psychology

Is it a good bet that no Republican will ever win the presidency again?

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:

President Donald Trump Job Approval Ratings and Polls | RealClearPolling

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.

Is there something wrong with taking benefits?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Is-there-something-wrong-with-taking-benefits/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

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.

What is this thing people call humanity, and why should I feel it, need it, or want it?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/What-is-this-thing-people-call-humanity-and-why-should-I-feel-it-need-it-or-want-it/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

“Humanity” is from the late 14th century and derived from the Latin word “humanitatem” or “humanitas” for “human nature, humankind, life on Earth, the human race, mankind,” and Old French “humanité, umanité.” “Humanity” includes all humans but can also refer to the feelings of “kindness, graciousness, politeness, consideration for others,” which humans often have for each other.

Variations of the term, such as the adjective “humane,” which arose in the mid-15th century, refer to the ineffable qualities of being human rather than the physical characteristics of human existence. By the early 18th century, it evolved from meaning “courteous, friendly, civil, and obliging” into “tenderness, compassion, and a disposition to treat others kindly” and evoke “kindness” within the sphere of the human condition.

By the 1700s, the plural of humanity — “humanities” was adopted as a description of the study of “human culture” through the literature branches of rhetoric and poetry and from a secular perspective rather than religious via “literae divinae.”

“Humanism” emerged from that evolution in meaning from the Latin “humanitas” or “education benefitting a cultivated man” while supporting the notion of humanity as symbolic of the best qualities of our species.

Much of this evolution in meaning is derived from a history stretching long before prehistory to a time when our survival as a species was contingent upon working together to feed and clothe ourselves as we hunted in packs.

Successful interdependence requires supporting one another; thus, empathy was given rich soil to grow.

I suspect, however, that none of this constitutes new information for you even though your question misses the point altogether — and to such a degree it screams severe psychopathy, even as an entertainment-seeking provocation.

From initially reading it in my notifications for questions I’ve been asked to answer, my first thought was that it’s an apparent provocation from a misanthrope and most likely a troll. What I discovered upon encountering your profile is something far more insidious.

Let’s begin with the presumption in this question, “Why should I feel it?” etcetera.

There is no “should” in that you are not “obligated to feel” anything. That’s not how emotions work. You appear somewhat educated — or at least literate — based on the number of publications you’ve written and have posted on Amazon.

Somehow, though, a fundamental comprehension of oneself as an “intelligent” member of an interdependent species escapes your notice. You rely on others to feed, clothe, and house yourself through literary endeavours and can’t acknowledge how you already “feel it, need it, and want it.”

Even this provocation attempts to cater to those basic needs by identifying people who can respond in ways that support egotistically defined goals.

Most literate people develop a basic comprehension of emotions and the atavistic precursors making them manifest. On my behalf, this could be a flawed presumption, but I’m pretty sure you’re no stranger to “darker” emotions such as fear and anger, and you have no misapprehension about their manifestations within you. The sarcasm in your writing indicates your preference for wallowing in those emotions and is consistent with the attitude displayed within your provocation disguised as a question.

The problem you struggle with is that you hate your interdependence and deny that it exists within you — most likely due to having found yourself disappointed and hurt repeatedly by people who failed to live up to your expectations from a very young age.

Sadly, in a world where a whopping majority 70%-80% of the population is raised within a dysfunctional family unit, your experience is far from being a minority. Unlike some lucky few who can cope with their pain to the degree that can transcend it on levels that allow them to minimize the transmission of a toxic mentality characterized by misanthropy, you have chosen to embrace the cynical view that humanity is beyond hope.

Whether or not that’s true is irrelevant to me because my biased perspective shudders at the prospect of living in a world where one broadly hates all of humanity to such a degree they fail to see or experience the gestalt of existence within each of us.

To live a life without comprehending the value of joy is the equivalent of living a life deprived of meaning. It’s like a walking death. Even if one’s life circumstances necessitate a deprivation of joy, knowing it exists can often be enough to overcome the most painful hurdles.

Even the briefest taste of love in a fleeting life characterized by its absence or a prevalence of fraudulent forms of love is enough to sustain one’s spirit for a lifetime.

That’s the power of living on the side of light those who wallow in the dark fail to comprehend.

Once one understands that power, one no longer feels pushed into seeking something out of conceptual reasons but from an atavistic need to partake in as much as one can, like struggling for breath while deprived of oxygen because of a plastic bag covering one’s head.

Sadly, you’ve never tasted it, or you would know why you are drawn to it while feigning a disinterested rejection. As much as your ploy may feel like a shield protecting you from further disappointment, it’s a cry for help heard echoing its way around the world, crying out in pain.

If nothing else, in your case, it merely reveals you as a product of a wholly dysfunctional era in which we exist today as a species suffering from generation upon generation of transmissible trauma.

In other words, you asked this question because, on some level, you realize your struggle. Although it may be easy to peg you as a statistic identified as part of “the one in five” visible sufferers of a mental health condition in society, you’re not. Instead, the psychopathic dysphoria you struggle with is made invisible by its type of dysfunctionality and how it fits within the accepted definition of a psychologically well-adjusted individual within a maladaptive system (by which I mean our environment and economies are not suitable for cultivating the best of humanity).

As unhealthy as your expressions are, their implications exist outside the boundaries of what the psychological sciences deem unhealthy because you seem capable of functioning at a high enough level to adapt to the rigours of your day. In my view and statistically speaking, of the remaining four in five who do not display visible signs of an inability to adapt, three of those four are still victims suffering from degrees of stress that remain invisible to a triage mentality characterizing the state of our species today.

Your wallowing in cynicism is not your fault. You’re a victim of an entirely dysfunctional world. You happen to be smarter than the average bear, making a positive adaptation to a broken world much harder.

If you’re lucky and can make yourself willing and available to receive the cream of humanity, you’ll feel the answer you seek that words alone cannot give you.

Try not to let the bastards wear you down.

Boa Fortuna