Why does it feel that the evil sides globally are winning. Even evil people are winning. Why?
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- Rampant unchecked capitalism of recent decades has created large wealth disparities akin to the earlier decades of the last century. It is no longer possible for one person in a household with a regular job to support a modest lifestyle for their family. All benefits especially medical for the whole family, being completely intertwined with the current job reduces mobility and further feeds into the wealth gap by keeping wages low. It’s easier to blame the powerless for this state of affairs than the powerful because the powerless cannot object.
- The fear of the other has been accentuated by media and misinformation. Targeted algorithms feeding most of the information that is consumed has created echo chambers that reinforce existing beliefs and fears. The propaganda state has never had it easier.
- The large military and police has given never before control to the state about what is allowed to be protested. Combined with the day to day struggles, it’s extremely hard to come together for what is right. The ruling class is able to maintain the fine balance between absolute misery and general dissatisfaction that it is still better to struggle through a thankless job than to say fuck it. Failures of recent large uprisings like Middle East and Hong Kong have reinforced the futility of standing up against the rulers.
- Evil has many heads and there’s always one head that you can find alignment with. It could be the deregulation of businesses, lower taxes, anti abortion, racism, but as long as there’s one thing you can align on, the general sense of powerlessness makes it easier to overlook the other heads.
- The line between evil and good has never been murkier, especially with globalization. If you focus on the betterment of your community, it would be considered good, but what if it leads to suffering of others outside the community. Is it also evil? What is community - is it the people in your neighborhood, your religion, your country, fellow business owners? The fuzzier these lines are, the harder it is to untangle them.
Just an hour ago I heard EmiliaRoig.com talking on the EuropeansPodcast.com (minute 28) and she said something that at first sounded naïve to me. But in hindsight, it may be true.
She said that “times are changing for the better (i.e. referring to the last 10 years or more.) and what we are seeing nowadays is just a shout of despair to that, being done by right-wing extremists, and is loud.”
I can recommend all that she said afterwards, be warned: talks fast ;p
A ruling class of ultra wealthy lording over the vast majority of people who are left with crumbs is a common sign that an empire is in decline. With the US having more global influence than any previous empire, the whole world will be feeling the effects in one way or another.
Too much internet.
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?
My state is winning. So far the new federal administration hasn’t disrupted us much: we look so much better as the other side of the comparison worsens. We’re a big part of the fight for humanity, and new regional transit based zoning is already showing increased housing starts
Because you listen to news that makes money by sensationalizing everything for profit, and happy stories don’t sell papers. There’s plenty of uplifting stuff happening in the world every day that flies under the radar.
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.
The Algorithm needs to be regulated. (Meaning: Recommendation algorithms should be monitored to make sure that they’re not ‘discovering’ that they can manipulate people with fear, anger and other base negative emotions.)
We already know that the most motivating things for humans is fear and anger/outrage. We also know that these are not healthy emotions for the individual or for society and yet we allow social media algorithms to to maximize engagement using fear and anger.
In addition, it is very hard to craft a message that is both appealing and true. It is much easier to craft a message that is appealing if you can get rid of the Truth constraint.
These are probably the two core issues that are causing us the most strife. Unthinking recommendation algorithms have identified content that stokes base emotions like fear and anger as being the ones that generate the most ‘engagement’; and people, seeking to exploit these algorithms for personal gain (advertisers, political actors, etc), craft messages to maximize their engagement (anger/outrage, fear) while ignoring reality/truth/facts because reality is too hard of a constraint.
The flip side of this is that you see people, who practically live on social media, start to unconsciously adopt the same messaging style because it works even better as people become attuned to the fear and outrage.
So, now you have a feedback loop of people being conditioned by algorithms to be maximally outrageous and those masses of people spontaneously generating memes and social connections that reinforce outrage and fear.
This poison is now spreading into our social institutions and governments. Facts matter less than saying things that are outrageous and valuing the truth is obviously a silly proposition. After all, it’s plainly obvious that it is much harder to get upvotes if you care about the truth…
Try it, go to a community that matches your political leanings and try to correct misinformation. If you’re not banned you will be buried in downvotes because people don’t value the truth as much as they value an entertaining lie.
IMHO, It’s the algorithm that’s the real devil.
For a long time, it was us against the bots and the companies. But we no longer know what’s being given to us because it matches versus what’s being given to us because they’re paying for it to be seen.
The danger is the algorithm gives us a steady stream of what we appear to want. It’s serotonin. Then it’s weaponized. There’s no appreciable difference between the ads, the propaganda, the creators honest content and the creators paid content. We’re getting echo chambers of what we want and paid advertisements to sure that up.
People see it on Facebook and TikTok and just take it as read that what’s being presented is truth. Even the ones that are savvy to bias end up getting swept along with the tide.
The only way to stop this is to demand disinformation and fact-checking. But instead of that, everyone seems to be hell-bent on knocking out private conversation where we might be able to communicate and are being forced to rely solely on whatever the algorithm allows us.
There’s no appreciable difference between the ads, the propaganda, the creators honest content and the creators paid content.
Well said.
e: oops, double comment
A ruling class of ultra wealthy lording over the vast majority of people being left with crumbs is a common sign that an empire is in decline. With the US having more global influence than any previous empire the whole world will be feeling the effects in one way or another.
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.
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.
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.
I study history a lot, also I’m older so I have the perspective of two or three generations now.
Things have normally been not the idealized concept of Disney princess goodness in government. Evil shits normally have been doing stuff for as long as civilization has existed. So all this is not new.
What is new, and makes this newsworthy, is the masks have fallen off. Those masks and idealized fantasy much of the population indulges in took decades, generations to build up. In many ways this is a very rude culture shock.
The other reason this is important now is the climate is rapidly collapsing while the trade systems have reached unprecedented complexity. So a group of particularly thuggish people rising to power in several nations at once, as they tend to do with regularity. May have epic and disastrous consequences! It’s a really bad time for this to happen
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.
All that is required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
Evil is willing to lie, cheat, steal, and kill to win. As long as good keeps fighting with one hand tied behind its back, evil will keep gaining ground.
It’s less that good has one hand tied behind its back, and more that good is fighting with a sword while evil brought an attack helicopter
Well, I think it’s more that we’ve spent decades building up cultural narratives of good that emphasize heroes who win through proselytizing, converting, and redeeming villains rather than just fucking stomping them. “If I do a bad thing for the right reason, I’m just as bad”, etc. In media, it works out because cosmic justice steps up to do what the hero won’t if the villain refuses to relent. In reality, it means that you get tut-tutted and told that the most you can do to stop ecocide and mass murder is peacefully protesting in such a way as not to even upset or inconvenience anyone, and it’ll all come right if you’re in the right. You might as well just go yell into a closet for all the good it’ll do, ofc.
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.
There’s a season for everything, even for evil, but it won’t last forever.
