Come on man, isn’t Lemmy cynical enough already?
Self examination is the first step to fighting cynicism.
Just please, less cynicism
Why are you cynical on cynicism?
Talking to Normal students in high school and in university in Australia (considered to be an imperial core country). I realised these people just really don’t give a fuck.
Most people don’t want to gain class consciousness, they think the current system is the best they can ever have and they wouldn’t want to risk it. Or they just refuse to reconise capitalism as the root problem.
Most people are too buzy with what ever that is happening near them that tragedy someone else are suffering on the other side of the world is just not important enough for them to take any action to try and change it.
Unless capitalism serious affects their ability to feed themselves or ablity to distract them from their misery (religion, social media, hobby etc), they won’t be bothered to do anything.
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 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 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’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.”)
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.
The Assholes will always win
Ethan Cohen’s poem “The Drunken Driver Has The Right Of Way”:
"The loudest have the final say, The wanton win, the rash hold sway, The realist’s rules of order say The drunken driver has the right of way.
"The Kubla Khan can butt in line; The biggest brute can take what’s mine; When heavyweights break wind, that’s fine; No matter what a judge might say, The drunken driver has the right of way.
"The guiltiest feel free of guilt; Who care not, bloom; who worry, wilt; Plans better laid are rarely built For forethought seldom wins the day; The drunken driver has the right of way.
"The most attentive and unfailing Carefulness is unavailing Wheresoever fools are flailing; Wisdom there is held at bay; The drunken driver has the right of way.
"De jure is de facto’s slave; The most foolhardy beat the brave; Brass routs restraint; low lies high’s grave; When conscience leads you, it’s astray; The drunken driver has the right of way.
"It’s only the naivest who’ll Deny this, that the reckless rule; When facing an oncoming fool The practiced and sagacious say Watch out — one side — look sharp — gang way.
“However much you plan and pray, Alas, alack, tant pis, oy vey, Now — heretofore — til Judgment Day, The drunken driver has the right of way.”
Reporting and fining drunken drivers need to speed up in the location.
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.
Why do you think the super wealthy are so keen on robots and AI? When even the police officers can’t “have had enough” there is no rebellion possible, ever again.
This. Our President (allegedly) playing “catch me if you can”
Capitalism at its core.
I believe we live in a very duplicitous world were greedy old people don’t mind seeing the world burn if they can get richer. The more you learn about the world the shittier it seems. I expect humanity will go extinct either because of climate change or due to achieving AGI and everyone being rendered for materials to make more money.
The disorder we see isn’t proof that the world is doomed. It’s proof that those old bastards don’t have the reigns like they used to. They’re cracking down not because they have unending strength, but unending fear.
Capitalism made almost everything the same big pile of shit. No matter the language and culture, in the end, it’s the same shit.
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.
Nothing will get better.
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.
Catharsis. As on the individual level of “get it out of the system”, the angst and anger also needs to be let out in societal level. Seeing as where the world is heading, the Pandora’s box has already opened and there is no way of putting back the angry genie. It will become worse before it gets better.
Cynics are dupes who are easily utilized by the forces which deliberately made them cynical. The foundation of conservative politics.
Meta 🤌
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.
That it’s pretty shit from the bottom up. Boring Lagrangian giving rise through great efforts of complexity to an endless dead void. On a mote of dust somewhere, there’s a soup of unusual chemicals making short lived bubbles of flesh that are compelled to eat each other for survival. Some of them organized into a System; it’s bad. It can change for the better or the worse, in increments, if enormous emergent collective efforts are made. On the individual level, though, existence is either painful or less painful but more boring if you’re lucky. But generally you don’t think about it and just kill time waiting for death.
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.
