- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.world
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I tried switching to historical documentaries but people have been terrible since well before we started writing things down.
Yeah I don’t know when they would prefer to live instead. Every age and culture have their disadvantages, you can argue that some are more progressive than others in various ways.
But here’s a fact. Penicillin was discovered 1928. That’s not even 100 years ago. I don’t know about others. But I’m really happy I live in the world where I don’t have to risk dying from a tic bite.
Yup! This is why we need to take money out of the hands of the wealthy and give it to the people they exploited.
it’s deeper than that.
money is the incentive to corruption. the actual cause of corruption is indifference to suffering of minorities and the disenfranchised.
the answer is easy. you don’t have to donate. you don’t have to protest. all you have to do is call out the smallest corrupt mistreatment of your fellow human beings.
see someone getting accosted by police because they are guilty of being black? start recording and ask the cops to identify themselves.
see someone being mistreated at a store because they are trans? call them out on it. get angry, tell make sure they are aware of how people that act like they do are treated.
also, don’t stop going there. go there every day. make sure they aren’t doing it again, and when they do, call them out on their bullshit again.
the only way to stop people from behaving badly is to teach them that it’s unacceptable behavior.
a society that stands idly by while people in that society are attacked is doomed to suffer and die.
“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
– Gustave Gilbert (After interviewing Nazis post-WWII)
a lack of empathy isn’t the source of corruption, money is. a lack of empathy is just a necessary pre-requisite.
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people think economics is a science but it doesn’t consider human nature
That’s literally the whole field of behavioral economics.
Also, economists don’t care about individual human behavior. That’s not what economics is. Economics is the study of broad trends in large populations. And for the most part, modeling these trends as people trying to maximize their own utility function is a useful tool to explain things.
Also also, the point of science is to be measureable and falsifiable so that hypotheses can be tested and disproven, making the predictions of the field more accurate over time. Economists create falsifiable hypotheses. Often they are disproven. Economics gets better at modelling the real world over time. Economics is a science.
“All models are wrong; some are useful.”
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If you want to understand evil you’ll need to observe it in yourself. Secondhand observations will not do.
see someone getting accosted by police because they are guilty of being black? start recording and ask the cops to identify themselves.
see someone being mistreated at a store because they are trans? call them out on it. get angry, tell make sure they are aware of how people that act like they do are treated.
I’ve literally never seen either of these things happen.
good for you?
I agree with you! Both things can be true :)
You will be seen as a malcontent and will be excluded from society more and more, the more you go down that road berating and lecturing people on their faults. Self righteousness doesn’t change the world for the better.
I know from experience.
Maybe naturalizing the incapacity for critical thought to be heard is the problem?
“You will be seen as malcontent”
Good. There’s no reason to be compliant to cruelty, if 1 person out of 1000 learns something it will be progress. Otherwise we just let the world forget empathy. Empathy, community, love, the things that allowed us to comunicate, to cooperate.
To exist as Human beings, to protect us from the uncaring world.
It is friendship that is the ultimate measure of progress. And friends don’t let friends be nazis
Seize the… Something… Damn it, I know this!
I deal with it by trying my best but also a heavy dose of cognitive dissonance when required. And learning (painstakingly slowly) how to be compassionate to myself regarding my shortcomings of not being able to fix it all.
Yeah…
Hence why conservatives hate education. It makes you have to feel empathy for other people and we can’t have that.
wait til you figure out that all of human history is one giant cycle of people being incredibly cruel to other people for incredibly tenuous reasons and realize this cycle will, presumably, never end; and thus every interaction you have with other people is if not driven by transaction (what can you do for them), likely to be driven by cruelty.
sweet dreams, it doesn’t get better.
Except the vast majority of human interactions are either neutral or positive. If you approach life with the outlook that everyone is transactional, it’s going to shape your behavior into an unlikable grump.
How does this cynical doomer shit get so much consistent up votes and echoes?
Very few people are dedicated enough to seek Lemmy out. Most will stay on reddit. Or never got on reddit, and are on IG and Tiktok. The main thing that will drive them here is negativity - noticing everything wrong about the platform they are using.
Because Lemmy is a hoard for emotionally and psychologically unwell people.
if the vast majority of your interactions with other people are neutral or positive, absent of transaction or cruelty, I’m very happy for you. genuinely. Unfortunately your personal experience, however, doesn’t invalidate mine; nor does it invalidate the mountains of human awfulness throughout history and up into the present day that I could list off to prove my point – keyword being ‘could’, here, as I’m not very interested in arguing, or in pissing on the parade you’re apparently having. If nobody’s pissed on yours, yet, why would I want to be the one to do so? so go, be happy, dismiss what I say as “cynical doomer shit” while you still have that fleeting luxury.
I’m sorry that my comment was a bit dismissive and invalidating. I didn’t really mean it to be, but I’ve been frustrated - I keep seeing this breed of misanthropy, and I understand why it’s an easy explanation for why things are bad, but it feels very clear to me that misanthropes ignore the vast catalog of human experience and lifespan and cherry-pick the negatives. When you believe that everyone is generally shitty, it’s easy to justify being generally shitty yourself (not saying that you are, just saying in general). You also then just start avoiding people in general, and every time you are forced to interact with people, you start looking for a way out.
I’ve honestly been there. I’ve been in that headspace. Any positive thing can be dulled by a “yeah but…” And then you look for ways to invalidate the positive things that did happen… calling them “transactional”. You go into the hard emotionless philosophy of “well technically everything is transactional, even altruism doesn’t really exist because your brain is making you feel good” and you feel RIGHT. Every terrible thing that happens you get to reinforce how RIGHT you are about the universe. The news is happy to feed you a torrent of terrible things that humans are doing, you avoid people most of the time so your chances of positive interactions are limited, and your worldview colors every interaction you have with people, so you either interpret or project negativity.
IDK, I guess I just want to challenge your perception a bit. It’s very possible that this is just depression, because it was for me. A mix of life changes, changes in my mindset, and medication have led me to where I am now. The thing that clicked for me was noticing how much my negative mood could affect my perceptions of people, and how easy it was for that mood to feed on itself.
Sorry if this comes off as condescending. I just honestly believe that most humans have the capacity for great good, and it really is just about us believing in ourselves and each other. We also have a capacity for great evil, when we believe that that’s how everyone else is. I have to push back on that.
while I appreciate your effort, I do in fact remember a time when I was more naive and positive (~5+ years ago), and I also remember people being just as awful to me and to each other at that time, too; the only real difference being that I was frequently awful right back – I just haven’t got the energy for that anymore. If your point is that my attitude colors or affects my reality, that doesn’t really hold water for me. the world around me hasn’t changed that drastically in that time (if anything it’s gotten slightly worse), I’ve just become more perceptive of it. And while sticking my head in the sand and pretending the world is a fine place full of fine people does sound like a wonderful delusion to entertain, it is just that. A delusion. While there are certainly some fine people in it, the vast majority of people are anywhere from unaware or indifferent, to actively making the world a worse place.
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How did you find a photo of me, with an accurate caption?
Ah, so you too have watched Adam Curtis documentaries.
HyperNormalisation https://youtu.be/to72IJzQT5k
didn’t know about them
been binging them and now i am spiraling even harder
Fun side-effect: one finds a strange appreciation and understanding for supervillains hell-bent on ending life on earth, “for no reason”.
Hey, if you want to see the world burn so badly, stop dilly-dallying and bring out the big guns! This is really taking longer than necessary.
I’ve flipped and flopped between being an accelerationist and a saviour when it comes to life-ending climate change.
Ultimately nobody has the guts to commit to using humans to simulate 100, 000, 000 whalefalls though.
Also, you would fail. Climate change almost certainly will not end life, or macroscopic life, or human life.
Also applicable to scrolling through Lemmy most days.
Me when I first watched Mr.Rob0t as a kid
Meanwhile, History Channel: Aliens. It’s all Aliens.
if anyone is in need of good news this morning: https://archive.is/lv3eU
I just downloaded like 30 seasons of modern marvels. I’m hoping those will restore some of my optimism for life since watching that show made me happy as a child.
