Americans are not quite as psycho and as selfish as we seem outwardly
I would argue that there has been a shift to exactly that, and it’s tied to everything happening alongside for-profit health care. America has a fetish for “self reliance” that has IMO been corrupted into “You’re on your own, sucker. Got mine.” instead of the ability to build a life from the land, which is likely part of the reason self-reliance ever became so important. Self-reliance also gets pushed by those who have the luxury to say it, already safe in some kind of wealth, or at least to those they look down on who have a hard time rising even to a modest level of financial self actualization. Self-reliance is pretty much the same as “picking oneself up by his/her bootstraps” these days.
The grind of the Capitalist Machine gets worse every year with the never-ending pressure to make the quarterly report better and more profitable, infinitely. That improvement comes at the cost of, well…ever increasing costs, more expensive benefits like healthcare, and having to work more for less buying power. All that on top of the fact that one bad event in one’s life could send you into poverty because that self reliance twisted into bootstraps has dictated slashing taxes, and slashing those taxes has had a focus on destroying social programs that help people not be so poor, because it’s your fault if you’re not self-reliant, and people have decided that it’s better to hoard what they can, particularly their money, and blame others for being have-nots. Why should I help some lazy (fill in the blank) when I have (insert difficulty here)?
I have very little to disagree with here, and I somewhat accept your premise that we’re being driven to be the thing we’re behaving as. I mean, that’d just be “fake it til you make it” in a particularly gross context.
However - I’ve drank beers (and bad shots, why not) around exactly the kinda folks you’d expect to find in some of the diviest bars in parts of rural America that barely (or don’t) have a grocery store. Some of those folks are irredeemable, don’t get me wrong. A whole lot of them, though, are truly decent folks who’ve been completely misled.
That was a work thing that I hated and left behind some years ago, but I know very personally two current Trump voters. If you reduce those 2 people to a ballot, pretty easy to condemn them. If you know them the way I do, it’s just blatantly obvious they have no idea who and what they voted for. They were fooled, conned, by a known successful conman. It’s really that simple.
Because they are constantly conned and have no idea how they are voting somehow makes them good and ok? Idk still seems insanely ignorant and dangerous to me.
I’m not making excuses for them, and I intend to keep track of the most egregious things that happen under the upcoming Trump administration so I can say to them “is this what you wanted? We knew this would happen and voted against it, you voted for it, is this what you wanted?”
And I never said their ignorance makes them good and okay, what a silly idea. They are good people first - one of them, for example, fought for custody of his kids and raised them as a single dad. It was super necessary and he did it very well. That’s a few steps beyond just “okay”, anyway.
There’s that line from MiB: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”
While not entirely accurate (there are plenty of dumb individuals, willfully so or otherwise), to paraphrase it a little that encountering individuals one-on-one is almost always great. People can be really interesting, and are generally pretty cool. As soon as hot button topics pop up, the ideology kicks in, and they’re not so cool or interesting anymore. They get angry, mulish, and make it personal.
While I do know just what you mean (and find that line useful too), I’m not describing the same thing you are. I’m describing people I know very well who don’t substantially disagree with me on hot button topics, but have been fooled into voting against the things they actually care about.
I’m not describing casual acquaintances that don’t work out once people get to know one another, I’ve absolutely had that experience though.
That’s not on the people though, but the system. What has been said in this thread - that US citizens ain’t as bad as they’re being thought of - can be applied to literally anyone, anywhere. Having a background of abuse and having learned of the botched Stanford Prison nonsense as well as the Tongan Castaways, I came to believe that we are indeed inherently good as long as we’re properly cared for, i.e. no existential fears or neglect. It’s hard not to immediately point out awful shit being done, but once you look into the people conducting it you can always find either a cause for their individual worldview to be so corrupted or a systemic cause making them believe to act morally correct. That, or the responsibility is put on someone else freeing them from any of it - as can be seen with the Stanford Prison Experiment, where the guards were acting kind and humane until being instructed by the Professor to not be; who held both responsibility and authority, fucking the whole shit up. This was only discovered around 2015. Nobody looked closer back then as the original believe of “human bad, human needs to be controlled” was initially confirmed, something culturally engraved and pushed by books and movies like “Lord of the Flies”.
Causing existential fear by putting everything you need behind a paywall - even down to something as fundamental as water in many cases - and enshrining unethical behaviour into law and an economical system created with the expectation of humans being inherently greedy, selfish and only held back by fear… the only reason why a society like that remains stable IS that people ain’t inherently bad despite everything. Same for other countries.
Probably one reason why religion is so alluring to many, another US thing that can turn out to become a problem (like right now, christo-fascism is a thing). The desire for good, and to be good in a world that, in a believe of fellow humans being bad and selfish, we keep making worse unnecessarily.
So yeah, we the people of this world are fine. It’s the US system that weirds me the fuck out.
I’m not familiar with Tongan Castaways but will have to give it a look. I felt similarly abused by the revelations of the Stanford Prison Experiment - my understanding of the experiment (pre reveal) did shape, to some degree, my understanding of humanity.
As I’ve gotten older and times have gotten more fraught, it’s become clearer and clearer that most people are fundamentally pretty decent, pretty “meh” at knowing what’s important to focus on (or even likely or possible to be accurate), and - critically - most of us are very vulnerable to fear-based manipulation. Those three traits are not as discordant as they seem.
Unrelatedly, I find it odd but endearing that you seem to use “ain’t” kinda routinely, as a German, lol. Even lotsa Americans don’t. That’s not a veiled accusation, btw, you seem genuine to me and I simply wonder how you came by it. Sharing things is great, for my part as much as I love odd beers and experimentation, y’all’s Reinheitsgebot has improved my life in a non-trivial way, hahaha
“Ain’t” is fairly regional in the US, and also kind of a class indicator. Class is not quite right but it’s close. In general you find it used a lot more frequently in the south, and also generally in lower income populations. It’s also less common among folks for whom English is their 2nd (+) language.
If you like it, keep using it! Language should feel good.
Edit: missed your “please tell me” part - it does stick out a bit the way you use it. It’s a very casual and informal word, almost to the point of being crass, and it doesn’t normally get used in the kinds of eloquent writing you do.
Oh yes, the US system is based more and more on “crabs in a bucket”. I mean, it’s always kinda been like that, but now it’s industrialized. Get yours, get famous, fuck everyone else.
I would argue that there has been a shift to exactly that, and it’s tied to everything happening alongside for-profit health care. America has a fetish for “self reliance” that has IMO been corrupted into “You’re on your own, sucker. Got mine.” instead of the ability to build a life from the land, which is likely part of the reason self-reliance ever became so important. Self-reliance also gets pushed by those who have the luxury to say it, already safe in some kind of wealth, or at least to those they look down on who have a hard time rising even to a modest level of financial self actualization. Self-reliance is pretty much the same as “picking oneself up by his/her bootstraps” these days.
The grind of the Capitalist Machine gets worse every year with the never-ending pressure to make the quarterly report better and more profitable, infinitely. That improvement comes at the cost of, well…ever increasing costs, more expensive benefits like healthcare, and having to work more for less buying power. All that on top of the fact that one bad event in one’s life could send you into poverty because that self reliance twisted into bootstraps has dictated slashing taxes, and slashing those taxes has had a focus on destroying social programs that help people not be so poor, because it’s your fault if you’re not self-reliant, and people have decided that it’s better to hoard what they can, particularly their money, and blame others for being have-nots. Why should I help some lazy (fill in the blank) when I have (insert difficulty here)?
I have very little to disagree with here, and I somewhat accept your premise that we’re being driven to be the thing we’re behaving as. I mean, that’d just be “fake it til you make it” in a particularly gross context.
However - I’ve drank beers (and bad shots, why not) around exactly the kinda folks you’d expect to find in some of the diviest bars in parts of rural America that barely (or don’t) have a grocery store. Some of those folks are irredeemable, don’t get me wrong. A whole lot of them, though, are truly decent folks who’ve been completely misled.
That was a work thing that I hated and left behind some years ago, but I know very personally two current Trump voters. If you reduce those 2 people to a ballot, pretty easy to condemn them. If you know them the way I do, it’s just blatantly obvious they have no idea who and what they voted for. They were fooled, conned, by a known successful conman. It’s really that simple.
Edit: redundancy
Because they are constantly conned and have no idea how they are voting somehow makes them good and ok? Idk still seems insanely ignorant and dangerous to me.
I’m not making excuses for them, and I intend to keep track of the most egregious things that happen under the upcoming Trump administration so I can say to them “is this what you wanted? We knew this would happen and voted against it, you voted for it, is this what you wanted?”
And I never said their ignorance makes them good and okay, what a silly idea. They are good people first - one of them, for example, fought for custody of his kids and raised them as a single dad. It was super necessary and he did it very well. That’s a few steps beyond just “okay”, anyway.
There’s that line from MiB: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”
While not entirely accurate (there are plenty of dumb individuals, willfully so or otherwise), to paraphrase it a little that encountering individuals one-on-one is almost always great. People can be really interesting, and are generally pretty cool. As soon as hot button topics pop up, the ideology kicks in, and they’re not so cool or interesting anymore. They get angry, mulish, and make it personal.
While I do know just what you mean (and find that line useful too), I’m not describing the same thing you are. I’m describing people I know very well who don’t substantially disagree with me on hot button topics, but have been fooled into voting against the things they actually care about.
I’m not describing casual acquaintances that don’t work out once people get to know one another, I’ve absolutely had that experience though.
That’s not on the people though, but the system. What has been said in this thread - that US citizens ain’t as bad as they’re being thought of - can be applied to literally anyone, anywhere. Having a background of abuse and having learned of the botched Stanford Prison nonsense as well as the Tongan Castaways, I came to believe that we are indeed inherently good as long as we’re properly cared for, i.e. no existential fears or neglect. It’s hard not to immediately point out awful shit being done, but once you look into the people conducting it you can always find either a cause for their individual worldview to be so corrupted or a systemic cause making them believe to act morally correct. That, or the responsibility is put on someone else freeing them from any of it - as can be seen with the Stanford Prison Experiment, where the guards were acting kind and humane until being instructed by the Professor to not be; who held both responsibility and authority, fucking the whole shit up. This was only discovered around 2015. Nobody looked closer back then as the original believe of “human bad, human needs to be controlled” was initially confirmed, something culturally engraved and pushed by books and movies like “Lord of the Flies”.
Causing existential fear by putting everything you need behind a paywall - even down to something as fundamental as water in many cases - and enshrining unethical behaviour into law and an economical system created with the expectation of humans being inherently greedy, selfish and only held back by fear… the only reason why a society like that remains stable IS that people ain’t inherently bad despite everything. Same for other countries.
Probably one reason why religion is so alluring to many, another US thing that can turn out to become a problem (like right now, christo-fascism is a thing). The desire for good, and to be good in a world that, in a believe of fellow humans being bad and selfish, we keep making worse unnecessarily.
So yeah, we the people of this world are fine. It’s the US system that weirds me the fuck out.
I’m not familiar with Tongan Castaways but will have to give it a look. I felt similarly abused by the revelations of the Stanford Prison Experiment - my understanding of the experiment (pre reveal) did shape, to some degree, my understanding of humanity.
As I’ve gotten older and times have gotten more fraught, it’s become clearer and clearer that most people are fundamentally pretty decent, pretty “meh” at knowing what’s important to focus on (or even likely or possible to be accurate), and - critically - most of us are very vulnerable to fear-based manipulation. Those three traits are not as discordant as they seem.
Unrelatedly, I find it odd but endearing that you seem to use “ain’t” kinda routinely, as a German, lol. Even lotsa Americans don’t. That’s not a veiled accusation, btw, you seem genuine to me and I simply wonder how you came by it. Sharing things is great, for my part as much as I love odd beers and experimentation, y’all’s Reinheitsgebot has improved my life in a non-trivial way, hahaha
Wait, isn’t “ain’t” commonly used? If there is some “undertone” to it of being not genuine please tell me, I would never know otherwise. 😅
“Ain’t” is fairly regional in the US, and also kind of a class indicator. Class is not quite right but it’s close. In general you find it used a lot more frequently in the south, and also generally in lower income populations. It’s also less common among folks for whom English is their 2nd (+) language.
If you like it, keep using it! Language should feel good.
Edit: missed your “please tell me” part - it does stick out a bit the way you use it. It’s a very casual and informal word, almost to the point of being crass, and it doesn’t normally get used in the kinds of eloquent writing you do.
Oh yes, the US system is based more and more on “crabs in a bucket”. I mean, it’s always kinda been like that, but now it’s industrialized. Get yours, get famous, fuck everyone else.