I saw this :reddit-logo: post and it got me thinking. Maybe it's the intense sleep deprivation, but I can't even muster the energy to be angry. I'm just sad. I know that individual choice is largely a psyop, but if at least a third of the populace actively wants things to be worse, how can we change things for the better? I know that there are many, many loving and wonderful and kind people all around this country. But as we're continually worked harder and harder and grow more and more impoverished, even the kindest souls will burn out. And what are we all up against? Not just the :porky-happy: elite, but the average swine whose main enjoyment in life is pissing off and upsetting anyone who wants things to be better. What can we even do against this?
David Graeber talks about this a bit in Bullshit Jobs, in a somewhat undercooked but still interesting section on "moral envy." https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs#toc49
Moral envy is an undertheorized phenomenon. I’m not sure that anyone has ever written a book about it. Still, it’s clearly an important factor in human affairs. By “moral envy,” I am referring here to feelings of envy and resentment directed at another person, not because that person is wealthy, or gifted, or lucky, but because his or her behavior is seen as upholding a higher moral standard than the envier’s own. The basic sentiment seems to be “How dare that person claim to be better than me (by acting in a way that I do indeed acknowledge is better than me)?”
"Moral envy" is a good phrase to describe this. I'll go read that section, cheers!
The inevitable act of declaring yourself anti-woke is that you enter a race to become the most anti-woke. This in turn means that everyone doing so has their behaviour and moral standards deteriorate drastically.
I assume this behavior is familiar to basically all vegetarians or vegans. They will sniff you out if you don't mention it when they notice an absence of animal flesh on your plate.
And mask wearers nowadays.
As a vegan, the solution is to just be so damn outspoken that people don't dare to bring it up lest they get a debate that I'm so prepard for.
Most of my family will audibly groan when someone attempts to facts and logic my eating habits because I'm about to bring the fire and hearing about chickens getting their beaks sawed off with red hot blades to cauterize the wound makes them uncomfortable.
And possibly also members of religions that are less tolerant of mammon-worship than american christianity is.
Area I used to live has a lot of cyclists, a girl I dated would frequently complain about how they were getting in the way.
There was a time in my life when I was more commonly greeted with "Get off the road, you goddamned hippie!" than I was with "Hello."
God, me too! I drink cider or wine from time to time, but hard alcohol really doesn't agree with me. I occasionally enjoy being buzzed, but never drunk. And I've already had a few acquaintances all but begging me to do a shot with them
Improve material conditions
Since that’s off the table it’s deterioration to collapse
The vibes comrade they’re fuckin terrible here
CHUDs are the bad guys and love it. However, they get pissed off at say vegans or "Emily" because those people actively show that their surface level "salt of the earth Christian" shtick is hypocritical and shallow. "Emily" and all the "woke do-gooders" are the true salt of the earth, and CHUDs deep down despise the idea of being truly moral.
Give it some time and CHUDs will start openly admitting that they are evil (and that's a good thing!). At the very least, they won't have the burden of being constantly reminded about their hypocritical religious fervor if they just start calling themselves servants of the devil.
I have to believe this is why so many weird reactionary men choose grim reapers and the jokester to represent themselves on Facebook. They realize at some level they're just evil, but also want to be cool and admired, but lack the maturity to be normal
The Joker identification (among other villains) always struck me as odd. Especially when I try to put my head through the minds of some dipshit on /pol/.
I would have guessed that if anything, chanlords and :grillman: alike would have united to come up with James Bond as their avatar of the right. James Bond is a white anglo man, a supposed "defender of the west" and has fought a ton of Soviets in the films, filthy rich and has the aesthetic of the upper class, he's basically a cop, James Bond is portrayed as having a near unhealthy lust for violence that his job thankfully limits, and he gets laid a ton. He is what 4chan CHUDs think they are.
Give it some time and CHUDs will start openly admitting that they are evil (and that’s a good thing!). At the very least, they won’t have the burden of being constantly reminded about their hypocritical religious fervor if they just start calling themselves servants of the devil.
Isn't this what they already do via the sigma grindset and worshiping Patrick Bateman?
I gotta bring back class to this discussion. Bourgeois and petty bourgeois people are bored as fuck, lack direction, and their narcissist and violent ytendencies are sharpened constantly. There's nothing interesting for them to do except flexing the colonialist violence they inherited from their ancestors.
Bourgeoisie and petty bourgeois people are bored as fuck, lack direction, and their narcissist and violent ytendencies are sharpened constantly. There’s nothing interesting for them to do except flexing the colonialist violence they inherited from their ancestors.
This explains chan culture almost perfectly.
"my vehicle existing as something small and sensible is seen as an offense [...] the mere existence of a Prius would send people into a rage"
"I've seen countless wildlife areas around where I live that regularly get wrecked because people will drive into the middle of them with their pickup trucks and do donuts."
"People picking up litter on the side of the road getting jeered at."
"I've seen people deface signs advocating recycling"
This is the end result of neurotic competitive western individualist ideology and culture contradicting the idea of there being a greater good. When god is slain and everything collapses down to an alienating, cynical, dog-eat-dog world, morality itself is reduced to a silly competition between individuals, nothing greater than this exists in the Zeitgeist.
There are too many contradictions between one's life and any possible form of a "greater good" which is detached from the tsunami of a massive psychic paradigm shift spawned of not just resistance but a Jihad, greater than anyone, towards a better tomorrow, for all of humanity.
And nobody has truly created a lasting alternative way of social organization which spawns this paradigm shift yet because neoliberalism defeated everything, muh material conditions destroyed any sort of challenge to the status quo so far.
Therefore,
"I think we all remember the recent driver who murdered people with his vehicle all because they had the nerve to hand out food to the less fortunate."
Is the end result of this sick contradiction, because how fucking dare those failures get to receive any form of mercy in this world, only the strong survive to crush the weak.
Open to discussion.
Your comment brought up some feelings that are hard to articulate. This might sound a little bazinga brained, but it's like we're all in a twisted simulation that some bored kid left running at high speed while he goes to the bathroom and we're in the end stages of all the parameters and rules breaking down
I had a fever dream once in which I was woken up from the simulation and learned it was a rehabilitative prison for reactionaries to demonstrate the end result of reactionary ideologies and the hell that results. I got to leave and live a normal life on probation in an advanced communist world and then, in the cruelest twist, it all melted away and I was back in my bed shaking and delirious.
I haven't been able to get that idea out of my head ever since, it just keeps growing and trying to elaborate on itself with further rationalizations. I don't believe it, of course, because it's far too hopeful and is dangerous on top of that, being fundamentally a dismissal of agency and responsibility (if we're all slowly-being-reformed monsters doomed to fail at doing anything good as a lesson in why it's bad when reactionaries win, then there's no reason to do anything but retreat into some mad hyper-purist devotion in the hopes of being judged as reformed, there's no consequences to anything apart from our continued suffering; taken seriously to its conclusions this is an absurdly nihilistic concept), but goddamn if it doesn't feel like things are actively being shaped to be as absurd and awful as possible for no point but to be absurd and awful.
I've actually been debating writing a short story building on the premise, with some shitposty title like "The Torment Nexus But It's Good, Actually."
a lot of these stand out to me as being car oriented. which, obviously, considering the sub it came out of. still, there really is something intensely depersonalizing and aggressive about these petroleum chariots. i don't really give a shit if my old little beater gets dinged or scratched, but you'd think i was the prince of peace compared to how other people conceptualize their cars as an extension of their body. don't touch. don't stare at. don't inconvenience MY car.
whether i'm on foot and adjacent to cars, or in one myself among other cars, everything feels so aggressive. people get mad over a 5 second delay and downright murderous by a 5 minute delay (delivery, oversize vehicle, miss one traffic light cycle). but on foot and in person, almost all of my interactions are extremely chill and pleasant.
honestly, if cars just vanished from the earth and the roads were only for bicycles and buses/municipal vehicles, with all the easements and sidewalks expanded for pedestrians, i would probably be in much better shape mentally/physically/emotionally.
car culture is really fucking us hard and we have normalized the shit out of it.
If spending too much time online has taught me anything, it's that behavior is a fluid that takes the shape of its "container". Change the environment, behavior changes with it.
Cars, by their very design, encourage people to see themselves as apart and slightly elevated from the rest of the world.
I was watching Cardcaptor Sakura today and was thinking about how nice suburbs can be if you just remove most of the cards. Individual houses with narrow roads with kids biking to school safety being a normal thing.
I'm from the midwest and particularly a suburb of a not-too-talked about small city. When I went to that "city", things always felt much more right with me. Even the lower density parts of the city had me thinking
:thinkin-lenin: "Huh, this is what the suburbs should have been."
I think the saddest thing about the Great Satan is how much better it could have been, that it is capable of nice things but actively chooses not to.
Would at least explain why people advocate for homeless genocide rather than just give them those empty homes.
being in a car is a little bit like being a landlord in that everything good for you is bad for everyone else and vice versa. It puts you in the position where your interest is opposed to everyone else and other people are reduced to mere inconveniences
I have been driving in some insane developing world traffic lately (think like India or Vietnam) and I have to do compassion meditation the whole time or I will find myself actively wishing death upon everyone around me
It's a serious effort to remain human while driving, even in the states, and I don't think most people are trying very hard
It’s just rugged individualism and survival of the fittest culture. They genuinely believe it’s a kill or be killed World and think they will be killed if their beliefs become culturally unpopular.
I don’t believe the nostalgia aspect that people were ever nicer though. People were just less alienated and couldn’t record others most evil moments. So in your memory it was a nicer time.
Hobbes and his consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
think they will be killed if their beliefs become culturally unpopular
This explains the social anaphylactic shock these groups experience when they sense a threat to their dominant position in the hierarchy.
Ironically, their firm conviction that the world is a “kill or be killed” place does more to make it one than anything else.
Only thing I mentioned was being “nice” to each other. Other things were materially better, but American culture has been an asshole culture since at least the Television (if not the talking pictures, if not forever).
agree to disagree.
You name me a year in the last century of US history, and I’ll name you national asshole behavior
The entirety of western culture since Reagan has been based on the rugged individualist notions that community is a hand out and other people are just inconveniences. Other people standing in line in front of me that make it take longer to be "my turn". These people will murder suicide their family before they let their own neighbors give them a meal to keep from starving to death. When the CHUDs get hungry, they will become the criminals they so despise, no doubt about it.
I’ve been watching the Netflix show Beef with Steven Yeun and Ali Wong. It truly is the encapsulation of American culture. So fitting with all these stories of people shooting each other’s families over road rage or paranoid boomers killing people who cough on their lawn. The show is literally about two complete strangers who had no purpose in life until they met each other and now they can only think about spreading misery.
If I had to choose 3 pieces of media to show a foreigner what American culture truly is, I would show him Falling Down, Borat 1, and Beef.
Try to avoid those people and if you're forced to interact with them do unspeakable social things to them that almost keep you up at night. Turn people against them. Mine their personal information. Use it in ways that will make them guard themselves forever.
I think a lot of this is ginned up by the ongoing culture war propaganda, and will dissipate naturally if that stuff ever dries up. A good chunk of people are modern day kulaks who will burn the country down rather than see it improved, however.
