A society in which it’s everyone for themselves, that refuses to care for one another, is no society at all. Then everyone acts shocked and horrified at someone who understandably snaps, like modern western culture doesn’t run entirely on schadenfreude.
That was the crux of the idea of a social contract, which is long dead in the US. Now people line up to revel in the suffering of their fellow citizens with “well you were stupid to do xyz in life, so you deserve your suffering haha.”
I agree, but I’m not sure that’s an unpopular opinion. Most people who act like they don’t owe anyone anything seem to forget all the help they’ve received. Craig T. Nelson said it best: “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No.”
Most people who act like they don’t owe anyone anything seem to forget all the help they’ve received
It’s not necessarily applicable. In the same way if I help someone that doesn’t mean they owe me, taking help doesn’t necessarily mean you owe someone else.
I’m down with that. I have been since I first figured out that my boss values office furniture more than he does people. He was bemoaning the lack of loyalty when I quit. I told him that loyalty flows both ways or doesn’t flow at all. Since he’d stopped the downward flow, I stopped the upward flow.
This scales nicely to society.
This really just comes across like you decided to join in on the misery you detest.
You sound jaded, and I’m sorry you’ve had to experience the things that lead you to this point. But not everyone has had your life experiences and there are people outside of your box, your reality. You can give up and think the majority is beyond saving and only out for themselves in all thoughts and actions. But that’s, like, your opinion, man. And it’s not one I’ve experienced and certainly not one I’m gonna share in.
I hope you want to believe otherwise and I hope you can get there, cause man, that’s a pretty bleak outlook. Best of luck.
Have you ever worked as a retail clerk for any length of time?
I’ve met one person in all my career who genuinely felt like that after being in retail.
You don’t realize how much people suck until you spend 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year cleaning up their messes and dealing with their behavior.
5 years in a pharmacy, so about the most vitriolic you can imagine. People with withdrawals mad you won’t break the law for them, people lying to your face hoping you’ll unknowingly break the law, and then people upset because theirs or their child’s medicine cost more than they make in a month.
I get what life can do to people, or worse, what people can do to people. But if you just stop and look you’ll find good people in this fight with you. And giving up on them is not something I’m going to do, it’s why I even made my original comment. OP is (imo) misguided, but that doesn’t make them a bad person and it doesn’t mean they’re beyond hope. And I like to imagine that most of the people they’ve seen that caused them to so harden their outlook are in the exact same boat that the OP is in. Simply misguided but not even close to being beyond redemption or belief.
But if you just stop and look you’ll find good people in this fight with you.
This appears to be the sum total of your argument, and doesn’t really address his statement of the social contract being broken. Just because some “good” people remain doesn’t mean the majority haven’t been pushed by the system to something worse.
I’d also like to advise you just how arrogant your statements here are:
And giving up on them is not something I’m going to do … OP is (imo) misguided, but that doesn’t make them a bad person and it doesn’t mean they’re beyond hope. … Simply misguided but not even close to being beyond redemption or belief.
So, you think your outlook is so superior that it grants you the authority to not only judge them as misguided but further imply that they are so wrong as to require redemption? Oh, but by the sheer goodness of your heart you still grant them the gift of your hope.
This is called toxic positivity. You are using the notion of positivity in a negative way: it is a tool to assert your moral superiority and thereby belittle others.
Pathetic
I suppose I should have known better than to expect someone so grossly self righteous to do any reflection.
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Why?
For clarity, I don’t disagree, but I want to know your reasoning.
- because you have to live with yourself
- because being better improves your life
- because your actions echo into the lives of others and affect their actions and it improves everyones lives
- because you lead by example
- because fuck the haters, love em anyway
- because you know better
because you have to live with yourself
That’s where you’re wrong, sir.
- no
Because you deserve to live in a world where people are decent to each other, and “people” includes you, and your behaviour is the first thing that’s most easily controlled by yourself.
Because my conscience doesnt create constant alerts notifications and warning messages that disrupt my sleep and bother me constantly while awake if I dont try as far as I can to be a decent human being. Some people seem to have these alerts etc disabled or the entire conscience app disabled or not even installed to start with though, I cant imagine how they get though life otherwise
I feel like no matter how good of a person I try to be, that voice in my head won’t stop saying I’m a piece of shit.
Reminds me of this comic:
I find that reading some crime stories in the news about some genuine pieces of shit shuts that voice down pretty effectively. Gives some perspective and reminds you that there are far far worse people in the world and that you are merely a flawed human as opposed to a malevolent, hateful psychopath that relishes in the pain and misery they cause others
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Kinda trying to minimize OPs argument though. Sure be a good person, but steal and take anything that isn’t bolted down.
Consider it bonus points if they’re so rich they don’t even realize something was taken.
It’s weird though that this seems to be the case mostly in the US. I can’t say that I know all cultures but most of the ones that I know of, or have experience with have a lot of compassion, especially towards people who have had bad luck or made bad choices. The US seem very brutal in that area
Oh, most of the fellow Americans I’ve encountered in my life revel in the bad luck or “poor decisions” (in hindsight, and often just good intentions and bad luck like student loans) of their own neighbors as if it were blood and they were a vampire. It’s like a chain of everyone getting exploited by our oligarch class getting a little relief by punching down to people who were more screwed by our oligarch class to feel superior to someone.
That is what it means to be an American 🇺🇸🤮
Fuck no society (or at least my country) does owe me, I pay taxes. Quite a bit due to where I live actually, I’m not upset about it but I get fuck all for it. And I’m just a working class person, I don’t have any connections … Imagine all the people just avoiding taxes.
Tax me more, honestly just give me working infrastructure, healthcare and other things that a functioning country should have. I’m so sick of footing the bill for all these fucking bailouts and subsidization of private interests, the do nothings in Congress are the real freeloaders. And yet they’ll bitch at you when you suggest we allocate some of the funds from the military into making sure our ‘strategic highway’ systems bridges dont just fall over.
I don’t mind paying but the service sucks 😭
My unpopular opinion is that if you evade all of your tax responsibility as a company you should have no legal protections in said country but they’d never bite.
Amazon’s semis and delivery trucks provide how much wear and tear on the highway grid but how much do we get in taxes for allowing that? $0 (maybe not exactly but you get the gist).I mean fuck cars but most Americans want working roads too.
And no it’s not smart to avoid taxes, that’s bad business that hurts the entire system in the long run.
Wear and tear on roads is paid for via taxes on fuel, so Amazon does indeed pay for wear and tear on roads.
This is also why lawmakers are looking at taxing EVs per mile driven.
This is a bit dated but shows that 41% of road upkeep on average is paid for by gas taxes (and other fees). So yes while they may have some tax paid on fuel (that they have likely negotiated down via bulk purchase), they’re not even paying for half on average.
Edit - just to include given we’ve seen landmark inflation over the last few years it’s likely the share of taxes on upkeep has gone down.
I’ve been telling people the social contract in America is broken for a long time. To me it’s just becoming more and more obvious. All the small things keep getting worse. No one cares about all the small social stuff anymore. People throw shit everywhere in stores, don’t return shopping carts, follow rules of any kind out in public.
People just don’t respect each other or give a fuck anymore. I mostly blame the boomers and silent generation folks who hurled contual abuse and insults and everyone for the last 20+ years. We’ve got a couple generations that grew up doing the Frontline jobs in retail and the service industry who just got shit on constantly. Maybe that’s just a small part of it, but whatever happened, it’s bad.
While I agree nobody is technically OBLIGATED to aspire to be better, empathetic, etc…: how is this fundamentally different from the view of a Jeff Bezos or an Elon Musk? At the very least, it seems you can’t simultaneously complain that things are shitty AND actively decide to live completely selfishly.
Being the punching bag doing the right thing won’t fix our perverse incentive structures.
Look at Obama, spent two terms trying to combat sociopathic hate and greed with love and compromise. Legislatively, he got his ass handed to him for his troubles.
This society has institutionally set perverse incentive structures that has bled into to the culture. Greed is literally aspirational. Empathy as a career leads to poverty. It is wrong. Very wrong. I hesitate to say evil because evil is subjective but it fits my definition of it.
It will never improve when we reward people who do the opposite, the Musks and Bezoses as you say, and actively punish those that give of themselves and empathize in more than words with their neighbors.
My point is, we have a lot of people with nothing, who will never have anything by design, who will always be hurt more by our system as it is by trying to be the change they want to see in the world.
If we all decided to treat society with the same disdain the Musks and every other billionaire does, at the very least society would collapse and thered be the possibility to MAYBE make a better one, instead of propagating this miserable, exploitative chain of suffering in perpetuity.
As it is, we have our owner class telling us to play by the same self-serving rules they and their ilk bribed their middle managers in Washington to enact. Playing their game by the rules they set but don’t themselves follow will just lead to generation after generation of suffering underclasses.
The people being hurt need to stop enabling their own oppressors and break the machines they’re paid almost nothing to run, or their children and their children’s children will suffer even worse.
Realized while writing that it is spurring me into a textual diaherrhia so please note wall of text ahead, which probably veers off into a rant.
If I had to surmmarise into tldr:
The system™ feels exploitative, and unless you partake in the exploiting then one must feel like their value systems are useless because it is not bringing in value.
Also rant about personal country government that seem to be failing upwards
End tldr
I read what was written and somehow felt a need to express, so apologies upfront.
I am not an American, but I have lived a life trying to do what I thought is the right or correct thing. It has left me with more regret and resentment. And as an observer I think it is more a societal problem.
I mean doing whatever the fuck you want and not only getting away with it but be rewarded seems to be in the loop of positive feedback. Like why suffer and do the right thing when you can take advantage of another and get rewarded.
The whole corporate monopoly-type culture isn’t only an American problem, just have to look at the world where a narrative or agenda causes so much suffering.
Lets just take my country for example. South African, we have been sitting with a electricity issue for going on almost 20 years because there is only 1 power supplier and that is government mandated monopoly. The power issue concerns were addressed to government before it was an issue and they figuritively sat and twiddled their thumbs until it got to a point where they needed to stick their thumbs just a bit out their asses.
Added to that, we had an ex-president that is mired is so much scandal to the point where one( of many) of his great " achievements " is participating in state capture by selling sub-substandard/ ghost electrical supply contracts to special interest individuals for personal gain.
And to this day is playing the lawyer-long game to avoid any consequence add to that you get politicians saying we should leave him alone he is an old man.
So in essence it feels like a big : fuck the country, i got my own, you people deal with the shit I profitted off, not my problem.
And although I cannot equate to the struggles of minorities, I can relate a bit as I live with the a country that enforces quotas and it is shit feeling knowing no matter how hard you work or how well you do you cannot advance when a company is pushing government agenda in a bid to say " Look we are doing the thing, we are empowering"
I mean things had to be done with the history of our country, I wish it could have been done with a broader and more encompassing economical structure to ensure that the majority could actually be empowered and be able to uplift the country to allow it to flourish to allow it to open opportunities for all. But unfortunately the current economic system and structure has it sitting in a country with 32 % unemployment.
I mean maybe the goverment is trying, but they have piss poor accountability as there is constant news of corruption, mafia-like intimidation, mismanagement, incompetence, never-ending joke of broken promises and lately seems a constant rise in prices - which seems to be a world problem too. I am honestly surprised the country holds itself together, I suppose that is because of the taxman is a functioning government entity that collects its due and guess there is enough competent people trying to keep the boat afloat in the background
It is like if you don’t know someone or have some influence you are stuck to the whims of the system and I personally feel there is an attitude that those above will personally do as little as possible and rely on those below to pick up the slack. I don’t want to harp about ‘oh woe is me’ just feel that almost everywhere there are problems and unfortunately the structure of power demands that those in power must exert power or coerce others to maintain it.
This is probably coming from someone who has been broken by a system coming in with naivete, so please take it as such, I am relatively fortunate to have what I have because of help of family so I cannot be a total victim to the system. But I still feel disillusioned by it and human nature because it is exploitative by design and I am too pigheaded to want to become a unfeeling husk and give into that base nature completely.
I mostly agree with you except that I’ll say the people are not a monolith. Many people still help others. Its the systems which treat you like shit. Attack them, not others.
Now people line up to revel in the suffering of their fellow citizens with “well you were stupid to do xyz in life, so you deserve your suffering haha.”
It’s not schadenfreude, it’s psychological defense from injustice. People don’t want to accept that bad things can happen to them if they don’t deserve those. They want to think that if they do everything right, nothing bad will happen, and if they make a mistake, then something bad will happen, and so there’ll be fewer and fewer mistakes and bad things as they go. It’s scary to accept that this is a lie and life isn’t fair.
However, not attacking others or their property is not something you owe others, it’s normal behavior, and behaving otherwise you trespass. It’s not a gift on your part to not steal what belongs to another person.
This makes me think of The Good Place and the book they reference: What We Owe To Each Other. It discusses the philosophy of Contractualism, and the morality of society.
Oh man, spicy and to the point. I love it.
Yep, American exceptionalism became American Individualism. Don’t get me wrong, overall I believe most of us want to do the right thing, most of the time anyway. I’m also keenly aware to the fact that incredible narcissistic, self-serving people are constantly gripping the power that could change things at all levels (local community, city, state, country). The most any random citizen can do is take care of it’s own, and every once in awhile, when resources are plenty, take care of their neighbors. Life it’s hard and extremely expensive.
This isn’t common amongst all Americans. Just a loud minority. It’s also overly emphasized on social media as well.
Yeah, well the majority aren’t voting for politicians that would enact a UBI, or rebuild the safetynet we actively, jubilantly destroyed as a nation in the 80s and 90s under Democrats and Republicans. Our current President was a major player in that when he was in Congress then, including putting a lot of poor minorities in prison to boost for profit prisons.
I’m not just talking about rhetoric, I’m talking about actions as a society. A vocal minority didnt make both of our only 2 major political parties work exclusively for the haves against the have nothings.
the actions of corrupt leadership decades ago are not the same thing as the entire populace being unredeemable.
You say that as if they (the plutocrats that own you and I) could destroy it twice. They moved on to fully legalizing political bribery. Until undone, they don’t need to do that twice either. Now they’re unhappy with the reproduction rate of their capital batteries, so bye bye abortion “rights.”
The corrupt politicians convinced the people to give the rich people their share in hopes that it’ll get urinated back on them with interest. Our institutions have been captured, political bribery is legal. The people arent unredeemable, the current system that oppresses them is. We can stretch that pain out over generations, or we can stop playing the torturer’s sick game.
I can’t tell if you’re even trying to support your original claim in the actual post anymore. Is this a complaint about society or the government institution. They are not the same.
again, you’re talking about everyone being terrible people because of corrupt leadership.
No he’s talking about Systems being terrible, not only because of their current leadership but by their design. Not everyone is terrible but we all get pushed to be terrible by a system that is terrible for all but the most fortunate.
Thank you, exactly what I meant but you said it more succinctly.
That’s not what the original post claims though. It’s fine if it’s about systems, but then they should clarify their post.
Our political system pretty much ensures radical progressives can’t get elected. Voting for someone who supports UBI could put a far-right extremist in office. This type of situation led to Trump. Pretending like people vote for what they want the most and not intelligently voting to stop something worse is extremely naive. If this is the foundation of your reasoning, it’s 100% faulty. I’m not saying it doesn’t have merit on certain points, but you can’t build a house on a foundation of sand.
Why should we owe anything to a society that actively exploits us and strips us of our rights? It’s not that individuals refuse to cooperate and help each other, it’s that everybody’s too busy fighting for their own survival to care about anyone else.
