70 million people voted for Trump twice. They cheer at ICE kidnappings, call racists saints, and such. The reality is that a lot less people are actually good (meaning they care genuinely about the well being of others) than this post makes it seem.
See I hard coped the “Believe that most people are good” thing, and then I saw numerical data that proves that most people (in the USA), in fact, not only want me to die; but hate most people not like them enough to support a sleazy dictator wanna-be and support a fascist regime, just to destroy the lives of other people who they see as “competition” or “lesser” or “undesirables”.
Believe that most people are good.
I’d love to if they didn’t show their ass IRL as often as online.
I used to believe people were good, but over the years I’ve just seen worse and worse behavior from the general public to the point that the only way I could possibly believe most people were fundamentally good would be to reject reality.
Yeah, talk to enough conservatives IRL and you’ll know this is bullshit.
Selfish, evil human beings. Whether they realize it or not.
Except for the elites, I think it’s more constructive to think of them as brainwashed by an ancient meme; potentially redeemable.
Emphasis on ‘potentially’. Don’t waste too much time on them, some of them get off on watching you uselessly spend your time and energy and sanity on them. Brainwashing doesn’t work like it does in comic books. These are people who were already willing to and capable of rationalizing putting kids into cages and the ‘brainwashing’ just gave them an easy explanation.
It’s like a person who has committed rape. Even if they come out later as an anti-rape activist and they’re publicly remorseful and they do a lot of work to make up for the harm they caused you still aren’t gonna leave them alone with your sister.
Nah, I’ve talked to a lot of republicans in real life and almost all of them are just fundamentally bad people who derive joy from hurting and oppressing others.
I legitimately know someone exactly like that. It blows my mind how anybody could be so sociopathic, no human compassion whatsoever, even for the people supposedly nearest & dearest to him.
I think the belief that most people are good actually causes people to attack the ones calling out bad behavior, rather than calling out the bad behavior itself, which is a major contributing cause of many societal issues. Some people are truly just bad people, and we need to learn to accept this. I did after the last few years in politics. Can’t be an algorithm when they elected the president. “Stay positive” is bad advice when you’re trying to accurately identify and solve a problem where things aren’t positive.
Does it matter that most people are good if most people in power aren’t, and they have an army of similar-minded people following their orders?
Because there’s more of us than there are of them, so perhaps we can do something about it.
How could most people be good if they voted for the the pedo king three times?
Most people did not vote which is a different kind of bad
You’d probably be shocked at how ignorant most Americans are. See those man-in-the-street interviews Mamdani had with NYC Trump voters? They seemed to know nothing about Trump, just had vibes.
If you get your news and political views from FaceBook, you’re going to be ignorant as hell. And if you throw Fox News in, you’ll come out knowing even less.
On top of all that, over half of Americans top out at a 6th-grade reading level. 20% are flat out illiterate. Can’t find the stat again, but an appalling number of us can’t follow along in a novel.
We can’t fix anything in this country until we fix education. How can we even speak to people about climate change, collapsing ecosystems, repeating 20th century history, anything at all, when they don’t have a basic education?
I totally agree that most Trump voters simply know nothing about him. I maintain an acquaintance with a Trump supporter kind of just out of curiosity and they know incredibly little about him as a person, or the things he’s doing as president. They’re generally just unaware. He didn’t even know that Trump abused emergency powers to bypass Congress to impose tariff taxes on Americans.
But that doesn’t mean they aren’t a bad person. Not engaging with the democracy you live in and ensuring that it remains healthy makes you a bad person, in my opinion. Too many people sacrificed their lives to give us democracy and not engaging responsibly is unbelievably disrespectful and makes you a bad person. Voting for someone without knowing anything about them makes you a bad person.
How I wish that was true.
I’m with you. I mean, its probably the bubble I live in, but I’m so tired of trying to talk to my friends and family about all of this but I’m dismissed as being paranoid or they tell me that Biden was just as bad or frankly most often just some dismissive joke in response.
I’m guessing about as many people care about this as there are who support all of it. The remaining 40-50% is just checked out and thinks this is just politics as usual. That’s my impression anyway.
This, more than anything, is why I stick to the Fediverse. There’s some negativity here, but it’s organic, and generally not being conjured out of thin air to get me to buy shit.
When I log on to FB to check my DM’s, it’s very obvious what the algo is doing, and I can’t be bothered to indulge it.
Oooh, and here I thought the GOP was a bunch of Nazis fucking children. Guess it’s just the algorithm fucking children and opening concentration camps.
We get it, you disagree with OP. Have you considered your comment may come across as a level of unhinged and impotent rhetoric that only moreso proves OP’s point? I hope you find peace soon, and I absolutely relate with your distaste of the current atrocities✌️
So are they atrocities or not? Because you seem awfully chill about the whole thing, like they’re mild inconveniences that aren’t actively ruining millions of lives
hope you find peace soon, and I absolutely relate with your distaste of the current atrocities✌️
There’s nothing outside the text. Whatever you’re reading into this is strictly your fantasy. I’m not denying we’re in a nightmare, I’m just old and stuck protecting the few that depend on me.
You Republicans never cease to make me laugh.
The pubbers are baseless as all hell now–what makes you think I’m one of em homeboy?
So which is it? Are these atrocities happening, or is it just the algorithm pushing that narrative? You can’t have it both ways (it’s real, btw).
Not with this government, 3rd world countries are installing solar while our leader is canceling solar and i cannot get panels
Or just stay away from algorithmic social media, or maybe i mean ad-based for-profit algorithmic social media.
Lemmy doesn’t seem to have a particular bent toward conflict the way that Facebook does (I know they’re different in a lot of ways). Bluesky doesn’t seem to have it, either, although we could still be in the “bait” phase before they “switch.”
Can I get some data on the “most people are good” bit?
Here’s my counter: most people are idiots
That doesn’t make them good. Being stupid is a rather limited excuse in the face of such great evils we have today.
When it comes to people you meet each day (friends, colleagues, schoolmates, …), are there people among them you’d call ‘genuinely evil’? Is it a majority of them?
Yes and yes, unfortunately.
Daily reminder that 30% of people would vote to bring back chattel slavery if it was convenient.
Yes, but only for foreigners and non whites. Who don’t matter obviously
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Honestly? Yeah, it’s well over a majority. I wouldn’t call them ‘purely evil’, but ‘genuinely evil’ is pretty much the norm in society. People just tend to compartmentalize their evil.
I feel like this is projection. How tf do you know “well over a majority” of people are compartmentalizing “evil”, in a way so good that we can’t detect it, but somehow you know this to be true and we should trust you? Why? How? What makes you special in knowing this? I’m sorry if I’m coming off rude, I just don’t understand how people can say this with such confidence when they haven’t asked “well over a majority” of humans. 😛
In 2024 35% of eligible voters didn’t vote and 32% voted for Trump. That’s not a perfect measure, but it’s about as much of a case as can be made. I’m also far less inclined to move any of those 67% over to the “good” side than to move any of the 32% that voted for Harris to the bad side.
I’m sure each of those people think they’re doing good though, rather than purposely “compartmentalizing evil.”
In my personal experience, 95+% of people are, at the end of the day, pretty selfish. I don’t mean that they need to be saints, but almost everyone does not want to make small sacrifices to make the world a better place.
I’m talking about people that don’t want to eat less meat or try to consume less, or maybe just give the benefit of the doubt to the other side.
Doesn’t make them evil though, just human. The human brain is wired not to make life worse for its host, or its offspring.
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It feels so weird to pass by incredible filth on a daily basis, but then get taken aback by a worldview. You must have been through a lot, wish I could help somehow.
pass by incredible filth on a daily basis
Can you be more specific? What is this referring to?
I tend to cruise /all
It seems as though you somehow made it less specific lol
https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=New
An insane mess
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Everyone I’m close to knows about the prison industrial complex because we talk to each other. That’s how a few of us found out, by knowing people who are activated enough to look into these things and spread the word. As to the rest, I could hit you with a list of things and say “approach the world with intent to confirm this bias” and it would amount to the same thing.
Not being part of the problem takes work, it’s true, but wisdom is in knowing people are highly situational, neither inherently good or bad but often entirely unequipped for the world we’ve created or the heights we’ve grasped. We’re beings of brilliance and kindness but also complacency and disaster. Not evil, but we create many evil situations by accident and shortsightedness.
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We live in different countries. I left the US because it was driving me crazy, and my heart goes out to you since I know a lot of people feel that way but don’t have a viable exit strategy. I’ve put in a lot of work to stop participating in an empire of slavery and stolen land, moved back to the land of my grandparents (which has its own terrible history, perfect being the enemy of good as we all know).
I’m against all the buckets. The only bucket we’re all in is a gravity well, and we need to act like it if we’re not going to hate it every minute.
Everyone I’m close to knows about the prison industrial complex because we talk to each other.
Maybe we live in different neighborhoods. Most of my neighbors are fine with locking “those people” up, and don’t much care what happens to them beyond that.
“approach the world with intent to confirm this bias”
How do you account for the vast majority of eligible voters either not showing up or voting for Trump? That’s about as unbiased a measure as I can think of.
Not being part of the problem takes work,
So we’re on the same page there.
wisdom is in knowing people are highly situational, neither inherently good or bad
If it takes work to not be part of the problem than aren’t people inherently “bad” until they do the work? I didn’t introduce that dialectic to this conversation. Of course throwing everyone into two buckets is inherently going to miss a lot of depth.
often entirely unequipped for the world we’ve created or the heights we’ve grasped.
I’m not sure it was ever any different.
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You’ve read a fair bit of self-help books or similar haven’t you?
There’s not a lot of difference between the average german citizen in 1940 and the average westerner today.
Feels almost like a non sequitur, even if not untrue. I know enough history to know that evil is banal, but that chiefly refers to people who stay silent, choose comfort over justice, and follow unethical orders. It’s taking things a ways further to say most people are mostly evil, don’t you think?
Comes down to your definition of evil, really. And how comfortable you are calling the majority of people evil - if you aren’t, obviously you’ll jump through a few extra hoops to keep that worldview intact.
Are you only here to sneer? At least do so interestingly.
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Go outside and start counting all the absolutely unnecessary gas guzzling SUVs. Walk your neighborhood with a trash bag and see what you collect. Ask yourself how many people you know are aware of the prison industrial complex, or would even care if they did know. How many people want subsidized housing in their neighborhoods to address homelessness? How many want some of the funding for their school districts to go to school districts in less fortunate neighborhoods? If there is a local home in obvious disrepair, how many people will gossip or complain to the municipality compared to how many will ask the neighbor if they need help?
Most people are nice. That’s not the same as not being evil. Not being evil takes work.
Holy shit dude how do you dupli-post 10 times
Weitd. I’m traveling so it was probably network issues.
I reject the premise. The term “Evil” is meaningless.
@the_q@lemmy.zip @LadyButterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone
@politicalmemes@lemmy.worldI can’t help but recall of two quotes: one from Rousseau who said “Humans are born good but society corrupts them”, and another from Hobbes who said “Humans are a wolf to humans”. While it seems like both thinkers couldn’t agree with each other because both statements look different, the logical implications from Rousseau inevitably leads to that of Hobbes. I’ll try to explain my point below.
When Rousseau says “society corrupts good humans”, he implies the existence of not-good humans because, as we know, society is made out of people (not just Soylent Green). Rousseau implies that the not-good humans were once good until they got corrupted by earlier not-good humans, which were corrupted by even earlier not-good humans… somewhere, non-goodness was born. Causality requires that a non-goodness stemmed from some kind of “patient zero of evilness”.
Now, religions would be tempted to think of this “patient zero” as something supernatural: Shaitan, Iblis, Angra Mainyu… It’s not exactly wrong (as archetypal representation), but it’s not accurate either: it’s not something too otherworldly, it’s right in front of us or, should I say, inside us.
Take Derren Brown’s “The Push” (a documentary about social compliance and conformity): before the auction gala where (spoiler)the person was cluelessly played by a hidden script to push someone from a rooftop, commiting murder to (in their mind) save themself(/spoiler), Derren conducted a “selection process” where the candidates would answer a test: unbeknownst to them, the test was beyond a questionnaire, it was evaluating who would keep standing up and sitting whenever a bell rang. They weren’t told to do so: they were, instead, socially pressured to do it, because all the other candidates were doing it. It’s the “monkey see, monkey do”.
Those who didn’t watch The Push (watch it, it’s illuminating) might ask: if the candidates weren’t told to do it (switch between sitting and standing whenever a bell rings), how did the behavior emerge? The behavior was initially seeded by actors, people who initially acted on it. Then things got funnier: one by one, actors were removed and fresh, clueless candidates were added, until no actors were in the room, yet the behavior continued. It was carried among “generations” (batches of candidates).
There was no devil behind this behavior. One could argue “Derren Brown was the devil behind the scenes, conducting a social experiment”, but something motivated those actors (e.g. money), just like something motivated the hypothetical “first evil human” to be evil, except… something also motivated clueless candidates to imitate it, just like something motivated the “Rousseau’s good humans” to spread societal corruption.
It’s not a devil: it’s humans, it’s us. We’re born with this wolf inside, and it just takes a “push” for it to howl. It’s inherent to us because it’s inherent to Nature.
Humans are situational. That’s what makes them interesting and worthwhile. Anything that is the same in every situation has no heart.
I tend to think that you really see what people are made of in a tight spot. In a nice situation, everyone finds it easy to be kind. But even those who rise to a challenge and show true heart only do so when they really believe it is an option. That is the point of having hope.
not to mention all the troll bots. If you are arguing online, theres a good chance its just a bot/
I know it’s scary
