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  • I saw on Mastodon someone say something kinda like this: good people don't feel the need to dominate others.

    Evil isn't "winning" as much as it is "on top." If you look around, talk to your neighbours and such, you'll see that good and reasonable people are everywhere; good is the overwhelming majority.

    That being said, positions of power are chased and coveted by those obsessed with power, and those aren't good people. Good people need to take charge, but it's --- in a way --- against their nature to do so.

    • good is the overwhelming majority.

      Let the overwhelming centrist majority in 1930's Germany tell you otherwise. People who peacefully ignore evil, even if it's preserve their own safety, are not good at heart. People just don't want trouble or disturbance, that's why people are naturally kind from day to day. But ignoring the piles of bodies while saying "no politics at the dinner table" is literally how the holocaust happened - the majority failed to act.

      1930's Germany at least had the excuse of limited information/education, all they had was radio from which only Hitler's voice was present. 100 years later with the worlds knowledge at our fingertips, ignorance to politics is a choice. Might I say an evil one, all things considered.

    • The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

      Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #2)

      • I've heard this before, but I had no idea it came from the Hitchhiker's Guide... Cool :D

    • I saw on Mastodon someone say something kinda like this: good people don’t feel the need to dominate others.

      I worry this is just rationalizing ones passivity as just an inherent part of ones assumed "goodness."

      • There was more to say than that quote. Still, it does feel that good and bad ("good" and "bad") people have a different rulebook, and it's not as simple a fight as who wants things more, but rather who's willing to do more for them, and evil simply has more tools.

        It's not that good people don't try or don't want to make a difference, but rather that their scrupulous nature doesn't allow for the means necessary for rule, in the majority of the cases.

        Plenty of good people do succeed in reaching and using power to do good, or at least I do hope and think that that is the case. Higher the stakes, though, or more the power, less likely it is.

  • Because the return of massive wealth disparity - similar to having kings again - has allowed those with money and power to bend the world in the direction of some form of dictatorship, whether it be fascism, oligarchy, whatever…. The New Kings are carving up society and want to increase control and profit, and an authoritarian governance is the way to do it. Just like how they treat their corporations. They are dictators, the little people are disposable production units to feed their machine.

    • How did we overthrow Kings again? Something about us becoming ahem "Enlightened" during some sort of era or period? What can we learn from the successes and failures? How did Europeans get ideas of freedom, autonomy, equality, and question of authority from when all they knew about was Kings and Divine Right? Did they perhaps go to some kind of ahem New World with a matchcoat and musket to live and trade amongst the natives for 200 years?! Perhaps there was some sort of ahem Indiginous Critique on European Culture that sorta blew the minds of the French, English, and Dutch alike? Perhaps they wrote some plays about this! That they could disobey or :gasps: impeach their leaders? That pursuasion and reason might be more important? Perhaps over some coffee and pipe tobacco? Oh right, next thing you'd think i'd say is they didn't trade or so much as look at silver? How they MUST have had a "Market" how else could goods or heirlooms possibly trade hands? Certainly not gifts, quests, or gambling! Jeez, I wonder if we still have something to learn from these ideas that were just too darn complicated for Ben Franklin and Jean Jacque Rousseau!

    1. Rampant unchecked capitalism of recent decades has created large wealth disparities akin to the earlier decades of the last century. It is no longer possible for one person in a household with a regular job to support a modest lifestyle for their family. All benefits especially medical for the whole family, being completely intertwined with the current job reduces mobility and further feeds into the wealth gap by keeping wages low. It’s easier to blame the powerless for this state of affairs than the powerful because the powerless cannot object.
    2. The fear of the other has been accentuated by media and misinformation. Targeted algorithms feeding most of the information that is consumed has created echo chambers that reinforce existing beliefs and fears. The propaganda state has never had it easier.
    3. The large military and police has given never before control to the state about what is allowed to be protested. Combined with the day to day struggles, it’s extremely hard to come together for what is right. The ruling class is able to maintain the fine balance between absolute misery and general dissatisfaction that it is still better to struggle through a thankless job than to say fuck it. Failures of recent large uprisings like Middle East and Hong Kong have reinforced the futility of standing up against the rulers.
    4. Evil has many heads and there’s always one head that you can find alignment with. It could be the deregulation of businesses, lower taxes, anti abortion, racism, but as long as there’s one thing you can align on, the general sense of powerlessness makes it easier to overlook the other heads.
    5. The line between evil and good has never been murkier, especially with globalization. If you focus on the betterment of your community, it would be considered good, but what if it leads to suffering of others outside the community. Is it also evil? What is community - is it the people in your neighborhood, your religion, your country, fellow business owners? The fuzzier these lines are, the harder it is to untangle them.

    • I felt so evil this morning that I drove my car. Fuck you Nature, I'm taking climate back

  • People are scared and angry and want action without thinking about the long-term gains only the short term. Creating fear is fascism 101 and how many rise to power

  • Because good natured people don't want conflict so they avoid it.

    Bad natured people actively seek conflict and engage with it whenever possible.

    Evil never sleeps. Peace does.

  • My opinion on this generally boils down to that the system has been set up to reward evil/antisocial behavior, and this part of the system is so entrenched and well established and organized that it has not been effectively and completely toppled or eradicated in so long, it has been able to consolidate power and resources to a point where very few extremely evil people are personally in charge of so much of what happens that it seeps into everything. Actually "seeps" is the wrong word, it's injected into everything. It's like has been said many times in recent memory, the cruelty is the point.

    For a simplified example, evil executives reward evil behavior by their managers, who in turn punish their employees, who lose control of so much of their lives to these companies and managers that they end up hurting their families and friends out of confusion and anger and other complex emotional reactions, and harm is perpetuated in every area of life.

    It's self sustaining, and even worse it replicates itself. In some ways I think of these systems as viruses. Also as cults. We all buy in to some degree.

  • One aspect is that mass media is overall owned by those people and is propaganda. If you don't have ways of seeing what's happening on the ground, you miss a lot of the good news. Even your twitter/bs/mastodon feeds won't give you the full story, you have to (where possible) get involved in a real community organization.

  • Well. Lots of people drank the kool aid. As long as some people getting a feeling of Power (like shitting on minorities), they will take the blow from the ruling class.

    The last time that shit worked started WWII.

    But yeah. What will we do about it. There are days where I think we will make it through. But other days I just feel weak and powerless and think we're doomed.

    Fuck greed, eat the rich.

  • Babylon rots from the inside. Corrupt systems cannot last forever.

  • It's very simple: human emotion. When something upsets the status quo, people get scared, angry and desperate. They turn to whatever solution they think will fix things.

    In the case of nations, that becomes right-wing politics. Many factors in the recent past have caused distress and fear. People are afraid of losing what they have, they don't like the uncertainty. They lack the education and critical-thinking skills to choose the best course of action, instead they choose the most reassuring course of action.

    In 1930s Germany, support for extremist political parties (not just the NSDAP) surged due to the desperate times they were experiencing. Germany underwent a period of hyperinflation, which was followed shortly after by the stock market crash of 1929. They were already in poor shape, both economically and emotionally, due to the punishments meted out by the Versailles treaty.

    Things became very bad for the Germans, and they turned to the looneys who offered a solution. A similar scenario is playing out in several countries around the world, especially the US. COVID really upset a lot of people, none more so than the overly emotional and uneducated. They felt attacked and vulnerable, and they were already deluded by years of misinformation. They turn to politicians like Trump, because he appeals directly to their emotions. He makes them feel safe, largely by scapegoating groups who aren't actually a threat (sound familiar?).

    People don't check if what they're hearing is true, they care most about having their fears assuaged. This is why we've seen a resurgence of right-wing extremism globally.

  • Hate drives engagement and can have multiple intersections with opposing view points. Take our algorithmic methods of serving content and you get silos of positivity with oceans of hate in between that fuel metrics of user engagement and view time. Drive your share price by those metrics and run the economy on those share prices. Viola hate becomes the new most important resource to generate and those who can spread it most effectively or direct that hate become those with the most power. If we want to break that grasp on power we need to break the cycle of engagement being tied to hate, find a way to drive engagement through positive action and understanding. I talk like I know how to do that but in reality that's one of the most difficult problems humanity has in general. Like greed is terrible but if you could figure out how to make positivity and mutual understanding more profitable than spewing hate and divisiveness you could channel those at the tops greed into positive feedback loops. Once you have more understanding, and equity in individuals understanding each other we can them finally work as a collective to start eliminating things like bigotry, poverty, etc.

  • Perhaps, because by now enough people feel a real impact on their life and fear for the ruling classes is not there anymore?

    Just a few examples from direct, personal experience (I am German, so what I enumerate has a German/Euro perspective):

    • Constitutional state? Does not matter, as long as powerful/influential people can literally buy laws or prevent even discussion of laws in the parliament
      • Easy way to figure out who is favored by one law, is to check who has to prove something and how hard it is to prove
      • Best part about this is, people in power can always point out to the law and that 'we' agreed upon that law
    • Systematic discrimination against the worker class/people not owning things: Thing about laws, taxes, ....
    • Every media has an agenda and is propaganda (In the west, propaganda means mostly being selective about the information presented and how to build the narrative. Only idiots in the west will outright lie about things. It also means, who gets to talk in the media, where to position news (headlines ore somewhere else) etc. Media are owned by rich people or the state owned media are controlled by people with strong affinity to political parties
    • Corruption on all but the lowest levels, especially in the government (In Germany corruption on the lowest level is uncommon und has a high penalty, but go up the level a little bit and 'you scratch my back and I scratch yours')
    • Nepotism on all but the lowest levels (Worked in many different companies and the bigger the company the worse it gets. Working class kid does not get an intern position although it would technically be the best choice? No worries, some kid with the right parents and no clue will have that opportunity.
    • No feedback loops: In Germany, we have professional politics which have extremely good conditions for their pension, whose children do not visit public schools and who have private health care decide, what in their opinion is appropriate for most of the people in the country concerning this things...
    • No real political influence: We just had the clown-show of voting. Guess what, I can only vote between Nazis and non-Nazis. Can I vote for more taxes for the rich, a sane economic agenda which not benefits the rich, and full military support for the Ukraine? Sorry, I am out of luck. Of course I am free to build my own party. Let's see how successful that is without massive investment of money and good connections to the ruling classes to get positive media coverage.

    Before the eastern block fell apart, at least in Europe/Germany, there was always the fear of the ruling class to experience another (French)revolution. Since this fear is gone, they literally have nothing to fear...

    Is it possible to change anything about the situation? I am more than cynical by now:

    • Most everyone is struggling to keep their level of wealth/position in society, so the middle class fights hard to be a little bit better of then the lower class, don't even mention the upper middle class, which fights with nails and teeth for every little advantage and privilege they have
    • The higher you go in hierarchies, the more sycophants you'll discover, which don't mind selling out other humans for status/privileges, and there are even true believers, so brainwashed by neoliberal agenda, that they will fight for the privileges of rich folk they will never belong to
    • There is no way to organize enough people in real life to force any political change (especially not with an aging population)
    • The ruling class figured out for a long time in western world, that instead of fighting facts/the truth, they just have to generate more bullshit, discussions, alternative narratives and lean back, because people will discuss and not agree
    • Nearly all change to the status quo is opposed and fought by some group, which benefits from the status quo
    • Neoliberal propaganda and views are so ubiquitous and pervasive in our media, stories, etc., that a lot of people cannot even think about alternatives any more.

    That's just for the western world, let's not start about the dictatorships/regimes supported by western governments with money, weapons and knowledge, where things are even more shitty.

  • What you're saying is true, but we must also remember that construction is always slower than destruction. What this means is that slow, steady improvements are not newsworthy - and thus gets no airtime - compared to destruction which happens over night and is thus newsworthy.

    So there is also a lot of slow, steady improvements going on in the world that we never hear about. There's not enough of it, I don't think, to offset the big evils of greed, climate change, and fake news. But it is there, and we must not forget it.

  • I think when people feel like things are going downward (quality of life, economy, local security, international security, ecological crisis etc.), tend to regress towards a conservative reflex. They want to protect what they have, by extension, they don't want things to change out of fear of losing what they have, or they attribute the loss of what they had to unrelated change (I lost my job because of immigration).
    I think it requires good quality education and information to go past this conservative reflex and understand that accepting some constrains (regulations, taxes) may make society better for everyone.
    It also means that manipulating education and information can prevent that and encourage people to take the natural conservative slope. I think "evil" people have found a powerful tool to do that with the mass adoption of social media that they can buy and manipulate.

    I see two big solutions, either falling so low that humanism bounces back out of terror of what happened like after WW2. Or managing to implement systems that will prevent nefarious manipulation of information and instead promote humanism.

  • I theorize that it has a lot to do with rich people. There's more wealth inequality than ever before, or at least (because I'm not well versed in history) if billionaires are maybe roughly equivalent to some kings of yore, that those kings couldn't have the same widespread impact in old times because of modern mass communication. Billionaires skew overwhelmingly amoral, so this increased global reach is allowing them to shape and skew things in amoral directions, which includes propping up power hungry leaders to do their bidding. This is especially true because the communication channels are controlled by other wealthy people who benefit from the system, so they have a vested interest in seeing that the algorithms continue to support the owner class.

    Even savvy leaders like Putin can't do it alone and alienate the oligarchs (see this CGP Grey video on "rules for rulers" as to why), but beyond that it's easy to see why weak idiots like trump are simple enough to puppet with money and flattery.

  • because theyve been laying groundwork and slowly infiltrating every corner of our society for over 50 years.

    The slow burn was for purpose, to keep people from noticing, and so that anyone that did notice and point it out would look like a crackpot.

    and, imho, I think they didnt expect the opportunity trump presented globally, in his first term, but they chose to come out of the shadows and try to exploit it regardless, which is why they've had the stumbling blocks they have had that has given opportunity to fight it.

  • A ruling class of ultra wealthy lording over the vast majority of people who are left with crumbs is a common sign that an empire is in decline. With the US having more global influence than any previous empire, the whole world will be feeling the effects in one way or another.

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