A lot of people just lack critical thinking skills and imagination. A lot of people like being at the bottom of hierarchy. A lot of people like when people they dont like suffer, even if it means they do, too. A lot of people are religious. All of these things are plagues on our society, and a lot of them are done on purpose by those in power.
Eh, I think it’s oversimplification to attribute it to a single motivation. There are definitely people like OP is describing, but there are also definitely the ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaire’ types. And honestly I think a damn big percentage is just plain ol’ fear of change wrapped in several layers of rationalization.
“It’s way easier to fool someone than it is to convince them they’ve been fooled.”
Another reason: it’s really easy for unimaginative people to sound smart with cynicism. They’d rather be superior than be right.
“Look at that crash! I told you that flying machines can’t work.”
Oo yeah, for real. I kind of stumbled upon this in my teens (maybe everyone does), but luckily was able to snap out of it, woke up, and realised I could form flexible informed opinions that define my whole personality
Its a lot of just world fallacy too
This is a mistake that many leftists do, thinking that people don’t like authoritarianism. A lot of people crave for it
In theory, a benevolent dictatorship is a good system, that can cut through a lot of bureaucracy and enact good changes in a timely fashion. The obvious problems are who gets to be dictator and how do you keep the dictatorship benevolent.
If I could unilaterally make somebody a dictator and believed they would do what’s best, I’d do it. But I don’t know if there is such a person. To me it just seems like people believe in and trust certain public figures to agree with them, and enact the same changes they’d want.
people tend dislike authoritarianism, but tend to be afraid of society changement. Everybody got contradiction
Or they are just brainwashed, and can’t fathom another type of society after ~500 years of capitalism.
I’ve known far more Musk fanboys than I would have liked to, and I wouldn’t say they see him or other genocidal pedophiles as gods or anything.
In fact, it’s quite difficult to describe it or compare it to anything, because that sort of blind admiration just plain doesn’t make any sense, and usually contradicts their other beliefs. Which is a big sign of being affected by propaganda.
The thread is so lost anymore it doesn’t even matter. In America it is just survival as America becomes Russia. You can’t defend anyone when you can’t even get your doctor visit or medication to live if you even try to rock the boat for more than 3 days. If that. Modern feudalism.
They see people like Musk, and they see strength, if only because of their economic capabilities. They want a society of strength. A society where people hoard around the few to lift them up. A society that enables greatness. Somebody who can look mortality in the eyes and reject it. To bring us into the future with vitality.
What they fail to see is that by turning the mighty into gods, we turn ourselves into coggs. In the pursuit of lifting them up, we alienate ourselves from the meaningful. Makes us sacrifice for the superficial. We become lifeless and in fear of the meaningful.
I don’t defend the rich but I also don’t claim it’s stupid hard to make 75k and up and I will never in my life say starting a career that can help you live comfortably is an impossible task.
I think the unwillingness to invest in one’s self and to sacrifice your thought process of fuck climbing up the ladder, is what’s hurting people’s personal wealth growth.
I think that as much people are preserving themselves and not going into careers because they don’t offer as many benefits as the boomers, I also think people are limiting themselves and I think that if you don’t want to invest in your future, that’s your own fault.
However, I do not agree with generational wealth but I don’t disagree on passing a home down. If you’re fortunate enough to have a house passed down to you, then that’s what you are, fortunate.
I dont agree with trusifarians using their wealth to buy up more property or to be greedy and glutenous with their money.
I don’t hate on the six figure earners but I think once you make 450k/year, you can start figuring out ways to better society.
I think once you hit a 20mil* net worth, you can figure out ways to help other people.
It’s like the Stanford marshmallow experiment. It’s not willpower, it’s that people have been taught that any money we save will be lost.
We’re all expected to invest or lose money to inflation. But most of us don’t know anything about investing. So we trust our money to some Wall Street type, and then get called stupid when we pick the wrong dudes. But you don’t get called stupid if you just spend the money now.
It’s even worse in the USA where everyone has the specter of medical debt hanging over us. You can do everything right and then just get a massive forever debt from which bankruptcy can’t save you. Better to spend the money on a community that might appreciate it.
So we trust our money to some Wall Street type, and then get called stupid when we pick the wrong dudes.
99% of account managers and financial advisors are just some dude. The only sensible thing to invest in is an index fund like VOO, SPLG, FXAIX, IVV, or for non-US stuff, VEU, VSS, or something else based on an index appropriate to your needs.
Genuinely, the best known growth strategy in a capitalist market is also the lowest-brain strategy. Buy an index fund, and then do nothing.
Everything else is just giving money to someone else to do a worse job on average.
You’re not wrong, but do you hear yourself? That’s a terrifying alphabet soup of complicated choices. And in the next thread we’ll talk about AI IPOs dumping on the index fund suckers before a collapse.
Yes, it’s alphabet soup, but no, the choices are not complicated.
In USA? Buy VOO.
Not in USA? Buy VEU and maybe VOO if you want.
And I pointed this out before that rich people inadvertently will end up becoming involved in politics, even if there was not interest or want to in the beginning or was never a goal; It’s shocking how many of them end up getting to know their mayor at a personal level to leverage them.
Most don’t leverage their local government for the better and it’s rare to see it. It’s rare that someone will like actually fund a food bank for a year and become involved in the community. Imagine having enough money to set a trust for a church to have an indefinite food bank? That would be so fucking cool, I would so do that if I had that kind of money to toss around. Or or or like buying old hospitals and completely demolishing them and putting up modern hospitals.
Our first mistake as a nation was not kicking out the royalists.
Alexander Hamilton
The world would be better if a bunch of people could just admit they are into mental BDSM and they are subs
Religion, narcissistic family members, social media algorithms, sandwich shops… all tuned to churn out subs.
I’m only okay with one of those.
(Also you forgot shipyards, BTW.)
Stamp on my brain, master
That’s what the AI is for.
Can Claude wear stilettos?
Found Richard Dawkins’s account
As I heard someone else say recently, everything with conservatives is either team sports or cuck porn and it really seems that’s true.
🤫 you gonna summon them lol
I can’t wait to see their smiling face
Right-wing values can be summarized in one word: Hierarchy.
That also happens to be the literal definition. Surprisingly few people know that the political left and right correspond to equality and hierarchy respectively.
Right and left wing are historical terms stemming from the literal left and right halves of a physical building. If you’re not referring to the revolution era french national assembly, you have to accept that since other connotations may have snuck in along the way.
Even at the time the terms came with complex meanings.
Boiling it down at any time merely to equality versus hierarchy is only something you’d do if you want to misrepresent people by oversimplification.
She ain’t wrong
I sort of disagree, it’s that they want to feel safe and taken care of. They’ve made Trump their Jesus, literally. He is their shepherd and will only do well for them.
That’s why the gas and inflation going in the wrong direction after 2 years is fucking with their heads. If he’s wrong about one thing, and god can’t be wrong, then maybe he isn’t a god.
The entire point of religion is to make the insecure feel secure, like the answers to the hard questions exist and Sky Daddy is looking out for them
These heirarchies caused or exaserbated just about every major tragedy in history - war, genocide, slavery, rape, empire, colonialism, capitalism, etc.
But depending on how you look at it, 25-40% of humans just like heirarchies and want them, despite the misery they cause for both the empowered and disempowered.
That’s a huge problem - fascism will likely always have a base of supporters to come back from no matter how many times we defeat it, and you just can’t imprison/disenfranchise/exile that high a % of people for a wide variety of obvious reasons.
I fear this is a “this is who we are as an organism” problem that will follow our species wherever we go.
I’d like to see how you got to “hierarchies = fascism”. I also think that the people who want hierarchies are much higher than 25-40%.
Belief that heirarchies are natural and desirable because some people are better than others is the worldview required to be vulnerable to the lie of fascism, it’s the precursor to all supremacist thinking.
If you look at opinion polling across countries, die-hard support for supremacist candidates hovers around 25-40%. Die hard as in will support those candidates no matter how poorly they’re doing. Support levels wax and wane as anxiety goes up and down, or as supremacist candidates tend to be winning or losing, but the core support base for authoritarian ideals routinely comes out around 25-40% across most western countries.
Belief that heirarchies are natural and desirable because some people are better than others is the worldview required to be vulnerable to the lie of fascism, it’s the precursor to all supremacist thinking.
It isn’t because “some people are better than others”, it’s because some people are better than others at leading. Leadership is a skill, and it can be learned and practiced just like any other skill. You could say, “Hey, Mary is good at fixing things, let’s put her in charge of repairs. Margaret is good at planning projects and organizing people, let’s put her in leadership.”
And no, it doesn’t imply that the person leading should have total control over everything or that they can’t be held accountable.
If you look at opinion polling across countries, die-hard support for supremacist candidates hovers around 25-40%.
You said “humans who want hierarchies” and you’re equating that with “support for supremacist candidates”. Does that mean that if I support a centrist or a left-wing candidate, then I don’t want hierarchies? I can tell you, there are certainly not that many anarchists in the world. 60-75% of the population?
But depending on how you look at it, 25-40% of humans just like heirarchies and want them, despite the misery they cause for both the empowered and disempowered.
Get them into kink.
Seriously though, you can have consensual hierarchical structures that provide an outlet for those desires to the degree that they are innate. Is the desire to force everyone in the world to be a part of your hierarchy really part of that innate desire? Or is it more that some people feel more comfortable when they have a clearly defined status?
And it doesn’t have to be confined to kink, for example, in a community for a competitive sport or game, there can be a bit of an implicit social hierarchy based on skill.
Those kinds of hierarchies are a lot closer to the hierarchies that humans evolved with, applying to an immediate social group, within “Dunbar’s number.” There was never a long period of time (from an evolutionary standpoint) where state-wide or globe-spanning hierarchies were selected for, so it doesn’t really make sense that those would be innate and unavoidable desires.
I wonder how many people think that their place in society would be a lot lower if it was based on competition, so it is better to preserve the system that keeps them where they are at.
In support of that theory, there was a multiplayer video game study a while back that found it was the less skilled men who were assholes to women players. The better players didn’t seem to care about their teammates gender. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games#Male_behavior_towards_female_gamers
Well, there are people that believe their position would be higher if the ‘others’ wouldn’t have taken that spot.
That’s literally true though? If it’s hard to see, take it to the extreme: If you were the only person in a place, you’d be the most important one by default?
They wouldn’t do a good job, but they’d have the job since, you know, there is less competition.
I did work and travel in USA, and they were paying us peanuts due to some law shenanigans (they had to pay overtime for Americans, not us.) Wouldn’t they have to hire a native instead of me if I wasn’t allowed to work there?
Same reasons cults work. They want someone else doing the thinking and leading for them, and surrender responsibility and blame to someone else. It’s never their own fault, so they want a system where they don’t have to be responsible or feel at fault.
The thing is, tree structures are very good ways to scale interconnected systems. Ask any computer scientist or computer networker about it.
This applies to societal systems as well. A bronze age society that has a feudal structure can manage a much larger area than a flat society. Armies can be coordinated that would be an ineffective mob otherwise.
That doesn’t make hierarchies nice for the people living in them, any more than the industrial revolution was actually nice for the people living through it. But they are an enabling technology, and societies that did not have hierarchy were eventually overwhelmed until almost every living human is living that way.
For sure it’s more effective with entreched heirarchies, bit i think it’s possible to use that organisational structure without it metastisizing into a perminant heirarchy. Anarchist federations do this, sortition is useful, turn-taking etc.
societies that did not have hierarchy
I don’t believe such a thing ever existed. Other mammals display heirarchies so it was probably present in a distant ancestor, predating humans and our societies.
It’s the nature, duration and intensity of heirarchy that has changed so remarkably in the last 15k odd years.
The desire for hierarchy and order isn’t an inherently bad one. A highly authoritarian individual will be the first to volunteer when someone needs to run into a burning building to save someone. They will be the first to volunteer to defend the community. They will also be the people that organize trash pickups, because littering is bad.
However, they can also be easily weaponized against others. Just like littering is against the natural order of things, and they will go out of their way to pick up litter, they can be convinced that other people are also against the natural order of things…with significantly more horrific outcomes.
A highly authoritarian individual will be the first to volunteer when someone needs to run into a burning building to save someone. They will be the first to volunteer to defend the community. They will also be the people that organize trash pickups, because littering is bad.
I don’t think this is necessarily true. A person can just as easily be motivated to do these from a sense of solidarity and mutual responsibility than a desire for hierarchies. (Ursula le Guin’s The Dispossessed explores the various aspects of how a society could be built on such principles.)
hierarchy and order
I don’t believe these two go together, heirarchies tend to be characterised by tension and discord.
highly authoritarian individual will be the first to volunteer when someone needs to run into a burning building to save someone … to volunteer … to organize
It’s actually the exact opposite! The phenomenon of Elite Panic is well established and included in disaster planning.
During an emergency, most people exhibit “spontaneous self organisation” - bucket lines, food distribution, search parties, etc. Whereas people with authority are much more likely to freak out, to fail to understand that the situation is different, to enforce detrimental rules, to feel threatened, to generally act badly.
huh?
people with authority
Oh, you misunderstand. I’m talking about authoritarians. You seem to have done some reading in the past. Do some more. theauthoritarians.org
The people that form those bucket lines and search parties would, ironically, be more likely to be authoritarian in worldview, and therefore have the greatest psychological need to fix the problem.
This touches the terrain of leadership and motivation, and I’d argue that authoritarianism is accidental here. Sure, here and there leaders with authoritarian views rise (e.g. Mussolini), but also people who do not believe in it so much (e.g. Che Guevara). There have been studies about the psychology of leaders and motivators, and they seem to be driven by a lot of energy and often certainty at least in some core ideas. There are books like A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness that go as far as to suggest these traits border the unhealthy in many notorious and strong cases.
Definitely.
It seems that populism/fascism is ‘ingrained’ in our simple minds. But that begs the question, why do some of us reject it? Random chance, empathy, or education?
It raises the question. Begging the question is this.
It seems that populism/fascism is ‘ingrained’ in our simple minds.
These are not mutually exclusive. Right-wing populists can also be fascists.
I don’t think it’s ingrained and then rejected, i think it’s present in some % of humans because heirarchic organisation is useful in limited, temporary contexts.
Pirate ships were feircely egalitarian until a target was sighted, then the captain is a dictator until the loot was secure. Some hunter-gatherers had a season of authoritarianism (say, hunting season) in between seasons of different social organisation.
So like how sickle cell anemia is debilitating but grants near immunity to malaria, heirarchophilia has just enough limited benefits that it remains as a variant within the population.
Or that’s how i think about it.
Personality difference.
Because I was taught as an American that I should be a rugged individual, which is incompatible with fascism. I also do not really enjoy much sports so this tribalism blah blah just doesn’t do it for me. I also don’t much like circuses and spectacles; fairs, to me, are just meh.
And I could probably ignore it when it’s benevolent, but it’s often malicious like germ warfare.
“Rugged individualism” is also incompatible with hierarchies but these people aren’t thinking that far into it. It’s just a myth that makes it your fault when society fails.
