🎥🎞️📝: <Amazing Focus>｜ A bet against faith

 Either die as a hero in this life, or watch yourself become a villain for the rest of your life.

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.

—The Dark Knight (2008)

"Spotlight" ( Spotlight ) is a 2015 American political thriller biographical drama, for Tom. McCarthy (Tom McCarthy) directed and with Josh. Co-written by Josh Singer. The content tells about the scandal that the church in the Boston area of the United States condoned and even acquiesced in the sexual abuse of children by pastors, and was organized, interviewed, and exposed by reporters from the "Boston Globe" focus group ( Spotlight ) for decades.

After watching the movie and reporting on it, I was connected to another recent social incident, "Eight Children of Xuzhou". The incident, which is now known as the "Xuzhou Eight-Child Mother Incident" , is a hot topic that will be widely exposed on social media around January 2022, involving cases of women being abused and human trafficking. The incident occurred in Huankou Town, Feng County, Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province, China. A video of a woman who allegedly had eight children and was imprisoned in a trance was circulated on various online platforms, and as investigators revealed the truth, the incident eventually sparked a huge public controversy.

Both of these two major social cases show the huge accomplice structure behind the incidents. The evil deeds of individuals actually require the cover of the whole group. The similarities between the two cases also point to the victims of power inequality . The former is the church to the commoners (top to bottom), the latter is the rural villagers to foreign women (more to less). It is difficult for victims in an unequal structure to escape the victimization cycle, and external intervention is often required to help the victim out of the predicament.

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Power unequal relationship between top and bottom

In most Western countries, people outside the church are like holy beings, and belief is a habit implemented in life. Therefore, it is common to go to church and listen to preachers. Therefore, for most Western countries , life is faith, faith is life, and the two are closely intertwined and cannot be easily separated.

In the church, pastors preach from top to bottom, and commoners listen from bottom to top. Here, the common people encounter the asymmetry of status in the Church; while everyone is "equally" nourished and sheltered by the Church, the Pope, priest, cardinal (one of the Pope's chief aides and advisers in governing the Catholic Church) The position, appointed by the Pope himself, is the position after the Pope in the clergy at all levels of the Catholic Church) and believers in other churches have a completely different power and an unshakable position, and this relationship is in the church system. It has been operating rigorously for hundreds of years.

The pastor who sexually abused children in "Boom Spot" has a certain position of power in the Boston Catholic Church. The families of children who have been violated did not deliberately tolerate such evil, but under their religious life, questioning these vicious priests is almost questioning the sanctity and purity of God. Cognitive dissonance under the faith makes these victims unable to publicly question the evil deeds tolerated by the church, and finally choose to turn a blind eye to avoid talking about it. In other words, if you take the initiative to expose, this is undoubtedly a bet against faith .

Once the obvious sexual assault scandal is covered with a belief filter, it seems that the victim cannot truly see the impact of the behavior on them. In particular, the pastor's cruel hand at a time when the children are gradually developing their conversion to the faith may only make the children rationalize their discomfort as part of their religious life, just like every victim is asked how to respond to the uncomfortable response when they are sexually assaulted. :

"I thought it was because he (the missionary) took special care of me."

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More to less power unequal relationship

As human beings, we are influenced by others throughout our lives, and by joining a homogeneous group that shares our views, we can give individuals a sense of group belonging and the courage to face the outside world. However, the number of people is a hidden concern in group life. A group with a larger number will inevitably affect a group with a smaller number. In a majority rule (also called majority rule) society, a group with a larger number of members It can even influence the direction of public opinion to gain the right to speak and spread its influence.

In the Xuzhou Eight Children's case, public opinion on the Internet has pointed to China's long-standing problem of human trafficking and how similar cases continue to occur in rural areas. Such a heinous act of kidnapping is far from what ordinary people think of as a paradise. However, the problem is not how the simple village is rendered into a ruined and evil place, but how the morally flawed behavior is gradually bleached by the expansion of the number of people. What can be done or even should be done ?

In the category of communication theory, there is a theory that describes the diffusion of ideas called " spiral of silence ". The main ideas of this theory are:

If people think that they are in the minority in the group, they will likely be reluctant to express their opinions; conversely, if people feel that their opinions are in line with the majority, they will be brave in expressing and responding. And the media usually focus on the views of the majority and despise the views of the minority. So the voice of the minority is getting quieter and the voice of the majority is getting louder, forming an upward spiral pattern. (Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, 1974)

In fact, in a highly connected group (eg, rural, primitive settlement, online community), actions or ideas can spread extremely rapidly, eventually engulfing opposing opinions. The tragedy of Xuzhou’s Eighth Child was also the result of cross-distribution. An inherently unacceptable moral flaw, after infecting a certain number of the local rural population, was irreversibly rationalized into something that can be done or even something that should be done. . If there are people in the countryside who do not agree with or even strongly oppose this behavior (such as women from other places), they will only be ignored or even silenced; Very few.

When rural individuals realize that they can transfer the responsibility for their behavior to the group they belong to, each group member seems to be able to transfer their responsibility through such a relay; however, such an idea simply allows its responsibility to go to waste and cannot be Substantially landed, and finally sank the responsibilities of the members into the bottomless pool of the group.

References:

Michael Rezendes (2002). Church allowed abuse by priest for years . The Boston Globe. Retrieved from: https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/special-reports/2002/01/06/church-allowed-abuse-priest -for-years/cSHfGkTIrAT25qKGvBuDNM/story.html

Li Wo Teng (2022). The identity of the mother of eight children in Xuzhou is confusing, but it has made the inconsistency of Chinese society more and more clear. Retrieved from: https://www.thenewslens.com/article/162861

BBC. (2022). Social and women's rights issues reflected in the "Mother of Eight Incident" in Xuzhou, China. Retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/trad/chinese-news-60259500

Lawyer Yingzhen (2022). Thriller than the Xuzhou Eight Children Incident! China's ban on film has destroyed the three-view shady scene, and human trafficking has become the CCP's propaganda method? Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rVSkLdTeSs&ab_channel=Yingzhen Lawyer

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1974). piral of silence theory . Retrieved from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence