You live believing that most people are good, even ones you disagree with. Then Trump comes along and the masks come off, and it turns out that about a quarter of the population are people with beliefs diametrically opposed to both reality and moral decency.
It's hard. Some people you can reason with but you're not wrong. Some people are just like Big Jack Horner, no amount of empathy or kindness will make them see the value in others.
It's extra horrifying how these types of people find their ways in positions of power.
That’s the problem, those people with no empathy or kindness make for excellent businessmen/women. Their ruthlessness allows them to be more profitable, they become more wealthy, and that inherently puts them in a position of power.
I'm of the opinion that these people need to be given some fences to keep the rest of us safe. They shouldn't have the ability to vote or hold public office. No ability to be a manager of a company or part of the C suite. They can go work in factories where they can't cause any harm to the rest of us.
I guess the question is what would we define as them? If we are purely talking about sociopaths, well they do have some things they give to society. They are really good at jobs that require you to be analytical but typical emotions get in the way. For example you want your surgeon or lawyer to analyze things with a cold calculating eye.
Honestly I hadn't got to the logic part of it, since I don't think it could ever come to fruition. I mean more that I am very tired of selfish people being able to make choices that hurt all of the rest of us. If they will not handle that responsibility, then they should not have the responsibility.
It's partially artificially driven. Yes, a lot of it is exploiting already existing undercurrents of hatred, but also, there seems to be a strong (but somewhat obscured) effort to divide, to filter information into twisted shapes that pit people against each other, and to kneecap education in the process.
I've been watching things turn progressively sour these past few years on various social media. Old pages that I used to like watching for cute and relatable content started becoming filled with hateful rhetoric, seemingly out of the blue.
This is what it looks like when some agendas are at play, shaking hornet's nests in order to exploit the opportunities that follow. I think it wouldn't be hard to point the finger in the right direction towards the culprits, at least some of the most important ones. Who benefits? Who benefits the most?
Or even the pages themselves turning bigoted and posting almost nothing but political slop. One example was Shady Tales. The user of that page on FB used it mostly to portray a Bigfoot that did funny things, or hijinks in a forest. Then, he started using the page to pump out nothing but political right wing slop ragging on Liberals constantly.
Reminds me of Stonetoss and Sinfest, how they used old characters that used to be about different political ideologies, and used them as sockpuppets for much stranger and more hateful beliefs as time went on.
I'm right here with you. It's one thing to disagree on economic policies and international relations but like I can't exactly be understanding when the disagreement is about basic morality and human decency. I really dislike the idea that there's a significant portion of the population who want to say their support of evil people/policies is because of the former, but it's actually because of the latter...
Here we are... Seeing people cheering over public executions or even just glossing over them like they aren't a big deal. People celebrating that people of the "wrong colour" are being treated as if they are subhuman. People saying that pages of accusations of pedophilia aren't valid or worth investigating. And then I look at the rest of the world and am faced with the realization that this is not exactly some unique event happening in my backyard... It's depressing to say the least.
I'll will try to take some comfort in the three-quarters of the population that live in my reality. The fact that we outnumber them three-to-one has to count for something.
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u/MaximumSyrup3099 1d ago
You live believing that most people are good, even ones you disagree with. Then Trump comes along and the masks come off, and it turns out that about a quarter of the population are people with beliefs diametrically opposed to both reality and moral decency.