A lot of people have aspirations of themselves being rich and if they can vote like rich people they participate in the rich aesthetic.
The sooner you realize the vast majority of humans are simply not very intelligent, the more everything starts making sense. And the more depressed you will be.
I have no science behind this (and am therefore a hypocrite) but I’m giving up on the assumption that people think. I suspect that most people feel and make decisions on those feelings.
Thinking happens later, if at all.Humans are animals that navigate life through the lens of emotions with logic being something that we have to work towards - so you may be closer to the truth than you think.
Keep in mind that if you are in a public space, about half the people around you have an IQ below 100.
Because they’ve successfully been conned into thinking that what’s in the best interests of the rich is in their own best interests too.
Because the rich pretend like it’s in peoples interest, people believe them because oh they are rich they must know what they are talking about, and because people are stupid.
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Ignorance and gullibility. I fall for misinformation all the time, especially when it confirms my own biases and it takes real effort to maintain a mindset of “yes this sounds true, but is it actually?” It is also terribly inefficient. If someone tells me, when I was a kid, that daddylonglegs spiders are the most poisonous, I am likely going to just go “neat” and now I think that and say it. If you stop and verify EVERYTHING EVER you have no time to do anything in life. This makes the filter of critical thinking…critical.
Also, it isn’t about being stupid (though that helps). Some of the smartest people I know are conspiracy theory nutjobs. They can easily draw parallels between disparate facts, but can’t filter their findings or understand correlation doesn’t equal causation.
Yep. Lost a good and very smart friend to the anti vax conspiracies and maybe others by now.
I’ve also had to really pay attention and tell myself that I live in a liberal bubble and need to balance that bias against what is truth.
Most are wanting an end to this current system so they’ll ‘play’ it out knowing albeit the struggle, Democracy has left the building and late stage capitalism is showing the disparity of the predators and preys of society
The incredibly recent Sri Lankan election enters the chat… and feels sad at being ignored.
I’m ignorant about that, care to elaborate?
Sri Lankans (of all varieties - complicated history) have elected a left leaning coalition. It’s very unusual the majority of every “section” of Sri Lanka to throw their support behind the same candidate / party (again - historical reasons.)
Here’s a BBC link. It appears to be reasonably factual as I understand it and is a good synopsis:
Because everyone thinks of themselves as a potential rich person. Or in other words: people think that being rich is the ideal state, so let’s align everything around that.
If we truly put a yoke on the rich and contained them, we would also be reining in the smallfolks dreams.
By contrast, rich people don’t sit around dreaming about being smallfolk and planning aspirationally for the day that will happen.
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This is a complex question, but up front first and foremost in any Capitalist country, voting will always benefit the rich, even FDR style Social Democracy came about as concessions to prevent revolution in the context of a decimated working class and a rising USSR.
People, generally, vote along their class interests, but these are handled in a different manner depending on which country you are in. Using the US as an example, the DNC caters to social progressivism, while the GOP caters to social conservativism. On foreign policy, the GOP and DNC are near identical, and when it comes to domestic economic policy, the DNC caters slightly more to urban voters while the GOP caters to rural voters.
This is all, however, in the context of parties that function as businesses that sell policy to Capitalists. Both parties serve Capital, because Capital is what holds real power. It holds power over the media, the state, everything.
The answer to how to fix this is getting workers to organize. When workers organize, they raise their social and class awareness and can accomplish far more than atomized individuals can.
I can use my brother as an example for that:
My younger brother is entirely sold on billionaire philanthropy. He watched interviews where people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos on talk shows and podcasts, places where people like this go to advertise themselves, and has been completely convinced that they’re innovative, smart people.
Smart people who, through just being so damn smart, managed to become billionaires.
It all boils down to education
Often when I see someone accusing people of voting against their own interests, it’s pretty clear that the person making the accusation has not taken the time to understand the values others are basing their choice on.
If I could rob a person and be confident that I would never be caught and punished for doing so, am I acting against my own self interest if I chose not to rob them because it goes against my moral code? No, of course not. But based on the way some people talk about voting against ones self interest, you might think I just cheated myself out of free money. Is it possible that a person might “vote against their own interests” because of a misinformed view? of course, but you’ll never understand a person’s motivations by chosing to paint them with broad strokes based on your prejudices instead of getting to know them individually and trying to understand what it is they truly value.You just got to get to know the Nazi to understand them?
Oh wait it is more nuanced than that. You gotta get to know the racist to emphasize with them?
Dang it, we got to dig deeper. You have to get to know the misogynist to get them?
Sometimes getting to know someone is not the magical solution people think it is.
There’s those broad strokes I was talking about. I appreciate you providing an example.
Refusing to empathize and understand how people arrive at their views in favor of this kind of prejudice will never contribute to positive changes.
Yes, the best cure to bigotry is love and compassion. Love and compassion start with empathy. It’s easy to empathize with those that think and act like you do - it can be difficult, but all the more important, to empathize with those that don’t. Refusing to do so only ensures polarization of society and a perpetuation of the cycles of violence that permeate society. This is something that has become all the more clear with the rise of social media and the info bubbles they trap people in.You can spend years turning the heart of a racist and certainly some people have done this successfully.
Meanwhile propaganda has turned out another ten thousand racists in the time it took you to change a couple minds.
To be frank your belief is not completely wrong but it will not solve our current problems.
You hint on the reality that it is our social constructs such as social media that is driving this resurgence of hate.
As a social worker by trade I can say I know a lot about this topic. There is a classic story of people getting swept into the river.
While it is admirable that you want to jump in to save people the real solution is going upstream and stopping people from falling in.
Understanding racist losers will not accomplish what you want. Changing their minds will not either. You have to stop it at the source.
It sounds like we’re largely in agreement. Absolutely, you want to tackle the issue at the source. I don’t see how one hopes to accomplish that without empathy. Understanding those racist ‘losers’ is how you begin to understand how to tackle this at the source.
I agree your belief is admirable, but it is extremely naive if you think it will make a difference on a large scale even if there are millions who believe what you do.
We already had a movement about peace, love, and understanding that was very popular with a huge chunk of the population doing the acts you described in the 1960s.
You have also clearly not spent any amount of time with the kind of people you think you can emphasize with. I lived in rural Idaho for Obama’s years. I couldn’t count the amount of times people joked about hanging or shooting him.
You want to empathize with a racist who wants a man dead just because he is black? I did plenty of this and guess the positive change it made. Yeah, it didn’t matter at all.
The only way is to stop the propaganda. This is the source. Hate radio, Faux News, and now Xshitter feed people with lies using psychological manipulation to twist their minds and hearts.
It takes years, sometimes decades, to deprogram people from this if they are willing to change. They are creating new racist losers at a pace you cannot keep up with. This is the reality we face.
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The answer is fear. Fear is what they truly value.
Fear is often a motivating factor in a person’s choice. This was equally true of the left and right in this past US presidential election.
I haven’t seen any evidence that fear is a value that most people hold though. The source of their fear is concern over the things they do value.
In the US, is this actually the moment past the point of no return? Would you ever allow yourself to accept that truth if so, or will you need to see actually bodies in the streets before you believe it’s over?
