It’s not perplexing. The worst of humanity — the criminals, the psychopaths, the sociopaths, the pedophiles, the corrupt — are all attracted to positions of wealth and power.
Ethics and morality are complex/expensive. They can only exist in an environment of abundance. The only thing separating us from cavemen is education; the ability to document and transfer information across generations; the ability to produce excess resources than we need to survive. Self-sacrifice is basically rejecting those baser survival instincts of physical pleasure and worldly possessions for some ephemeral concept of “the greater good”. That’s what we need right now, but capitalism explicitly rewards the baser instinct of selfishness and greed with wealth and power, so the most greedy and selfish of humanity prevail.
It doesn’t matter than civilization was built on cooperation or collective effort, or that selfishness and greed are a regressive, unproductive, dead end that will doom us all. Selfishness and greed only need to prevail long enough to destroy the foundations of civilization, like a stable climate and agriculture. Once those are gone, abundance ends, and we’re back to focusing on our survival in hourly/daily increments.
Hey! Some of us sociopaths don’t give a fuck about titles, position, and power!
In times of abundance we just happily feign whatever is in the best interest of being able to happily feign, which usually helps out the tribe and that’s why we got to keep making enough babies to pass that along.
Ethics and morality are complex/expensive, no doubt about that. Everything you said (except equating all sociopaths with the same angles of sociopathy) is true, no question.
Luckily, our selfish drive to get back to the comfy and unassuming does tend to result in…headaches for the other, less integrating members of the worst of humanity class.
We’re outnumbered though and can’t tell precisely when it’s time to stop trying to feign along and go dispassionately tear apart the obstacles standing between us quietly living in the metaphorically cave near the village and basking in the sounds of a happy society whose periphery is all we need to get by.
Ah, I see the word perplexing seems to hold different meanings here (not native speaker, but I just looked it up and what I meant is one of the meanings).
Just for clarification, it’s not a question for me as to why but just like the ‘yeah, I know, here we go’ kind of situation that is quite hopeless, as in the ending the referenced movie ‘don’t look up’ points to.
It’s not perplexing. The worst of humanity — the criminals, the psychopaths, the sociopaths, the pedophiles, the corrupt — are all attracted to positions of wealth and power.
Ethics and morality are complex/expensive. They can only exist in an environment of abundance. The only thing separating us from cavemen is education; the ability to document and transfer information across generations; the ability to produce excess resources than we need to survive. Self-sacrifice is basically rejecting those baser survival instincts of physical pleasure and worldly possessions for some ephemeral concept of “the greater good”. That’s what we need right now, but capitalism explicitly rewards the baser instinct of selfishness and greed with wealth and power, so the most greedy and selfish of humanity prevail.
It doesn’t matter than civilization was built on cooperation or collective effort, or that selfishness and greed are a regressive, unproductive, dead end that will doom us all. Selfishness and greed only need to prevail long enough to destroy the foundations of civilization, like a stable climate and agriculture. Once those are gone, abundance ends, and we’re back to focusing on our survival in hourly/daily increments.
Hey! Some of us sociopaths don’t give a fuck about titles, position, and power!
In times of abundance we just happily feign whatever is in the best interest of being able to happily feign, which usually helps out the tribe and that’s why we got to keep making enough babies to pass that along.
Ethics and morality are complex/expensive, no doubt about that. Everything you said (except equating all sociopaths with the same angles of sociopathy) is true, no question.
Luckily, our selfish drive to get back to the comfy and unassuming does tend to result in…headaches for the other, less integrating members of the worst of humanity class.
We’re outnumbered though and can’t tell precisely when it’s time to stop trying to feign along and go dispassionately tear apart the obstacles standing between us quietly living in the metaphorically cave near the village and basking in the sounds of a happy society whose periphery is all we need to get by.
Ah, I see the word perplexing seems to hold different meanings here (not native speaker, but I just looked it up and what I meant is one of the meanings).
Just for clarification, it’s not a question for me as to why but just like the ‘yeah, I know, here we go’ kind of situation that is quite hopeless, as in the ending the referenced movie ‘don’t look up’ points to.