Because, for all of the awfulness they bring to the rest of us, they are human.
Humans who the other humans desperately need to be stripped of their wealth and power, and for whom the doing of which might offer them some small chance to save themselves from the yawning void of more more moremoremoremoremoremore
Yeah we humanize them because it's important to remember that essentially anyone that ends up in their position will behave similarly. They aren't demons, they're humans. We should stop putting people in their position.
This. As soon as we treat them as "only monsters," we start to think that "regular humans" aren't capable of monstrous things.
They are human. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that, while also reiterating that they basically shouldn’t be in that state.
Also, I think it’s important to draw a line between the “rich” (well-off working professionals like researchers, doctors, small entrepreneurs), and people with more wealth than many sovereign nations put together.
Because they are human. What is the difficulty here? They're not reptilians or space aliens or inter-dimensional beings. It's in all of us.
Some.people priase Hitler.
We cannot understand class behavior by examining individual morality. Viewing the capital owning class as a collection of mustache twirling villains is not a useful framing. Rather, we should look at them as the human personification of capital itself. Their social being, their entire material condition, is defined by the accumulation of private profit and the protection of property relations that enforce their dominance.
Their inability to relate is not a personal failing but a direct result of their objective position in the capitalist mode of production. They live in a world insulated from the precarity of rent, medical debt, and wage slavery that defines life for the working majority. Their consciousness is shaped by them being insulated from the problems regular people experience. Therefore, critique of their lack of empathy is a liberal dead end because it mistakes a systemic outcome for a personal choice.
The focus must be the capitalist system itself, which necessarily produces the inequality and the divide between the capitalists and the workers. The fundamental contradiction between the socialized nature of production and the private appropriation of wealth is the core issue. The solution is to dismantle the economic base that creates them as a class and move towards a system where the means of production are socially owned, abolishing the very material conditions that breed alienation and disparity.
They are as human as anyone else. We should be cognizant of that. They are human beings within a human system. Move beyond anger and hate, and ask what must be done to end suffering and injustice.
For all the quips about guillotines, the first fix needs to be removing their excess wealth, not their heads.
If given a chance they will kill. To obtain that level of wealth one generally has to have a sociopathic level of lack of empathy. Maybe not all are like Trump and itching to blow people up and put people to death. A lot are probably less actively bloodthirsty (thankfully) but at the same time have no issue taking away your health insurance, your income, your housing, etc if it impacts their bottom line even though they already have enough resources to last 100,000,000 lifetimes in extreme excess.
“Oh but if they let these things change they would lose their wealth” exactly - when it comes down to it, they would rather leave you to die than risk losing their obscene wealth. So this is violence, and therefore violence is an appropriate response, especially when the state continually and repeatedly fails over decades (arguably from its inception) to rein them in.
There are plenty of people who are sociopathic around you right now. What they usually lack is the power/opportunity to do harm. Under capitalism the crimes of capitalists are made normative and legal. All sociopaths are human, and depite what some may think, you can't just punish/shoot your way out of a systemic problem.
But how to do that without removing their head?
Ah, that was some clever wordplay, given that one of the definitions of capital is "of or pertaining to the head"!
Why do the working glass poor vote Trump
Because the aforementioned billionaires, and previously multi-millionaires, have been spending untold billions over a period of nearly a century to keep them trapped in a propaganda bubble.
Because they're fucking stupid.
Why do some people think dehumanizing anyone is fundamentally OK?
There are actual psychopaths and sociopaths. They are humans. They got that way not from Stan Lee's pen, but by real experiences in our actual world.
Making them a caricature will in no way help with the problem.
I'm perfectly ok with dehumanizing literal flag waving Nazis. I give them no quarter. If a Nazi fell into the train tracks in front of me, I would just walk away.
They're human, and should be destroyed mercilessly by any means necessary. There's no contradiction in recognizing the humanity of people who will unfortunately need to be killed to stop them killing the rest of us indiscriminately.
Dehumanization is pointless, and leads to dangerous misanalysis (like underestimating them). Honestly, it's also just a cowardly coping mechanism to avoid the harsh realities behind the idealistic moral frameworks we're brought up with.
Isn't dehumanizing kind of the whole Nazi thing?
I think most people are incapable of understanding just how much damage the rich do to the working class on a regular basis.
The rich kill more people every year, through business and political decisions, than any terrorist group or military. Often by being the puppet masters of those terrorist groups and militaries.
The rich are humans, that's just fact. However, people need to wake the fuck up and see the richest and most powerful in the world fundamentally lack humanity. They are fundamentally isolated from human beings through their wealth and influence.
It's important to remember that the actions of the working class are primarily derived from their class interests, not because individuals are dicks. Humanizing even shitty individuals is an important part of persuading people away from thinking in terms of individual people and more about the dialectics of class.
This is an idiotic post. Yes, they are human. Yes they may make bad decisions, but so do poor people. They just don't make enough to matter.
Well, they are in fact human. Trying to understand how they got the way they are is the first step to trying to not let more of them happen. That said, the rotten apple is still an apple. But in the end, I am still going to throw it away.
People are brainwashed. They have been for generations. And only very few even like to admit that they are brainwashed. I was too... Luckily I woke up, and became both woke and able to think critically...
Hot take, we should deliberately dehumanize rich people.
Lemmy is such a weird site. Almost every thread I’ll read the most terrible dehumanizing shit said about working class people for just existing in a conservative U.S. state, but a thread asking why the rich are idolized every negative comment appears to have upvoted responses calling to recognize the humanity in everyone.
Weird.
Really depends on the instance. Most lemmy.world subs are cesspools. Hexbear and the like tend to be much better overall.
Hexbear remains winning
Hexbear is really the best social media sitr ever
Is humanize the word you really mean to use, or do you mean something more like valorize or glorify?
Are you aware of what it means to dehumanize?
I'm pretty sure they meant that. There are a lot of people who don't see rich people as humans anymore. The irony is lost on them.
Because we are surrounded by the media that the rich owns that propagandizes us to put the rich on a pedestal.
At what point is someone wealthy using gapminder levels of income where level 1 is earning $2 a day, level 2 is $8, level 3 $32, etcetera?
And at what point is a person in power?
Is Zelensky in power? Xi Jinping?
Greta Thunberg? John Oliver?
JT Chapman? Karl Marx?
The admin of this site?
The OP made a distinction between wealth and power. Your question salad conflating the two, even if wealth does grant power, is muddying the original question with “What is the definition of ‘is’?” It isn’t meaningful.
What the fuck does any of that rambling have to do with the question?
they're just subs that are into bdsm
Financial domination
Because they get paid to do so.
I'm aphantasic. Until people started really talking about how they "see" things in their heads, I assumed it was all just a figure of speech. Flashbacks, thought bubbles, daydreams in media... I assumed that was all just, you know, an easy way to get the information across. Now I know you freaks actually see stuff and the mind's eye isn't some convenient turn of phrase. Weirdos!
In a similar vein, I have empathy. It is difficult for me to intuitively understand the perspective of someone who doesn't have any. As an example, it's hard for me to understand a person who's exploiting children a la Epstein. And in truth, I don't want to understand them, either. Even knowing how many of them are the way they are... if I had a little less introspection, I'd probably just default to "they're just like us."
I am not sure it is really about Capitalism but the broader human Centralization whatever its political or economic system. We Centralize and someone has to be at the top as that is our nature and those at the top exploit as power corrupts. This is wired into us a species and it has brought us a long way for better and for worse.
To try to understand someone is not the same as respecting them. One can try to understand one's enemy to better fight them.
I think the unfortunate truth is that many non-evil people would be just as evil if given the opportunity. Or to frame it slightly different: I believe that too much money and/or power is what turns most people evil over time.
Boot lickers. Just boot lickers. Hoping to become one of them one day.
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