Since it's been removed I pulled the post here:
"sorry for repost but the last title was too political so it got taken down
im currently 17 and pretty much all my life i have demanded economic prosperity and for politics to not waste their time on social issues that dont really matter.
but ever since i took my first tab, i have begun considering leftist ideology, such as free healthcare, reformation to education, taxing the rich, affordable housing, and putting a focus on environmental clense.
this current mindset i am being uncontrollably pushed towards is really scary, as i am becoming the type of person i wouldve bullied online a year ago
what do should i give up lsd so i can try and manage this political shift of mine or embrace the change"
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American culture is designed to brainwash the empathy out of people, especially men. It can be a serious internal struggle to undo all that damage and re-learn basic human empathy. I've been there.
I've been there too, comrade. :fidel-salute: congratulations on deprogramming
I have some lefties at my work and we occasionally bring up arguing with chuds and libs in our lives. Our catchphrase at this point is "I don't know how to make you care about other people".
I got in an argument with a guy in an old friend group that basically devolved into him telling me I needed to stop caring about others because the vast majority of the population was detestable and could go jump in the ocean for all he cared.
I kind of feel the same, at this point. Of course, the people who I think should jump in the ocean are a completely different set of people that the chud would think that about...
And when they do break out of the brainwashing suddenly they're an "empath" because they've literally never felt empathy before and its assumed what they are feeling is some novel event. This is like every single male on psychedelics ever
When I went on psychadelics I ended up spending three hours articulating a coherent philosophy of life based on Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and first century Christianity. Then I spent some time flirting with the refrigerator. Shrooms are cool but definitely get a trip minder.
And then those empaths will mansplain thinking about other people, as if it's not an entirely normal thing for most people.
:bell-hooks-shining:
Empathy hurts in America. I think of the story about Siddartha Gutama, the Buddha, who was a prince. The first time he left his palace he sees a poor person, a sick person, and a dead person and he realizes that his fancy life of ease and pleasure has been a lie at the expense of others, and he has this sudden shock of empathy and renounces his former life to become a philosopher and try to understand the nature of life and the meaning of suffering.
In the US there are so many desperately poor people, homeless people, people suffering from mental illness, people suffering for no fault of their own. Trying to have empathy for everyone who suffers is painful and distressing because most of the time there's nothing you can really do for them. Sure, you can slip a homeless person a 20 or some cheeseburgers once in a while, but the big structural solutions that would really help people are always held beyond our grasp by the fucking oligarchs. And that hurts. it can be so easy to just turn your empathy off and ignore it all to protect your own psyche, and a lot of people do just that.
Commenting so I can find this later and show it to ... basically everyone I know.
:meow-floppy:
Empathy is for Women and The Gays
And this is exactly why I call bullshit on a lot of so-called "All-American Christians".
I'd argue that Christian values led me to the left. I see prejudice and bigotry as a form of arrogance and therefore de-generacy, I see the destruction of the environment as de-generacy as it is ruining a divine work of art for philistinic decadence, I also have a strong amount of admiration for the advances in science, literature, etc done by Christianity: (Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, the Bible shaped literature as we know it, etc.), and not even all "Americanized" Christianity is bad, as transcendentalist Chrisitianity is one of the best subsections and that was born right here in the states. Finally, French and Irish history has also influenced my leftism, even though both are global north.
It's not even a matter of "brainwashing" it's just strictly speaking not useful to "have empathy" (which here really just means having values, and ideally taking actions which are principally pro-social in nature), unless you're a very specific kind of - I don't know to describe it other than "high social value" - person.
If you have power within, and are able to have all of your material needs & creature-comforts met within the market, you've won so there's no fucking reason beyond the sanctity of your "Immortal Soul" to care about what the fuck happens to anyone below you; and there's plenty of TV preachers who will tell you that your prosperity is itself a sign of divine favor.
If you are an ugly autistic loser who lives with their parents at 30 (I'm talking about myself here for anyone who wants to get mad at me for saying that); then you also have no real reason to exercise empathy beyond that which is necessary to getting your ass kicked; because everyone already sees you as fundamentally inferior to themselves and so any attempted pro-social action you take will never actually be reciprocated upon, and just as well the expectation that it ever would be can only be taken as evidence of one's own toxic entitlement.
same :sadness: feels very bad man
I'm not gonna argue with your experiences, but I'm fairly certain human beings are social creatures. Meaning we literally survive more easily in groups of people we get along with. The survival of one increases the survival of the whole group, even someone who can't do manual labor can still contribute to the group in some way shape or form. I don't like defaulting to "human nature" arguments, but we literally evolved to work together. And not as isolated subjects of an Alpha Chief or whatever, but as a community.
Empathy is our ability to do this. It's our ability to be a part of a group of other people and not immediately kill each other like we're betta fish or something.
And despite our society being run by and for those with the least empathy, the average human being would still push a magic "Help Others" button if they felt like it wouldn't hurt themselves. People will take care of themselves first, but they also do care about other people by default, until it's beaten out of them by a society run by the worst of us.
I guess what I'm really getting at here, is that I don't really believe that I'm ever actually going to get to be a part of any "group", any community, in which I can be a genuinely valued member.
I am never really going to be able to benefit from any of what you are talking about; precisely because there is no such thing as a "Magic Help-Others Button" that can be pressed at no cost to oneself. Anyone who would choose to associate with me would have to do so knowing that they would then need to go out of their way to accommodate my social & developmental deficits were they to do so; and so how could they ever really value me as much as someone for whom they did not have to do those things? Maybe if I were exceptionally talented in some other way, but I'm not; I can't really do anything other than menial labor.
haven't you heard empathy is a feminine trait
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The dragon of chaos brings you tea and cookies and wants to talk about your feelings.
My empathy is very strong because of my autism and I learned to numb it to mask because sobbing in the middle of history class got me made fun of. Unmasking has been quite the process. I thought I just lacked empathy entirely for a long time. It made me feel like a monster. I was never a chud, but it definitely played into a lot of reactionary brainworms.
I'm not autistic but I have had literal crying breakdowns learning about WWII and other horrible moments in history.
Yeah it’s definitely not the only reason you would feel it that strongly. I’m sorry you had a hard time processing that stuff
I don't regret it or anything. I think crying out in horror is the appropriate response to something like WWII. That degree of violence should be intensely upsetting and emotionally painful, you know?
toxic masculinity favors you being 'logical', having no emotions, and a 'hard worker' and cookie cutter
My "favourite" part of this toxic masculinity mindset is that choosing to be a logic bro with no emotion is in of itself an emotional choice in which you supress certain parts of yourself.
This ties in to the idea that the first act of violence that toxic masculinity asks of the individual is violence against yourself. Young boy children have empathy and share and enjoy playing with trucks and dolls, but that gets beaten out of them by society, and to mature in to toxic masculinity they have to kill the parts of themselves that are "Soft" or else become an outsider. You have to destroy your self before you have the capacity to go on and destroy others.
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