No no you don't understand. It's always the people with the least amount of economic power who are responsible for everything!
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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Yea but there's so many of them! They must be getting controlled by some imaginary ruling class, or something
Exactly. They're simultaneously responsible and irresponsible.
It's a pretty incredible trick to convince people that those who, demonstrably, have the least power in society are responsible for all of its problems. What's that thing about how there has to be an enemy, and that enemy has to simultaneously be weak, wretched and inferior but also strong enough to pose a threat that justifies an authoritarian response? I forget who tends to do that...
Well, yeah.
It's not the powerless that made things how they are, it's the powerful that shape the world.
It's also worth noting that when you're powerful but don't have the votes it takes to do a thing you want, the shortest path to getting those votes is unifying people around being mad at some sort of scapegoat.
This is why fascism looks the way it does
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it emerges from a democracy in some sort of crisis
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it's always that elites (a voting minority of powerful interests) need political support
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the way they always get it is by focusing anger on a scapegoat, with promises to punish them
Only a Death-Eater uses absolutes.
- Gandalf or some shit
Currently watching Lord of the Harry Witcher right now and can confirm this.
Also one of the aspects of fascism
The enemy or 'other' is both simultaneously weak and unworthy and should be defeated ... and powerful and oppressive and is the cause of all problems.
That's not just fascism, that's any time people villify an enemy. That is said by both major US parties.
Well it's really not that simple. I assume you're referring to things like climate change and privacy concerns and general de-evolution of government.
Just to boil down a very complex subject into a lazy comment:
Let's take climate change for instance. Do corporations and government do almost nothing to curb climate change? Yes. Do they actively lie to people about climate change? Yes.
Does the public still know that climate change is a real thing? At least some of them.
Do a ridiculous proportion of people still buy gas-guzzling SUVs and plastic water bottles and use plastic bags at the grocery store unnecessarily? Yes.
Do some people have full access to the information to educate themselves very quickly on the science, and yet choose to ignore that and instead actually actively promote what they want to believe instead? Absolutely
The reality is that "blame" is seldom simple and we all carry some amount of responsibility.
Personally I view this as a sliding scale. And while I do take personal responsibility in driving an efficient vehicle and refusing plastic bags and bottles (even though people look at me like some kind of crazy hippie and mock me accordingly), I also refuse to live in a yurt in the forest. When more people move down the scale toward me, it will make it easier for me to move even further down the scale.
Do a ridiculous proportion of people still buy gas-guzzling SUVs and plastic water bottles and use plastic bags at the grocery store unnecessarily? Yes
It's not that this doesn't matter, it does. But almost every time it's mentioned is alongside industrial climate impacts as if they were at all in a similar scale.
They aren't even close. People doing the 'well actually' thing for individual climate impacts are inadvertently being patsies for corporations to continue to deflect scrutiny away from the absolutely ridiculous levels of climate impacts they have. And while consumers are trying to move to metal straws, corporations have basically not even started trying to address low hanging fruit ways to mitigate climate change, let alone anything slightly tricky.
Yes, but expecting corporations to do it on their own is silly. They operate in a competitive environment so game theory should tell us what's going to usually happen. The laws and regulations exist, and a lot more are needed, but it's also not as simple because costs of enforcement also range from inexpensive to infeasible. In the end, it's people making self-interested decisions, whether on behalf of themselves or on behalf of corporations. I don't know of any easy solutions - my feeling is that those don't exist - so the best bet is to steer society towards better and more effective politics. More distributed and less concentrated power structures, checks and balances, enforcement, novel, effective, and efficient systems through science based analysis, as well as lots of trials and errors and fast iterative improvements based on rapid feedback loops. In short, the world nowadays moves faster than the current government systems and it's a losing battle until governing adaptability can increase in speed.
People doing the 'well actually' thing for individual climate impacts are inadvertently being patsies for corporations to continue to deflect scrutiny
No one is doing that. I could very easily just say that you're just doing the opposite. That is, deflecting personal responsibility from individuals and just blaming corporations. It's very easy to just lean back and blame corporations for your choices but the reality is that they simply couldn't sell this bullshit if individuals weren't buying them.
I keep thinking about that, and I keep coming back to how the ones being lied to will double down on "but the ____ actually are very powerful! That's why they've taken so much for themselves! That's why they have so many protections!"
I've had a conversation like that.
But what about your carbon footprint? Isn’t this all your fault for asking your boss for a cost-of-living pay rise?
Ever heard of underdogma?
edit) My criticism of op's argument ends at "technically, not literally always". I do agree with most of the arguments here but I also think that this kind of simple argument is more harmful than not.
The person who wrote that book is a political agent for the rich.
It's not a matter of responsibility.
The rich and powerful won't safe the world. If we don't want to live in a world with so many natural desasters that there is no farming and only synthetic food, then things have to change.
The opposite of the rich and powerful are not the weak and vulnerable but almost everybody. It's OK to let things happen but it's also possible to change everything, maybe even in a week or two.
Who's responsible for how good things are?
Labor.
Just to be clear, everything good is one group of people's fault- and everything bad is another groups?
Thats not what I'm saying and you know it's not. Quit arguing like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving.
Then what're you saying?
Uh oh. You’re going against the narrative.
Delusion.
Not necessarily. I think that lying requires intent. Someone could tell me something verifiably false without lying because they truly believe it to be true.
Not always. Half of these putzes openly fight to protect the system because they benefit from exploiting their neighbors, too.
EDIT: Here they come right now lol
Money is power. The people with the most money have the most power and therefore bear the most responsibility for the way things are