KevlarUnicorn

KevlarUnicorn wrote

We didn't get this way overnight, we won't move people away from it overnight. Millennia of conditioning, of accepting your God/the King/your Lord/your President/your Boss as your sovereign leader who knows best, has lead us here. This is why we're in the position we are. There are examples of humans working together without benefit to a hierarchy, there are studies that show humans love to share with each other, that it makes them feel good. That has to be repressed in order to keep the system as it is.

We are social creatures, building empathetic connections with one another, and the more we recognize each other as human, the more likely we are to genuinely care about the disposition of their outcomes.

Our flaws are there, certainly. We all possess selfishness, greed, distrust, and hate. It's just that those are often small flickers that must be fanned into flames for them to be of use to those who exploit us. Humans are quite trusting, and due to our social nature, fairly easy to lead, due to our fundamentally flawed way of thinking. Our brains aren't designed to address the needs of millions and billions. Our brains can scarcely conceive of those numbers outside of the theoretical.

So getting our brains to feel that very human empathy for a man who was murdered by a fascist in a tiny nation halfway around the world, or fully understanding the concept of millions of people dying from inadequate healthcare, it pushes the limits of what we can grasp. 2 kids in our neighborhood get killed by a murderer? We're filled with rage against the perpetrator, and empathy for the grieving parents.

President Obama bombs 100,000 innocent men, women, and children in order to push an imperialist agenda? It's a shame, but what can I do?

So there is a lot to unravel, and that's only when we're able to step back and work out what has been tangled in the first place, which is difficult because the system is hellbent on keeping us distracted. For now, anarchy seems Sisyphean. We roll the boulder up the hill, and the gravity of the environment we're in, the unforgiving slope, they keep us from making further progress.

It can be done. It can. It's just that there need to be shifts in the current system, ones that benefit anarchism and socialism over capitalist greed. Climate change may make that a possibility, but you cannot underestimate capitalism's desire to exploit people even in the face of global death. Capitalism is not a human centered system, and so billions are free to die as long as the elite maintain a workforce strong enough to keep them alive and "wealthy."

TL;DR - We have to short circuit the cost to benefit analysis in the human brain, otherwise, people will keep pulling the slot machine arm expecting to get rich, even as the flood waters rise around their knees.

(Sources regarding human behavior): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0389-1 https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/debunking_the_myth_of_human_selfishness https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781880/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5513638/ https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-mind-and-brain/201510/caring-others-is-what-made-our-species-unique https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_compassionate_instinct https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-we-are-wired-to-connect/

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KevlarUnicorn wrote

Reply to comment by MC_Cookies in by !deleted23972

He signed a petition against cancel culture, along with famed piece of shit TERF J.K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, in an effort to curb the latest trend of trying to "stifle debate." A bunch of blue checks from Twitter signed it too, including Matt Yglesias, who is renowned for his racist, bigoted, misogynist views. In short, most of the people signing it have had their asses handed to them online for saying something ineffably stupid and short sighted, and they just want it to stop gosh darnit.

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