They’re genuinely nice… aside from the Meidung, the restricted life opportunities and lack of many freedoms, whatever sexual (rape & incest, sometimes enabled by anesthetic) abuses are covered up by social structures, and all the other problems they have from our perspective. Let’s not idealize them.
Indeed, but even if you take the worst imaginable view of them, you still have to admit that they respect the “good fences—good neighbors” principle. I see no prospect that they might cease doing so in the foreseeable future, even if they expand greatly.
I sure won’t be joining them anytime soon, but this still makes it irrational for me to be frightened by them, considering all the the high-status mainstream people whose Meidung I have to fear if I speak my mind with too much liberty, who limit my freedoms and opportunities in ways I find suffocating and frustrating, and who run the presently powerful institutions with an incomparably worse record of abuses. (The latter often aren’t even covered up in an active and planned way, but rather kept from scrutiny merely by the high status of the institutions in question, making it a self-destructive status-lowering move just to start arguing against them.)
They’re genuinely nice… aside from the Meidung, the restricted life opportunities and lack of many freedoms, whatever sexual (rape & incest, sometimes enabled by anesthetic) abuses are covered up by social structures, and all the other problems they have from our perspective. Let’s not idealize them.
Indeed, but even if you take the worst imaginable view of them, you still have to admit that they respect the “good fences—good neighbors” principle. I see no prospect that they might cease doing so in the foreseeable future, even if they expand greatly.
I sure won’t be joining them anytime soon, but this still makes it irrational for me to be frightened by them, considering all the the high-status mainstream people whose Meidung I have to fear if I speak my mind with too much liberty, who limit my freedoms and opportunities in ways I find suffocating and frustrating, and who run the presently powerful institutions with an incomparably worse record of abuses. (The latter often aren’t even covered up in an active and planned way, but rather kept from scrutiny merely by the high status of the institutions in question, making it a self-destructive status-lowering move just to start arguing against them.)