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This is sorta why I think capitalism is both a useful pragmatic system and a terrible idea.

It’s the whole greed is good thing. It’s this clever little hack of “well let’s let the greedy sociopaths be that way, and we will just arrange the game so it benefits everyone.”

It sorta work in the beginning stages of capitalism. They realize that they can make profits exploiting workers and go to town and consumers reap the benefits of there being lots of stuff to buy to meet their needs.

Sure your boss is an amoral exploiter, but it means the widgets get made.

But capitalism is not static, it’s a game played over time where those least bound by morals and ethics trap greater and greater rewards. Leading to where much of western civilization finds itself today, beholden to a handful of the worst human beings.

The only mechanism to keep them in check is competition, and it’s a system that devolves over time to have little to no competition, so we shouldn’t be surprised.

I often wonder what the world could be if we took seriously the job of restraining the impulses of that 5% of the population. We teach young children to share and be kind and the golden rule. Then you reach adulthood and realize that all of that is still true but unrewarded, and the way to get ahead is to exploit people. The wealthiest and most “successful” amongst us in this society are those most willing to exploit their fellow man for their own benefit. You get a billion dollars by being willing to steal a billion dollars from your workers. No one can earn a billion dollars you have to have thousands of people working for you everyday, and for each one of those people you have to be willing to extract value out of them, what in any other context we would call theft.

Individualism is a dead end, the forces you describe are powerful because society is organized for their benefit. The cruel and psychopathic have avenues to make themselves useful to the ruling class. This is a social construct not an individual virtue or vice.

We can only make changes together. I def think people need to be more individually courageous, but the most common source for courage is social support, not some inherent trait. Some people are oppositional defiant in a way that can make them practical for a time, but without something larger steering circumstances then these individuals end up becoming tyrants all the same.

Well it would be nice if we ever return to normalcy to overturn CU and clamp down HARD on the issues that enable the rampant abuse of the system. Like I'm talking union busting levels of "No you're complicit in this more than X% you are out, forever"

Is authoritarianism also cluster b? There are a lot of people who seem to get off on being part of the group. Like, it brings them chemical joy to be screaming in a crowd about how that other group of people need to die. Those people kind of suck, too.

I don't think every maga hat is a narcissist, but a lot of them are trash humans who value their in-group feelings of solidarity over everything else.

I agree that this is the root of all human problems, but I think there's more to it also. There aren't 95% of people willing to resist it. I imagine the opposite kind of people, those deeply selfless and incapable of tolerating injustice, also make up less than 5% of people.

And so even though only a small minority are naked power seekers, something like 80+% of all humans are just looking for someone to tell them what to do. They don't want responsibility, power, or self-determination. They want to be made to feel safe, and be given orders.

I mean there are some options for dealing with that.

A. Early monitoring in childhood followed by extensive therapy

B. Eugenics if a genetic link is identified (least savory option and likely not possible)

C. Rebuild our social circles and communities

To expand on C, I think a lot of what you're identifying as narcissistic behavior or sociopathy is actually caused by the destruction of our communities. The way our society is built it rewards anti-social action with money and it's cold and depersonalized. It's easy as a upper executive to fire 500 people you've never once met and you will never meet. You don't have to know them beyond a few spreadsheets of data. People will absolve themselves of personal responsibility and refer to the financial aspects. Additionally, our communities have been destroyed. The addition of the nuclear family structure encourages you to provide as much as possible to as few individuals instead of valuing extended family and community. Plus in some places in the world it is possible to go days or weeks without ever interacting with members of your community.

Another pseudoscientific theory about how a small minority of society are naturally bad in a way that causes all social ills?

Has anyone made a tarpit for these types? Some sort of scoring system to trap them in.

Oh my god this essentialist bullshit.

Yeah some inbred ancient greek ivory tower assholes couldnt teach someone to be good in between beating their slaves and fucking their kids and believing lightning came from an old guy with a big fluffy beard whike changing nothing about their surroubdings. Someone else tried one thing three thousand years ago, and im all out of ideas. guess it's impossible. Shows great passion for the subject.

This is all fundamental elemental unchangeable nature of humanity. Our social system has no effect on what that is or how it manifests. the system has zero culpability for the outcomes it produces, it could have been no different.

And we obviously know this. You can look at neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat baguettes and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat deep fried twinkies and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat poutine and neofascist empires where they eat borscht and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat fried rice(i know, but too many distinct regional cuisines) and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat sushi. Plus accounts from a bunch of their current and former subjects, and historic accounts of monarchic slave societies. Weve got data on people from all kinds of society. All kinds of culture. And they all turn out some percentage of shameless manipulative bastard-monster. Allof them! Every possible kind, even the cutthroat neoliberal one that just eats boiled sheep! So obviously no ither proportion of humanity is possible. Weve even done formal studies on upperiddle class male college students from a couple of these places to confirm it!

And, look, heres where we get into much harder science: it's in the DSM as a disorder. That means its always bad and always gonna be bad. There's no social arrangement or technology that can make it benign. Just cant be done. That's not just some shit some guy decided so he could get home and start nursing the hangover from his four martini lunch and the mountainous pile of cocaine he snorted for his daily insight into normal humanity-that's a fact.

Fucking YES. Thank you, extremely well said

This! Political activism is about networking and mutual aid, not visibility in media. At least it should be. Give me less Gretchen more aid workers.

I have considered joining NGOs, but they all require WhatsApp.

Bingo. Anytime I see a too-large way of thinking, I try to suggesting thinking small. You can't save the rainforest, but you can plant a tree in your community, you know? And it feels good.

I volunteered as en EMT for about 10 years, until the second kid came, and COVID and all that. It was difficult, took me away from work and my family, long days, mentally and emotionally taxing at times, and one of the more rewarding experiences I've had in my life. And it was all done within a few miles of my home. I (like to think) I had an impact on my community, and it feels good.

I second this, and add that if you have an area of expertise, you will have more impact if you utilize that expertise. Some examples:

• If you have access to a commercial kitchen during off hours, you could cook food for the poor.
• If you are good at socializing, try meeting with local political groups, influencing election candidates, or running for office.
• If you are a software engineer, volunteer on an open-source project related to a cause that you care about.

And if you don't want to spend effort, you can always donate to a cause.

How do you find these in person gatherings, most of my socialization with other Americans happens through work and I cannot be my authentic self at work because that has negative consequences in my experience, the American work culture is kind depressing, where everyone seems to be in some rat race to be the most busy and most productive or at least pretend to be so, most of my interactions lack human warmth and it all feels fake and performative, I have to be guarded about what I say so that it doesn't come back to bite me even with colleague's of the same level and I am tired of the expectations of overwork and constant threat of being laid off of the right people don't have a high opinion of you.

Yes.

The rich used to take the same transport as the rest of us. They could be in a separate car on the train but they were still attached. Then they got automobiles and could drive on their own and we built highways to connect their favorite places. But can only get so far and planes were invented. Now they are stuck with the poors again but up in first class.

Now they have private jets and all the roads full of the regular people, the trains and the planes. They remote in or call in from their cellphone instead of being in the actual office.

The wealthy dont live like the rest of us anymore. And their social group is much more carefully curated to not let us in. They dont want to know regular people.

It's not a competition, and if it is, it's not one anyone should want to win

New to the US World, or just seeing it for the first time?

What is the benefit of making a comment like this?

Make an app that tracks them ... it seems to bother them. They dont seem to care if companies spy on us, so spy on them. Im sure nothing bad could happen just from an app that shows the physical location of a politician, CEO, or billionaire.

Labor unions are good, but they're not the be-all end-all of wbat we need; they're a moderate compromise measure. A good one, but if it atarts getting too bloody or hard to take a necessary internediate goal because the state deployed all its violence and disinformation, well... The state has already deployed all its violence and disinformation.

I'll participate, but I'm not giving out my info. I'd rather not be on as many lists as possible.

People love an easy answer to excuse why they can treat someone else with less care or not listen to them as if they are already wrong. We love the little lies that make life easier. Its far less effort needed than trying to understand.

I mean, you could mention it. You could probably mention it easier if people would stop using .world as the default for everything, but you can mention it.

I think it's a little too quick to be thought of as THE SOLUTION. Everyone seems to have absorbed just a teeny bit of the action hero mentality though, because that action will never be cleanly carried out. It will be a massive shit show for decades.* Every martin luther king jr. needs their malcolm x, sure, I absolutely believe that viewpoint, but the peaceful community advocating and community building needs to be emphasized and practiced (that's the important bit, after all) more.

*There are far too many folks (in the US part of the "clowns of the world" mentioned) that are literally next door to the people that they will want to go after, and they've been itching to do it. Nothing that breaks the peace will see inaction from those folks, and that's what pushes me to always advocate. I don't want to be the cause of innocents suddenly being lynched because they happen to live in a deep red area and some sort of 'civil war 2: electric boogaloo' breaks out... And I use that electric boogaloo specifically because it is a pretty stark reminder (I hope), that those sorts of folks have been literally talking about what they have wanted to do for decades at this point. Unless the lefties break out some secret plans, they're going to be out-organized and very out-planned.

"Step in it"? Present tense? Nah. Past tense. Way past tense.

went to my first protest this decade for labor day! met some really interesting folks and found a couple local groups i'm gonna meet up with later this week. can't really recommend this enough

Not too many more; you'll either die in the camps here, or, after a couple brief decades of the living envying the dead, the planet will no longer support life, and you will necessarily die.

he had his moments

It seemed to work well for Russia. Oh wait... no, no it did not at all.

Actually we'll do it different this time, smartass

Organize.

Voting is doing the bare minimum.

Definitely! Always vote, even if you have low confidence in the election's integrity or your influence on the overall outcome. You have nothing to lose by voting anyway.

And which problems would be solved by that? The housing crisis? The rise of fascism? The neocolonial exploitation of the global south? The Climate crisis?