A society in which it’s everyone for themselves, that refuses to care for one another, is no society at all. Then everyone acts shocked and horrified at someone who understandably snaps, like modern western culture doesn’t run entirely on schadenfreude.
That was the crux of the idea of a social contract, which is long dead in the US. Now people line up to revel in the suffering of their fellow citizens with “well you were stupid to do xyz in life, so you deserve your suffering haha.”
I agree, but I’m not sure that’s an unpopular opinion. Most people who act like they don’t owe anyone anything seem to forget all the help they’ve received. Craig T. Nelson said it best: “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No.”
Most people who act like they don’t owe anyone anything seem to forget all the help they’ve received
It’s not necessarily applicable. In the same way if I help someone that doesn’t mean they owe me, taking help doesn’t necessarily mean you owe someone else.
This really just comes across like you decided to join in on the misery you detest.
You sound jaded, and I’m sorry you’ve had to experience the things that lead you to this point. But not everyone has had your life experiences and there are people outside of your box, your reality. You can give up and think the majority is beyond saving and only out for themselves in all thoughts and actions. But that’s, like, your opinion, man. And it’s not one I’ve experienced and certainly not one I’m gonna share in.
I hope you want to believe otherwise and I hope you can get there, cause man, that’s a pretty bleak outlook. Best of luck.
Have you ever worked as a retail clerk for any length of time?
I’ve met one person in all my career who genuinely felt like that after being in retail.
You don’t realize how much people suck until you spend 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year cleaning up their messes and dealing with their behavior.
5 years in a pharmacy, so about the most vitriolic you can imagine. People with withdrawals mad you won’t break the law for them, people lying to your face hoping you’ll unknowingly break the law, and then people upset because theirs or their child’s medicine cost more than they make in a month.
I get what life can do to people, or worse, what people can do to people. But if you just stop and look you’ll find good people in this fight with you. And giving up on them is not something I’m going to do, it’s why I even made my original comment. OP is (imo) misguided, but that doesn’t make them a bad person and it doesn’t mean they’re beyond hope. And I like to imagine that most of the people they’ve seen that caused them to so harden their outlook are in the exact same boat that the OP is in. Simply misguided but not even close to being beyond redemption or belief.
But if you just stop and look you’ll find good people in this fight with you.
This appears to be the sum total of your argument, and doesn’t really address his statement of the social contract being broken. Just because some “good” people remain doesn’t mean the majority haven’t been pushed by the system to something worse.
I’d also like to advise you just how arrogant your statements here are:
And giving up on them is not something I’m going to do … OP is (imo) misguided, but that doesn’t make them a bad person and it doesn’t mean they’re beyond hope. … Simply misguided but not even close to being beyond redemption or belief.
So, you think your outlook is so superior that it grants you the authority to not only judge them as misguided but further imply that they are so wrong as to require redemption? Oh, but by the sheer goodness of your heart you still grant them the gift of your hope.
This is called toxic positivity. You are using the notion of positivity in a negative way: it is a tool to assert your moral superiority and thereby belittle others.
Pathetic
I’m down with that. I have been since I first figured out that my boss values office furniture more than he does people. He was bemoaning the lack of loyalty when I quit. I told him that loyalty flows both ways or doesn’t flow at all. Since he’d stopped the downward flow, I stopped the upward flow.
This scales nicely to society.
It’s weird though that this seems to be the case mostly in the US. I can’t say that I know all cultures but most of the ones that I know of, or have experience with have a lot of compassion, especially towards people who have had bad luck or made bad choices. The US seem very brutal in that area
Oh, most of the fellow Americans I’ve encountered in my life revel in the bad luck or “poor decisions” (in hindsight, and often just good intentions and bad luck like student loans) of their own neighbors as if it were blood and they were a vampire. It’s like a chain of everyone getting exploited by our oligarch class getting a little relief by punching down to people who were more screwed by our oligarch class to feel superior to someone.
That is what it means to be an American 🇺🇸🤮
You owe it to yourself to be a decent human being though.
Kinda trying to minimize OPs argument though. Sure be a good person, but steal and take anything that isn’t bolted down.
Consider it bonus points if they’re so rich they don’t even realize something was taken.
Why?
For clarity, I don’t disagree, but I want to know your reasoning.
Because my conscience doesnt create constant alerts notifications and warning messages that disrupt my sleep and bother me constantly while awake if I dont try as far as I can to be a decent human being. Some people seem to have these alerts etc disabled or the entire conscience app disabled or not even installed to start with though, I cant imagine how they get though life otherwise
I feel like no matter how good of a person I try to be, that voice in my head won’t stop saying I’m a piece of shit.
Reminds me of this comic:
Because you deserve to live in a world where people are decent to each other, and “people” includes you, and your behaviour is the first thing that’s most easily controlled by yourself.
- because you have to live with yourself
- because being better improves your life
- because your actions echo into the lives of others and affect their actions and it improves everyones lives
- because you lead by example
- because fuck the haters, love em anyway
- because you know better
because you have to live with yourself
That’s where you’re wrong, sir.
- no
There are companies that their success depends on your statement is wrong. Companies like Gofundme would not have been able to operate if nobody helps out anybody.
A drop in the ocean, because we refuse to communally pay for a robust social safetynet. In fact, we had a pathetic one once, and spent the 80s and 90s dismantling even that to “turn the bull loose” for shareholders that already won at life through birth or luck.
This makes me think of The Good Place and the book they reference: What We Owe To Each Other. It discusses the philosophy of Contractualism, and the morality of society.
Fuck no society (or at least my country) does owe me, I pay taxes. Quite a bit due to where I live actually, I’m not upset about it but I get fuck all for it. And I’m just a working class person, I don’t have any connections … Imagine all the people just avoiding taxes.
Tax me more, honestly just give me working infrastructure, healthcare and other things that a functioning country should have. I’m so sick of footing the bill for all these fucking bailouts and subsidization of private interests, the do nothings in Congress are the real freeloaders. And yet they’ll bitch at you when you suggest we allocate some of the funds from the military into making sure our ‘strategic highway’ systems bridges dont just fall over.
I don’t mind paying but the service sucks 😭
My unpopular opinion is that if you evade all of your tax responsibility as a company you should have no legal protections in said country but they’d never bite.
Amazon’s semis and delivery trucks provide how much wear and tear on the highway grid but how much do we get in taxes for allowing that? $0 (maybe not exactly but you get the gist).I mean fuck cars but most Americans want working roads too.
And no it’s not smart to avoid taxes, that’s bad business that hurts the entire system in the long run.
Your feelings are valid.
I’ve been telling people the social contract in America is broken for a long time. To me it’s just becoming more and more obvious. All the small things keep getting worse. No one cares about all the small social stuff anymore. People throw shit everywhere in stores, don’t return shopping carts, follow rules of any kind out in public.
People just don’t respect each other or give a fuck anymore. I mostly blame the boomers and silent generation folks who hurled contual abuse and insults and everyone for the last 20+ years. We’ve got a couple generations that grew up doing the Frontline jobs in retail and the service industry who just got shit on constantly. Maybe that’s just a small part of it, but whatever happened, it’s bad.
It’s not an unpopular opinion, just a reasoning that anyone could realize.
I don’t know, I always hear people telling people who’ve been at the ass end of society their whole lives here to just be like Charlie Brown and show up tomorrow with a smile to get fucked over again like it’s their duty and obligation.
I mostly agree with you except that I’ll say the people are not a monolith. Many people still help others. Its the systems which treat you like shit. Attack them, not others.
Now people line up to revel in the suffering of their fellow citizens with “well you were stupid to do xyz in life, so you deserve your suffering haha.”
It’s not schadenfreude, it’s psychological defense from injustice. People don’t want to accept that bad things can happen to them if they don’t deserve those. They want to think that if they do everything right, nothing bad will happen, and if they make a mistake, then something bad will happen, and so there’ll be fewer and fewer mistakes and bad things as they go. It’s scary to accept that this is a lie and life isn’t fair.
However, not attacking others or their property is not something you owe others, it’s normal behavior, and behaving otherwise you trespass. It’s not a gift on your part to not steal what belongs to another person.
Yep, American exceptionalism became American Individualism. Don’t get me wrong, overall I believe most of us want to do the right thing, most of the time anyway. I’m also keenly aware to the fact that incredible narcissistic, self-serving people are constantly gripping the power that could change things at all levels (local community, city, state, country). The most any random citizen can do is take care of it’s own, and every once in awhile, when resources are plenty, take care of their neighbors. Life it’s hard and extremely expensive.
It’s war. You see it in vets, you see it in cops, you see it in gangsters, you see it in abused people. Life is war imo. I didn’t start off like that until gangster raped my life. Chaos will always reign supreme above governments, and order that comes from natural chaos will always triumph over man made order.
