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cooperation rule
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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We were conquered by comfort. We had enough money to throw at those willing to produce things for vast sums of wealth, that we threw vast sums of wealth at them to make us comfortable.
Not secure. Not safe. Not healthy.
Just comfortable. Nice, predictable, reliable routines that give just enough satisfaction to make you feel like you're not in immediate danger, and for our survivalist brains, that's enough.
Even our discomfort is comfort. Working 13 hours a day moving other people's furniture sucks, but you can still scroll your phone, you can still get sugary snacks and a bottle of alcohol at the end of the day. You will still undoubtedly read some story that will make you feel special for working hard, a message that you're a "real" person and a "true citizen" and that makes you comfortable with your hard days and self-medication to get through the week.
To say nothing of the vast, vast number of people who are completely tuned out from conscious thought and just shuffle from one easy reward to another. Scroll your forums, check your likes, eat your burger and soda, yell at someone on a forum because they don't like a thing you like. Watch the advertisement for the new thing that successful people own... you can afford one of those things, right? Maybe save up a little longer, and you can get one!
We live in margins of debt and safety, we let culture shape us, we have long since given up shaping it. There's an app to do that for you.
I disagree that 'comfort' was a cause. That line of thinking comes from the same puritanical austerity narrative that has been used to tell the working class that our circumstances are due to poor character rather than because we were talked out of demanding more.
It's victim-blamey, but like all victim-blaming narratives it has the virtue of restoring a sense of control, a sense of "this is the thing that I can decide to do that would have prevented this."
...which isn't to say that I don't think we can't identify things that could have stopped this. But I don't think a vague assertion that people here are more distracted or 'comfortable' than elsewhere helps. Also - a lot of people are not comfortable. But they may deal with that by at least enjoying the distractions or not staring into the sun of things they don't think they can change.
Ultimately, we ended up here through corrupt systems. The Trumpers were right to want to 'drain the swamp', they are just so blinded by antimosity that they fell for a grifter because he promised to hurt people.
All the pillars of democracy have been under attack since Reagan - high quality journalism and education to maintain an informed voter base, a voter base with enough time to research issues, and political campaign laws to keep government working in the public's interest.
Occupy Wall Street tried to sound the alarm, but journalism was already too corrupt and the movement was successfully sold to the public as 'annoying college kids demanding free things'.
So now we have a significant chunk of the voter base that doesn't know what habeas corpus is, or anything about how our checks and balances are supposed to look, and thinks what makes this country "a free country" is that we blow shit up with fireworks on July 4th - and doesn't see why authoritarianism would be so bad.
And the rest of us who are looking on aghast are honestly afraid of our police, of Trumpers openly talking about lynching us (and yes - they have more guns than us. Most liberals still refuse to consider becoming armed), and of losing everything and dying in a prison cell run by a for-profit corp.
This is a stage-4 cancer diagnosis on a social scale, and people are still figuring out if we want chemo or to try to ride this out as long as we can.
On top of that, while conservative social media spaces are full of people threatening violence, all of the platforms are coming down hard on any space that discusses anything more provocative than holding a sign in a nonn-threatening manner in a way that abides any police order given.
There is no place to organize, and no one is proposing or organizing any serious strategy. Seriously -- I've gone to local meetings, and all any activist org or politician will say is "organize with your neighbors (organize what?) and try to do mutual aid".
That is not a meaningful response to an organization like the Heritage Foundation.
I think I've seen this play out longer than most users here and I have sunk to the realization that we're not getting better.
My assertation sounds victim-blamey and defeatist because I blame the victims and I feel defeated. Stupidity is easier for most people and so that's the water-level we all sink to.
I see no way we're going to get enough people to care about their community and each other more than they care about getting to wal-mart on Friday to stock up on weekend comforts. That's fucking paradise to the median voter and the bulk of the population we would need to mobilize. There are vast, vast sums of other people's productive capability being shoveled into the machine to keep people consuming distractions, sugar and sedatives and there's no way to tell people to stop consuming this self-destruction without an equal measure of vast sums of people's productive power... but you don't get that kind of capital to begin with without stealing and exploiting billions so here we are.
No seriously, you have no idea how dark it really is. You haven't talked to enough people and learned enough neurology to understand how bad this situation is if you're not victim-blaming also. I spent most of my adult life active and involved and trying to mobilize others and have had to know and understand people's lives and did my best to be as empathetic and charitable as possible, but when I see all the people actively turning off their higher-cognitive functions on purpose so they can scroll incel-propaganda and racist memes in peace, people who don't care about politics at all past WWE theater and spectacle sometimes, or an excuse to hate some group of people, I know when we're at our limit. It's many factors together, sure, but at the end of the day it's the people and what they want. They let this happen so on some level they want this and fuck the small minority who don't I guess. (That small minority is often too busy yelling at each other over problematic tweets and other performative virtue signals to possibly organize and create new movements that average Joe and Jane can get behind.)
I'm just done and ready to bail on the whole continent. The cancer is incurable in its current form, we have no treatment, it may be better for the patient to die and we find a way to start over.
Counterpoint, it's not all the people. You and I are depressed as fuck, our brains like to tell us that everybody is against us, it's all worthless, and the only good part is the end, but that's not very accurate.
I burnt out as a caregiver for developmentally disabled adults, due to lack of support in the community. I was working nights, working with clients that had violent behavior (unfun fact, 100% of people with Down's Syndrome will develop early-onset dementia), and my friend group imploded with the stupidest drama. It's too easy for me to think "most people have never had a client have a seizure in the shower and spray shit and vomit all over them, blah blah addicted to comfort", but it turns out that's a really terrible way of getting people on your side.
I'm going to a local meetup this weekend to discuss plans and mutual aid in my rural town. There's not a lot of us, but nobody can argue it'd be better to stay home.
Agreed, it's so many wrongs built upon a foundation of awful; I think the internet magnifies and accelerates this enshitification. Thank you for your work
I know and understand it's not literally everyone but I am so used to dealing with statistics in my roles in life that I despair at the ratio. And it's getting worse. We simply don't have enough people who actively care about others and their community to turn it around, and the more you try to shake empathy and decency into people, the harder they push back and resist the notion out of emotional insecurity, spite, and their own biases and struggles.
I have massive respect for caregivers, I could barely do it in my own family. The levels of empathy and sympathy you need feel utterly at odds with the general attitudes of most people. I don't have much in the way of community anymore, but I did try, I even was a political organizer for a spell, but I've watched our nation collectively embrace their insecurities and hate. I used to coach young men and provide alternatives to the incel-rhetoric that was spreading like wildfire across the internet, and with hard work and dedication and compassion I saved more than a handful of young men from falling into that darkness... but there are so, so many, and for every young dude you reach and instill the value of love and emotional intelligence, a thousand will fly right past you frothing with hate and malice, and the ones you DO reach, will almost immediately fall right back into the pit as soon as they have a bad day and start scrolling the forums again.
I am depressed, yes, but I worked hard on it and have mostly overcome the worst rumination and mental effects. Still though, it's really challenging to keep any optimism after seeing so many people making the same mistakes over and over for so many years. I don't know where we're heading but it's nowhere good.
Yes, it's hard and it is getting worse. But the revolution will not be televised. There is an overwhelming interest in keeping people from knowing about each other, they're not going to make it easy for us to organize. The internet is complicit, as it's controlled by only a handful of companies, who don't want to lose their monopoly either.
One of the ways in which to drive a wedge is to highlight the failings of the other side. It's more personal for you and I, and therefore more effective. We cannot focus more on the failings than on the successes, even if there is more fail than success, because success is birthed from failure. Yes, it feels weird, it feels like you're ignoring how badly we're all doing, but we have to keep our eyes forward and not get bogged down with despair.
It is just a small thing, but you are only one droplet in a cascade. People who have stood on the precipice and stepped back are in a more valuable position to reach others on the edge of darkness, and you have enabled that to spread. If darkness can spread like a mind-virus, so can the sun.