Edited to replace original incorrect Herzog attribution with my own version that correctly attributes the quote
It’s gruesome, isn’t it? When I was young, I used to believe that people were, for the most part, decent. Misled, often, stupid, very often; but good at heart. Now, I’m convinced that a good third of our society is broken and a third of our society is blind to anything that doesn’t affect them.
It was a strange feeling when I reached an age and realized that most people I know didn’t meet the standards of what I thought should be a good person.
I actually originally dug this picture up for a post of this RawStory article titled ‘Their ignorance is willful’: WaPo analyst says enough with the MAGA voter pity, which is highly relevant.
The problem with the majority of right wing extremists isn’t that they’re just stupid misled bumpkins, but that they’re actual psychopaths who vote for people like Trump because he’s promising to hurt everybody they hate
I’m convinced that we’ve lost, at minimum, 20% of our nation to some kind of mass-hysteria style sociopathy. I mean, maybe they’ve always been lost and we just didn’t realize it, but going forward, I don’t think anything can be done to ‘fix’ them. Most people, I think, are responsive to their environments and social standards, but after a point, you get so dug in that peer pressure doesn’t work, even on social animals like us. All we can do is save the children of that 20%.
It’s the same with conservatives pretty much around the world right now.
I really don’t know how we’re going to unfuck the situation without a lot of bloodshed – and make no mistake, it would be them who spill that blood like they’re already doing, just at a much larger scale. As it is, conservatives are a threat to stable and peaceful societies, and due to their resistance to meaningful climate action they’re an existential threat to humanity in general.
I think what happened is that it became more acceptable to show their nastiness; that they used to have to hide it because our society wouldn’t accept it. Then Trump being elevated to president normalized the violence and hatred being out in the open and those people felt safe to come out of the woodwork.
I feel like it was always there, simmering beneath the surface, but I’m a self-admitted (overall) misanthrope who thinks most people are, on average, pretty shitty.
None of what you describe is necessarily mutually exclusive. You can be broken, misled, misinformed, and stupid, while still being good at heart.
I think that everyone is blind to something. Some of us are less so than others. Growing up in this world will do that to a person. Shit happens to everybody. Some of us are better equipped than others to handle it, while others are not.
None of what you describe is necessarily mutually exclusive. You can be broken, misled, misinformed, and stupid, while still being good at heart.
Yes, but the issue is that they’re broken, misled, misinformed, stupid, AND malicious.
I think that everyone is blind to something. Some of us are less so than others. Growing up in this world will do that to a person. Shit happens to everybody. Some of us are better equipped than others to handle it, while others are not.
I would ascribe that intermittent blindness more to the other ~80% of the population.
We are blind too. It’s just that the things we were raised to believe but don’t realize aren’t petty and mean.
How your raise kids matters.
For instance, most of the people who are atheists in the west argue for a set of beliefs that perfectly aligns with protestism without God. It is baked into every lesson they were taught as a kid.
It takes a lot of work to keep your heart from hardening in this world but it is work worth doing.
if it makes you feel any better you were wrong and it was always fucked up. the difference between now and when you were young is that you’re more aware now.
i dont think it was always fucked up, there was always some amount of fucked up, but there’s vastly more amounts of fucked up now.
The problem mostly aren’t the individuals. Human normally are nice.
These are processes started by psychopaths using the heard instinct for their plans.
Most individuals are nice, groups of people on the other hand can never be trusted.
Gonna have to disagree with you there. Individuals are good are pretending they’re nice. The number of people who are horrifying when they think it’s safe to let their mask down around you is… concerning.
Not even kidding, about a year and a half ago, I took a job in a different department at work, and within 10 minutes, the guy that I was training with, had said 3 offensive slurs within the first 10 minutes of meeting the guy. Like dude, I could go to HR right now and you’d be gone in another 10 minutes. Wtf? In 2023? I mean, the guy was 71 years old, so I kinda gave him a pass on doing that, which kinda gives me the ick, but still. I didn’t turn him in because they basically built the building around where this guy happened to be standing and got offered the job the day it opened up. Another guy, whose only 38 and should know better though actually did get a 30 day suspension for repeated racist remarks. He’s actually a smart guy but he’s been mislead. Not a very nice guy, but smart.
We’re all just reeling from traumatic experience to traumatic experience. We don’t get any real time to slow down and heal, so emotions from one trauma show up in other unrelated problems. People become a bull in a china shop, hit someone else, who then becomes another bull in said china shop, they hit a few more, who then in turn become more bulls, so to anyone in the china shop that hasn’t been hit yet, it all seems chaotic and evil. We’re all just deeply traumatized with no avenue for healing.
