Social Values

Why should I contribute to society?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Aside from it being a moral duty, why should I contribute to society?”

As a reason to contribute to society, a “moral duty” represents a form of coercion which garners the absolute least that one will contribute. Referring to contributions made to society as a “moral duty” creates the perception that it’s like paying a tax. You do it because you have to.

That’s the best way to get the worst attitudes and the least value in contributions from people.

“Paying it forward” is a far better way to frame contributions to society because it serves as a reminder of how one has benefited from society and the contributions of others as part of a shared community.

Another context that can help to imbue the concept of contributing to society with motivational meaning is as a team. As members of a species, we are all members of the same “team” in the sense of our challenge to maintain survival. This perspective is why I chose the concept of a bucket brigade to illustrate the idea of working together to put out a fire.

Understanding the difference in perspective between one who feels they “should” versus feeling like one “can” will clarify the attitude we should be cultivating in society to encourage contributions back to society. When a person feels like they’re a valued member of a supportive community that enables their members to achieve their best potential, it cultivates an attitude of gratitude that prompts people to think positively of what they can do in return for their community.

Think of it like gift-giving during the holidays, where people go to great lengths to impress someone with a special gift they know will be meaningful to the recipient, versus the sentiment people demonstrate when put in as minimal an effort into their gift as they can get away with to meet an expectation from someone they don’t care about but feel an obligation to gift them something.

To do what one “should do” invites the minimum effort to meet a bar of expectations set by the lowest common denominator and is characterized in the best of terms as an apathetic form of disengagement from one’s community. Why give something to society when you don’t value it?

Conversely, when one feels closely connected to a community that has cultivated gratitude within their mindset, they want to give as much as they can afford to adequately express their appreciation for what they value receiving from their community.

To do what one can, rather than what one must, is to be motivated by a natural desire to contribute out of a spirit of reciprocity.

This is why the social contract is crucial to our health as a society and why community development is an essential mindset for leaders to adopt and cultivate within society. Community members who feel they belong to a larger dynamic and are valued for their contributions are engaged and self-motivated to do what they can to improve life for everyone else.

They understand and value the meaning of the words, “We are all in this together.”

This sentiment is the glue that will keep society from collapsing into chaos during the most troubling times.

This sentiment is the glue that has given humanity the grace to survive and prosper to such a degree that our short presence here will be as lasting into the future as hundreds of millions of years of a planet dominated by dinosaurs has been to date within a fraction of the time they existed.

When one feels connected enough to something, they have no problem going out of their way to contribute as much as they can afford because they believe their giving is its own reward. They derive pleasure and fulfilment from giving to their community. They will go to great lengths to contribute as much as possible to their society because giving transcends moral duty.

Some people will give to causes, for example, because they want receipts to lower their tax burden through the benefit of deductions.

Other people give to cancer research, for example, because they have been personally affected by the issue. Giving as much as they can afford is a way of coping with the issue by acknowledging a loss or a deeply impactful experience. Giving is rewarded by a cultivation of hope within oneself.

Many people volunteer their time in contributions to a cause because of the social connections they create and benefit from on an intangible level. Giving energizes one’s spirit through interpersonal interactions and cultivates the interconnectedness that defines a core need for the human condition.

In all self-motivated cases, one’s contributions are made without considering moral implications because those are justifications which devalue the experience.

In all cases, people give in greater abundance and more honestly of themselves when internally motivated by intangible and intrinsic benefits than by material and extrinsic ones.

Understanding why one would want to contribute to society out of an internally motivated reason is far more crucial to the value of one’s contributions than meeting an arbitrary degree of obligation.

Understanding how one has benefited from the efforts of those who came before us and how we are each linked in a centuries-long chain of humans collectively contributing to an aspirational future for all of humanity is how to convert an obligation into a desire.

When we are disconnected from our humanity and community as humans, we lose sight of the value of our contributions to an evolving whole.

Learning to appreciate our distinctive differences between individuals and celebrating those differences while embracing the uniqueness of their contributions is how we can justify giving the best of what we can to those who will come after us and allow us to be remembered as individuals who each gave our best to make their lives better.

Cultivating this community spirit of belonging is how we survive our challenges, such as those we are struggling through today. Our connection to community allows us to cope with and overcome being inundated by the toxic influences of those who lack appreciation or reverence for the sacred nature of what we collectively benefit from.

Encouraging the creation of connections between us results in a superior form of morality that organically emerges in society to endure throughout our existence on this planet more successfully.

There is no valid reason why you “should” give back to society. However, without a desire to give back to society, you have lost out on one of the most valuable sentiments a human can experience, which is core to our development as healthy humans living fulfilled lives.

Bonus Question: How do you accept the fact that no one loves you?

Learn how much more important it is to love yourself and life than to be loved.

No two people or living creatures love in the same way.

Love is not about receiving but about giving.

If you want to be loved, get yourself a dog and/or a cat, or several.

If you can love what you do each day, it can sustain you enough to allow other forms of love to make their way into your life.

Good luck.

Why do Liberals trash Conservatives?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why do liberals feel it’s okay to publicly trash conservatives?”

It’s funny, but the only time I think of myself as a liberal is when an ideologue draws a line in the sand.

Whenever I encounter a nutbar, I think to myself that the idiot I have encountered is a nutbar. I don’t care much about triangulating their ideological affinity. I prefer interacting with people as people and not as idiotologues who are myopically affixed to a flag embedded in quicksand.

Sadly, though, it’s become almost impossible not to assume the nutbars I encounter are ideologically conservative. It has been so consistently this way for so long that I was surprised recently to discover a nutbar group that was ideologically left-wing.

I had to do a double-take because I hadn’t encountered anyone I could remember who had extreme views (from my biased perspective).

If you feel conservatives are unfairly trashed, then you are obliged to speak out against the people who have co-opted the conservative brand. It’s not like the MAGAts among you are the silently incognito types in your group.

You don’t get to complain about liberals mocking conservative stupidity because that’s the only brand of conservative appearing on the horizon.

“All that is required for evil to exist is for good people to do nothing.” — Edmund Burke

If you wish to identify yourself as conservative and be treated with respect, then you have a house to clean up.

Standing on the sidelines and complaining about being trashed isn’t defensible. It makes you a coward and a hypocrite.

If you have a problem with liberals trashing conservatives, then you should be going after the people who are giving liberals something to trash.

You should be screaming at the top of your lungs at the treasonous monsters who are making you look bad.

Complaining to liberals about being trashed only makes you look worse.

Grow some Liz Cheney-sized cojones and fight to take your party back. Clean out the trash clogging up your house and take the garbage people out with it. You need to stop behaving like a snowflake because you bear responsibility for this happening.

You’re supposed to work with your honourable opposition to create solutions to our common problems, not treat them like enemy combatants while mindlessly cheering for your team and trash-talking the other like politics were a sporting event.

Real lives are at stake, and your nation deserves better. The entire world deserves better. Democracy demands better.

Bonus Question:Why do many democrats oppose ICE deporting illegal immigrants?

Your question needs to be fixed:

“Why do many Democrats oppose ICE deporting people without first identifying and proving that they legitimately are immigrants who are in the country illegally?”

You’re welcome.

A bonus question you could add is, “Why does the Trump administration commit human rights violations against American citizens by ignoring an 800-year-old legal precedent from the Magna Carta that’s more than three times as old as the U.S.?”

Yet another question you might want to ask is, “Why am I not scared of being hauled away in the dead of night and sent to a foreign concentration camp?”

Being placed on an International Human Rights Watch list should deeply disturb you. If it doesn’t, you’re the problem, not the people who fight to protect rights you take for granted. Before rewording their protests to suit your biases, you should try to understand what they are saying.

Why would anyone turn a blind eye to the liberal agenda?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why would anyone be so ignorant as to turn a blind eye to the liberal agenda? It’s very apparent they want to control and not be controlled as they should.” (This answer was originally written about six months before the 2024 election and I’ve updated it but I may have missed a few items that could make it seem somewhat disjointed. I apologize for any confusion I missed clearing up. Thank you for reading.)

You have answered your own question.

You assume the right to control what you demonize as a “liberal agenda” and then hurl a confession of your controlling nature as an accusation.

There is no “liberal agenda,” but CONservatives have been very clear in conveying their agenda of controlling a population. The examples of power-hungry conservatism stretch back to antiquity through a delusional assertion of association with Godhood through the arrogance of a “Divine Right of Kings.”

This delusional presumption forms the basis for driving efforts such as Project 2025 and Trump’s assault on democracy, both inside and outside the borders of his nation. This delusional presumption forms the backbone for the “Dark Enlightenment” proposed by the political influencer, Curtis Yarvin, who imagines restoring a two-class society of rulers and serfs. It is precisely this assumption of power that drives every right-wing organization manipulating a MAGAt army of extremists who are prone to violence and listed as domestic terrorist organizations like the “Proud Boys,” “Oathkeepers,” “Sons of Odin,” and other militia groups.

Right-Wing Extremist Terrorism in the United States

https://www.adl.org/resources/report/right-wing-extremist-terrorism-united-states

This self-serving and socially destructive delusion sums up the entire character of conservatism. It shows up everywhere in everything you monstrously destructive idiots do.

Every problem you pretend to deal with, you make worse. You create problems with your perpetual violations of the social contract each time you issue an idiotically dictatorial edict to repress people and strip them of their rights on all issues that you pollute with your monstrously vile, misanthropic hatred of your fellow humans.

Name any issue where a conservative barfs up what their perversion of a solution is, and you will see nothing more than a hammer smashing a nail because CONservatives can’t handle complexity or nuance.

Economics? — Tax breaks for the wealthy while claiming the wealthy are altruistic beings and not predatory parasites who were responsible for the Great Depression and World War II, and the rise of the Nazi threat — even though history is repeating itself right from the tax table level to the overt increase of racial hatreds.

Abortion? — Shrink the government to the point of fitting inside every vagina to monitor the state of pregnancy. Force pregnant ten-year-old rape victims to term while endorsing capital punishment for women who abort their development process as per their right to bodily autonomy.

Environment? — Pretend the floating plastic continents don’t exist, and if that doesn’t work, deny they’re a symptom of a much larger problem because the last thing you want to do is hold wealthy monsters who pay for your unearned power in government accountable for their destruction.

Alternative Energy? — Deny the need to transition to an environmentally responsible system of meeting our growing energy needs because that would reduce the grotesque profits of the fossil fuel industry, destroying our planet. Have some idiot monkey perform for optics by bringing a snowball into the chamber to deny the global warming responsible for creating heat bubbles that incinerate towns from the face of the map.

Crime? — Pretend it’s on the increase instead of admitting that crime has become less of a problem because you need to keep your idiot flocks scared of a big, bad world so that you can justify the militarization of a government-sanctioned terrorist organization that kills innocent citizens for sport.

Mass-Murders? — Pretend that children being gunned down in their schools is the price the public must pay to be free, while no other nation on the planet experiences that kind of depravity. It’s more important to you monstrous freaks to defend profits for the weapons industry because weaponizing everything is how you react to being overwhelmed by a world that intimidates stupid people who wallow in fear.

You name it. You pollute EVERY issue with ignorant stupidity and destroy lives.

“Right to Work” Laws — Strip workers of their rights, increasing poverty among the working class. All “Right to Work” states have the highest poverty level in the nation.

The list is endless. CONservative stupidity worsens EVERY issue and creates issues that would not exist without their power-hungry meddling. CONservativism is defined by its bullying antics.

Your president is a 34-time convicted felon who you reinstalled to finish destroying 243 years of democracy. It wasn’t enough, though, that he is responsible for more American lives lost than Osama Bin Laden. You want him to rid you of more Americans you don’t like to help the oligarchs take over the nation and become a mirror image of the corruption that has defined an enemy America has been in a cold war with for over 100 years.

You endlessly complain about the debt when your government isn’t controlled by “your team”, while ballooning it by trillions in giveaways to the wealthy and throwing people into dire straits by stripping them of their lifelines.

Republicans embrace the power-hungry, controlling evil that the founding fathers escaped and warred against for the freedom of the people. Republicans embody that evil and seek to transform the nation into the nightmare that prompted the creation of a nation built on liberty through fraternity and equality.

America was built on the solidarity of the people against the controlling monsters that CONservatives everywhere embody.

During the horrors of your prior CONservative presidency of war criminals, you had Karl Rove blatantly announcing your treasonous agenda by claiming your goal of a “permanent Republican majority.” You have taken all the steps you can in an overt agenda to ensure that’s the case by denying Obama’s right to appoint a SCOTUS judge and maintain an objective balance in the scales of justice. Now, you have succeeded in corrupting the highest court in the land to make it a mockery of justice.

You spit on democracy when you dedicate your efforts to controlling strategies like gerrymandering districts, purging voter lists, and creating barriers to the electorate to ensure you can win elections. Then, when that corrupt strategy fails, you attempt a coup on the nation and kill people who won’t submit to your abusive horror show. None of you care in the least about solving our common problems because the only problem you care about is how to control everyone and everything permanently.

You are all ruled by fear and ignorance.

You have concocted a plan (Project 2025 / Agenda 47) to send the entire nation back to a medieval state of rulers and serfs and blatantly threaten violence against those who don’t capitulate to your monstrously inhuman betrayal of humanity. Meanwhile, you believe Trump’s denial of knowledge of it as he recruits its authors and begins his assault against the nation with a “flood the zone” strategy to implement it, on day one of his re-election.

You people embody evil and embrace it with every word and deed, including this pretend question.

“Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality” are values that define a liberal sensibility. It’s not an agenda because values transcend agendas. Only stupid monkeys who have nothing of value to offer beyond horror need agendas. The most famous Republican in history was a liberal. He freed slaves because he valued “liberty, fraternity, and equality.”

You should be embarrassed by your incompetence, if not by your evil and controlling natures or your betrayals of your fellow citizens.

Agendas are what monstrous freaks of broken human nature rely on to conspire against their fellow human beings and assert power over them.

Liberals want power to be decentralized and distributed to everyone, while CONservative monsters aggregate power and attempt to centralize it like every dictatorship throughout history. With clear intent, conservatives deliberately try to reset humanity to a medieval state of society with rulers and serfs and deny it in the same breath.

You can see it in their agenda to make the president’s powers absolute. The SCOTUS took another significant step in that direction before the 2024 election, hoping a decent human like Joe Biden would choose the high road of not exercising that power and permanently terminating a threat to democracy.

You stupid freaks have no clue that you have handed him the right to assassinate your beloved saviour, who pretends to be victimized through a fraudulent assassination attempt to gain sympathy because he’s the most unsympathetic character in recent history. Having him assassinated by the legal means you have granted him would bring a sigh of relief heard all around the world. No one but you, bloodthirsty freaks, wants the ideological divide you’ve been stoking to escalate into a bloody nightmare.

Joe Biden has proven that by refusing to follow your frenemy’s method of eliminating political rivals by nuclear mist. Meanwhile, Trump has been doing all he can to eliminate his detractors by having judges and political leaders arrested, while you delusional freaks cry “freedom!”

Only grotesquely inhuman monsters would support a predatory pedophile like that murderous Orange Nazi… but here you are… endorsing a convicted felon on an agenda to destroy democracy and install him as a permanent ruler while he brazenly claims no one will ever need to vote again.

Ignorance is what defines humongous monsters like you. You should be very glad that we still have the pretense of democratic civilization protecting your stupidity because once that veil drops, all bets are off. You are sowing chaos, and with it, you will reap a whirlwind of regret, which will require the rest of this century for the nation to recover.

Your politics of hatred is not infinitely sustainable and will burn itself out along with you, just like it did almost one hundred years ago, and one hundred years before that. The real tragedy, however, is how many innocent lives you will take with you as you destroy 250 years of progress.

We see you for what you are and what you feed on, while the more people who wake up to the truth of you, the more you dig yourselves into a toxic hole that the world will try to bury in the dust of horrified memory from a nightmare of evil.