It's not just conservatives, I also see many libs believe in this shit. In addition, they really believe in the "Just World Hypothesis" (i.e. that the good will eventually be rewarded and that the evil will eventually be punished). I just can't bring myself to believe that the evil will "get what they deserve," at least in this world, after everything I've seen. I don't know, how do others here deal with the brainworms of personal responsibility and the just world hypothesis?

  • LoudMuffin [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Another thing that's annoying is that a lot of these people seem to think that humans are unfeeling robots. Sure, you could go to college while working full time at Walmart and learn to code, but realistically, how many people are going to have the discipline to quite literally deprive themselves of a basic human existence outside of their work to grapple with difficult/ardous coursework in what little spare time a 40-60 hour workweek affords them? This is not to mention familial obligations and whatever else a person might need to deal with outside of themselves. Basing your society around an ideal that only a very select few people can meet (and those that do ironically are usually already at an advantage) seems like a good way to wind up with an incredibly dysfunctional society wherein the vast majority of those who can't are simply discarded and left to their own devices and those that can are stuck in perpetual state of anxiety and fear because they know that those that couldn't view them with resentment, and that their own station in life is not as secure as they think it is

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      These people love to accept that if something is a even remote possibility, it might as well apply to all cases. If there is a chance an overworked minimum wage worker goes to school and eventually gets an office job, that means the system works as intended and the particulars don't matter, what matters somehow is the person's mindset or personal ambition. It's just an intense lack of sympathy from what I see. They love to point to specific examples too of people going from poverty to financial stability and assume every single person could replicate that path without fault if they just perform the same actions.

      I've been contextualizing it a while that a lot of people assume the real world operates like Minecraft. In that there are freely and readily available resources everywhere and intended functions of those resources, and all you have to do is find the right things and put everything together and then hey you've got a house and a garden. You win.

    • Abraxiel
      ·
      3 years ago

      I see this an aspect of this often in places like AITA, where everyone collectively forgets that people get upset or tired or hungry or try to avoid embarassment. Even when it's apparent that someone is acting from such a cause, it all has to get collapsed down to who's right and who's wrong. This even compounds the issue, because if someone has a reason for why they said something nasty to their brother in law or whatever, but they're still judged to be in the wrong, people tend to inflate the offense so that any complexity to the interaction is less important.

      That's a tangent, but the point is that people really want our emotions and behaviour to be wholly suppressed by abstracted social mores and ill-defined ettiquette and rules. This is simply not where we are! We're animals, and a scared animal will bite. We have to work with this rather than just say everyone has to be better and then heap all of our pent up abuse and the inherent systemic violence on whoever gets caught out needing a twix, or who doesn't have the wherewithal to be a fucking striver while they're grinding out at an abusive job. I want to ask people all the time, "have you ever been angry, have you ever been afraid?" you can't think straight. Like you literally can't process information in the same way because your brain prioritizes "be aware and ready to avoid or confront a threat" at the expense of whatever dispassionate evaluation everyone enjoys when they hear about something from the outside, after the fact.

      And it's not like we have to just say, "well, everyone can just do whatever they want because they're only reacting to their experience," no! But we have to understand how it fucking happens and how to work with real, temperamental human beings. Sometimes that means forgiving an outburst, sometimes it means taking a lap to cool off before you talk to someone. Sometimes it means acknowledging that it's very unlikely for a person to be able to work full time, improve themselves, manage their household, and also go the extra mile to maintain best practices in everything while building a surplus to get ahead.

      kind of a rant, but this shit is in my head a lot.

    • UlyssesT
      ·
      edit-2
      7 days ago

      deleted by creator