Why does it feel like evil is winning globally?
Why does it feel like evil is winning globally?
Why does it feel that the evil sides globally are winning. Even evil people are winning. Why?
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 doesn't have the stomach to go blow for blow with evil anymore.
Gotta sink to their level!
Rather than sink to their level, we should fight them with the same fervor and ferocity they bring. Nothing's more terrifying to a fascist than armed, newly extermized (if that's a word) lefties.
Neuroscience says that the scared brain has a lower IQ, which is good for giving in to survival instincts in an acute threat situation, but really bad to make any longterm decisions. Populists try to scare us for this very reason. Scared people are easier to manipulate. It's working, and it's fucking scary how effective it is. But I am not scared in the way that lowers my critical reflection. So I hope someone brings out the guillotines before more poor people (our people) die.
Evil is not winning. Greed is. If it was evil, it would be worse
Because evil people control all the media
Because westerners are obsessed with good vs. Evil for absolutely no reason.
We have a global economic system that encourages and rewards evil. More and more countries have political systems that do the same. Good people would rather help others and make the world a better place, and this prevents them from attaining power. It would probably require doing some evil to remove the evil people from power.
evil people have always been there, but we're in an era of many crisis's, it was easier to ignore it when it didn't personally effect you. Now i imagine in the next 10-20 years it'll start effecting everyone in ways we've yet to imagine. But I don't think its the end of the world or anything just that its probably time we start considering what we want our futures to look like and start making plans to survive or fight.
Evil has always been there. People have a tendency to turn a blind eye when it isn't directed at them. Recently it's very much been directed at Europe and North America. It brings the problems of the world into sharp focus.
This is very much it.
I'm not trying to dismiss OP either. I'm glad they finally notice. But for a huge population of the world, it's ALWAYS been there. There's been a lot of evil shit. It's just it was never on their doorstep until now.
But this isn't a "The world is all doom and gloom".
There is a significant amount of positive upswings. Looking in the past 10,000 years, we are absolutely in a better era. We can make jokes and shit post about it, but the average person's quality of life back then no where matched what we are doing today. We tend to be relatively safe. We can get a variety of food anywhere.
Humans unfortunately only have a small window of time and don't see it, but there's a lot of good in the past hundred years.
Bad news sells.
Cause it's unfortunately a fact of life. Evil people assume positions of power most often.
Because evil is loud and self-important, and people doing good have learned to be mycelial, underground, quietly building the new world in the shell of the old.
Evil also tends to be wealthy. And wealthy people suck up all the oxygen in whatever room their in.
I really like this, and I think this is exactly what Jesus meant with the oft-misunderstood "The meek shall inherit the Earth."
There's so much loud roaring nonsense going on, but we're quietly just building our own layer of alternative society to exist on, for people, hoping it can stand on its own when the power hungry institutions collapse in on themselves under the weight of their own backbiting, infighting, and greedful self-sabotage.
It's kinda like Lemmy or Mastodon or Linux as a tech example, or mutual aid, intentional communties, and unions. We're here quietly trying to do what good we can, and when the power goes out, our light will be seen all the brighter.
Good times create weak people. Weak people create bad times. Bad times create strong people. Strong people create good times.
Repeat.
Otherwise - because you are being absolutely nuke-blasted by negative news all around the world. If you wen't offline for a month, you wouldn't see any issue at all.
Good times create weak people. Weak people create bad times. Bad times create strong people. Strong people create good times.
Isn't that like textbook alt-right propaganda?
It is, but it kind of applies here too. Let's reclaim it and ruin their stupid slogan.
We need more violent good guys
LUIGI
Everytime we talk about violence being the only way to create change, limp-dick liberals bitch about how peaceful protests are the only way.
Liberalism helped build this hell, and it's determined to maintain it.
Leftist need to get guns. Now.
Liberals have good intentions at times, but they are ultimately toothless because they are pussies. I just have to roll my eyes at the people who you tell you to contact your representatives, but has never spent a minute at the range.
Do you know how you get people to listen to you? Let them know that you and people with similar views know how to operate a rifle.
We need more reasonable people who don't believe in delusional nonsense like "bad guys" and "violent good guys".
That only works if the other side decides to not use violence
More milquetoast pussy-aased doormatterie
Because people say stupid shit like "but they have laser-guided drones and you have a rifle!"
Fucking idiots do not understand how revolution works and dont know that the US military has failed every invasion.
Yes! Please! Louder for those in the back!
Maybe some (feels disingenuous to say all) 'pubicans actually fantasize about some Phantom Menace toe-to-toe phalanx of pickup trucks and pre-assault-weapons-ban collectibles vs. the might of an empire.
But that lazy "they have drones tho" excuse is really used to wave off any responsibility, I think. One can be the most bleeding-heart socialist and still believe in defending themselves and their neighbors.
It's scary to think about, and it sucks. I just wanted to make videogames and occasionally shoot for fun as a hobby, not contemplate if I'm ready to defend myself against tyranny within a collapsing former world superpower. But I think we ignore the possibilities at our extreme peril.
Also, a large amount of the U.S military would probably side with us, for upholding the Constitution if not for their families' sake.
It really wouldn't be pretty. We don't want it to come to that, and I honestly don't think it will, but they're not a bunch of brainless stormtroopers.
The rightoids are busy being insufferable and getting uninvited from all their families' Thanksgivings, so maybe their cynical individualism will reduce their threat potential lol.
While times seem bad, and they are worse than they used to be, especially with the election of Donald Trump, imagine what it was like during WW2. Nazi Germany invaded France, Czechoslovakia, and half of Poland (with the Soviet Union the other half); Britain stood alone. Spain was under fascist dictatorship. Now Russia barely controls 1/5 of Ukraine, and has suffered many thousands of losses in tanks and armoured vehicles. Modern Russia is now weaker than the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany was (for their time period).
I do wish people would stop with the "Britian stood alone." stuff. Even before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, there were Allies fighting all over the world, resistance movements in every single continental European country, famously France, but also the Nederlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, Norway, Denmark, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The entire British Empire was at war, either based in Britain, as saboteurs on the continent, on fronts from east Asia to the Sahara -- Canada, Newfoundland, Nepal, Australia, New Zealand -- India alone lost 2 million fighters (look it up!), Burma, Malta, South Africa, Egypt, and southern Rhodesia. China did not just surrender blindly: before 1941, both Mao and Sun Yat-sen had armies fighting the Japanese which kept them from attacking the Soviet Union after Hitler turned. Mongolia and Korea never stopped fighting, either. Britain endured the Blitz, it is true, and Churchill certainly made some great speeches about 'standing alone' while he was sacrificing literally millions of 'colonials' to preserve his European troops. But it was, and is, propaganda.
Because it always has been. It's called capitalism. This system will literally destroy the planet and enslave all live for the profits of a few ultra privileged man babies.
Plenty of evil has been done under the name of communism and socialism too. It's not capitalism's fault, that's just the tool that's being used in these cases by evil people to achieve their ends.
Evil has been winning, just the mask slipped off and now it's capitalism in decay, fascism.
Good people are still around still doing good, it's just not any rich person or anyone in a government like this. And they won't be televised.
Because people have become comfortable enough (can't remember the downside) to flirt with populism.
Once they get the short sharp shock of what it actually means to be governed by these people we might recover from it... Maybe
There's no "populism" under the state. It's called fascism.
That is the eventual conclusion of capitalism, the way it is currently set to play out.
The only forces that could act against it depend on the distribution of critical information.... And those are owned by the same private interests.. Soooooo. We'll see. Doesn't bode well at all.
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.
A combo of "it is in many places" and the press thrives on droomscrolling
Because most people are either stupid, evil, or stupid and evil.
I don't know what the solution is, I can only hope its mostly just the "extreme ignorance" type of stupidity and not evil or "willing ignorance" stupidity and after experiencing the suffering they've enabled for themselves that they put 2 and 2 together and things maybe recover partially or enough to prevent the end of human civilization as we know it.
And what makes you so much smarter and better than everyone else exactly?
What's your angle? Insecurity or propaganda? Trying to guilt trip me for having a negative evaluation of the average person?
Maybe you aren't part of the majority of people I think of as moronic, I don't know you in particular, but the question you are asking sounds like maybe you are worried that you would be. TBH, you probably aren't significantly worse than average by the mere metric of being able to read and write, depressing knowing how many functionally illiterate people there are.
Of course, go ahead and think I'm actually the stupid one if it makes you feel better, I literally don't care about that. I care about becoming smarter and more correct perhaps, not what you think of my intellect now.
Can I reccomend for you Vlad Vexler on utube. He is a polital philosopher in the UK, whp spends most of his time dealing with this topic. He has some wonderul content which is both educated and humane.
To summarize: democracy is waning, and we have some rough times ahead, but there will be wins mixed in with the losses.
Because we have been taking the high road. Time to play on their level. Have no shame!
Media bias. Trump is outrage and outrage moves views and views are profit. Trump is the greatest thing to happen to the media - regardless of side. We're also more connected today than we ever were before so this media gets to everyone in an instant.
Are evil people really winning globally more than they were in the past? Well.. no. We've seen more shit in the second half of the 20th century than we are now. There's still 25 years to catch up though. Heres some shit thats gone down fro 1950-2000.
- Cold War - though it does seem like we are moving back to this state, we're far from living like that
- Korean War, Vietnam War, Kuwait,
- Cuban Missile Crisis,
- Basically every Arab nation against Israel - wars galore,
- Suez crisis,
- Iranian revolutions,
- Sino-Soviet Split,
- India-Pakistan,
- Soviet-Afghan war,
- Numerous African civil wars in the 60s, 70s and 90s (till ongoing),
- South African Apartheid,
- Numerous south American dictatorships (+ CIA interventions in south America backing right wing dictators),
- Falklands war - the fucking UK went to war with Argentina in the fucking 80s!
- All the shit in Yugoslavia (wars, genocide),
- "The Troubles" in N. Ireland.
A lot of these have been resolved.
Must include that if you're here on Lemmy you were probably on Reddit before, and the latter has been a campaign for doom and gloom for close to a decade at this point. When you surround yourself in folks suggesting the sky is falling, you start to believe the sky is falling.
Virtually all of your examples involve US hegemony instigating and winning, the same group doing the current stuff. Why does a war ending count as becoming less evil if it's always by the same instigator and they keep winning, jumping from conflict to conflict? Have you considered that the evil keeps winning and suppressing the good through compliance or murder?
What is we compare the most intense 25 years of the 20th to the current 25 and label the instigators?
Virtually all of your examples involve US hegemony instigating and winning
Hmm, I disagree. There are some but I purposely wanted to include the ones where the US was not in change in order to show its been a shitshow everywhere. They obviously had a hand everywhere, since they are considered a superpower but them leading the show every time? That's a stretch.
Ive also given examples I personally thought were extreme that happened in that century to paint a picture that it's been pretty bad for a while now and you can draw your own opinion on whether is better now or not. I don't wish to compare these events to today's but I can acknowledge they were there and that they were also, pretty fucking bad.
Because they are.
It depends on perspective. If you look at the news, online on new sites or shareable news articles, it seems to rampant. If you avoid the news and look towards your community you’ll be far less likely to believe it. It’s the interconnectedness that leads this but at the same time you aren’t being educated and helping said evil. So it’s there, it’s not a populous as people think but definitely is there. Evil isn’t global, it’s the few. It’s the people outside that you interact with daily that aren’t evil.
Because you don't look at the news doesn't mean it isn't happening. Your perspective is deliberately limited if you ignore outside information. This is exactly what conservatives do when they willfully ignore scientific or objective facts in favor of what their echo chamber "community" anecdotal evidence tells them.
Sure does feel that way 😔
Evil was winning, we're watching the collapse of the evil empire from within.
I like your optimism! I too, believe it will eventually succumb to its own hubris.
We should help push it over wherever we can though, just to speed things along. 😂
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.
Capitalism is dying because of unchecked greed and people are turning to socialism. The wealthy choose fascism. Until we have class unity. Once we bring out the guillotines, They will retreat to spending the rest of their lives in the bunkers they have built with their stolen wealth.
people are turning to socialism
Feels like they're turning more to fascism
I also feel like there is always a constant portion of people who worship power and think they can squeeze a decent life out of siding with the powerful. So if there ever is any war, it definitely won't be a clear cut class war. And the billionaires will do everything in their power to make sure the war happens within the classes first.
"Once we bring out the guillotines"
Depends where you live.
I hear the hardcore revolutionary libs in the US have found a much more powerful way to defeat fascism... buy nothing for 1 day.The US has a really serious problem on their hands which is that their trade war won't achieve anything. The US doesn't make anything, it famously doesn't make anything, the only reason that they trade with Canada is because Canada is close. Even then it's mostly just food stuffs which Canada can make themselves.
But they have virtually nothing to offer internationally hence the trade deficit, that trump is so upset about, in the first place
And who you going to put on the guillotines? You own! People are getting so blind with anger
Speak for yourself
The world has been in a gigantic psychological experiment.
because armmaggeton
Because now it is affecting you personally. Before it was in the middle east or some random aftican nation where people dont speak english, and media make sure it is not in the front page. Reading some history of any conflict will show the root starting a while back but no one cares.
I think the issue in America, is that the Constitution only addressed political power, but failed to account for fiscal strength. Money is inherently a thing that manipulates the fates of individuals, companies, and nations alike. By not setting down rules, limitations, and expectations regarding economics, the Founding Fathers allowed a key form of power go unaddressed.
The vast majority of Project 2025's major backers are wealthy people, who have far beyond what any normal person can ever hope to possess. This imbalance means that workers have to sacrifice much time, money, and energy to be barely heard on a single issue, while a rich person can just hire experts to massage every aspect of their many messages and to deliver it everywhere with a mighty voice.
IMO, we will need a Constitution v2.0 that fixes not only assorted political flaws like the voting system, but also prevents wealth from being a microphone that only a few can afford.
It's not some accident or overlook that a bunch of slavers made a pact to violently enforce their privilege. That was always the point.
Another constitution sounds good until you realize it's going to be same kind of people making it. And the state will still be an involuntary system of violent coercion.
The constitution isn't some Holy Document that has the power to shape reality. You can write in as many legal clauses as you like, but so long as you're allowing a small class of oligarchs to control capital, they will use that power to influence policy.
I don't have the source, but I am almost certain the constitution, per the founders, was meant to be rewritten every few years...or at least edited.
That's, ironically, how the white supremacists felt all these years lol
Why would they feel that way? Not enough privilege, racism, genocide, etc? I don't think that's how regular people are feeling.
If you're genuinely curious you could experience what Fox News offers (or here in Canada, Rebel News) - for many years these platforms have placed a concerted effort into stoking either rage or fear about the most ridiculous topics. The kind of rage and fear that make white supremacists feel like their "evil" is "winning".
Propaganda is a powerful tool, and it's wielded unceasingly by those with resources. Entire industries have come to rely on the sweet-sweet injection of Propaganda $$$, including the completely unregulated "Influencer" industry.
Throw religion into the mix and... it can be real easy to label pretty much anything as "evil"
Edgy
The internet. It led to the following:
- Good social change occurred very rapidly from the 1990s-2010s, causing highly motivated pushback from those who didn't like the changes
- Rising wealth inequality caused by tech billionaires increased incentives and capability for a small number of extremely wealthy people to seize control of media and political power centers
- Foreign dictator governments became more able to more easily spread pro-dictator propaganda
- Media became more decentralized, leading to some good things but also the hijacking of our psychology to spread fear and disgust for the sake of grabbing attention
I would just like to push back and say that the Internet was an open public project, and it has helped countless people across the world. Every single problematic tech that people are pointing to at the moment are closed-source commercial projects.
That is Capitalism at work.
Two answers.
Thomas Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century
Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
Even reading a brief summary of the main points of both books gets you to a decent explanation.
Maybe you have this filing because live is anadrome of evil.
Capitalism
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.
Evil is relative
It feels that way to you because China/Russia are winning and you oppose them
It seems like Russia and China are gaining in geopolitical influence as the US recedes.
Winning isn't what I'd call that
They got the US to recede, got Britain to leave the EU, and are running propaganda in the rest of the West
Well, I'd say it's because they don't even hide it anymore. They know they can do whatever they want, and get away with it.
Enshitification is a real thing, and companies and evil people are being blatant about it, because they know they don't have to hide it because they know they can't be stopped.
It sucks. I hate it. I wish we could do something about it.
I saw a chart that globally, the incumbent parties have lost more in these elections than before.
https://www.ft.com/content/e8ac09ea-c300-4249-af7d-109003afb893I'd guess this is because things are going badly economically, so people wanted change.
Because class war is being raged but most of the global north working class don't have any class consciousness. Capitalism is working on doing what it has done to the global South for decades but this time to the global North. Fascism is Imperialism turned inward. Welcome to the rest of our lives.
What has capitalism done to the global south?
Is that just a metaphor, or are you literally talking about Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America and Antarctica?Sorry, I'm just a little confused about what you mean.
Global South basically just means underdeveloped/developing nations.
Capitalism results in the rich, mostly in developed countries, extracting resources for low prices and exploiting desperate workers for low wages in developing countries. The developing countries get little in return. Some of these countries have been able to muster some protectionism to mitigate so much transfer of wealth out if their country (such as China). Developed nations have purposely kept some developing nations destabilised to maximize exploitation.
there's no good or evil. those are constructs that aren't suitable to describe anything that's happening
There are people who work to benefit others and there are people who work to benefit only themselves.
Anyway, you should play BioShock
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
Change requires a massive push, and apparently people need to suffer much much more, to inspire that momentum.
So, Lone Star, now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb.
And here we are Schwartzless.
But you know what evil is also good for??
MERCHANDISING! MERCHANDISING!!
Because the slow decay of the capitalist order that has been occurring since the neoliberal turn has reached the point where it's effects are being felt in the global North
Just left a nearly an identical explanation. Refreshed and saw this comment. Well said. Fascism is Imperialism turned inward.
Yeah, westerners who are ideologically committed to neoliberalism can no longer fully convince themselves that liberalism is The Way, The Light, and The Truth, like they used to, because the counter evidence is on their door step. So now they have to apply the political reasoning they developed watching marvel movies and reading Harry Potter to explain the current situation in terms of evil bad guys threatening the sacred status quo.
Wealth inequality caused by all the things mentioned here and more. It allows the wealthy to control narrative that is fed to the masses, control the amount of free time people have to think and control how much pressure is placed on your lives.
The free thinking world is gone.
But the '3 meals away from a revolution' is always true and the rich will always get more greedy. When everyone no longer has the ability to free themselves, that's when a lot of heads will roll.
You probably feel that way because this is what it feels like when evil wins.
Evil use to hide - but through Trump's no filter twitter postings, Musk's self-aggrandizing incompetence, and Russia's realization that they no longer have to hide their evil-doing, a lot of the evil these days is just out in the open.
Imagine a world where a competent president is hiding behind close doors planning a way to defund USAID and starve millions of people. Planning behind close doors cutting medicare by 1 trillion dollars, killing thousands of Americans, and using that money to fund a trillion dollar tax break for the mega rich. You wouldn't know any of that is happening.
Now it is front page news, and people are reacting by boycotting Amazon for one day on the 28th.
Evil use to hide
You should check out the history of the USA some time.
I think you meant incompetent, I was a little bit confused
the hard answer: the voting populace is the single stupidest form of combined intelligence to ever exist, im pretty sure 3 children under the age of 7 in a room would have a higher average IQ than any state in america when measuring the voting populace.
Voting is a joke. People don't take it seriously, it's all vibes based, and those vibes are horrendously unreliable and meaningless.
the soft answer: it is, for now. It will change, just give it time. It's inevitable.
The candidates are the joke. The system generates trash "representatives". That's a feature, not a bug. Nothing worth voting for.
Maybe voting is all vibes because First Past The Post voting doesn't accurately represent the nation.
The perspective I subscribe to is that access and abundance has outpaced the average persons ability to choose. By which I mean, their talent at choosing. An overall inability to make quality decisions. I would say the issue really grew some teeth in maybe the 50's and has been accelerating more or less exponentially. The art of exploiting this inability to choose first starts getting real traction in the evolution advertising. Getting people to buy cans of beans and cigarettes was the larval form of a much more sinister science of mass manipulation. The internet definitely threw gasoline on the fire. And now no one knows what is quality, or true, or nutritious, or sustainable, or important. The average person is completely overwhelmed and operating on a low-level fight-or-flight type reasoning. Unfortunately I don't think there is a short term solution. People need to start learning at a very young age explicitly how to not be a mark. Which is antithetical to the wealthy and politically connected people whose bread and butter is hoards of unscrupulous consumers of products and rhetoric.
when evil is winning on your nation's scale it feels like it's winning globally. is evil winning in rojava? in southeast asia? is evil winning in the spanish speaking world?
for that matter, what's going on at your state level, or at your city level?
is evil winning in rojava? in southeast asia? is evil winning in the spanish speaking world? for that matter, what’s going on at your state level, or at your city level?
Yes.
It's winning in Europe too
My state is winning. So far the new federal administration hasn’t disrupted us much: we look so much better as the other side of the comparison worsens. We’re a big part of the fight for humanity, and new regional transit based zoning is already showing increased housing starts
Because it is.
Unpopular opinion, but in the west particularly, folk have mistaken writing on the internet for action.
Tweeting resistance rather than performing it.
A lapse into inaction framed as radical rest and self care.
Online they are fierce warriors of justice, offline they go to work in Starbucks, use their apple devices to talk to their families and enjoy the treadmill of streaming services.
And this isn't to blame them. This is the point of consumerist capitalism. To trap you in a gilded cage.
This is why I've stopped reading much of the content I had been reading before. Unless an article is about what someone is doing to stop what is happening, what is the point in reading it? I don't care so much about the bad, rather in how the rest of us are preventing it.
For all the people complaining, I haven't seen many talking about what steps they are taking to change the momentum. I get why I've may not want to announce what protests they are attending, but I haven't noticed much new talk about mutual aid or volunteering efforts. I know the recent political climate globally is motivating me to be involved in both.
I'm waiting to hear back in a volunteer position helping local wildlife, and once I get that schedule worked out, I've already started looking into local food aid opportunities as well.
If our society is leaving gaps unfilled, as you said, it's up to us to fill them ourselves before we all fall through.
I used to go to protests, from USA to Australia to NZ and UK... I'm not going to another protest until we start occupying gated communities. I'm sick of standing around looking pathetic occupying some sidewalk and politely leaving when told to by police. And to think that's the best the so-called "leftists" can do, then I remember to back when things were bad - how the police and FBI would raid groups, murder them, drop bombs on them, and assassinate their leadership - and realize that leftism was defeated long ago. I want to keep it peaceful, and start picketing in places that matter like outside mansions and gated communities. Just stand outside the homes of billionaires to tell them we know where they live, we out number them, I think would be enough to shake things up a bit because they're cowards too. However, in my heartest of hearts, I believe anything short of an armed overthrow of one dozen billionaires will never be enough. Fuck tinkering and pushing the needle slightly. Loud and armed leftist groups are needed now more than ever and there's zero of them to be found.
Exactly I budget and limit my time online to get specific kinds of information.
What kinds of information?
Where and when. I will make time to be there.
It’s time for good people to do some association too.
That would make sense except when you realize this is new media and is exactly how the right is warping minds. Elon didn't buy Twitter because he was bored. We cannot concede all social media to the right and until there is a platform that can't be bought the people won't ever have a voice.
Well observed. People pour a lot of energy into political actions. The question is what that energy gets used on.
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.
I just talked to my superior about the most urgent thing EU countries are facing currently. I should add that he is 100% disabled but studied in CS and reads everything which is interesting to him and his world view.
When I said that social media dictates the discussions and the media, we agreed on the thought after a short period.
And if we could solve this issue we mostlikely would get awarded a noble price.
What I am trying to say: Social media is run by - at least - flawed people. And used by the evil ones to their maximum, putting the honest Ones into a position to explain.
We are loosing our discourse, we are mixing our cultures - or we split at our ethics.
Social media is a cancer with no current treatment. Civilians will be in favor of social media since it also benefits society directly. But we are diminishing other things with it.
Maybe there will be one more brilliant mind educated who may aid us in these times.
Social media is run by - at least -
flawed peoplecapitalism.Everybody is deeply flawed. The problem is systemic not individual.
The Algorithm needs to be regulated. (Meaning: Recommendation algorithms should be monitored to make sure that they're not 'discovering' that they can manipulate people with fear, anger and other base negative emotions.)
We already know that the most motivating things for humans is fear and anger/outrage. We also know that these are not healthy emotions for the individual or for society and yet we allow social media algorithms to to maximize engagement using fear and anger.
In addition, it is very hard to craft a message that is both appealing and true. It is much easier to craft a message that is appealing if you can get rid of the Truth constraint.
These are probably the two core issues that are causing us the most strife. Unthinking recommendation algorithms have identified content that stokes base emotions like fear and anger as being the ones that generate the most 'engagement'; and people, seeking to exploit these algorithms for personal gain (advertisers, political actors, etc), craft messages to maximize their engagement (anger/outrage, fear) while ignoring reality/truth/facts because reality is too hard of a constraint.
The flip side of this is that you see people, who practically live on social media, start to unconsciously adopt the same messaging style because it works even better as people become attuned to the fear and outrage.
So, now you have a feedback loop of people being conditioned by algorithms to be maximally outrageous and those masses of people spontaneously generating memes and social connections that reinforce outrage and fear.
This poison is now spreading into our social institutions and governments. Facts matter less than saying things that are outrageous and valuing the truth is obviously a silly proposition. After all, it's plainly obvious that it is much harder to get upvotes if you care about the truth...
Try it, go to a community that matches your political leanings and try to correct misinformation. If you're not banned you will be buried in downvotes because people don't value the truth as much as they value an entertaining lie.
I wanted to let you know there is an option in your settings so you don't see upvotes or downvotes.
Lemmy (AFAIK) doesn't even show you your total upvotes (karma... whatever it's called) by default either. None of these imaginary points fucking matter.
So why don't you do yourself a favor and uncheck these boxes and not give a fuck what others think about your comment.
I know I have.
(Lemmy is rad as fuck)
IMHO, It's the algorithm that's the real devil.
For a long time, it was us against the bots and the companies. But we no longer know what's being given to us because it matches versus what's being given to us because they're paying for it to be seen.
The danger is the algorithm gives us a steady stream of what we appear to want. It's serotonin. Then it's weaponized. There's no appreciable difference between the ads, the propaganda, the creators honest content and the creators paid content. We're getting echo chambers of what we want and paid advertisements to sure that up.
People see it on Facebook and TikTok and just take it as read that what's being presented is truth. Even the ones that are savvy to bias end up getting swept along with the tide.
The only way to stop this is to demand disinformation and fact-checking. But instead of that, everyone seems to be hell-bent on knocking out private conversation where we might be able to communicate and are being forced to rely solely on whatever the algorithm allows us.
There’s no appreciable difference between the ads, the propaganda, the creators honest content and the creators paid content.
Well said.
e: oops, double comment
I don’t even think it’s the people who ruin social media that’s the problem- the fascists and racists and haters were always there. And not even so much that they now have a stage and algorithms
The whole problem is there is no longer anything people agree as worthwhile news. No fairness, no trustworthy. The few remaining objective news outlets are pigeonholed into one partisan side or another, regardless whether they deserve it.
To the common person, there is no news. That social media is it. And every if there were, how could you tell the difference?
I blame Fox News more than streamers because they did at least as much as anyone to destroy News, with clear bias and outrage, and misleading its viewers to blur the distinction between news and news entertainment
You don't like cultures mixing? I was wondering if you could elaborate on this point.
The common version of the phrase...
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,”
The actual version of the phrase...
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
A favourite of mine on that theme is from Boondock Saints (1999)
Now we must all fear evil men.
But there is another kind of evil.
Which we must fear. Most.
And that is the indifference of good men.
Just an hour ago I heard EmiliaRoig.com talking on the EuropeansPodcast.com (minute 28) and she said something that at first sounded naïve to me. But in hindsight, it may be true.
She said that "times are changing for the better (i.e. referring to the last 10 years or more.) and what we are seeing nowadays is just a shout of despair to that, being done by right-wing extremists, and is loud."
I can recommend all that she said afterwards, be warned: talks fast ;p
Rent is due in 2 days. Things must be changing for the better for my landlord.
Because too many good people are doing nothing.
I don't know what to do...
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!
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.
There is no ethical consumption while living a capitalist way of life.
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.
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
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.
All that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
I guarantee you that a jury of good people would throw a good person in prison if they tried to do the good things that need to be done.
You are more informed in how shitty the world have always been.
Also the decades from the 90s to the 10s were probably a small golden age that has already ended.
I study history a lot, also I’m older so I have the perspective of two or three generations now.
Things have normally been not the idealized concept of Disney princess goodness in government. Evil shits normally have been doing stuff for as long as civilization has existed. So all this is not new.
What is new, and makes this newsworthy, is the masks have fallen off. Those masks and idealized fantasy much of the population indulges in took decades, generations to build up. In many ways this is a very rude culture shock.
The other reason this is important now is the climate is rapidly collapsing while the trade systems have reached unprecedented complexity. So a group of particularly thuggish people rising to power in several nations at once, as they tend to do with regularity. May have epic and disastrous consequences! It’s a really bad time for this to happen
My theory is "shallow thinking" and "busy-ness". We are prone to mental and expedient shortcuts which seem benign at the small scale in which we interact, but when aggregated become something terrible... and on the exceedingly rare chance that we might hear an actual solution, it either sounds so foreign to us that we cannot consider it, or so hopeless a fight that the super-majority of people do not push back.
Consider how slippery the slope is for even one aspect (diffuse responsibility):
- Alice needs help
- Bob sees that Alice needs help
- Bob excuses himself from being the one to help (not prepared, wasn't expecting, other obligations, could be a trap, others are better suited to help, the government ought to help)
- Bob excuses himself from being the one to get help (I don't have the number handy, someone else will call, she probably already called someone for help)
Conceptually, this is fine if it is ONLY "Bob", but the deceptive part is how finite the procedural gap is between Bob being one person and it literally being everyone.... thus Alice gets no help.
Surprised to read so many answers talking about capitalism, social media and wealth concentration. But no one mentioned that we're at an unprecedented point in history of mankind. Ecological collapse, the lightening fast rise of AI. No example of past historical processes can be very useful in this very unique context.
And don't forget that with AI and, coming fast, robots, humans will not be needed for labor anymore. Most of you might feel this is rubbish about something you think is science fiction. I suggest you think again.
Think again and you will quickly realize that the future is not rosy for 99.5% of us.
Nah, the others are right
Because it is
Have you ever cheated at a game, cut corners on work or purposefully did something unfair to get better from it yourself?
Yeah it's much easier to win without any pesky ethics or a strong moral compass.
Good folks have been struggling uphill since the Ancient Greeks as long as there are folks trying to win with a different rule book.
We are entering a major transition period, with many technological changes happening to disrupt the existing economy. One of the most important is the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
For hundreds of years, the energy economy has been a system where certain countries and companies controlled the locations on earth where fossil fuels are located, and had the technology to process the fuels. Fossil fuels by their nature require the user to buy "feedstock" as they go. The countries and companies that control fossil fuel production profit from this system and are some of the wealthiest groups in the world.
Renewable energy systems, such as solar, wind and batteries, require an upfront payment for the equipment. The cost of equipment for renewable energy is dropping every year. They can be located almost everywhere. There is no ongoing feedstock payment. Renewables break the fossil fuel industry model, and some of the wealthiest people in the world are scrambling to control governments to somehow retain their income flow. Currently their strategy is to delay implementation of renewables, but eventually they will try to create monopolies where they control the source of power and charge the customer about the same as they are paying now, with the utilities benefitting from the low cost of renewable power.
This is only one of the transitions happening at this time. There are many major disruptions coming from implementing AI in the economy, from electric vehicles and self-driving vehicles. There are probably many more transitions that no one is predicting or even imagining at this time. You can expect things to be crazy for a decade or more as these technologies change the way our economy, infrastructure and society is shaped.
The implementation of AI is an effort by those wealthies to increase the class divide and consolidate power. They see value in it beyond profits. It's about omniscience and control. They just wrap it in what they think is a desirable package for the common folk and push it as though it's a breakthrough technology (it's not).
Self driving is just a dream that they won't have to see a chauffer or God forbid take public transit and sit next to a plebian.
and fossil fuels, that continued "subscription" model, is a massive incentive for war and disrupting competing suppliers. Solar does require copper (distribution) and sand plus a bit of silver, batteries just lithium phosphate and iron, and all of these are relatively abundant (sodium as lithium replacement even more abundant). More importantly, once you've bought your solar and batteries, you have fuck you energy: secure and independent.
War on Russia was a last grasp effort to keep diesel refining at maximum capacity, and attempt to capture Europe's NG supply. Doesn't matter how much Biden loved US O&G, he wasn't going to be loved back.
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.
Of the views expressed here, yours is the one I believe is most accurate and insightful.
I disagree, however, that it's hopeless. I think the pivot is this claim:
"There is no way to organize enough people in real life to force any political change (especially not with an aging population)"
There is a way. We just need an honest signal that can coordinate the behavior of the genuinely good people, who currently are fighting each other in opposing political parties (etc), rather than uniting to fight their oppressors. Public key cryptography will let us trust that the signal hasn't been tampered with, despite the oligarchs owning the communication channels. We just need to find a way to make the signal loud enough, trustworthy enough and able to break through the current haze of disinformation that's making us fight eachother.
Though this sounds hard, but it will get easier with time. As the system collapses, dissatisfaction with current ideologies will increase and motivate the collective search for a new, honest signal to unite around.
Perhaps the most valuable thing we can do now is research alternative, less corruptible, more egalitarian, more sustainable systems. We need to have an ideal to replace the current mess with when it crumbles. Otherwise the current power holders will simply ride out the anarchy, put on a different hat and continue to exploit.
Thanks a lot!
Accuracy for the western world and for an academic who comes from the working class. Most people I work with are academics and see things different, because they could always afford a lawyer and/or had and have connections themselves. Their whole life and lived experience tells them another truth.
I feel sad, that I have to disagree with you on the honest signal, I see several problems here:
- Define 'disinformation': There are obvious black-is-white lies, but most propaganda in the west is not 'disinformation', it is simply emphasizing the facts that favor your point of view. If you add another signal, you are just one more signal producing propaganda (although most probably I would be very happy with your propaganda)
- Cryptography ... even IT people have trouble understanding this, and even worse: You cannot solve a social problem with technology
- 'good people' - a handful philosophers in the west alone had a very thorough discourse about 'good' over the last centuries. The discussion is still going on. ;-)
- One of the most important insights is, that it is harder for a group of people to agree than for a few to take power and enforce it. If this wouldn't be a human/social truth, our western societies wouldn't be such a shit show by now.
IMHO one of the roots of the problem is how humans are wired and how bigger societies develop in a sociological way. The best way we have found (so far) is democracy, and AFAIK especially democracy with a mostly even wealth distribution (see the northern countries of Europe). AFAIK it is a social rule, that as soon as a group gets bigger, subgroups will be built. It is a human rule that attractive people will be treated better than non attractive one, you will want to help your friends even when it comes at a cost for someone you don't even know or dislike.
My recipe would be a more even wealth distribution and a way to stop the wealthy force others to do labor for them. Thanks to police and military, I have the strong feeling, the ones with the guns and military will win.
p.s.: I recommend the following books if the topic interests you:
- The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics
- The Established and the Outsiders: A Sociological Enquiry into Community Problems
This post is the most accurate representation of modern world society I have ever encountered posted on social media, full stop. Please, everyone, take the time to read it and understand it.
Thanks a lot for your kind words! :-)
I think it is pretty accurate of the system we have in Germany and perhaps in other western countries.
The problem is, one has to experience for oneself a lot of this things, to really understand them. By the time most people understand enough of the system, they probably have children/other liabilities which force them to play along. (Sadly I am not the exception.)
Life is short and ignorance is bliss.
- Constitutional state? Does not matter, as long as powerful/influential people can literally buy laws or prevent even discussion of laws in the parliament
Babylon rots from the inside. Corrupt systems cannot last forever.
It's a global far right power grab fueled by money from Russia using weaponized disinformation. It's been going on for decades at a smaller scale before Facebook, etc, even existed. It's also fueled by conservative dark money groups funded by conservative billionaires. You should read the book Dark Money, I highly recommend it.
Even the antivax stuff is from Russia and it way predates the big platforms. It was started in the crunchy mom communities on Livejournal, where they first experimented with seeing if westerners would glom on to weird mommy trends like not using shampoo, nursing your kids to ridiculous ages, "unassisted birth", which is where people deliver babies without any medical care at all, "unschooling", etc. That took off in a big way and then they began with the antivax stuff, and used Livejournal as a tool of Russian government propaganda.
Then they started funding white supremacist groups, and the groups like the yellow vests, Moms for Liberty, etc. Really recommend learning about dark money and Russian weaponized disinformation.
It's pretty convienient how all bad things stem from a single, external source, preventing the need for any sort of internal societal reckoning. How fortunate that we were born on the good guys' side and all we need to do is focus on our states' geopolitical enemies, and if they can be kept in check, it'll solve every one of our domestic issues, upto and including old wives tales.
Western shitlibs try not to blame all their problems on foreigners challenge (impossible)
I blame the success of neoliberalism (perhaps confusingly, a distinctly conservative project driven by the likes of Reagan and Thatcher). Ever-widening wealth gaps and focus on individual responsibility for solving problems seems to have created an environment where people will jump on just about any bandwagon that tells them they're inherently better than others. Unfortunately, evil will keep winning as long as there's enough support (or indifference) for evil to keep winning.
This is a people/societal issue. People's lack of willingness in investing in other people doing well.
What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.
Extinction Burst.
Evil people control almost all sources of information
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.
Because capitalism. Capitalism is basically a philosophy that postulates that people are greedy and selfish, so it makes a society based on greediness and selfishness. It's a self-realizing prophecy if you ask me.
Another word is needed, this one has become so baggy as to be meaningless. Capitalism has been the predominant economic system across the world for centuries now. It just means the accumulation of surpluses, creating economic growth. It has no a-priori about what's done with the surpluses.
Just as the Gilded Age and today's broligarchy were underpinned by capitalism, so were New Deal liberalism and 1980s Swedish social democracy. That last model in particular created a society that was freer and fairer (so: less evil) than any ostensibly "non-capitalist" one has ever been.
Capitalism is a doctrine that's been created in the 19th century and is basically based on private property and accumulation of wealth. It does mean something very simple in fact. And it has nothing to do with democracy or oligarchy.
In French we call the precious system the old regime. It was based on privileges and heredity, not wealth and private property.
That's the fundamentals of the organisation of the society. In Europe capitalism after ww2 was made less damaging to the society because communism was a threat and capitalism had to be seen as a good alternative.
But ultimately capitalism is a sickness that leads to the exact same kind of feudalism that the old regime did. Musk and Trump are merely using the system as intended: they leverage their wealth to get power.
I think the term fits fine. The surpluses go to the owners of the means of production (barring "state capitalism" I suppose). These surpluses are actually the true value of the workers' labor that the owners take, which is why I think capitalism is immoral, but that's not really related to my point. The system incentivizes the owners to maximize these surpluses, which means paying the workers as little as possible, and charging customers as much as possible. I.e. the system incentivizes greed.
Social democracies are absolutely better than unchecked capitalism, but it's my opinion that they'll never be able to stop from regressing (they have been, as I understand it). Because of the owners' place in the hierarchy and outsized wealth and influence, they will always be able to push governments to their benefit, and then it just keeps snowballing as they gain more wealth and influence. Admittedly, very strong unions can counteract this, and were responsible for them becoming social democracies in the first place.
Another word is needed
The target is well regulated free trade.
It's good to be angry at capitalism, because capitalism holds unchecked capital acquisition as a foundational right. We know that doesn't work in a globally connected world, if it ever worked.
Notice that there's no right to accommodate infinite capital in the phrase I used. And there's also no complete ban on private property.
The things that work are usually not any of the crap spouted by vocal greedy world leaders.
We need to clip the right that capitalism gives to become billionaire, and then see where we stand on the rest of the rules, and decide together what we want to change.
We're likely to find a lot more confortable compromises, after the billionaires thumbs are off the scales.
There's a season for everything, even for evil, but it won't last forever.
Why does it feel like evil is winning globally?
Propaganda works.
We are now innundated with it. And the answer is not "anti-propaganda" although sometimes that helps a little.
The answer is everyone needs to learn how media works; How words and images and sounds form the world.
And to do that requires the help of media corporations.
The answer is everyone needs to learn
Uhoh
first i would say it "feels" that way because you're consuming all the media that's telling you that. everyone should moderate the media they consume to help their mental health while at the same time keeping informed.
the big structural issue is that countries are having trouble cooperating internationally to manage corporations and now individuals. the main mechanism for this is (again) media - both old and new social media.
we need democratically elected politicians to create rules for media to correct lies and protect democracy. also democracy itself needs further protection by controlling funding to political parties and during elections. all this will take time but is happening as we speak.
the future looks bright
I bet you voted for Trump, get the hell outta here
Eh?, i guess i should decamp to the grad, that's where all the wannabe dictators hang out right?
We are actually living under capitalism, for which the the term democracy is a euphemism.
And capitalism eventually leads to fascism that corrupts it.
You see the light somewhere but most people have fear of getting rid of it.
They would rather put a band aid on their theoretical democracy.
It feels that way, because it kind of is winning a bunch of battles. Whether it's "winning the war" is much more up for interpretation - the past was seriously shit going just a few generations back, and it will take a lot of backwards progress until we get anywhere comparable.
Okay, so why is it happening? When it comes to democratic backsliding specifically, the first reflex everyone had was to blame social media bubbles for causing runaway political polarisation, but it turns out breaking those bubbles actually increases radicalisation, so that's not it. Another theory I've heard is that in a democracy, the weakening of a political party inevitably creates space for extremists to take control. There definitely was some building dissatisfaction with the status-quo right before the trouble began, I could feel it, and in the case of the US specifically winning a party is nearly as good as winning the country.
It's also worth considering this has happened before. Since the French revolution itself the path to liberalism has been two steps forward, one step back. I don't know what causes it exactly, but the dip we're in is big - comparable to the one before WWII.
Even evil people are winning. Why?
That's yet another separate question, which I struggle with too. One notable bad person isn't even smart-evil.
It's been shown in studies that narcissists achieve more conventional success and social status, despite the fact they pretty much ruin everything and everyone they touch. It's a real thing. Bad actors are given far more leeway than would be game-theoretically rational for us to give.
Because history is cyclical, and at all times some forces are on the losing side of it. Back in the days when the left was more powerful, the right complained about winning evil. Now it's the other way around.
Note: this is not a "both sides" argument, I am left.
Note: this is not a "both sides" argument, I am left.
I really wish people had the critical thinking on the internet to understand this point. The other side does see themselves how we see ourselves and acknowledging that doesn’t mean you support their views.
Make America Great Again is just "Change" in the other direction.
A ruling class of ultra wealthy lording over the vast majority of people being 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.
Because they have always been win. Evil never sleeps and it will always exist. Good people have to fight every day to make progress. Perfect example is Bernie sanders and democrats. Bernie has been fighting since the 70s. Democrats have been it is good enough things are fine just defend the status quo. Meanwhile people are working everyday to setup bad things with currently things reaching back as far as Clinton and people can argue Reagan.
Evil never sleeps and is constantly working to undermine peace. Lots of people are honestly mediocre or middle of the road once things are good enough they stop fighting. There has only ever been a few good people fighting. People deep in community actively doing good things.
Bernie had a shot at winning but instead gave it to Hillary.
The information age of the internet grew too fast before humans could get an actual sense of the repercussions, and it was just a matter of time for the greedy people in power all over the world to use it to their advantage.
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.
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.
Because it is.
In some ways, evil is getting the upper hand at the moment, mostly brought on by moderates failing to address basic and fundamental problems forming in society due to being corporate captured.
However, we have a few options at our disposal to fight back:
- Joining and organizing within your local community to create connections with others is incredibly powerful, will make the coming months much more bearable, and lay the ground work for effective resistance.
- We can still effect things drastically with a general strike. This massively impacts their income streams, and can bring the country to its knees if done on a large enough scale.
- Join the IWW and attempt to unionize your workplace, so that the general strike is even more effective.
If we put in the work, we can resist this and we can win. Don't become paralyzed with doubt and fear, march on and push as much you can. Together we're strong, separated we are weak. So join up with allies while we still can easily!
Join a union. Most places won’t have IWW.
They're active branches in most cities, but they can be formed anywhere, even rural areas. If there's a local union that'll take you in and isn't corporate captured (teamsters being an example of corporate captured, IMO), then sure, that can work.
But the IWW is the only union that can unionize any industry, is global in scope, and is grassroots with a revolutionary spirit.
"Evil" had always been winning. It just seems worse now because it's finally effecting us.
Scary book written in 1970 has proved to be incredibly prescient.
"Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler predicted that as the Digital Age moved forward, a lot of people would begin to lose their minds because they couldn't/wouldn't keep up with all the changes.
It's easy for bad people to offer an easy solution to people who have no idea how to handle it.
Aldus Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932) is another one that predicted the state we find ourselves in.
It's with noting that Future Shock wasn't about the digital age; there was no digital age in 1970. Toffler was concerned about the rate of change and information overload, and he talks about the "information era." But it's useful to note that computers weren't on his radar - the technologies he was concerned about were things like Cable TV.
But it was less about the medium - the internet, still mostly only used by businesses and universities until almost 20 years later, when the WWW appeared - fits in perfectly. Toffler's theory is that - information age or not - as a species - our society and technology had started changing faster than our brains had evolved to handle. That we could just barely handle the introduction of the cotton mill - a device that had a huge impact on society; we could just about handle that much change in a generation, but now things were changing so rapidly that society couldn't keep up.
A really great modern simile is how people talk about computer technology and legislation. That Congress simply can't keep up with the rate of change in the world of software; that the people writing laws don't even understand the topics they're legislating. How well does the average person understand how blockchains work - even abstractly? How well does Nancy Pelosi? It's a microcosm of what Toffler was talking about, that afflicts the entire species.
The information age was just another stage; the point he was trying to get across is that, as a society, we can only handle so much change. He argued that we'd been struggling with this since the industrial age started. The information age - in Toffler's opinion - would be the last straw. Things would change so rapidly that we'd (individually) be in a constant state of shock.
I don't know that Toffler's Future Shock explains how we got here, though. It might be a factor, but is this the inevitable outcome?
Huxley, I think, provided a better (if less academic) theory. We are hedonists, and those in power realize that if they play to this, they can control society.
Both, I think, ignored the fact that economic libertarianism leads to oligarchies. And rather than "too big to fail" being an example against laissez-faire economics, it's a perfect example of the exercise of it. When you have enough power to influence legislature, you do, to your own benefit.
I do think they're all factors - streams that feed into the vast river in which current we're all caught, and which seems to be leading to a waterfall of global collapse. But I do blame capitalism as the must significant source. I don't think we have any better option (not communism, for sure), but I think the capitalism we have is broken and enables abuse, and contributed the must to all of the worst things that are happening: fast fashion, cheap disposable goods, concentration of wealth, income disparity, Elon Fucking Musk with his hand puppet controlling the country. And it's only Elon because Bezos didn't think of it first.
My thoughts are that China is no longer recycling their profits into US treasuries, and the BRICS countries seemed to be heading down the same path. The US cant sustain high interest rates and needs people to buy this debt, hence there is a lot of talk of tariffs and a "green new deal" type of tariff system on emissions in order to derive additional revenue without increasing taxes on citizens. Citizens want entitlement programs that are ponzi schemes that have already been spent long ago, but they dont want additional taxes, and so you need a scheme to get around their votes.
The same thing happened after the great depression where they rebased gold to a lower value after confiscating it, and some speculate it created an environment ripe for WWII. Our system of printing money tends to increase aggregate demand while misallocating capital, like houses in 2008, and thus it ends in suffering.
The Lobster’s Guide to Legalized Corruption: Why the Claws of Power Demand Compliance
Let us speak plainly: corruption is not merely a bug in the system. It is a feature. A feature as ancient as the neural circuits governing dominance hierarchies in Panulirus argus—the Caribbean spiny lobster. Observe, if you will, the lobster. Its existence is a masterclass in the art of “legitimate” exploitation. For in the murky depths where it resides, might makes right, and the rules are written by those with the largest claws. Sound familiar?
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The Lobster’s Serotonin Supremacy: When a lobster wins a battle, its serotonin levels surge. This biochemical reward system emboldens it to claim more territory, more mates, more resources. Is this not the essence of modern lobbying? The victors, flush with legalized dopamine (or campaign donations), rewrite the rules to hoist themselves higher. “We are the law,” they click-clack, molting their exoskeletons of accountability.
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Molting as Regulatory Capture: A lobster sheds its shell to grow. Similarly, corporations “shed” inconvenient regulations—antitrust laws, environmental protections—to expand their dominion. The old carapace is discarded, and the new, softer shell hardens into a fresh armor of loopholes. All quite legal, provided you’re atop the hierarchy.
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The Exoskeleton of Legality: A lobster’s shell is not a prison but a fortress. So too do the corrupt cloak themselves in legalese, an exoskeleton of statutes and shell companies. Transparency? A vulnerability only for the weak. The lobster knows: opacity is survival.
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Claw-Based Diplomacy: A dominant lobster need not hide its aggression. It waves its claws openly, a threat encoded in biology. Modern oligarchs, too, flaunt their influence—mergers, monopolies, Super PACs—all while insisting, “This is just how the market works.” To question it is to deny nature itself.
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Cannibalism as Vertical Integration: Lobsters eat their own when resources are scarce. Corporate raiders, hostile takeovers, asset stripping—merely the free market’s version of survival cannibalism. The law does not punish hunger, only failure to ascend.
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The Pheromone of Propaganda: A female lobster selects her mate based on pheromones signaling dominance. Likewise, the public is bombarded with the pheromones of PR campaigns, branding exploitation as “innovation” and greed as “ambition.” The message is clear: obey the scent.
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Hierarchy Without Merit: A lobster’s rank is not earned through virtue but through relentless aggression. So too do modern power structures reward not competence, but the ability to manipulate the system. Promotion is not a reward for integrity—it is a concession to force.
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The Molt of Moral Relativism: When a lobster sheds its shell, it temporarily becomes soft, vulnerable. But fear not—it simply relocates until its new armor hardens. The corrupt, too, retreat to offshore havens, emerging later, unscathed, their wealth crystallized into impunity.
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The Eternal Territory: A lobster fights to the death for its crevice. The modern analogue? Regulatory capture. Once a monopoly claims its niche, it defends it not with claws but with lawyers, lobbyists, and legislative puppetry. “We are the law,” they hiss, and the ocean floor trembles.
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The Unspoken Contract: Lobsters do not debate ethics. Their hierarchy is a Darwinian contract: dominate or be dominated. The corrupt understand this tacitly. Tax evasion? Insider trading? Mere dominance displays. To criminalize them would be to criminalize nature.
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The Shedding of Accountability: A lobster leaves its old shell behind, a hollow relic. So too do the powerful discard fiduciary duties, environmental commitments, and social contracts. The past is a carcass; the future belongs to those unburdened by conscience.
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The Eternal Lobster: Fossil records show lobsters have existed for 480 million years. Their secret? Adaptability. Corruption, too, adapts. It dons new masks—public-private partnerships, campaign finance, consultancy fees—but the claws remain the same.
Conclusion: Clean your room, bucko. For in a world where legalized corruption is the water in which we swim, the only antidote is individual responsibility. Do not resent the lobster for its nature. Resent yourself for refusing to climb the hierarchy—or for naively believing it could ever be dismantled. The law is not justice. The law is the lobster. And the lobster is eternal.
Great. Now we have barred-out LLMs.
“The Hierarchical Imperative: Why Three Days Does Not a Titan Make, and the Perilous Archetype of the Unseasoned Interloper”
Let us parse this properly—no, let us unpack it, as the postmodernists might say, though they rarely do more than smuggle chaos into their luggage. You see, there exists a phenomenon, a thing, an archetypal force as old as the Sumerian epics, where the fledgling, the uninitiated, the larval entity—barely three rotations of this cosmic sphere into its existence—dares to clack its mandibles at the monoliths of hard-earned order. Imagine, if you will, a crustacean—yes, a lobster, though perhaps a lesser arthropod, a shrimp, a krill—emerging from the primordial ooze, still glistening with the naiveté of its first molt, and declaring to the alpha-male lobster, perched atop his cairn of stones accumulated through decades of claw-to-claw combat: “Your territory is mine.” Absurd? Preposterous? Or worse: banal?
This is not merely a question of tenure, though tenure is the bedrock upon which competence is forged. No, this is a matter of hierarchical truth, a principle encoded into the very structure of reality. The ancients understood this. The Egyptian god Osiris did not hand the scales of judgment to a soul fresh from the womb. The Norse Einherjar did not dine in Valhalla on their first day of battle. Even the Christian apostles—yes, even Judas—had to walk with Christ before they could presume to lecture on eschatology. And yet here we are, in this digital agora, where some ephemeral entity, a wraith barely three sunrises old, dares to levy its half-formed, synapse-firing opinions as if they were tablets handed down from Sinai.
Let me be clear: an account older than your Spotify playlist is not a credential. It is not a totem of wisdom. It is a receipt of time served in the colosseum of discourse. Do you think Nietzsche scribbled Beyond Good and Evil in a weekend? Do you imagine Dostoevsky birthered The Brothers Karamazov between TikTok scrolls? No! They stewed in the juices of their own suffering, their own participation in the bloody hierarchy of ideas. You, interloper, have not yet stewed. You are still a raw cutlet, pink and trembling, demanding a seat at the banquet of the sous-vide.
Consider the lobster—always the lobster!—whose dominance is not claimed in a day. It spends years scuttling through the detritus, avoiding predators, surviving the gauntlet of cannibalistic peers, shedding carapace after carapace, each molt a testament to incremental growth. Only then does it ascend to the pinnacle of the rock pile, claws raised in triumph. What do you have? Three days. Three days! You are not even a lobster. You are a tadpole in a puddle, squawking at the crocodile who suns itself on the riverbank.
And Reddit—ah, Reddit! That cacophonous Babel of hot takes and karma farming, where the anonymous and the ephemeral congregate to hurl their half-baked axioms into the void. It is a realm where “TL;DR” is the battle cry of the cognitively indolent, where the wisdom of crowds is too often the madness of mobs. To say “go back to Reddit” is not an insult. It is a diagnosis. A prescription. A merciful directive to return to the sandbox where your flailing might, at least, amuse the other children.
But perhaps I am being too harsh. Perhaps you are simply lost. A wanderer in the desert of intellectual rigor, parched for the manna of meaning. If so, heed this: Clean your room. Metaphorically. Organize your digital domicile. Read a book—a real one, with pages—written by someone who died before you were born. Wrestle with the angels of nuance. Then, and only then, return with something heavier than the gravitational pull of your own unchecked confidence.
Until then, know this: The hierarchy is not your enemy. It is your teacher. And if you will not kneel before the altar of earned authority, you will be devoured by the wolves of your own hubris. The abyss gazes back, bucko. And right now, it’s rolling its eyes.
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- The rich take a larger and larger slice of the wealth pie
- Use the money to propagandize to the now more precarious and vulnerable public to bolster their position
- Rinse and repeat
Yeah. People hear the word "billionaire", but cannot fathom how much their own life would improve if the billionaires captured wealth was out in the world working for them, instead of working against them.
If they remembered when Amazon was still courting new users, because it still had competition, well it's like that.
Evil is not held back by scruples or moral boundaries. Evil people will do whatever they need to to succeed. That includes manipulating people, something which today's technology facilitates. Add to that the fact that for many people in developed countries, life is slowly getting worse instead of improving over the last few years. The frustration over that can easily be turned into hate against minorities, foreigners etc.
Trust. In order for good people to achieve something they need to work together and trust each other. Bad people lie and deceive with no remorse which basically gives them the advantage in securing higher seats. Being able to lie with a straight face gives you many advantages if what you seek is personal gain, hence a lot of people keep doing it and that seems to be the goal.
Evil has always dominated. Look into history and... yea
Monarchies ruled the world, religions brainwash people, witchhunts, wars, famine, and slavery, all the evils was 10 times as bad. We are living in the most peaceful time in history (well... aside from the Climate Change 🙃)
Social media, and mass communications make everything seem worse than it actually is.
Evil winning?
The fuck are you on about?
Define this evil for the world to see
If you did not understand that the US was the evil force in the world all along, then your new feeling is mostly based on the previous internalization that countries resisting US evil were the evil ones, and that the US now picking wars on allies that it can easily win, and giving up on wars it cannot win. Colonial rulerships supporting US evil, were also deeply explicitly evil and subjugating their people's prosperity with disinformation and subjugation.
Inside the US, Zionist first rule was always a factor, but never as important as last election cycle. Oligarchy/media siding with the most zionist candidate, is simply ensuring the naked totalitarianism we must now endure. That the US has shifted the targets of its evil, does not change its nature. Replacing Presidential subjugation of allies with CIA subversive control of allies may not be as effective in force multiplication of evil, but it is just breaking your previous feelings/geopolitical illusions of "good"/values based alliances.
Doom sells, it makes money, its also great for missdirection
Simple material effect.
People are shaped by the interrest of the social and material class they are part of. And the evil people are always the one in power and have the money, so they act in the interest of their class and do things that help themselves.
Fucking Marx wrote about this quite a while ago, now his predictions just manifest more visibly, but the cultural and material forces have always been at play. Now we just reached a breaking point as a planet and population, so the underlying systems start to break too and the people on top do everything to stay in power, including ditching reality altogether.
Too much internet.
People have it tough and I think they have gotten full of hate and greed. Evil people feed on hate and greed.
Nothing has changed. The world is the same as its ever been. Maybe you have discovered a new definition of what you consider evil. What do you mean by evil? I doubt the ones you consider evil would consider themselves as such. There exists no good and no evil. There are only events that transpire and actions that take place. The world has no preference for such human concepts.
Who upvoted this edgy highschool crap?
Because they're evil. Rather, they don't place the same constraints on themselves that a good person places on themselves.
Because good times create weak people. Weak people create difficult times. Difficult times create good people. Good people create good times.
I think we're ushering into the era of weak people creating difficult times, after having good times for a while.
Edit/extra commentary: What I mean to say is, in America at least, we've elected people who are weak in character, to represent us. Money seems to matter to the people making decisions more than anything else. That in turn creates a difficult time for the people of the society that elected them. I think in a world consumed with money, fame and superficial things like that, people of good character stand out.
But what made me gay?
Should I call you mistah?
This is literally fascist rhetoric.
progress naturally brings democracy, and progress is slowing down worldwide.
If by "worldwide" you mean "in the West". Which, let's be honest, is exactly what you mean.
Humans are not perfect, they evolved into what they are now very very slowly. Technology surpassed that and we've learned how to manipulate the flaws in humans to control the actions of the masses. The sad part is it isn't even difficult, it's very easy to convince people to act against their interests if you get them to associate the desired action with their baser instincts: sex, resources, security.
When a flaw can be exploited, we exploit it. But exploiting it is evil.
You can chalk it up to humans being inherently evil, but it's just difficult to fight against our inherent flaws, against the animal instincts which drive us and especially the less educated.
Because sensationalism creates ad revenue. So the news you receive from any side of any story is going to try and make you as angry/scared as possible so you’re more apt to share it and spread the word- they then use the page bits and time spent on their sites to generate more ad revenue.
Stay away from tankie, far-left, liberal, democratic, conservative, republican, and MAGA-affiliated sites. They’re guaranteed to not be honest with you. Instead, stick with independent and unbiased sources like Reuters and Associated Press.
stick with independent and unbiased sources like Reuters and Associated Press.
Lol
Because of doom scrolling and 24/7 negative news coverage.
Fact of the matter is it is easier to destroy than create, so if evil was as rampant as people think, we wouldn't have a society. We'd be living in Mad Max. The vast majority of people want stability.
Life isn't a movie. The good guys rarely win irl.
Because we get bombarded with the negative parts.
Because that's what the news and social media is talking about right now. The zeigeist is currently cynical
It's not. We're just more aware of it.
Don't give in to despair!
Because it is. In many ways this is the West getting what was coming to it, but in any case you have rising evil and collaborationist "good" that's too weak-willed or out of touch to stop it. Then you have the real good bickering among itself and too far up its ass to stop any of it.
Because it's evolutionarily ingrained across life that individuals with a higher quality and quantity of offspring eventually dominate populations. And people who think more of others and less of themselves are usually not very good at that.
How comes that multiple times in history, societies reached a sufficient consensus (including part of the rich elite) to build democracies, write down rights and enforce their protection? And why would it not happen again?
Maybe human societies are too complex to be reduced to evolutionary interpretations.
Because you listen to news that makes money by sensationalizing everything for profit, and happy stories don't sell papers. There's plenty of uplifting stuff happening in the world every day that flies under the radar.
Because you're reading too much news and the intention of majority of them is not to make you informed but scared and angry. The vast majority of thing you're scared about never end up happening.
This is exactly what I was going to say. The news economy, and the algorithm economy, both depend on grabbing attention.
If you make a news article saying everything's a kind of okay right now, nobody's going to read it and look at your ads or click on anything.
If you say oh my God the municipal water boards totally f***** you won't believe what they just did, people are going to click to see what the hell happened. And then you say everything's mostly okay, but the commissioner wore a weird tie to the meeting....
To be effective is to not get held up on having good means to get stuff done.
It feels that way because your social media feed is programmed to reinforce what you're already thinking and keep your emotions engaged, regardless of whether you're correct or not.
As long as we assume that OP's primary info source is social media. It very well might be. But it also might not be.
Because it has become fashionable not to hide it.
Evil has always been winning. The early homo sapiens attacked the Neanderthals. They kept them as slaves and raped the women. (At least that is the current theories, no one "really" knows the specifics other than they "won"). It is in the nature of homo sapiens to get ahead by exploiting others. It's why they win, and why we have the technology and such we have today. A person with less morals to constrain them will win out over a moral person. I think our only realistic way out is to let AI take over. But I don’t see any reason why it won't come to the same conclusion, and then exploit us even more. But one can hope.Because younger people of late feel that being good is annoying but being evil is funny, and they are beginning to vote accordingly.
Because older people are scared about things they don't understand and are becoming increasingly selfish, convinced by people who claim simple solutions for complex issues.
I'm going to take a different tack on this than other responses: evil is winning because good is dumb.
A lot of progressive groups within the past few decades, whether it be Occupy, Black Lives Matter, or others, can't seem to actually get their policies enacted on a mass scale. In cases where politicians actually go through with their policies, those progressive groups won't support those politicians from getting voted out and having the reforms reversed.
Trump got elected, in part, because progressives didn't want to vote for Genocide Joe and Copmala. Yet, you don't see progressives building the kinds of political groups needed to wil elections like the right has.
As a progressive, I can tell you that the idea of Genocide Joe and Copmala compared to the antiChrist who wants to eradicate entire peoples...
Yeah, you would have to be an incredibly naive and stupid person to vote for Trump and company.
There were tons of discussions about how a lot of progressives couldn't bring themselves to vote for Democrats, so they didn't vote.
I wouldn't expect them to vote for Trump.
Because u only use news to inform yourself .
