Most likely because you’ve been conditioned to believe that everything is your fault, whether it has or hasn’t been. You may have been raised in a household where blameshifting and victim-shaming were standard responses to complaints, which is far more common than most people want to admit, given how prevalent that behaviour is in society.
We are generally all taught to internalize our pains and cope silently with the mistreatments we receive from others, and that’s primarily a consequence of other people’s incapacity to do anything that could help alleviate another’s suffering. Most people are just too busy trying to keep their heads above water in a dystopic world where they can’t afford to care for others because doing so comes at the expense of their survival.
This condition of “everyone for themselves” is by design and has been cultivated in society over the last several decades by a ruling class that has pitted individuals and groups within the working class against one another.
They’ve realized it’s cheaper to cultivate animosity within the lower classes than to support income equity and economic justice.
The consequence is for people to internalize their unresolved issues and begin a process of suicidal ideation. Blaming yourself for everything is a slippery slope, not limited to your personal experience but also a cultivated attitude in society. We can see an upward trend correlating suicidal ideation with the increased economic injustice we are all forced to endure by the ownership class.
In essence, the long-term consequences of the class war waged against the working class is a strategy of deflection away from their persistent threats while simply directing a flow of negative sentiment back onto the working class while denying the majority a valid outlet for their struggles, and that creates a solution for them that permits them to ignore the suffering they cause.
They have become so successful in cultivating a self-destructive form of lower-class pruning that whenever someone steps outside the paradigm and shockingly challenges their destruction, many among the lower classes will fight to protect the system of abuse by attacking those who do not capitulate and die quietly so as not to disturb their quiet reverie.
People like Luigi Mangione respond in diametric opposition to their expectations of people internalizing their abuses, and that represents a shock to a system they cannot tolerate, so take measures to ensure vigilantism like his is presented to the public in such a way that he becomes a message to the little people of what will happen to them if they resist and fight back.
In short, believing everything is your fault is precisely the attitude cultivated in society because that’s how the ruling class can rule with a minimal amount of their blood being shed.
This post is a “twofer.” It’s a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What do you think about Elon Musk saying “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elon-musk-empathy-quote/“ — In this case, I’m setting up my answer with an answer to another question: “What role does empathy play in understanding and connecting with the thoughts of others?”
Empathy is a conduit to understanding and connecting with others.
Empathy is like an additional sense or language allowing more profound insights into people than a typical means of sharing information about oneself with others.
“How you say something is as important as what you say.”
I assume you’ve encountered this above phrase or similar ones to understand how meaning is conveyed in ways beyond the definitions of the words one uses.
Empathy is similar in that one identifies more closely with the emotions of others, which makes it easier to connect with people on much deeper levels much more quickly than most people are used to.
Empathy is otherwise the glue that keeps human civilization together.
“Evil is a lack of empathy.”
This sentence above is the simple answer that most have already presented, so I had intended to ignore this question. Tomaz Vargazon’s answer, however, has motivated me to provide my input by the inclusion of the full quote he provided from Musk’s interview with Joe Rogan:
Musk: Yeah, he’s [Gat Saad] awesome, and he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, there’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So, we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
Rogan: Also don’t let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.
Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.
“Suicidal empathy”
“Don’t let someone use your empathy against you.”
The “empathy exploit.”
These three statements indicate that these sociopathic morons don’t understand empathy because they are conflating “ compassion” with “empathy.”
These are not the same thing. Not by a long shot.
Empathy operates like a sensory receiver, while compassion is a cognitive process of identifying with another life.
Empathy cannot be “used against someone” any more than one’s eyes can be used against them.
The ability to experience another’s emotions is not a weakness but a strength.
Another issue is how we process our understanding of the emotions we detect.
The only vulnerability to exploit is the trust connection between individuals, and that exploit exists regardless of either party’s empathetic capabilities.
Their arguments are the equivalent of claiming one can be susceptible to being robbed because they know more about the criminal attempting to rob them.
It’s a bloody ludicrous argument forwarded only by sociopaths who have no clue what empathy is.
The harsh reality in today’s world is that empathetic people are victimized precisely because they’re walking, talking, living, and breathing lie detectors.
Anyone with advanced empathetic sensitivities understands precisely what I’ve just said. Every sociopath on the planet would otherwise vehemently deny this is the case while using this statement to vilify anyone who reveals this truth to the public.
Only sociopaths would ever dare to consider empathy a weakness because they recognize empathy as a superpower wielded by people who always default to showing compassion toward others, especially toward those like them, who comprise the most broken humans among us.
The lesson of today’s age and of this garbage pronouncement by the most destructive sociopaths we have seen emerge in society has pushed the tolerances and compassions that empathetic people experience toward humanity past the brink of decency and forces us to realize how our species is in a severe struggle for survival.
If we allow these sociopathic monsters to continue defining humanity for us, civilized society as we know it will crumble.
Now is the time for empathy to assert itself as humanity’s superpower and end the scourge of sociopathy before it’s too late.
Now is the time for the meek to inherit the Earth because these monsters have no respect for life beyond their fleeting whims.
These are expressions from people who have no reverence for anything outside their navels.
The more we allow them to assert dominion over humanity’s character, the more they teach us they will relent only when we break and repeat history.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “To which degree is not having enough time, and being relatively busy, contribute to most people not being able to come up with new ground breaking ideas, make new inventions, or even making novels, manga etc.?”
Many answers are the typical soporifics based on the presumption that today’s economics are “normal.” There is no accommodation for the dysfunctional state of economic affairs people live with today.
People can conceptualize how one income earner per family was the norm 50 years ago. Still, they can’t imagine the math well enough to understand the differences between then adequately and now when a two-income family can barely make ends meet.
During the heyday of the middle class and the economics of a time we’ve lost, blue-collar labourer dad could earn enough from his low-skilled job to afford a mortgage, a relatively new vehicle, and an annual vacation for himself, his wife, and their two-and-a-half kids.
That’s just a pipe dream which no longer exists for the average citizen, particularly not when a large contingent of full-time employees can’t afford stable housing.
Unskilled labour means being unable to afford to live. In the U.S., one needs two full-time jobs to afford to rent a cheap private suite. Shared accommodation is the only way to make ends meet. Consolidating incomes to meet basic survival needs has become the norm.
One job is no longer enough to survive on.
Forget investing in one’s future.
Income mobility has all but vanished.
Everyone today has been living with a supplemental income in a gig economy while learning to monetize every waking moment to feed and clothe themselves for so long that it’s become a normalized existence.
There’s no time left for a social life, let alone any entrepreneurial initiative. Topping that challenge off, no disposable income exists to permit investments in education or capital purchases to allow expansion. One must scrimp and save while sacrificing meeting sleep and nutritional requirements to cobble together something of a hope for building a better future.
It’s insane, and no one knows any better because the period in which trillions have been stolen from the working class has happened so slowly that one would have to understand what starting from scratch then was like compared to what starting from scratch today is like.
How unfortunate for me but fortunate for those who will listen. The difference between then and now is nightmare and day.
Getting a job that would not only pay for living expenses and a social life while having plenty left over to bank and save for an education was a matter of a decent paying labour job during summer break from school and a part-time job during the academic year. Even with those financial burdens, there was still plenty of disposable income to afford a very healthy social life. A concert back then, for example, didn’t cost a week’s worth of pay but half of a shift for one night’s work — a movie cost less than one hour’s worth of labour. A movie night out now is an entire day’s worth of labour.
I think it’s essential to stop counting numbers on the level of an abstraction like money and start counting the increasing costs we’ve been enduring based on our time because that’s the most valuable commodity each of us has.
It’s much easier to ignore the costs we’ve been increasingly enduring without matching increases in our income when they’re treated like abstractions. If we were to look at how much time has been stolen from our lives, I’m pretty sure the guillotines would be out in full force right now.
The problem with factoring economic changes based on dollar figures is that it allows the victim-shaming mindset we see displayed by so many sycophants for the wealthy to assert their nonsense positions with righteous indignity.
They can remain utterly oblivious to reality and the delusional nature of presumptions autonomically adjusted to a dysfunctional economy while failing to account for the severe impact on one’s time that has been stolen from the working class.
It’s been slightly over ten years ago now that I had my life destroyed by a nuclear bomb being dropped on it, not because of anything I did but because others assumed their fraudulent righteousness permitted the devastating assault. That was a severe lesson in the extent to which overcompensating behaviour can become a destructive force in society — that I intend to share in more detail but not here because it’s a distraction from the point of this answer.
At any rate, I can unequivocally state that if that had happened to me when I first started carving out my niche for a professional future almost 50 years ago, it would have been a relatively minor event in my life. I would have recovered within a couple of years and been well on my way to having put that traumatic nightmare in my rearview mirror.
Instead, I’ve struggled to regain my footing for over ten years. The life I had is gone and unrecoverable.
Instead of making small bits of progress on the road to recovery, I’ve been enduring an increasing degradation in my quality of life as I find bits of it and my dignity being slowly stripped from me every day, not because of my bad decisions or because of anything I’ve done to warrant this nightmare, but because others choose to pile on their abuses atop the mountain that weighs me down.
For example, I’m currently scrimping to put together enough of a buffer in my economics to afford a minor upgrade to a graphics card that will allow me to become more efficient and competitive in the marketplace while allowing me to work at resolutions that can secure income. It’s funny how an obscure specification such as image resolution can hinder success, but that’s our world today. Forty years ago, such a minor upgrade would have been, at most, a couple of months of saving up spare cash to pay cash for the upgrade. I’m saving to afford an additional monthly payment for an 18-month commitment.
The world we live in today is characterized by a lifestyle I first became familiar with in art school with the dynamic of patrons. Relationships between artists and their patrons financed art production in the Middle Ages. Today’s equivalent to that in the high-tech world is an “incubator.” For general entrepreneurs, it means a guest appearance on Shark Tank to hope a capitalist can see a parasitic profit relationship from your initiative by doing nothing but assume control over your enterprise and collecting cash for your efforts.
The alternative for the little people is to turn to the government to find themselves herded through an infantilization process and vetted to identify the value to be extracted from them by financial enterprises that have developed relationships with pseudo-government entities called “Stewardship.” They are intended to provide business development services but don’t do anything beyond setting you up to be bilked by predatory lenders from whom they get a cut.
In my case, I went along with the puppy mill program with a naive attitude that I could trust a government-aligned agency to tell me the truth about my options. I went along with the program to develop a concrete plan for recovering my entrepreneurial income within a couple of years with a product idea and niche that would generate over $100 thousand per year working for myself without needing support staff.
A simple demand loan of less than $15,000 would have been sufficient to get my life back on track. I discovered early on that it wasn’t even on their radar for a support option. As it turned out, the $10,000 in financing I was promised was not even close to possible by the time I had completed their program.
I was informed at the outset that I was eligible for a grant that would have made financing possible. At the end of my programs for creating my business and financial planning documents, I asked what had happened to the grant. I received crickets as a response and then was insulted with condescension by someone who’s never been an entrepreneur and nothing more than a bookkeeper.
The fact that I had progressively managed to succeed on my terms for over 25 years and that I had proven I knew what I was doing when I provided an advanced business plan in greater detail than they expected or had ever seen through their program was irrelevant. (Most people I met in the rudimentary courses I was herded through were quite naive about business processes. I found myself contributing value on a level that augmented the instructors’ efforts — and in which they expressed a sincere appreciation because it increased class engagement).
Everything, every entity, and every stage in society is rigged at every level from a predatory perspective to drain value from anyone unlucky enough to have to rely on their “altruistic” roles in society. It’s become a game of indentured leveraging, not unlike the days of gladiators who would agree to a couple of years in the arena getting beaten and stabbed to get themselves out of debt.
Had I been living through the same economy as when I started, I would not have even needed to rely on external support. I would have had sufficient disposable income from a typical labour job to use my initiative to climb out of this nightmare of a hole I’ve been dumped into — within only a few years.
The short answer to the question posed after this long-winded rant is that it is to EVERY degree that the little people no longer have a hope of income mobility. The ideas, inventions, and initiatives still exist. It’s the resources we once had that have vanished from the landscape. It’s the disposable income that we could rely on to improve our lives that no longer exists.
That is the most motivationally destructive assault the wealthy have perpetrated upon us, and I would not be able to restrain myself in the presence of many of the sociopathic assholes who are playing games with our lives. While increasing their hoards to historic levels of obscenity, they parasitically drain our value from us.
The dynamics of today’s economy are enraging on a level I could never have imagined experiencing, but here we are. I’m now someone who, after a lifetime of being vehemently against capital punishment, endorses precisely that with guillotines for the 1% in our society if they don’t wake up and start taking economic restorations seriously and beginning with supporting UBI.
With UBI, all the repressed creativity withheld from society and human progress will be released into a new era to make our first Renaissance appear like a trial run. We are on the verge of a fully automated society. The only thing holding us back from an explosion of creativity and initiative is the sick competition among the most parasitic among us to become the world’s first trillionaire.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Elon Musk apparently didn’t dismiss empathy entirely, but thought that we have a problem with empathy for the wrong people. How do you judge?”
I partly disbelieve this moronic assertion but won’t deny it’s possible he would say something so stupid.
I wouldn’t put it past him because he disowned a daughter that he paid to ensure she was born physically as a male.
He got pissed that he didn’t get what he paid for and punished his child for daring to assert her identity.
Suppose he lacks empathy, which he seems to demonstrate while bemoaning his inability to experience empathy proudly. In that case, he’s a walking-talking case for how badly screwed up some kids can be when their sociopathic parents severely screw them over.
It still amazes me when I look at photos of him as a kid because he appears as a somewhat sensitive type of nerd who tried being himself but was abused for it.
That’s the only explanation I can devise that makes sense of his severe state of dysphoria (minus the drug addiction of both the chemical kind and the egotistical drug of power through his wealth).
He appears as a youth to be a typical “sensitive” who would likely have been highly empathetic. Still, it’s been beaten out of him through likely mostly verbal abuse (because he doesn’t appear to show typical traits of physical abuse — such as scars or even an emotional coldness in his demeanour). (Unlike DonOld Trump, whose physical abuse is written all over his demeanour. You can almost read the number of times his father physically beat him like counting rings on a tree trunk.)
Statements like the one attributed to him show the child attempting to speak through the cracks of a semi-polished exterior.
Empathy is like any other characteristic, which presents itself in varying degrees throughout the population. Empathy is like muscle mass; it has a developmental potential but must be cultivated to show itself in its most developed form.
In his case, his capacity for empathy was stripped from him and has been starved to (near?) non-existence.
I suspect some vestiges of empathy remain alive within him but that he’s trapped in a world where he cannot trust, allowing himself to experience it because the fear of permitting himself to experience it openly has been beaten out of him by his parents.
It’s not that the “wrong people have empathy” but that people have had their empathy wrongly denied their right to experience it without adverse repercussions.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “With the stock market plummeting, market prices soaring, and unemployment on the rise, is it a good bet that no Republican will ever win the presidency again?”
One would think so. One would hope so.
However, history dispels that delusion.
If people remembered who was responsible for what, there would be few Republican members of Congress today.
DonOld Trump is considered “below water” in his numbers at an historical level, but that only means less than half of 350 million people support his performance.
Here are the daily results on Real Clear Politics, which aggregates results from multiple pollsters:
47.8% Approve of his performance and 48.5% disapprove of his performance.
From a polling and historical perspective, these numbers are considered disastrous for this president. Still, the reality is that almost half of the nation, by extrapolation, supports this wrecking crew of an administration.
There are over 150 million people who should be paralyzed with fear over the prospects of their future who are cheering on the destruction engine as it wreaks havoc over every aspect of their lives that they count on to survive.
These people are more focused on politics as a team sport in which they view themselves winning even though they may be losing everything. As long as their team remains in power to hurt those they hate, they care for nothing more beyond that because they expect the lives they’ve grown accustomed to living to stay as they’ve expected. None can conceive of the great steamroller bearing down on them because they believe it’s meant to destroy only the neighbours they hate.
They won’t realize the horror of the situation they are creating for themselves until being directly confronted by it. Even then, they won’t admit to being responsible for making their fates and will deflect responsibility onto their ideological enemies.
The greatest lesson we are learning about modern humans that we have been able to overlook throughout history, primarily, is the impact of mental health on the stability of our societies.
We have been living with generational PTSD for thousands of generations and have accepted many toxic attitudes and behaviours as “normal,” while in today’s world, we’ve begun asserting a need to address these toxicities. The consequence has been an escalation of toxicity because those most afflicted cannot and will not seek help for their dysphoric conditions. They will escalate their rejection of responsibility for their destructive behaviours and attack those who seek to address those behaviours to help cure our species of their horrifyingly destructive impacts.
Anyone who has dealt with abusive behaviours understands how the abuser becomes most dangerous when they feel that their grip on power is loosening. They despise it when their victims become more capable of defending themselves against them. Their response is rarely an act of introspective self-awareness, leading to acknowledging how they are being asked to transcend their hatred. Their responses are almost always an escalation and a vicious attack against those who shine a light into their darkness to force them to confront its ugliness.
DonOld Trump will never acknowledge his responsibility for escalating international conflict because he sincerely believes himself to be victimized by his victims for not simply rolling over and capitulating to his demands.
Almost 150 million Americans think like he does to varying degrees and that means Americans will be plagued by Republican betrayals of basic human decency until, like addicts, they hit rock bottom and realize they won’t survive without acknowledging how much they depend upon the support of the international community in which they belong to and begin begging for assistance.
That won’t happen until at least after they trigger a deep depression.
That also won’t happen mainly because their opposition is also in denial over the severity of their problems. They still mistakenly believe that they can reason their way back to sanity.
The DNC is still primarily in denial that they and their nation are in a war that will destroy them unless they can stir up the passion of love of country to match the passion of destruction driving their opposition. They’re still trying to play by the rules of decorum while denying how those rules are irrelevant to a monster who ignores them at best and who weaponizes them against the DNC.
This approach turns off a large contingency of potential voters because it is construed as cowardice, and to a large degree, it is. They can’t help but continually lose against an aggressive enemy when they perpetually move toward compromise.
At some point, compromise is more toxically destructive than full-on aggression, and the DNC hasn’t yet realized that it has long passed that threshold. They lost the ability to compromise when they didn’t hold the Bush administration accountable for their war crimes and now the chickens have come home to roost.
This does not bode well for America’s future and spells hardship, at best, for the rest of the world.
This is a period in human history and global politics with at least as significant an impact on our international culture as WW2 has had. How much more severe the impacts will become is impossible to guess because we haven’t even come close to the horizon that will allow us to perceive, let alone acknowledge how massive the engine of destruction is that bears down upon us all.
Only a working-class member of society can pose this question because the little people are perpetually shamed when they take more than they need. This guilt may have begun in our early history while struggling for survival as tribal units, where scarcity was an omnipresent threat due to our level of development and not a consequence of the corrupt politics defining our world today.
If one tribe member took more than they needed, then it was apparent to all members that they all suffered. Greed was naturally restrained at that level, and like all traditions and attitudes inherited from our history, guilt-shaming people for taking more than they need has been passed on throughout the generations.
It’s been an effective means of encouraging people to consider the needs of others. Still, society is no longer plagued with the existential threat of scarcity by our physical incapacity to meet our needs. The threat of scarcity has transformed from a physical limitation to an entirely artificial construct created by the powerful in society to leverage the lion’s share of benefits to themselves. Scarcity has been transformed into a systemic issue enabled by politics, gluttony, and greed. Taking more than one needs at a local banquet no longer results in someone dying of hunger. However, we can still recognize and react viscerally to someone who gorges themselves to the point of vomiting up their overconsumption.
We don’t react that way with the wealthy, whose overindulgence is invisible to most because it manifests as an economic abstraction — numbers in a system characterized by intricate mathematical gymnastics. We don’t react that way to the Walton family underpaying their people and cutting back on staffing to the degree where the few employed are overworked and so radically underpaid that they need government subsidies to survive. We envy their successes and reward them with more benefits.
There isn’t a wealthy person on the planet who doesn’t take advantage of every benefit they can.
They do that as a matter of course and as a matter of pride. Donald Trump has bragged about circumventing his tax responsibilities, and the people cheer him for his success while envying it and wishing they could do the same.
We’ve created a double standard in a society where the privileged few are rewarded for taking advantage of benefits they don’t need while victim-shaming those who rely on benefits they desperately need to survive on the bare necessities.
There is something wrong with this picture, but we seem to prefer to ignore it when designing policies and creating legislation that dramatically affects the lives of billions.
Whether your issue with whatever benefits you or those you know may be taking advantage of, I would suggest we’re only playing into the biases corrupting our systems by focusing on what individuals do when availing themselves of benefits, We would all be far better off addressing the issue of benefits from a systemic level because the sentiment resulting from a fixation on what one’s neighbours are spending their food stamp money only enables the billionaires to justify their tax cuts and increase their subsidies.
After all, the legal concept of “lost opportunity cost” was entirely devised by a rich asshole who justified an entitlement to money beyond the tangible losses incurred in a conflict. It’s a legal argument flatly denied to someone who can’t afford to support it in a pay-to-play legal system.
Try not to forget how Elon Musk tried to sue his advertisers on Xitter for abandoning his platform because he felt entitled to the benefit of their advertising dollars.
This particular move is the equivalent of seeking a benefit from being paid for a job from which one has been fired. With this kind of toxic attitude of entitlement to benefits, I don’t think there’s any little person on the planet who should feel guilty about taking a benefit.
If we fix this surreal hypocrisy, we can discuss what is wrong with taking benefits.
All of the ugliness we see on social media didn’t just magically appear because of social media. Social media is simply a means by which people can express their natural selves. People have always been the way they are on social media. The only difference is that their voices and behaviours were not broadcast to the world.
Before social media, people lived in social silos which enabled toxic people to rule their environments. Their victims had no outside support or validation for their suffering and were groomed to believe they had to accept the toxicity as normal. People have been groomed for generations to believe social reality is immutable, that change is impossible.
We can now see that the opposite is true, and social media helps bring about change.
Social media brings about social change much faster than was ever possible, and that makes social media a solution to society’s woes, not a problem.
Consider, for example, how concepts like “Woke” are used as weaponized disparagements to enable the corrupt among us to leverage hatred into legislation sending society back into the dark ages.
Fifty years ago, and before social media, similar terms like “tree hugger,” “do-gooder,” and even “liberal” were terms of disparagement in which whatever little media attention was given to them existed without pushback from a public rejecting the toxicity. “Politically incorrect” was such a term that took hold as a disparagement before social media, and it is now widely accepted as a negative characteristic in society.
The pushback it received wasn’t magnified like “woke” has been through social media. Consequently, the attempts made to weaponize “woke” like all disparagements which began with positive connotations haven’t succeeded at converting “woke” into a negative. “Woke” is now a term that backfires onto those who try to use it as a disparagement. Through pushback on social media, “woke” will reassert itself as a wholly positive connotation. In contrast, those who invoke stupidities like “woke mind virus,” and “go woke go broke” will increasingly become viewed as enablers of toxicity much like the red alert beanies in society have become.
This represents tremendous progress in the fight for human decency on how we perceive concepts and how they frame our interactions with the world.
It’s almost quaint, now, to think of “do-gooder” as a bad thing to be called; and to such a degree that if someone is to refer to someone else as a “do-gooder” today, they sound like sociopathic idiots. That conceptual lifecycle is what has happened now with the term “woke.” It’s taken a fraction of the time for the implications of the word to settle into our public consciousness within the context it originally conveyed.
Being called a “do-gooder” fifty years ago meant one would retreat in embarrassment, but now, the accusation garners confusion. The person who hurls that accusation appears like an idiot.
In contrast, “woke” became popular less than two decades ago. It appeared as a positive connotation that the toxic among us attempted to weaponize like they have with every positive connotation in society. Within a comparatively short time, people who weaponize “woke” are already being regarded as toxic idiots.
Without social media, the weaponization of “woke,” and the legitimacy of concepts like “woke mind virus” would have been accepted as valid disparagements in which those are “woke” would retreat from social discourse because they had no outside support.
Arguments and counter-arguments flitted about in geographically isolated silos and never managed to spread from community to community. The consequence was to cultivate localized and insular community values. Social media cultivates community values across the globe. Social media breaks down the silos, and the barriers of distance between human beings and empowers those who must face the bullies attempting to corrupt positive values in society.
The best weapon against bullying is social media because of this. It’s also a megaphone for bullies, but they’re outnumbered by those they victimize and they are generally stupid people.
For example, the best thing that Trump could have done was to have that media circus of bullying Zelensky. He claimed, during his ego masturbating rant, that he “let it go so long” for a purpose suiting his goals, but it backfired spectacularly.
He and Vance were viewed as the bullying thugs they are and I’m sure this will be a watershed moment for many who have blindly supported Trump. Many people, if not most of us, have been exposed to bullying and the thing about bullying, is that the victims of bullies never forget.
Social media is community development on steroids. The problem with social media, however, is that it is predominantly operated on a for-profit basis, which makes it impossible for social media to cultivate positive social values deliberately and strategically.
Community development on social media occurs organically and within a chaotic environment. The fact that we can progress on issues through this chaos is a testament to the human spirit. No matter how the toxic people among us make life difficult for the rest of us, we are pushing back and succeeding in gaining ground on establishing a baseline for decency. It may occur glacially in contrast to what would be possible if a publicly owned and operated, not-for-profit social media environment existed within and to compete against the for-profit model.
We are, however, succeeding in making “woke woke again”.
I’m sure many people would quickly gravitate to a much safer environment where they could trust that their personal information wasn’t being mined for profit.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Can you trust people who hear the voice of god in their head and demand other people follow the words of their god?”
Sure. You can trust them to live in a world of delusion that creates a barrier between their internal narrative and the shared reality we all live in.
You can trust that they will defend their delusion to an extreme that could dramatically harm people who do not support or challenge it.
You can trust that if you’re not hyper-vigilant about their actions and attitudes, they will eventually devise a justification for doing you harm when you least expect it.
You can trust that if you don’t support their delusions, they will trash-talk you to their peers and give them all the reasons they need to become toxic toward you.
You can trust that they will do anything to affect the laws to ensure everyone submits to their delusions.
You can trust that their moral paradigm is entirely self-serving at the expense of anyone who does not submit to their delusions.
You can trust that if you piss them off enough, they will easily justify actions that can end your life.
You can trust that if they can establish and operate within a community of sufficient numbers, they will do whatever they can to undermine the systems they live within to transform their community into a Gilead nightmare.
You can trust that they view their toxic attitudes and destructive actions through a lens of corrupted righteousness, fueling a war under the guise of being an army in service to their delusion.
You can trust that they will identify the most easily victimized and relentlessly attack them as a recruitment strategy for their delusion as they seek to spread adherence to it like it were a communicable disease.
This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “What could be the main reasons some people experience stagnation, even if they aren’t lazy?”
Trauma and burnout are immensely impacting causes of inertia in one’s life. Burnout often precedes depression, and severe trauma can result in Executive Dysfunction. Depression can be debilitating, and Executive Dysfunction is scary AF.
Imagine waking up daily with a laundry list of activities you sincerely want to do, but your “round-to-it” never makes it off the couch for some indiscernible reason. “Yeah, yeah, yeah — I’ll get around to it.”
Weeks later… that five-minute job of daily housecleaning is a prohibitive three-day adventure you decide is no longer worth the effort. It’s better to return to doing nothing while thinking, “Tomorrow’s another miserable day when it can be done.”
Loss of hope for one’s future is a terrible thing to experience that can lead to all sorts of ugly and tragic outcomes. Restoring hope is the fastest way to cure one’s depression and worse.
Our economic dystopia is the main culprit of many of our social ills today, and it’s leading us down a dark road just like it did last century when it gave rise to fascism and the Nazi scourge to ignite a global war.
It’s mind-boggling to me that both the victims and perpetrators of this centuries-long class war so easily overlook such a prominent issue that it never seems to stop being waged against the little people.
It’s harrowing to realize how conceptually straightforward it is to avoid chaos and how impossible it is in practice to prevent it.
There is something so intoxicating about having power that people think of themselves as insulated from all the harm they do to countless others with impunity.
The worst thing about Trump, for example, isn’t the damage he’s doing with his decisions and actions. That he can continue wreaking havoc while he should, by all forms of reason that claim to value the concept of justice, be rotting behind bars right now — that causes us all the most harm. His freedom is the grossest of violations of the social contract imaginable.
His freedom confirms that there is no value in decency, integrity, honesty, trust, or responsibility. His freedom is an encouragement of every rotten behaviour and attitude imaginable by humans. It’s a veritable permission to be our worst selves. His freedom is a purge of our humanity.
Why TF should anyone think they have a future if that future means having to become a grotesque monster who is willing to destroy lives to get some money for themselves?
When push comes to shove, I doubt few people would trade having a loving family and being surrounded by a community of people who care for you as a person for a gold toilet.
Since that’s the world we live in today, that’s deeply depressing. What kind of person can believe a hopeful future awaits at the top of a garbage heap? It certainly isn’t the best of humanity.
It’s the kind of world most decent human beings don’t want to live in. With that in mind, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that birth rates are plummeting because what decent human being wants to tell their kid to learn how to manage their plastic intake enough to minimize the health risks it poses while admitting they did as little as they could to prevent this shit from getting worse.
“Yes, kids… I decided not to vote because I didn’t care enough to know the difference between parties and just decided to believe they’re all the same, so I said fuckem, let them turn this world into a shithole for my kids.”
In short, the main reason people are experiencing stagnation is the same reason they experienced it during the fall of communism as a system of governance. We are failing ourselves because we are failing to demand better from our leadership instead of holding their feet to the fire. After all, that requires risking one’s perks and benefits in life; w may as well let them do whatever they want so that we can complain about how shitty things are and be able to say, “I told you so.” when it all turns to shit.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “When will people understand that their constant selfish reckless belligerent greed is what brought society to its current disgusting miserable state of existence?”
Let’s look at someone like Donald Trump. He has spent an entire lifetime spreading hatred while bullying people to feed shallow desires, and he entertains himself through acts of cruelty he enacts on fleeting whims. He’s been behaving in ways that epitomize constant selfish, reckless, and belligerent greed, ostensibly his entire life.
His response to being criminally convicted was not remorse but to have the conviction overturned.
This question naively presumes that a person who behaves in destructive ways throughout their life will magically experience an epiphany of conscience in which they will transform into the “decent human” imagined by this querent.
Never has any evil monster throughout history found any turning point in their life that magically transformed them into saintly beings. Most who claim to have “seen the light” assume such a position as a fraudulent means of continuing their prior agenda of self-benefit at the expense of others.
The short answer to your question is “never.”
People cannot change their essential nature. They may choose to improve, but that presupposes desire that has always existed and a lifetime of dedication toward that end.
People like Donald Trump see nothing wrong with their behaviour and so will never make an effort to improve.
Epiphanies such as this question presume to be possible constitute wishful thinking on a highly destructive level of delusion that prevents us from addressing the fundamental issues of broken psychology that we must dedicate ourselves as a society to addressing on the most basic levels.
We can never truly call ourselves civilized if our systems enable and empower the kind of evil embodied by people like Donald Trump — and make no mistake about it, we encourage his evil.
Our societies embrace and enable selfish, reckless, and belligerent greed.
Until we can address the fundamentally broken human psychology on a system-wide and social scale, we will continue to be plagued by these behaviours.
Ten percent of the world’s wealthiest are destroying our planet at a rate practically matching the total of the other 90% of the rest of humanity. Instead of doing something to restrain their destructive behaviours, we put them on pedestals and worship their harmful behaviours.
Changing humans in ways that address destructive behaviours embodying selfishness, recklessness, and belligerent greed means we must start at the top and change all of human society.
thotbag 