I read an article in Uplifting News the other day - it was about an elderly woman who fell and broke her leg while hiking, and a whole band of people helped carry her down the mountain and to the hospital.
There’s an awful lot of bad news out there, and it often feels like humanity is failing each other. But at least in this story, absolute strangers came together to help someone who couldn’t help themselves. I cried happy tears.
There’s a short stretch of road on the way to camp that’s always been a sand trap, but lately it had become almost impassable.
Whenever someone is stuck, people come out the woods and start shoveling and hooking up tow straps. Pulled up last week to 3 vehicles, grabbed my shovel and walked up, “OK. Which one’s stuck?” “Bro, we all stuck.” “OK, who’s first?”
There were two white girls stuck in an AWD drive vehicle. One of the guys got them into AWD mode and they drove it out. A black family was stuck in a medium-sized car and the neighbor used a 4x4 (which he keeps in the weeds for just such cases) to lever the ass end off the ground. Our local Boomhauer backed his 4WD up and yanked another truck out. I stood there with my shovel mostly being useless.
Never gone 15-minutes stuck without a helpful redneck pulling up. One of the guys on the road just dropped a dump truck full of red clay and packed it into a little hill! Should be good for a long time. The guy next to my lot is poor as a church mouse, and not in great health, but he drives his little POS tractor down the roads pushing the sand to the side. Not long ago the road collapsed where I turn just past the trap, so bad even my ancient F150 would bottom out. Someone got out there and removed all the broken asphalt and smoothed it over, that was serious work! (I should note, this is a private dirt road in the boondocks, no city or state assistance.)
Humans are largely good to one another face to face, our most evil things happen when we create systems that allow us to remove the humanity from one another. We also have a tendency to allow only sociopaths and psychopaths to lead us, and we gotta nip that in the bud, but most people who aren’t like that don’t want to lead.
We also have a tendency to allow only sociopaths and psychopaths to lead us, and we gotta nip that in the bud, but most people who aren’t like that don’t want to lead.
I wouldn’t say “allow”, but either way, you’ve hit the core issue there on both counts - leaders. Hierarchy creates inequality, it’s just how it works. It’s why any cult of personality is dangerous and bound to maintain an imbalance.
This mostly focuses on management in the workplace, but applies just as much to leadership rolls in general: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/colin-jenkins-deconstructing-hierarchies-on-the-paradox-of-contrived-leadership-and-arbitrary-p
It’s literally a case of being the change you want to see in the world.
If you’re smart enough to know all of the reasons why you’re not a good leader, you should go be a leader and then work on your problems in the process.
The outcome would be better for everyone if we had self-aware leaders who are working on their flaws instead of the p-noid zombie self-serving self-gratifying leaders that we currently have.
Hierarchy creates inequality, it’s just how it works.
Always and every single time, it doesn’t matter how nicely you dress it up or try to convince yourself that if it was you (or your personal “leader” of choice) it would somehow be different. Inequality is literally built in to the structure.
E: I just had to come back and show some appreciation for “be the change you want to see in the world - follow someone else”, I know you didn’t mean it, but the irony is just too good…
this is how i feel about driving. people arent likely to yell at each other and cut each other off while walking like they are driving. not that it never happens, but when im driving these days theres ALWAYS someone mad asf next to or behind me
I feel like people got worse on the road after the pandemic. Dunno why, just a feeling I got.
Oh they definitely did.
Before the pandemic, I’d see one or 2 highly questionable moves in a drive.
Now it’s like a dozen.
I see people making lefts on red, cutting off semi trucks, weaving in and out of traffic, driving with absolutely no lights at night, and my god the speeding.
A few years ago it was normal to see people doing like 5 miles an hour over the limit, now it feels like half the people want to do 10 or 15, even on surface streets.
I wonder if it’s that most people drove less during the pandemic, the fact that cops around here were told to only pull people over if they were a direct threat to the public, or if the social isolation just made some people way more self centered. But driving has definitely gotten worse since the pandemic.
You sure you aren’t driving poorly given that it is always someone mad right near you?
our most evil things happen when we create systems that allow us to remove the humanity from one another
This alienation is, incidentally, why conscientiousness is more reliable than empathy as a mechanism for ensuring people are good to one another.
Empathy doesn’t scale. It’s possible to have empathy for people that one knows closely, or sees often. But empathy for incidental strangers is harder, and empathy for those one only “sees” abstractly is even harder than that. Empathy isn’t built for extension to millions or billions of people.
Conscientiousness – for example treating people fairly because it’s the right thing to do, as opposed to treating them warmly because it feels good to do so – is actually scalable. You can make a commitment to treating everyone fairly, and then you don’t need to rely on feeling good about a person in order to do right by them.
That prices for photovoltaic are dropping rapidly:
In Denver, a person with a house gets subsidized rates for electricity. By parking their EV in their garage and charging overnight, they can pay 4.2¢ per kWh.
Meanwhile, a person like me who lives in an apartment and must charge his car during the day at public chargers like EVGo or Electrify America, pays 59¢ per kWh.
This means that assuming a typical 70 kWh charge (from almost empty to almost full) costs:
- For the house-owner: $2.94
- For the apartment dweller: $41.30
That’s almost a 15x difference! (Yay for EV economics).
We don’t have an economy. We have two economies. We have a severely bimodal economy.
My spouse and the many others sticking with their careers after being oncology ICU nurses during the worst of the pandemic. They know it’s a thankless job and they’re treated like shit, the healthcare system is a disaster, families and patients scream at them and attack them, the job certainly isn’t about money, it puts your physical and mental health at risk, but they’ll do it anyway for that one person who gets to ring the bell and say their cancer is no longer detectable.
My oncle sailed into early COVID season with late non-hodgekins and not long to go. He thought of his pregnant daughter and her child, and the risks of attending treatment, now daily, and took a voluntary.
Our med system made this horrific decision slightly less so by handling everything but the go button; and while we miss everything about him to this day, we’re grateful.
It’s important work, even when we don’t win.
I like to think that people, on the whole, are becoming more accepting of those that are different.
I don’t know how true that is, and there’s certainly loud arseholes out there, but maybe the common non-chronically-online person is more welcoming than 10 years ago.
