Ask Lemmy

The world has been in a gigantic psychological experiment.

Because it is

• The rich take a larger and larger slice of the wealth pie
• Use the money to propagandize to the now more precarious and vulnerable public to bolster their position
• Rinse and repeat

Simple material effect.

People are shaped by the interrest of the social and material class they are part of. And the evil people are always the one in power and have the money, so they act in the interest of their class and do things that help themselves.

Fucking Marx wrote about this quite a while ago, now his predictions just manifest more visibly, but the cultural and material forces have always been at play. Now we just reached a breaking point as a planet and population, so the underlying systems start to break too and the people on top do everything to stay in power, including ditching reality altogether.

People have it tough and I think they have gotten full of hate and greed. Evil people feed on hate and greed.

@Mee it just seems like that. In reality, everything in the world has been just someone's interests - because that's how the world was built. In fact, good and evil are just subjective terms. What may be good for you, it might be bad for somebody else. Your evil might be someone else's good and vice-versa.

I think you should think the things into more of what you care the most, what your values are, what is important for you overall. And then you'll see the bigger picture: people are just having different values than you, they think that the values you believe in are not theirs. And I am somewhat in the same situation as you - let me give you an example:

Among the values I care the most are democracy, personal freedoms, the ability to voice out (politely) your own opinion; you'd think I am a normal person, that no sane person would be thinking otherwise. Well, what if I told you, you're wrong! There was a poll last year in my country where 40% of the people said they would agree with my country returning under a dictatorship. Forty freaking percent!!! This is mind-boggling, right? That's what I also think.

What would be the solution to a problem like this be like? Well, you could join the crowd, that would be the most obvious, right? Be one with the majority, mindlessly agree on what they say, do what they do. But I bet you would never see your place in there. Instead, I think you should keep staying true to your own values and beliefs and look for people that share these. Speak to them, understand them yourself as well and who knows, maybe you can do something about it. 😁

/my 2c

Evil is not winning. Greed is. If it was evil, it would be worse

It feels that way, because it kind of is winning a bunch of battles. Whether it's "winning the war" is much more up for interpretation - the past was seriously shit going just a few generations back, and it will take a lot of backwards progress until we get anywhere comparable.

Okay, so why is it happening? When it comes to democratic backsliding specifically, the first reflex everyone had was to blame social media bubbles for causing runaway political polarisation, but it turns out breaking those bubbles actually increases radicalisation, so that's not it. Another theory I've heard is that in a democracy, the weakening of a political party inevitably creates space for extremists to take control. There definitely was some building dissatisfaction with the status-quo right before the trouble began, I could feel it, and in the case of the US specifically winning a party is nearly as good as winning the country.

It's also worth considering this has happened before. Since the French revolution itself the path to liberalism has been two steps forward, one step back. I don't know what causes it exactly, but the dip we're in is big - comparable to the one before WWII.

Even evil people are winning. Why?

That's yet another separate question, which I struggle with too. One notable bad person isn't even smart-evil.

It's been shown in studies that narcissists achieve more conventional success and social status, despite the fact they pretty much ruin everything and everyone they touch. It's a real thing. Bad actors are given far more leeway than would be game-theoretically rational for us to give.

Trust. In order for good people to achieve something they need to work together and trust each other. Bad people lie and deceive with no remorse which basically gives them the advantage in securing higher seats. Being able to lie with a straight face gives you many advantages if what you seek is personal gain, hence a lot of people keep doing it and that seems to be the goal.

The information age of the internet grew too fast before humans could get an actual sense of the repercussions, and it was just a matter of time for the greedy people in power all over the world to use it to their advantage.