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Let’s be real. There’s a lot of really fucking stupid people out there but that’s not the root issue. Especially since not everyone responsible for this clusterfuck – gestures broadly at
Americansociety – is stupid. Some of them are very smart, just morally bankrupt.Even the dumbest of the dumbest Americans realize that things have gone rather poorly for them over a long period of time. They’re not wrong about that and they’re justifiably upset.
Are a lot of them stupid for electing a pathologically lying, serial raping, failed businessman twice? Absolutely. But that’s still not the real problem. The problem is the motive behind the action.
The motive that instead of recognizing that a rising tide lifts all ships and working towards the collective good says, “I want things to be worse for someone else than they are for me.”
That level of selfishness and lack of empathy has successfully made things worse for everyone. The US’s cardinal sin is the falacy of the “rugged individual.” John Donne rightly wrote, “No man is an island entire of itself. Every one is a piece of the continent; a part of the main.” Every lgbt+ person who faces discrimination, every immigrant who is whisked away by thugs in masks, every person who remains unfed or unclothed while the ultra rich get richer is an assault on humanity at large.
What’s truly frustrating is being deeply angered by the repeated, blatant moral failures and yet feeling like you are powerless to stop it.
Edit: I realize that there are lot of stupid things going on in the world and lots of people on Lemmy who are not American. So please take this comment as just one man’s reflection on his own surroundings.
I think our hangup with trying to figure out if negative outcomes are rooted in what someone knows/doesn’t know, versus what someone’s subjective, internal motivations are, is a false dichotomy and a useless mental exercise when we can treat it all the same way for better outcomes. I am more concerned with material reality than what’s going on in someone’s head. It’s not like we can throw the average asshole or moron into school or an education camp and “fix” them. The only way we fight negative outcomes in a society broadly is to create strong disincentives for anti-social or anti-community behavior. Shame, punishment, public humiliation, and in worst cases incarceration or expulsion.
This forces the dumb and evil alike, if there is even a difference in most cases, to think before acting and make choices that won’t end up with them in the ol’ stockade having rotting vegetables thrown at their face.
Dumb is evil and evil is dumb. Not all dumb people are evil, but all evil people do things against the interest of society or even themselves, which is “dumb” according to the rest of society. Lets normalize moving past this argument entirely and dealing with universally accepted consequences for doing bad things. We have to stop giving stupid people some kind of pass for pulling our society apart at the seams.
I would push back against phrasing the mindset as:
“I want things to be worse for someone else than they are for me.”
When that is just a manifestation of one of several mindsets such as
"I’m better ~smarter, stronger, faster, more evolved, less emotional, better looking, more educated, stronger morals, etc.~ than them. Why should they have it better than me?
“My life has gone bad because of their actions”
Etc.
It’s an important distinction because nobody rationalizes their own decisions or reasoning in such an irrational way and phrasing it as such limits the opportunity for self reflection.
It also allows for conflating very real blame assignment IE “people are dying on the street because the ultra-wealthy are treating shelter like trading cards” with “you just hate rich people because you think you’re better than them, that’s just another form of discrimination”.
Not just intelligent, even to have a modicrum of critical thinking skills, and ounce of compassion, and its a hard time nowadays.
Yeah the bar is pretty low sadly.
The bar is in the basement, having conscious thinking take place in your head, with actual language/narrative and associative connections and consideration of anything for any amount of time regularly makes you “intelligent.”
The number of people gliding through life on the same kind of autopilot we use when we do things like driving in traffic, is astonishing and extremely frightening when you realize just how prevalent this lack of conscious thought is.
👩🚀🔫👩🚀
Watching all these C grade students take over is so annoying.
It’d be actually interesting if they all weren’t so intellectually dishonest as well as stupid.
And you just know some of them only got a C because rich daddy had a talk* with somebody higher up to keep their baby from failing.
*Threats, bribes, blackmail. You know, all the normal forms of communication that rich people use.
It’d be actually interesting if they all weren’t so intellectually dishonest as well as stupid.
There is no difference.
The human brain is not by default a reasoning or logic tool. The human brain does one thing and one thing only: it provides coherent narratives to explain feelings and sensations. Not reasonable narratives, just coherent. That’s really it. It can do this to varying levels of complexity depending on experience and learning, but even the smartest people will discard reason to validate an emotion. This is why we have anti-vax nurses and climate-change denying scientists and engineers who think the Earth is flat.
We are not a species that makes sense, and the most clever among us have figured this out either directly or implicitly, and are exploiting this fact to get things they want.
The key to happiness is to be just stupid enough that you aren’t sad, but smart enough that you can function well in society. So just smart enough to have friends, a job, a significant other, maybe be a part of some non-profit organization or religion.
Be a himbo or bimbo basically.
The sea of yokel cries, it’s too much.
Just don’t look up!
I think “of average intelligence”. All the intelligent people are smart enough to withdraw their minds from society.
The rest of us get triggered by seeing common sense ignored. Makes us feel smarter than we are.
All the intelligent people are smart enough to withdraw their minds from society.
Such a waste of a good resource. You can contribute positively to society instead. I volunteer with a group that supports low-wage workers. Call it a “drop in the bucket” if you want, but actually meeting community members who are suffering and providing them with tangible help is far better than sequestering one’s self away from society.
☝️🤓 Actually, commoners are to blame. Witch hunts never died, Pythagoreans were damned, monks expunged.
Maybe society needs to do better for smart empaths.
As someone that does plenty for the community, environment, and disaster services—the things I know I’m best at—I don’t see what that has to do with withdrawing from society with the mind.
I’d rather protect my mental wellbeing so that I don’t become jaded from the day in and day out of society, lest I go the way of so many others, doomscrolled into a state of apathy or even spite toward society. No one’s ever lifted a finger for something they’re mentally done with.
So I don’t really understand your point on two levels, but I think it was worth mentioning that for anyone else. We all operate differently and if it works for us, it works for those around us 👍
I like to think “of average intelligence” means intelligent. Just not remarkably so. Kind of like a medium red thing is red. Anyone a little intelligent, generally intelligent, or very intelligent is still on the spectrum of intelligence. Not unintelligent. At least not remarkably so.
