I saw this :reddit-logo: post and it got me thinking. Maybe it's the intense sleep deprivation, but I can't even muster the energy to be angry. I'm just sad. I know that individual choice is largely a psyop, but if at least a third of the populace actively wants things to be worse, how can we change things for the better? I know that there are many, many loving and wonderful and kind people all around this country. But as we're continually worked harder and harder and grow more and more impoverished, even the kindest souls will burn out. And what are we all up against? Not just the :porky-happy: elite, but the average swine whose main enjoyment in life is pissing off and upsetting anyone who wants things to be better. What can we even do against this?
Your comment brought up some feelings that are hard to articulate. This might sound a little bazinga brained, but it's like we're all in a twisted simulation that some bored kid left running at high speed while he goes to the bathroom and we're in the end stages of all the parameters and rules breaking down
I had a fever dream once in which I was woken up from the simulation and learned it was a rehabilitative prison for reactionaries to demonstrate the end result of reactionary ideologies and the hell that results. I got to leave and live a normal life on probation in an advanced communist world and then, in the cruelest twist, it all melted away and I was back in my bed shaking and delirious.
I haven't been able to get that idea out of my head ever since, it just keeps growing and trying to elaborate on itself with further rationalizations. I don't believe it, of course, because it's far too hopeful and is dangerous on top of that, being fundamentally a dismissal of agency and responsibility (if we're all slowly-being-reformed monsters doomed to fail at doing anything good as a lesson in why it's bad when reactionaries win, then there's no reason to do anything but retreat into some mad hyper-purist devotion in the hopes of being judged as reformed, there's no consequences to anything apart from our continued suffering; taken seriously to its conclusions this is an absurdly nihilistic concept), but goddamn if it doesn't feel like things are actively being shaped to be as absurd and awful as possible for no point but to be absurd and awful.
At the very least it's an incredible short story idea
I've actually been debating writing a short story building on the premise, with some shitposty title like "The Torment Nexus But It's Good, Actually."