The core human problem is Sociopathy / Narcissism (Cluster B Personality Disorders). 5% of people cause 95% of all problems. And it has always been that way.
No matter what systems or institutions you put into place, public or private, and no matter how rock-solid your constitution or by-laws or institutional culture is: eventually and inevitably, one day, sociopaths and narcissists will conspire to take it over, by hook or by crook, and ultimately they will succeed.
Government, company, charity, church, club, movement, whatever; they all fall to sociopathic takeover, no matter how initially well-led, well-planned, well-founded. In fact, the more successful your organization or movement, the more lucrative a target for takeover it becomes. Corruption, therefore, is inevitable. The best you can do is keep it at bay as long as you can before the cycle of corruption, destruction, and renewal takes place.
It’s the ever-perennial Problem of Evil.
No one has ever solved it, though many have tried.
You cannot educate it away, you cannot religion it away, you cannot forgive it away, you cannot shame it away, and you cannot punish it away. It keeps coming back.
You cannot teach Character. For example, Seneca attempting to tutor Nero into becoming a man of Wisdom and Character is a tragic tale as old as human time. To a Narcissist, everything is merely a tool for gaining power and influence, even lessons in Ethics and Character. Pearls before swine.
Only a Sisyphean resolve to constantly and persistently RESIST, every hour, every day, every generation - every moment that one can, no matter what, and knowing that bullies and a control-freaks will always be with us, and the struggle to resist and restrain them will ever be refreshed anew with every sunrise, that is all we have right now.
Learn the signs of Malignant Narcissism. Be proactive. Protect yourself. Stand up to bullies.
Luigi.gif
I don’t think this is a long term sustainable solution.
It’s a temporary short term solution that is repeatable. If my time working under capitalism has taught me anything it’s that a temporary short term solution works perfectly well as a long term solution if you accept it as maintenance. Just gotta clear out the cunts every once in a while.
That’s what many think about punitive systems. And you are correct. But we are at the magical point where a large number are just fine with that.
Hard to see such a thing. At least we can take some satisfaction from Luigi events.
Only needs to work a couple thousand times.
This is sorta why I think capitalism is both a useful pragmatic system and a terrible idea.
It’s the whole greed is good thing. It’s this clever little hack of “well let’s let the greedy sociopaths be that way, and we will just arrange the game so it benefits everyone.”
It sorta work in the beginning stages of capitalism. They realize that they can make profits exploiting workers and go to town and consumers reap the benefits of there being lots of stuff to buy to meet their needs.
Sure your boss is an amoral exploiter, but it means the widgets get made.
But capitalism is not static, it’s a game played over time where those least bound by morals and ethics trap greater and greater rewards. Leading to where much of western civilization finds itself today, beholden to a handful of the worst human beings.
The only mechanism to keep them in check is competition, and it’s a system that devolves over time to have little to no competition, so we shouldn’t be surprised.
I often wonder what the world could be if we took seriously the job of restraining the impulses of that 5% of the population. We teach young children to share and be kind and the golden rule. Then you reach adulthood and realize that all of that is still true but unrewarded, and the way to get ahead is to exploit people. The wealthiest and most “successful” amongst us in this society are those most willing to exploit their fellow man for their own benefit. You get a billion dollars by being willing to steal a billion dollars from your workers. No one can earn a billion dollars you have to have thousands of people working for you everyday, and for each one of those people you have to be willing to extract value out of them, what in any other context we would call theft.
I think we underestimated the harm that capitalism would do in terms of normalizing greedy sociopaths. It’s turned into a giant propaganda machine that serves to gaslight the masses into believing that the sociopaths are good and right and deserve what they’ve stolen.
And we’ve built a world that silos people away from other normal people so it’s even harder to use your community to fight back.
It’s going to be incredibly hard to do any sort of reset now. Most people refuse to even see any sort of problem with it.
Adam Smith agreed with you in the 1600s when he thought up the system. He specifically said that capitalism couldn’t be the end goal, but he wasn’t aware of what the end goal would be, just that it would necessarily benefit the people, not the rich.
Well, comrade smith maybe fucked up.
He didn’t fuck up, and his work is important in early leftist literature.
The fuck up was everyone after him not listening except to the bits they wanted too.
people reading selectively
I think on some subjects, when writing publicly, that really needs to be considered.
just got to reset it every 100 years or so. we may be overdue
Many ancient societies had recurring debt jubilees on approximately that time scale… for basically this reason.
Debt jubilee season comes, everyone’s debts are wiped clean.
Sucks for the lenders, great for the borrowers, but also everyone knows when it is scheduled.
That is pretty close to a reset of the playing field of your economy in many ways…
… though of course slavery did also exist in many of these societies, so… far from a perfect reset.
Capitalism might be the mechanism, but it’s not the root cause. Any system will eventually be corrupted in the same way without constant vigilance.
The worship of capitalism certainly contributed. Capitalism needs heavy controls.
Individualism is a dead end, the forces you describe are powerful because society is organized for their benefit. The cruel and psychopathic have avenues to make themselves useful to the ruling class. This is a social construct not an individual virtue or vice.
We can only make changes together. I def think people need to be more individually courageous, but the most common source for courage is social support, not some inherent trait. Some people are oppositional defiant in a way that can make them practical for a time, but without something larger steering circumstances then these individuals end up becoming tyrants all the same.
Well it would be nice if we ever return to normalcy to overturn CU and clamp down HARD on the issues that enable the rampant abuse of the system. Like I’m talking union busting levels of “No you’re complicit in this more than X% you are out, forever”
I agree that our only way, truly, out of our current mess here in the United States is to get hardcore, focused, and doggedly persistent. Overturning CU, if we ever have a remote chance of even getting close to doing it, will be a hard slog, but it is fundamental, absolutely necessary, and singularly non-negotiable.
It should be our primary issue, I think, even though it’s not a sexy one.
If Democrats don’t deliver on this fight, then we must fight the Democrats tooth and nail, too.
The real problem is that our elected representatives are not sufficiently afraid of us.
We should be verbally abusing Democratic party leadership until they “radicalize” with us, or join MAGA in fighting us outright.
If good, strong, brave people can fight the good fight and win, then perhaps we can turn the tide and we’ll keep evil at bay for another 40-year cycle or whatever.
Or it might be too late, and we have to go through a real destructive cycle of severe suffering at the hands of tyrants first. I hope not, but I don’t know.
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Is authoritarianism also cluster b? There are a lot of people who seem to get off on being part of the group. Like, it brings them chemical joy to be screaming in a crowd about how that other group of people need to die. Those people kind of suck, too.
I don’t think every maga hat is a narcissist, but a lot of them are trash humans who value their in-group feelings of solidarity over everything else.
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I don’t know, but I suspect there might be a link.
We need a preventive cure for authoritarian personality, rather than the extant extremely violent cure.
I imagine early intervention helps, but right-wing (ie: authoritarian) people don’t want to invest in quality education. Not the kind with a good teacher-student ratio and time spent on social skills.
Well yes, the virus is tryong to breed. It does that in pig shit ignorance and filth. Suffering and inchoate rage.
I agree that this is the root of all human problems, but I think there’s more to it also. There aren’t 95% of people willing to resist it. I imagine the opposite kind of people, those deeply selfless and incapable of tolerating injustice, also make up less than 5% of people.
And so even though only a small minority are naked power seekers, something like 80+% of all humans are just looking for someone to tell them what to do. They don’t want responsibility, power, or self-determination. They want to be made to feel safe, and be given orders.
Don’t forget their cowardly base that will claim ignorance of the Paradox of Tolerance while they claim those who are intolerant of intolerance are just as bad and evil. Those who would step in front of the only solution found to work with any permanency. The fascist apologists and enablers.
I think you’re right, and this is why it’s so important to protest and create a movement, be visible and make a noise in every way you can. Those 80% will follow a movement but they won’t act as individuals.
I mean there are some options for dealing with that.
A. Early monitoring in childhood followed by extensive therapy
B. Eugenics if a genetic link is identified (least savory option and likely not possible)
C. Rebuild our social circles and communities
To expand on C, I think a lot of what you’re identifying as narcissistic behavior or sociopathy is actually caused by the destruction of our communities. The way our society is built it rewards anti-social action with money and it’s cold and depersonalized. It’s easy as a upper executive to fire 500 people you’ve never once met and you will never meet. You don’t have to know them beyond a few spreadsheets of data. People will absolve themselves of personal responsibility and refer to the financial aspects. Additionally, our communities have been destroyed. The addition of the nuclear family structure encourages you to provide as much as possible to as few individuals instead of valuing extended family and community. Plus in some places in the world it is possible to go days or weeks without ever interacting with members of your community.
Eugenics
hitler approves
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Yeah these days it’s just altering in vitro. We have the tech, but we are rightfully frightened by it. It’s hard to deploy in a way that it does good and is not abused
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The sad thing is we do have the potential to shape a healthier human race. The potential to cure all genetic diseases and have a better future. We have the technology today.
Unfortunately we cannot be trusted to use it. It will 100% be used to target minorities and harm people to create something racists ideal. It’s kinda sad
Dude we can’t even take polio. You think we’re ready to fuvk with our own genomes for this shit?
Another pseudoscientific theory about how a small minority of society are naturally bad in a way that causes all social ills?
And of course none of this is exacerbated by said socirty. It’s your fault if you don’t fit thos artoficial thing we built, which cannot fail-only be failed.
Has anyone made a tarpit for these types? Some sort of scoring system to trap them in.
Fascist uprisings are the closest we’ve come.
Oh my god this essentialist bullshit.
Yeah some inbred ancient greek ivory tower assholes couldnt teach someone to be good in between beating their slaves and fucking their kids and believing lightning came from an old guy with a big fluffy beard whike changing nothing about their surroubdings. Someone else tried one thing three thousand years ago, and im all out of ideas. guess it’s impossible. Shows great passion for the subject.
This is all fundamental elemental unchangeable nature of humanity. Our social system has no effect on what that is or how it manifests. the system has zero culpability for the outcomes it produces, it could have been no different.
And we obviously know this. You can look at neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat baguettes and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat deep fried twinkies and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat poutine and neofascist empires where they eat borscht and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat fried rice(i know, but too many distinct regional cuisines) and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat sushi. Plus accounts from a bunch of their current and former subjects, and historic accounts of monarchic slave societies. Weve got data on people from all kinds of society. All kinds of culture. And they all turn out some percentage of shameless manipulative bastard-monster. Allof them! Every possible kind, even the cutthroat neoliberal one that just eats boiled sheep! So obviously no ither proportion of humanity is possible. Weve even done formal studies on upperiddle class male college students from a couple of these places to confirm it!
And, look, heres where we get into much harder science: it’s in the DSM as a disorder. That means its always bad and always gonna be bad. There’s no social arrangement or technology that can make it benign. Just cant be done. That’s not just some shit some guy decided so he could get home and start nursing the hangover from his four martini lunch and the mountainous pile of cocaine he snorted for his daily insight into normal humanity-that’s a fact.
For fascists, sure. If we killed all the sociopaths, who would cut us up when we’re sick/injured and run into our burning buildings?
If we kill all the mentally ill, who ths fuck would make our art? The actually good stuff?
You’re just asking why I think it would be good to harm people who have done nothing wrong. I wouldn’t. I can point to several posts in my history that will show I’m not a eugenicist. Which appears to be the brush you’re reaching for.
Maybe you were replying to thee wrong comment.
Yeah, probably.
Fucking YES. Thank you, extremely well said
100% there.
look for local mutual aids, or political organisations fighting for your rights.
being active will make you feel better and will actually make the world around you better.
“They” want you to give up and doomscroll
This! Political activism is about networking and mutual aid, not visibility in media. At least it should be. Give me less Gretchen more aid workers.
I have considered joining NGOs, but they all require WhatsApp.
And? Jesus people need to get off their high horses sometimes. Yes we all get Facebook is bad. We all get that Whatsapp is not ideal and something like signal is infinitely better.
To use Whatsapp as a reason why you won’t do good? Fucking weak bro.
try thinking smaller. where can you help in your community? volunteering is my emotional bastion against the larger, more uncontrollable horrors of the world.
As well as helping, make sure to connect with these people and build up community bonds. Our power comes from unity.
Bingo. Anytime I see a too-large way of thinking, I try to suggesting thinking small. You can’t save the rainforest, but you can plant a tree in your community, you know? And it feels good.
I volunteered as en EMT for about 10 years, until the second kid came, and COVID and all that. It was difficult, took me away from work and my family, long days, mentally and emotionally taxing at times, and one of the more rewarding experiences I’ve had in my life. And it was all done within a few miles of my home. I (like to think) I had an impact on my community, and it feels good.
I second this, and add that if you have an area of expertise, you will have more impact if you utilize that expertise. Some examples:
- If you have access to a commercial kitchen during off hours, you could cook food for the poor.
- If you are good at socializing, try meeting with local political groups, influencing election candidates, or running for office.
- If you are a software engineer, volunteer on an open-source project related to a cause that you care about.
And if you don’t want to spend effort, you can always donate to a cause.
I feel overwhelmed a lot lately.
I think one of the causes for the situation in the U.S. is isolation. Both that the bad actors are too isolated from their fellow human, and that people of good will feel alone in facing rising assholedom.
It’s helped me to physically go to gatherings of people who are like minded. To be reminded that you’re not alone. We’ll never get everyone on our side, but I believe we can get enough.
How do you find these in person gatherings, most of my socialization with other Americans happens through work and I cannot be my authentic self at work because that has negative consequences in my experience, the American work culture is kind depressing, where everyone seems to be in some rat race to be the most busy and most productive or at least pretend to be so, most of my interactions lack human warmth and it all feels fake and performative, I have to be guarded about what I say so that it doesn’t come back to bite me even with colleague’s of the same level and I am tired of the expectations of overwork and constant threat of being laid off of the right people don’t have a high opinion of you.
For me I’ve been involved in an anti gerrymandering group, which definitely fulfills the “like-minded” category. But there’s still value just in connecting with people outside work even if it’s not ideological, so things like classes, hobbies, casual sports/exercise, anything that has regular meetings.
Many organizations - like churches and NGOs - offer some kind of organized approach to do community projects, like feeding people, repairing houses and things (especially for a single mother household that has fallen on hard times?), so you could join one of those?
If such is not done in your area, then all the more reason to start something on your own! 😉 (Or else find a new area)
Yes.
The rich used to take the same transport as the rest of us. They could be in a separate car on the train but they were still attached. Then they got automobiles and could drive on their own and we built highways to connect their favorite places. But can only get so far and planes were invented. Now they are stuck with the poors again but up in first class.
Now they have private jets and all the roads full of the regular people, the trains and the planes. They remote in or call in from their cellphone instead of being in the actual office.
The wealthy dont live like the rest of us anymore. And their social group is much more carefully curated to not let us in. They dont want to know regular people.
Which means theyre no longer human. Just animals to kill when you’re bored.
Hey, OP. Welcome to your 30s. 🎉 New to the US, or just seeing it for the first time?
New to the
USWorld, or just seeing it for the first time?What is the benefit of making a comment like this?
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If you read the OP it doesn’t say anything about it being a new phenomenon. Even if that’s what this comment “accomplished” is it worth shitting on someone for sharing their emotions? It comes across as self congratulatory, like the commenter is above the OP because they’ve experienced negative circumstances for longer.
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- The 30s* comment
- posted in the 2010s*, the 2000s*, the 90s*, the 80s*
Might wanna dial back that last question, just in case. 😅😶
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May your message be resonant and your delivery as effective as nails in a baseball bat. 🤘🏼
FWIW, I meant it in welcome, not patronizing dickery.
Take a walk, fellow prol, breathe the air. It was levity, not whatever you’ve got there, triggering on default. (FFS. This place smells of reddit more every day.)
Thank you for clarifying you didn’t intend to be patronizing. That said, I invite you to re-read the content of what you wrote:
Hey, OP. Welcome to your 30s. 🎉 New to the US, or just seeing it for the first time?
After OP just expressed emotional distress, you said “Welcome to your 30s”, which implies you think that has something to do with what they just said. “This feeling is part of being in your thirties, when you start to notice things are wrong in the world.” Not a stereotype I’ve heard before, but reading it as a straight welcome doesn’t make sense either because OP didn’t say “I just turned 30,” they said they’re 32. This isn’t a new age bracket for them.
That reading is bolstered by the next part. After OP is crashing out about the state of the world, you asked if they’re new to the US or just seeing it for the first time. The “or” implies these are the only two reasons why OP might be bringing this up. “Are you new here or did you just start paying attention?”
Even if you were going for a “Welcome to the club friend, things have been fucked up for a long time,” I don’t think it’s an effective comment because of the tone, and you’re assuming this is the first time they’ve thought about it, and that they don’t know that things have been bad before. That may be true, but sometimes people just want to vent. I understand it’s common to become jaded over time if only just for self protection, but it’s valuable to still be able to be outraged and to experience injustice fresh.
I appreciate you having good intentions. I think a sincere reading of the words can end up with the impression I shared.
Me in my 40s, who’s been feeling this way since my teens:
It’s not a competition, and if it is, it’s not one anyone should want to win
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Relevant username?
to quote jreg, “these people have physical bodies”
Make an app that tracks them … it seems to bother them. They dont seem to care if companies spy on us, so spy on them. Im sure nothing bad could happen just from an app that shows the physical location of a politician, CEO, or billionaire.
Make an app
I’ve seen this Rick & Morty episode.
This ain’t funny.
Sign a strike card, baby https://generalstrikeus.com/ we’ve got a long way to go but I’ve been handing out flyers on the street… Spread the decentralized jeezus-i-wish-we-had-labor-unions word. Please. No really… I’m begging.
Labor unions are good, but they’re not the be-all end-all of wbat we need; they’re a moderate compromise measure. A good one, but if it atarts getting too bloody or hard to take a necessary internediate goal because the state deployed all its violence and disinformation, well… The state has already deployed all its violence and disinformation.
It does seem like the number of non-violent options are dwindling. I really meant that I wish we’d had strong labor unions for the last several decades, as I don’t think we would be in quite the same mess as we are.
If an action works, it will be defined as violence. There’s a point to playing the theatrics of an action, and most things are not best accomplished by shootin’ dudes en masse, but our opponents have taken nonviolence off the table, and pretending otherwise is masochist or suicidal.
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I’ll participate, but I’m not giving out my info. I’d rather not be on as many lists as possible.
I keep being told it’s my own fault for not voting. I’m not even a non-voter. But every time things get worse, I’m told that I deserve it for not making Texas a winning Dem state by… idfk, sneaking into the back of a voting booth and spamming “D” into the console until someone drags me out.
People love an easy answer to excuse why they can treat someone else with less care or not listen to them as if they are already wrong. We love the little lies that make life easier. Its far less effort needed than trying to understand.
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Such a shame we cant mention it here.
Or at least a necessary step in it,
I mean, you could mention it. You could probably mention it easier if people would stop using .world as the default for everything, but you can mention it.
I think it’s a little too quick to be thought of as THE SOLUTION. Everyone seems to have absorbed just a teeny bit of the action hero mentality though, because that action will never be cleanly carried out. It will be a massive shit show for decades.* Every martin luther king jr. needs their malcolm x, sure, I absolutely believe that viewpoint, but the peaceful community advocating and community building needs to be emphasized and practiced (that’s the important bit, after all) more.
*There are far too many folks (in the US part of the “clowns of the world” mentioned) that are literally next door to the people that they will want to go after, and they’ve been itching to do it. Nothing that breaks the peace will see inaction from those folks, and that’s what pushes me to always advocate. I don’t want to be the cause of innocents suddenly being lynched because they happen to live in a deep red area and some sort of ‘civil war 2: electric boogaloo’ breaks out… And I use that electric boogaloo specifically because it is a pretty stark reminder (I hope), that those sorts of folks have been literally talking about what they have wanted to do for decades at this point. Unless the lefties break out some secret plans, they’re going to be out-organized and very out-planned.
Surely you’re not suggesting that civil wars are somehow bad or difficult to win
The first step is to organize, start a local community group and exercise your combined people power.
“Step in it”? Present tense? Nah. Past tense. Way past tense.
I’ll step in you! (Sorry if thats too forward)
No thanks 😜
Just as well; no washer/dryer here, so id need to use a public one.
You may not be able to stop the idiocy, but you can stop the feeling of isolation. Get out there and connect with political groups that are working against fascism.
went to my first protest this decade for labor day! met some really interesting folks and found a couple local groups i’m gonna meet up with later this week. can’t really recommend this enough
I’m right there with you. For all of you that say to just wait this out — how many of these am I supposed to wait out?! I’ve been doing this since Reagan, and it’s only gotten worse.
Insert (I’m tired boss) meme.
I just want out at this point.
Not too many more; you’ll either die in the camps here, or, after a couple brief decades of the living envying the dead, the planet will no longer support life, and you will necessarily die.
This is the refreshing optimism I come here for. Finally someone talking sense!
There is an alternative, but it is jnfortunately against the rules. So either die in the camps, or kill yourself (on a planetary scale)
Personally im very lazy, hoping i end up in the camps.
Yeah! A coward dies a thousand deaths, and with climate change, those who survive fascism, if we dont depose the billionaires, will surely add some zeroes.
🫂
i dont think george constanza said that on the show…
