Evil is inherent to the world. All light casts a shadow.
No amount of peaceful protests and organizing peacefully will result in any amount of meaningful change. The only way to get this rat fucked world to be not ratfucked is to fix it by force in a very violent and bloody way.
This. Our President (allegedly) playing “catch me if you can”
Capitalism at its core.
Capitalism made almost everything the same big pile of shit. No matter the language and culture, in the end, it’s the same shit.
- The most meaningful reforms, like large-scale climate action, won’t happen until citizens present a credible threat to the owning class’s dominance, making reform the appealing compromise.
- The owning class, at least a large section of it, along with loyal reactionaries will wage violent open war before ceding power leftward. They have the option to decide if a peaceful road forward exists, and historically, then tend to mass murder citizens instead.
The boot of capitalism is on our necks, but I’m not sure my countrymen are worth fighting for. Americans may be too far gone. Maybe I should just leave.
Many of us are doing in secret and in public. Help us out where you can, and take action. If you leave then please drum up support wherever you move to and help from there. It takes us all. Have hope we are winning together!!
Cynics are dupes who are easily utilized by the forces which deliberately made them cynical. The foundation of conservative politics.
Meta 🤌
The desire of intelligent, hardworking people to just live their lives and be left alone means we’re eternally condemned to be ruled by those who are absolutely unfit for the job. Anybody smart enough to be a good leader wouldn’t have the job.
Humans are the cause of almost every problem on the planet and wont and don’t deserve to survive the great filter. The universe is better off without us.
There’s a well-known quote about how capitalism seems inescapable, but so did the divine right of kings. The problem I have with it is that we didn’t get rid of kings. If anything, men like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, they have more wealth and power than kings could ever even dream of. All that’s really happened is that royalty has been obfuscated; they no longer need to be the face of the kingdom. They can buy elected leaders to achieve their goals, purchase media companies in order to control the narrative of the peasantry, and they never need to step in the spotlight. It makes me think that humanity will ultimately never be able to rid ourselves of these parasites; there will always be dragons.
The problem I have with it is that we didn’t get rid of kings.
Moreso that we replaced kings with a new form of ownership, and therefore new owners. And, in every era, the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas - the idea of the divine right of kings seems to have been replaced with the divine right to profit, and to use “earned” money however one wants, with no regard for society.
Obligatory: everyone should read The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. (The aforementioned quote is hers.) Science fiction anarcho-comminist community depicted as having tangible benefits/detriments.
Climate change will kill q huge part of the world population within the next 50 years and we’ve known about it being a thing for over a hundred years and yes nobody could be arsed to stop it.
And stop it was literally what they could do. Cars could have gone for electric much sooner. Public transportation should have been much, much bigger. Bicycle first cities
So much that could have been done but wasn’t done because that would not make a select view anti social rich
Soon most of us will.doe from climate change effects
You think electric cars are some sort of solution? They are part of the problem, not the solution. Making things worse but not quite as quickly is not making things better.
Truth is we could never stop it without radical global abolition of high energy activities. That’s impossible given the short term gains of breaking ranks and the unpopularity of that level of denial. We didn’t have to destroy ourselves as quickly, but the path was set when we had the industrial revolution.
Are electric cars a net improvement?
I’ve heard that they are, because electricity can ve produced more efficiently and pollution can be better handled than individual car exhausts
Humans as a whole can’t be ask to do even the smallest changes. What if you ate less meat? I’LL EAT ONLY MEAT NOW.
Historically, the only thing we’ve found that lowers wealth inequality is inevitably large scale war and death. And i don’t expect that to change before the next time it lowers.
It’s not an uncommon opinion, but:
People are horrible by default. We are generally mean, stupid, and crazy and have to learn to be otherwise, and most of us never achieve such mastery.
If you only saw a bear in a circus you would think it’s nature was to ride a unicycle.
Humans have had to live in brutish/nasty conditions; including the present day, where many of us are drowning in debt, two paychecks away from homelessness while a few are trying to make more money than they could ever spend.
I know others have already replied with counterarguments, but as a simple partial counterpoint, the fact that everyone alive are decedents of those who survived the hunter-gatherer stages of their society, for a long long time, is evidence that we’re generally capable of learning to be caring, smart and sane, it’s not some utopian advanced stage beyond our grasp. Prior to our technological developments like food preservation, individualistic societies were not viable.
I actually hold the opposite opinion; that most people are generally good, or at the least, focused on their own problems most of the time.
This isn’t just personal experience (I’m old so have a bunch) but one example is that I watch a lot of travelling vlogs, mostly motorbikes. Whenever a rider has a breakdown, even in the middle of nowhere, someone will be along and will help. Even allowing for a general positive bias of the media, those who would take advantage of that situation are a tiny percentage.
What does happen though, is that those who aren’t good can abuse the goodness of others to gain power and influence, so are statistically more noticable.
I’ll counter and say that it’s culture/conditions-based. Humans have a range of available/possible behaviors/thought patterns and they are reinforced/shaped by their surroundings/the system they live in. There are and have been egalitarian societies that aren’t full of “mean, stupid, and crazy” people.
“The idea that the key features of successive societies and human history have been a result of an ‘unchanging’ human nature […] is a prejudice that pervades academic writing, mainstream journalism and popular culture alike. Human beings, we are told, have always been greedy, competitive and aggressive, and that explains horrors like war, exploitation, slavery and the oppression of women. This ‘caveman’ image is meant to explain the bloodletting on the Western Front in one world war and the Holocaust in the other. I argue very differently. ‘Human nature’ as we know it today is a product of our history, not its cause. Our history has involved the moulding of different human natures, each displacing the one that went before through great economic, political and ideological battles.”
“The world as we enter the 21st century is one of greed, of gross inequalities between rich and poor, of racist and national chauvinist prejudice, of barbarous practices and horrific wars. It is very easy to believe that this is what things have always been like and that, therefore, they can be no different. […] The anthropologist Richard Lee [said]: “Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality, people lived for millennia in small-scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalised reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations.” In other words, people shared with and helped each other, with no rulers and no ruled, no rich and no poor. […] Our species […] is over 100,000 years old. For 95 percent of this time it has not been characterised at all by many of the forms of behaviour ascribed to ‘human nature’ today. There is nothing built into our biology that makes present day societies the way they are. Our predicament as we face a new millennium cannot be blamed on it.”
-Chris Harman - A People’s History Of The World: From The Stone Age To The New Millennium*
edit: and adding a short video https://youtu.be/Est6nay4Z5E?t=18
edit: some books that are on my TBR that might be worth checking out:
- Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
- Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness
- The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World
- Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (“shows how new findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast human nature in a radically different as the supreme altruists and cooperators.”)
What’s your most cynical opinion about the world?
The Earth will, eventually, long after we’re all gone, be incinerated by the sun. If life co-exists elsewhere in the universe, I suspect it will be too distant to have much impact on us nor them. So I believe that humanity will inevitably have no meaningful legacy in the long term. And I also believe there is no objective meaning to existence, it’s just a neat little quirk of chaos.That doesn’t imply I think nothing is meaningful, it doesn’t take long to notice I care deeply about people and what we do. But, ultimately, meaning is temporary and subjective. (I haven’t explored much of formal philosophy but I’ve heard my perspective aligns with absurdism or existentialism)edit: I didn’t realize this isn’t actually cynicism (a prudent distrust), but more nihlism (a distrust upon belief in meaning)
It can be expressed by a graffiti that I saw on the side of a bike path in Montreal, in French: “L’humanité ne court pas à sa perte, elle y va en voiture”. Or something like “Humanity is not running to ruins, it’s taking a car”.
As much as I want to blame giant corporations and capitalism for a lot of our societal problems, this sentence resumes so well how common people also enable all of this by refusing to change and just going with the easiest option. I know we won’t reach our climate change goals. I know because when I say I organized my life around the fact that I don’t need a car, everyone tells me that they couldn’t live without a car, that it’s very useful, and that I should get one. I’m not even a real adult as long as I don’t have a car. I’ll feel so much freedom when I’ll have a car. I should just get a car! Just get an electric one! Like, instead of encouraging people to live without a car, the vast vast majority of people will actually encourage others to get one.
So yeah, we’re not “running” to our loss. We’re wasting energy to move our fat asses in individual motorized multi ton metal cubes to go there faster. It’s so useful! So practical! So fast! There’s no time to waste. Like Marge Simpson once said: “Outta my way, Nature!”
It’s a giant metaphor for the rest of our society. Same with all the AI hype, food delivery apps, and over consumption in general. We’re digging our graves out of excessive “convenience”, and cars are one example of this.
We love to blame the big corporations and governments for where we are, but both are products of our society and people. George Carlin said it best, selfish ignorant people vote for selfish ignorant leaders. All of this is a product of a society who allows it. Big tech and corporations exist because we as a society give them money. Social media algorithms and ads and everything exist because they work. We sit here and preach linux, and preach getting off of it, but we are the minority. The majority don’t care and happily go along with whatever is given to them, and they vote and purchase just like it.
Climate change is a big one for me. I see people every day saying we need to hold companies accountable - and we do, but goddamn if we all stopped using oil every day, natural gas for cooking, choosing to bike or take a train over driving or flying you know what? Those companies would be forced to change because they wouldn’t be making money off of us. If even just 40% of Americans stopped using Oil the “big oil” companies would be looking at bankruptcy or minimum desperately trying to modernize to stay on top. We can’t shift all of the blame on them, we continue to purchase their products because it’s easier. Everything in the end is a consumer good, and if we voted/purchased differently as a society then things would change. The fact is is that people either don’t care, or worse don’t want to change.
yeh but nah
they infiltrate our environmental groups. legally and illegally coerce us & our our “leaders”. have been systematically attacking, undermining & removing funding for renewables & climate research for decades. environmental protesters are “legally” assaulted, kidnapped, beaten & sometimes killed by their hired goons, meanwhile neo-nazis march with impunity.
it’s not simply a matter of them offering one alternative and just letting the market decide. they engage in unbelievable levels of corruption, coercion, deception, even genocide to steal natural resources from first nations people.
meanwhile the public, barely keeping their heads above water, exploited, subjugated & worn to the bone, oftimes struggling to survive, make almost the only non-choice they can barely even choose from.
yes the majority are to blame, for alot, but also recall we’re talking about an average, likely poorly educated person going up against billion dollar brainwashing machinery (oftimes utilising research paid for with our tax dollars initially performed for therapeutic use, now weaponised in a twisted perversion of their original intent)
like you aren’t wrong. but there is alot more to the story.
carlin is certainly on point in his quote you cited, and you are right this is perhaps the most difficult to reconcile aspect.
let us weigh this alongside another poignant quote of his:
The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you.
The irony being their pov is just regurgitation of propaganda by these companies that consumers are to blame.
Best we continue to change nothing because what’s the point! Here’s my credit card fill 'er up please and thanks!
Preach!
