“people are fundamentally bad and that’s why the world is so bad. people act in bad ways because they’re just bad people. there is a latent evil in everyone and that is humanity’s default state” -person who is not going to form solidarity with their community or perform mutual aid or figure out why cruelty truly happens in the world beyond the thought-terminating cliche they latch onto or ever even give a shit about helping the world in the first place
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in reply to @stardustreverie's post:
I disagree with everything here, honestly.
Solidarity and mutual aid don’t fail because people have a negative view of humanity, they fail because humanity fails to embody their positive view. You can’t have a durable… anything that’s not fundamentally built on the fact that people do bad things some of the time, often for bad reasons.
Starting from the view that but for some structure people would be saintly is just a recipe for eventual cynicism. More than that, however, it’s a view that does not love people as they are but the imagined person they could be. No kind of solidarity can be built on that because the ostensive subject is a fiction. Nor is it self-consistent, it just reframes their latent evil into something people who argue for solidarism typically find acceptable despite it, too, being subject to the same argument that there’s some root cause for the lack of social trust.
Recognizing potential for harm is not the same as assuming people are fundamentally toxic?
"Latent evil". I feel like maybe you'd do well to sit with this post because it seems like it's aimed directly at you! If your assumption is that humans are ontologically evil, even if only in a "latent" fashion, yeah, you're not in a good position to build solidarity or alliance with anyone.
you do have to be honest with yourself, you are really not doing a good job of convincing anyone in this post’s comments with the way you’re acting, let alone “building solidarity”. in fact, i would argue you’re alienating people far more (and therefore, proving my point further)
it's not a binary, pal; humans can be capable of decency without being "saintly" and they can be capable of fucking up and doing fucked up things without having "latent evil"
you're right that assuming that people will always do the right thing if given the opportunity is a recipe for falling into cynicism but the alternative isn't assuming that people will do evil by default unless given a strong incentive otherwise
Long experience has taught me that is the alternative. Truth is that people make bad choices, including bad choices that hurt other people, including choices that hurt other people because they want to hurt other people.
That's a part of humanity you can't get away from and... it's fine? The whole purpose of solidarity is ruined if you can't accept this and ask "what's the best life this person can live consistent with the best life of others?"
I do make bad choices but they harm either my ability to find success or my personal dietary health. Otherwise no I don't want to hurt people. I prefer to love people or be there for them if I know them. And I prefer to be respectful to those I don't know.
it sounds like you're buying into misanthropy. here's a great post about that, i think you should sit on it for a while: https://cohost.org/stardustreverie/post/6992212-people-are-fundamen
It seems like you're buying into the Twitter way of doing things. Please refrain from that in future.
ok actually i really do need you to understand how hilarious and frustrating it is that you would say this to me.
a long while ago, a few years back, i tried twitter once. i never really got into the habit of regularly checking it or regularly making posts. just, any interaction with the website to find new content felt like i was interfacing with some soulless content algorithm (which i was), so within weeks the twitter account was dead. that is the extent to which i have ever used twitter.
no, i wasn't some guy who "never uses twitter" but actually has a twitter account and goes on twitter all the time to scroll the timeline or whatever the heck. i just straight up was not a person who used twitter. ever.
i DID however frequently use reddit. i'm one of those reddit -> tumblr -> cohost double refugees (except i got on cohost a bit earlier than the big tumblr migration and never did much tumblr in the first place). mainstream reddit is stupid, of course, i was clinging to the far-left queer spaces. and sometimes you would come across a guy who was talking about twitter in a way that makes it obvious they think that twitter takes up a much more significant place in the world than it actually does or ever has. based on your comment here i'm sure you're kind of familiar with what i'm talking about, and what would motivate me to think of such a person as a dingus.
so in the pvp enabled dregs of reddit comment section threads i one day came up with the greatest bit i've ever conceived of. whenever one such dingus appears, i would ask them "what's twitter".
it's a really simple question, and the aim is to put things into perspective in the simplest, most annoying way possible. what do you mean what's twitter? you don't know what twitter is? twitter is where almost all of The Internet is happening, is it not? nope, never even heard of it. weird concept for a website. it's like a blog site except your posts can only be 100 characters long? that's kinda stupid, actually.
but then, as always, elon musk had to go and ruin everything. having managed to somehow fail to rebrand twitter as "x", now everyone i try the bit on just assumes i'm being pedantic about the name. "what's twitter?" i ask. oh, sorry, i mean """"x"""". what am i supposed to do? ask "what's x"? they already think i'm a tool.
my bit. you have to understand, friend. my poor bit. it died so young. and now here you are, having mistaken me for a twitter user. it's as if the universe is mocking me for what elon has done to me.
anyways i really do think you should consider re-considering misanthropy. believing that on average, people are good, just tends to be a really neat philosophy and it's a fundamental idea in a lot of leftist teachings.
this comment is so good it could have been a post on its own
It's also worth considering that there's really only one political philosophy that benefits from everybody assuming that humans are terrible. If you buy the premise, then they can sell you mass incarceration, strict border control, mass surveillance, eliminating all public services, and so forth, none of which makes any sense if you have any faith in people...
the punchline is that in such a system you can freely be a terrible person so long as you're terrible in ways that the system doesn't explicitly punish
Right, and you can see why in "engagement-driven" social media, where (for example) you can call for genocide to spread the idea that people are terrible, but if you call that person out to oppose the idea, that gets you disciplined and booted off.
Can they? Because I accept this and I think people just need to chill out about fist fights, etc.
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