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.
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.
That this fits . . .
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)
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.
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.
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.
That we will continue to exploit other humans for material comfort, and justify it with more or less overt racism - black and brown lives just can’t matter, otherwise we’d have to give up our privilege and things. Make their countries unlivable and let them drown trying to get out.
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.
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.
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 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.”)
People who choose to suppress a growing power with the idea that they can easily win,
then make it look like they’re the victims when the victims decide to fight back,
with the ones standing up to themselves becoming stronger and stronger over time,
and the suppressing people choosing to never negotiate a losing battle/war
apart from demanding that the winning party makes concessions to let them win,
deserve to die through the consequences of their own actions.Bonus points for those people who fly banners of freedom and progressiveness
while their organizers get paid by doing the bidding
of oppressive conservative foreign agents
who want their country to regress for their own gains of power.
And while displaying their wicked pop-culture chants, posters and gestures,
are often demanding their government to retract a reasonable proposal such as
‘murder, and that includes any incel strangling his perceived girlfriend to death,
should be made illegal, even if you’re on a vacation’
or ‘stop taking money from foreign agents’
that are mild copies of laws from said foreign agents’ country.And even more bonus points for the appointed new leader
legitimized through a so-called international award of good behavior.And I say this because while all the hypocrisy is absolutely infuriating,
to top it off by trying to chop off the hand and head
that tries to give you mercy, then there’s no redemption,
only more and more defense against
a more and more deadly risky liable escalationIt 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.
