally involve self-blame. A core argument of Wolf is that victims are peculiarly at risk of failing to assume personal responsibility – this is what is so disabling about victim identity. Rape crisis feminists put the problem very differently: victims often assume excessive responsibility, for their own actions and for the actions of others. In fact, for rape crisis feminists, ‘victim identity’ primarily consists of this self-blaming consciousness. ... Rather than seek the ‘rewards’ of victim recognition, the self-blaming victim situates themselves as the agent of their own victimization.”
― Rebecca Stringer, Knowing Victims

“Despite its pacific demeanor, tolerance is an internally unharmonious term, blending together goodness, capaciousness, and conciliation with discomfort, judgment, and aversion. Like patience, tolerance is necessitated by something one would prefer did not exist. It involves managing the presence of the undesirable, the tasteless, the
faulty—even the revolting, repugnant, or vile. In this activity of management, tolerance does not offer resolution or transcendence, but only a strategy for coping.”
― Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire

“If tolerance poses as a middle road between rejection on the one side and assimilation on the other, this road, as already suggested, is paved by necessity rather than virtue; tolerance, as Nietzsche would say, becomes a virtue only retroactively and retrospectively.”
― Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire

“Designated objects of tolerance are invariably marked as undesirable and marginal, as liminal civil subjects or even liminal humans; and those called upon to exercise tolerance are asked to repress or override their hostility or repugnance in the name of civility, peace, or progress. Psychically, the former is the material of abjection and one variety of resentment (that associated with exclusion); the latter is the material of repressed aggression and another variety of resentment (that associated with forsworn strength or domination).”
― Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire

“Moreover, since (as chapters 3 and 5 will argue) tolerance requires that the tolerated refrain from demands or incursions on public or political life that issue from their “difference,” the subject of tolerance is tolerated only so long as it does not make a political claim, that is, so long as it lives and practices its “difference” in a depoliticized or private fashion. In addition to being at odds with the epistemological and political stance to which many politicized identities aspire, this requirement also results in the discursive suppression of the social powers that constitute “difference” as well as in the strengthening of the hegemony of unmarked cultures, ethnicities, races, or sexualities;”
― Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire

“Tolerated individuals will always be those who deviate from the norm, never those who uphold it, but they will also be further articulated as (deviant) individuals through the very discourse of tolerance.”
― Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire

“Tolerance also requires a public acceptance of beliefs and values at odds with our own, beliefs and values that we may consider wrongheaded and even immoral. ... In this context, a morally passionate citizen becomes strangely intolerable.”
― Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire

“As chapters 5 and 6 will discuss in detail, the identification of liberal democracies with tolerance and of nonliberal regimes with fundamentalism discursively articulates the global moral superiority of the West and legitimates Western violence toward the non-West. That is, the exclusive identification of the West with tolerance, and of tolerance with civilization, makes the West into the broker of the civilized, delimiting what is “intolerable” and therefore legitimate for imperial conquest cloaked as liberation.”
― Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire

“Only recently has tolerance become an emblem of Western civilization, an emblem that identifies the West exclusively with modernity, and with liberal democracy in particular, while also disavowing the West’s
savagely intolerant history, which includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch burnings, centuries of anti-Semitism, slavery, lynching, genocidal and other violent practices of imperialism and colonialism, Naziism, and brutal responses to decolonization.”
― Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire

“What conditions are usually necessary for outgroups to be mistreated? Activation of a
social identity leads to such negative outcomes after two conditions are met. First, ingroup members must believe that a common set of norms and values apply to both themselves and to members of the outgroup. Second, the ingroup must see its values as the only acceptable values, so that their values overwhelm those of the outgroup and are the ones that should guide both themselves and the outgroup. The combination of these two factors leads the ingroup to perceive members of the outgroup as deviant, morally inferior, and a potential threat to ingroup values.”
― Kristin J. Anderson, Benign Bigotry: The Psychology of Subtle Prejudice

“[B]enign bigotry often manifests in giving one group the benefit of the doubt, while other groups that are stereotyped are held to tight standards.”
― Kristin J. Anderson, Benign Bigotry: The Psychology of Subtle Prejudice

“In honor cultures, people are shunned and criticized not for exacting vengeance but for failing to do so.”
― Mark Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence

“Honor also makes people verbally aggressive. Just as status can be lost by accepting insults, so it can be gained by issuing them. The Montenegrans, for instance, are said not only to have “a low personal tolerance for insults” but also to exhibit “a
strong tendency to insult other people in the name of manly fearlessness” (Boehm, 1984: 103). Verbal pugnacity is a feature of most honor settings.”
― Mark Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence

“Insults can be much more subtle, posing dangers for the visitor unschooled in local custom as well as dilemmas for the insider familiar with the etiquette of honor. Part of the give-andtake of honor cultures, their “dialectic of challenge and riposte” as one sociologist puts it (Bourdieu, 1966: 197), is that people issue ambiguous affronts that force the recipient to choose between appearing excessively sensitive, on the one hand, or insufficiently manly, on the other (Pitt-Rivers, 1966:28).”
― Mark Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence

“Honor is the morality not of the bureaucrat or accountant but the warrior and aristocrat.”
― Mark Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence

“A culture of dignity expects people to ignore rather than to confront insult, to cultivate inner strength rather than outward display, and to let the state rather than the aggrieved prosecute violence.”
― Mark Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence

“As in days gone by, maintaining a public reputation for fearlessness is a central consideration for those located within a modern culture of honor (see, e.g., Horowitz, 1983: chap. 5). An honorable person must display heart, must not only be prepared to fight but be seen to, for in the competitive world of honor others will create tests: “There are always people around looking for a fight to increase their share of respect” (Anderson,
1994: 88). Turning the other cheek does no good, avoiding confrontation now will only attract more later. Word that somebody can be taunted or pushed around will inevitably spread. It is therefore far better in the long run to fight and lose than not to fight at all (Canada, 1995: 16).”
― Mark Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence

“Thus, the deeper problem in honor disputes is nearly always that of respect, and respect is vital when a reputation for strength or vulnerability quickly becomes public knowledge and largely determines how others will treat one. (For this reason, as the historian Edward Ayers [1984: 274] has noted, a white
southern aristocrat of the nineteenth-century would probably better understand the violent conflicts of young, lower-income males than do most middle-class people today.)”
― Mark Cooney, Warriors and Peacemakers: How Third Parties Shape Violence