On FB, during the time when the party-state was still in full force (2023-05-16), I saw a post on the page of one of the party’s female influencers that contained a different message on each line, and reading together the highlighted first letters of the lines produced: “If God is with us, who is against us?” One of the lines was: “Why did István Vágó die just before the papal visit?” Someone commented to her that perhaps it is evil to make jokes about someone’s death, and to invoke God in doing so. She was outraged by this, wrote some explanation of why it was not evil, and even wrote: “I will not allow this post of mine to be demonized.”
It occurred to me that this post is already so demonic in itself that it may not even be possible to demonize it further.
But the point is that perhaps this post started the thought process that led me to the hypothesis that these people who work for the party—and many of the voters as well, who demand and say all kinds of evil things—actually truly believe themselves to be good, and the reason for this is that they have an imagined evil force in their heads—which includes everyone who is harmful to the party—and the evil of this force is so great that, by comparison, they can only be good, and this justifies all their evil.
This leads to such extreme situations that people who continuously misappropriate taxpayer assets meant to improve the situation of the impoverished, and spend them on luxury goods and smear campaigns, may actually be convinced that they are not the evil ones, but rather the journalist who at some point portrayed them in a bad light.
Part of my hypothesis is that their brains construct this imagined evil force largely out of grievances. It may work something like this: someone was fired from public television under the Gyurcsány government, for example, and because this was a personal grievance for them, they feel it to be a greater evil than anything else, including, of course, the fact that since then, at public television (after the party reinstated them), they may have burned billions on nonsense from money that belongs in the social welfare system.
The sentence, “I will not allow this post of mine to be demonized,” also shows that in this milieu they do not believe in objective moral standards, meaning that something cannot be good or bad in itself; rather, its nature depends on the marketing attached to it. If many people consider it good, then it is good; if too few do, then it is bad. One of the party’s leading activists, Gábor G. Fodor, also alluded to this when he said something to the effect that they are engaged in a struggle over reality. This woman apparently does not believe that her post can be evil in itself. According to her, it becomes so if she is not skillful enough, or not determined enough, and “allows” her post to be demonized.
Such psychological processes can lead all the way to the Petra László phenomenon, when a camerawoman and party activist deliberately tripped a father fleeing with his little daughter in his arms.
It occurred to me that this post is already so demonic in itself that it may not even be possible to demonize it further.
But the point is that perhaps this post started the thought process that led me to the hypothesis that these people who work for the party—and many of the voters as well, who demand and say all kinds of evil things—actually truly believe themselves to be good, and the reason for this is that they have an imagined evil force in their heads—which includes everyone who is harmful to the party—and the evil of this force is so great that, by comparison, they can only be good, and this justifies all their evil.
This leads to such extreme situations that people who continuously misappropriate taxpayer assets meant to improve the situation of the impoverished, and spend them on luxury goods and smear campaigns, may actually be convinced that they are not the evil ones, but rather the journalist who at some point portrayed them in a bad light.
Part of my hypothesis is that their brains construct this imagined evil force largely out of grievances. It may work something like this: someone was fired from public television under the Gyurcsány government, for example, and because this was a personal grievance for them, they feel it to be a greater evil than anything else, including, of course, the fact that since then, at public television (after the party reinstated them), they may have burned billions on nonsense from money that belongs in the social welfare system.
The sentence, “I will not allow this post of mine to be demonized,” also shows that in this milieu they do not believe in objective moral standards, meaning that something cannot be good or bad in itself; rather, its nature depends on the marketing attached to it. If many people consider it good, then it is good; if too few do, then it is bad. One of the party’s leading activists, Gábor G. Fodor, also alluded to this when he said something to the effect that they are engaged in a struggle over reality. This woman apparently does not believe that her post can be evil in itself. According to her, it becomes so if she is not skillful enough, or not determined enough, and “allows” her post to be demonized.
Such psychological processes can lead all the way to the Petra László phenomenon, when a camerawoman and party activist deliberately tripped a father fleeing with his little daughter in his arms.