Ask Lemmy

I saw on Mastodon someone say something kinda like this: good people don't feel the need to dominate others.

Evil isn't "winning" as much as it is "on top." If you look around, talk to your neighbours and such, you'll see that good and reasonable people are everywhere; good is the overwhelming majority.

That being said, positions of power are chased and coveted by those obsessed with power, and those aren't good people. Good people need to take charge, but it's

in a way

against their nature to do so.

Because evil people control all the media

Well, I'd say it's because they don't even hide it anymore. They know they can do whatever they want, and get away with it.

Enshitification is a real thing, and companies and evil people are being blatant about it, because they know they don't have to hide it because they know they can't be stopped.

It sucks. I hate it. I wish we could do something about it.

Because the return of massive wealth disparity - similar to having kings again - has allowed those with money and power to bend the world in the direction of some form of dictatorship, whether it be fascism, oligarchy, whatever…. The New Kings are carving up society and want to increase control and profit, and an authoritarian governance is the way to do it. Just like how they treat their corporations. They are dictators, the little people are disposable production units to feed their machine.

Capitalism

Two answers.

Thomas Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine

Even reading a brief summary of the main points of both books gets you to a decent explanation.

Media bias. Trump is outrage and outrage moves views and views are profit. Trump is the greatest thing to happen to the media - regardless of side. We're also more connected today than we ever were before so this media gets to everyone in an instant.

Are evil people really winning globally more than they were in the past? Well.. no. We've seen more shit in the second half of the 20th century than we are now. There's still 25 years to catch up though. Heres some shit thats gone down fro 1950-2000.

• Cold War - though it does seem like we are moving back to this state, we're far from living like that
• Korean War, Vietnam War, Kuwait,
• Cuban Missile Crisis,
• Basically every Arab nation against Israel - wars galore,
• Suez crisis,
• Iranian revolutions,
• Sino-Soviet Split,
• India-Pakistan,
• Soviet-Afghan war,
• Numerous African civil wars in the 60s, 70s and 90s (till ongoing),
• South African Apartheid,
• Numerous south American dictatorships (+ CIA interventions in south America backing right wing dictators),
• Falklands war - the fucking UK went to war with Argentina in the fucking 80s!
• All the shit in Yugoslavia (wars, genocide),
• "The Troubles" in N. Ireland.

A lot of these have been resolved.

evil people have always been there, but we're in an era of many crisis's, it was easier to ignore it when it didn't personally effect you. Now i imagine in the next 10-20 years it'll start effecting everyone in ways we've yet to imagine. But I don't think its the end of the world or anything just that its probably time we start considering what we want our futures to look like and start making plans to survive or fight.

Because class war is being raged but most of the global north working class don't have any class consciousness. Capitalism is working on doing what it has done to the global South for decades but this time to the global North. Fascism is Imperialism turned inward. Welcome to the rest of our lives.

My opinion on this generally boils down to that the system has been set up to reward evil/antisocial behavior, and this part of the system is so entrenched and well established and organized that it has not been effectively and completely toppled or eradicated in so long, it has been able to consolidate power and resources to a point where very few extremely evil people are personally in charge of so much of what happens that it seeps into everything. Actually "seeps" is the wrong word, it's injected into everything. It's like has been said many times in recent memory, the cruelty is the point.

For a simplified example, evil executives reward evil behavior by their managers, who in turn punish their employees, who lose control of so much of their lives to these companies and managers that they end up hurting their families and friends out of confusion and anger and other complex emotional reactions, and harm is perpetuated in every area of life.

It's self sustaining, and even worse it replicates itself. In some ways I think of these systems as viruses. Also as cults. We all buy in to some degree.

Have you ever cheated at a game, cut corners on work or purposefully did something unfair to get better from it yourself?

Yeah it's much easier to win without any pesky ethics or a strong moral compass.

Good folks have been struggling uphill since the Ancient Greeks as long as there are folks trying to win with a different rule book.

Bad news sells.

All that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

when evil is winning on your nation's scale it feels like it's winning globally. is evil winning in rojava? in southeast asia? is evil winning in the spanish speaking world?

for that matter, what's going on at your state level, or at your city level?

I just talked to my superior about the most urgent thing EU countries are facing currently. I should add that he is 100% disabled but studied in CS and reads everything which is interesting to him and his world view.

When I said that social media dictates the discussions and the media, we agreed on the thought after a short period.

And if we could solve this issue we mostlikely would get awarded a noble price.

What I am trying to say: Social media is run by - at least - flawed people. And used by the evil ones to their maximum, putting the honest Ones into a position to explain.

We are loosing our discourse, we are mixing our cultures - or we split at our ethics.

Social media is a cancer with no current treatment. Civilians will be in favor of social media since it also benefits society directly. But we are diminishing other things with it.

Maybe there will be one more brilliant mind educated who may aid us in these times.

That's, ironically, how the white supremacists felt all these years lol

You are more informed in how shitty the world have always been.

Also the decades from the 90s to the 10s were probably a small golden age that has already ended.

You probably feel that way because this is what it feels like when evil wins.

Because the slow decay of the capitalist order that has been occurring since the neoliberal turn has reached the point where it's effects are being felt in the global North

My theory is "shallow thinking" and "busy-ness". We are prone to mental and expedient shortcuts which seem benign at the small scale in which we interact, but when aggregated become something terrible... and on the exceedingly rare chance that we might hear an actual solution, it either sounds so foreign to us that we cannot consider it, or so hopeless a fight that the super-majority of people do not push back.

Consider how slippery the slope is for even one aspect (diffuse responsibility):

• Alice needs help
• Bob sees that Alice needs help
• Bob excuses himself from being the one to help (not prepared, wasn't expecting, other obligations, could be a trap, others are better suited to help, the government ought to help)
• Bob excuses himself from being the one to get help (I don't have the number handy, someone else will call, she probably already called someone for help)

Conceptually, this is fine if it is ONLY "Bob", but the deceptive part is how finite the procedural gap is between Bob being one person and it literally being everyone.... thus Alice gets no help.

I saw a chart that globally, the incumbent parties have lost more in these elections than before. https://www.ft.com/content/e8ac09ea-c300-4249-af7d-109003afb893

I'd guess this is because things are going badly economically, so people wanted change.