Ask Lemmy

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Evil" had always been winning. It just seems worse now because it's finally effecting us.

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.

Because the return of massive wealth disparity - similar to having kings again - has allowed those with money and power to bend the world in the direction of some form of dictatorship, whether it be fascism, oligarchy, whatever…. The New Kings are carving up society and want to increase control and profit, and an authoritarian governance is the way to do it. Just like how they treat their corporations. They are dictators, the little people are disposable production units to feed their machine.

Evil people control almost all sources of information

Unpopular opinion, but in the west particularly, folk have mistaken writing on the internet for action.

Tweeting resistance rather than performing it.

A lapse into inaction framed as radical rest and self care.

Online they are fierce warriors of justice, offline they go to work in Starbucks, use their apple devices to talk to their families and enjoy the treadmill of streaming services.

And this isn't to blame them. This is the point of consumerist capitalism. To trap you in a gilded cage.

Why does it feel like evil is winning globally?

Propaganda works.

We are now innundated with it. And the answer is not "anti-propaganda" although sometimes that helps a little.

The answer is everyone needs to learn how media works; How words and images and sounds form the world.

And to do that requires the help of media corporations.

Babylon rots from the inside. Corrupt systems cannot last forever.

Perhaps, because by now enough people feel a real impact on their life and fear for the ruling classes is not there anymore?

Just a few examples from direct, personal experience (I am German, so what I enumerate has a German/Euro perspective):

• Constitutional state? Does not matter, as long as powerful/influential people can literally buy laws or prevent even discussion of laws in the parliament
  • Easy way to figure out who is favored by one law, is to check who has to prove something and how hard it is to prove
  • Best part about this is, people in power can always point out to the law and that 'we' agreed upon that law
• Systematic discrimination against the worker class/people not owning things: Thing about laws, taxes, ....
• Every media has an agenda and is propaganda (In the west, propaganda means mostly being selective about the information presented and how to build the narrative. Only idiots in the west will outright lie about things. It also means, who gets to talk in the media, where to position news (headlines ore somewhere else) etc. Media are owned by rich people or the state owned media are controlled by people with strong affinity to political parties
• Corruption on all but the lowest levels, especially in the government (In Germany corruption on the lowest level is uncommon und has a high penalty, but go up the level a little bit and 'you scratch my back and I scratch yours')
• Nepotism on all but the lowest levels (Worked in many different companies and the bigger the company the worse it gets. Working class kid does not get an intern position although it would technically be the best choice? No worries, some kid with the right parents and no clue will have that opportunity.
• No feedback loops: In Germany, we have professional politics which have extremely good conditions for their pension, whose children do not visit public schools and who have private health care decide, what in their opinion is appropriate for most of the people in the country concerning this things...
• No real political influence: We just had the clown-show of voting. Guess what, I can only vote between Nazis and non-Nazis. Can I vote for more taxes for the rich, a sane economic agenda which not benefits the rich, and full military support for the Ukraine? Sorry, I am out of luck. Of course I am free to build my own party. Let's see how successful that is without massive investment of money and good connections to the ruling classes to get positive media coverage.

Before the eastern block fell apart, at least in Europe/Germany, there was always the fear of the ruling class to experience another (French)revolution. Since this fear is gone, they literally have nothing to fear...

Is it possible to change anything about the situation? I am more than cynical by now:

• Most everyone is struggling to keep their level of wealth/position in society, so the middle class fights hard to be a little bit better of then the lower class, don't even mention the upper middle class, which fights with nails and teeth for every little advantage and privilege they have
• The higher you go in hierarchies, the more sycophants you'll discover, which don't mind selling out other humans for status/privileges, and there are even true believers, so brainwashed by neoliberal agenda, that they will fight for the privileges of rich folk they will never belong to
• There is no way to organize enough people in real life to force any political change (especially not with an aging population)
• The ruling class figured out for a long time in western world, that instead of fighting facts/the truth, they just have to generate more bullshit, discussions, alternative narratives and lean back, because people will discuss and not agree
• Nearly all change to the status quo is opposed and fought by some group, which benefits from the status quo
• Neoliberal propaganda and views are so ubiquitous and pervasive in our media, stories, etc., that a lot of people cannot even think about alternatives any more.

That's just for the western world, let's not start about the dictatorships/regimes supported by western governments with money, weapons and knowledge, where things are even more shitty.