It's not just conservatives, I also see many libs believe in this shit. In addition, they really believe in the "Just World Hypothesis" (i.e. that the good will eventually be rewarded and that the evil will eventually be punished). I just can't bring myself to believe that the evil will "get what they deserve," at least in this world, after everything I've seen. I don't know, how do others here deal with the brainworms of personal responsibility and the just world hypothesis?

  • Abraxiel
    ·
    3 years ago

    I see this an aspect of this often in places like AITA, where everyone collectively forgets that people get upset or tired or hungry or try to avoid embarassment. Even when it's apparent that someone is acting from such a cause, it all has to get collapsed down to who's right and who's wrong. This even compounds the issue, because if someone has a reason for why they said something nasty to their brother in law or whatever, but they're still judged to be in the wrong, people tend to inflate the offense so that any complexity to the interaction is less important.

    That's a tangent, but the point is that people really want our emotions and behaviour to be wholly suppressed by abstracted social mores and ill-defined ettiquette and rules. This is simply not where we are! We're animals, and a scared animal will bite. We have to work with this rather than just say everyone has to be better and then heap all of our pent up abuse and the inherent systemic violence on whoever gets caught out needing a twix, or who doesn't have the wherewithal to be a fucking striver while they're grinding out at an abusive job. I want to ask people all the time, "have you ever been angry, have you ever been afraid?" you can't think straight. Like you literally can't process information in the same way because your brain prioritizes "be aware and ready to avoid or confront a threat" at the expense of whatever dispassionate evaluation everyone enjoys when they hear about something from the outside, after the fact.

    And it's not like we have to just say, "well, everyone can just do whatever they want because they're only reacting to their experience," no! But we have to understand how it fucking happens and how to work with real, temperamental human beings. Sometimes that means forgiving an outburst, sometimes it means taking a lap to cool off before you talk to someone. Sometimes it means acknowledging that it's very unlikely for a person to be able to work full time, improve themselves, manage their household, and also go the extra mile to maintain best practices in everything while building a surplus to get ahead.

    kind of a rant, but this shit is in my head a lot.