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.
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?
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.
e: oops, double comment
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.
We are entering a major transition period, with many technological changes happening to disrupt the existing economy. One of the most important is the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
For hundreds of years, the energy economy has been a system where certain countries and companies controlled the locations on earth where fossil fuels are located, and had the technology to process the fuels. Fossil fuels by their nature require the user to buy “feedstock” as they go. The countries and companies that control fossil fuel production profit from this system and are some of the wealthiest groups in the world.
Renewable energy systems, such as solar, wind and batteries, require an upfront payment for the equipment. The cost of equipment for renewable energy is dropping every year. They can be located almost everywhere. There is no ongoing feedstock payment. Renewables break the fossil fuel industry model, and some of the wealthiest people in the world are scrambling to control governments to somehow retain their income flow. Currently their strategy is to delay implementation of renewables, but eventually they will try to create monopolies where they control the source of power and charge the customer about the same as they are paying now, with the utilities benefitting from the low cost of renewable power.
This is only one of the transitions happening at this time. There are many major disruptions coming from implementing AI in the economy, from electric vehicles and self-driving vehicles. There are probably many more transitions that no one is predicting or even imagining at this time. You can expect things to be crazy for a decade or more as these technologies change the way our economy, infrastructure and society is shaped.
and fossil fuels, that continued “subscription” model, is a massive incentive for war and disrupting competing suppliers. Solar does require copper (distribution) and sand plus a bit of silver, batteries just lithium phosphate and iron, and all of these are relatively abundant (sodium as lithium replacement even more abundant). More importantly, once you’ve bought your solar and batteries, you have fuck you energy: secure and independent.
War on Russia was a last grasp effort to keep diesel refining at maximum capacity, and attempt to capture Europe’s NG supply. Doesn’t matter how much Biden loved US O&G, he wasn’t going to be loved back.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a last ditch effort to recapture former Soviet territory before its oil and gas resources lose economic value.
Simply not credible. Russia has enough drilling sites available to it to serve decades of demand. It set clear reasonable red lines to avoid an invasion, and investing in developing resources on contested land is an extra, unnecessary, risk that makes such investment uneconomic. It is grossly unfair to impute imperialist objective to Russia’s special military operation which was purely to prevent rabid NATO expansionist evil.
Except for this war, global oil/liquid fuel demand is declining. But use in the war is just a massive, at least 3% of global diesel use, nevermind the terrorist attacks on refineries/depots/supplies. US aligned nations have simply wanted this war more than Russia all along, and it is unfair to fantasize Russian resource expansion as an objective.
How many NATO countries are former Warsaw Pact that begged and clamored to join quickly after the USSR dissolved? Why did Finland and Sweden finally decide to join NATO?
If not Ukraine, maybe someone from Georgia, Chechnya, Moldova, or Tajikistan could explain it to you.
Propaganda and hatred is a perfectly valid explanation. Georgia escaped stupidity this year despite propaganda objectives. Moldova succeeded in stupidity. Doesn’t make Russophobia smart, or an objective good, just because it exists.
It is surprising how weak Russia actually is. At this point just about any other nation could come in and wipe out the Russian government.
That was the big propaganda hope of suiciding Ukraine. “Surely Russian people will believe complete BS that NATO is a purely defensive alliance that has an open door policy because it loves everyone it captures”. Russian economy has outperformed the colonies who embraced their pipeline sabotage. The fantasy of invading Russia has occurred multiple times in the last centuries. It never worked out, and of all of the attempts, this is the biggest failure of them all.
It is grossly unfair to impute imperialist objective to Russia’s special military operation which was purely to prevent rabid NATO expansionist evil.
And you’re blocked. What a moron.
Evil people control almost all sources of information
It’s a global far right power grab fueled by money from Russia using weaponized disinformation. It’s been going on for decades at a smaller scale before Facebook, etc, even existed. It’s also fueled by conservative dark money groups funded by conservative billionaires. You should read the book Dark Money, I highly recommend it.
Even the antivax stuff is from Russia and it way predates the big platforms. It was started in the crunchy mom communities on Livejournal, where they first experimented with seeing if westerners would glom on to weird mommy trends like not using shampoo, nursing your kids to ridiculous ages, “unassisted birth”, which is where people deliver babies without any medical care at all, “unschooling”, etc. That took off in a big way and then they began with the antivax stuff, and used Livejournal as a tool of Russian government propaganda.
Then they started funding white supremacist groups, and the groups like the yellow vests, Moms for Liberty, etc. Really recommend learning about dark money and Russian weaponized disinformation.
It’s pretty convienient how all bad things stem from a single, external source, preventing the need for any sort of internal societal reckoning. How fortunate that we were born on the good guys’ side and all we need to do is focus on our states’ geopolitical enemies, and if they can be kept in check, it’ll solve every one of our domestic issues, upto and including old wives tales.
False equivalence is part of the disinformation. The enemy of the perfect should not be the simply good
What?
I don’t think I’m saying that at all, just that this is where it stems from and that Republicans and their supporters have glommed onto it. Obviously I’m saying it’s multifaceted.
Do you have any sort of evidence that connects the Russian government to things like not using shampoo?
“Evil” had always been winning. It just seems worse now because it’s finally effecting us.
