They get to feel superior to vast swaths of the population without doing anything.
Probably generally starting with either an inferiority complex, or being a sociopath.
I know some people are born into these mindsets. I know what it’s like to have been raised by a bigot; indoctrinated thoughts are the hardest to change.
I am convinced a large part of the problem is some people prefer convenient answers which make immediate sense, as opposed to nuanced truths.
Could it be that racism creates conditions which lead to a higher frequency of situations which will reinforce racist stereotypes? Too much thinking involved, it makes more sense that the blacks are inherently different.
You should do an AMA it would be nice to hear about your exp growing up like that and how you changed your life.
Unfortunately my experience is nothing short of common. Our current generation is the most tolerant in history, so naturally our parents will hold bigoted opinions.
If you want to hear a fascinating story, listen to Megan, who left the “God hates fags” church, and now tries to explain indoctrination.
I bookmarked this to. I am really filling up bookmarks with all these great links. So thank you.
Could it be that racism creates conditions which lead to a higher frequency of situations which will reinforce racist stereotypes? Too much thinking involved, it makes more sense that the blacks are inherently different.
I have struggled to communicate what you said in your first sentence in less than paragraphs several times and failed. Thank you for giving me an example of how to say it succinctly. Let’s hope I can remember/replicate that the next time I try to get the concept across to someone.
People become lonely, disaffected, and negative towards the world they live in. They then reach out to other communities, and due to one thing, or another, primarily their personality, they don’t get accepted. However, communities based around hate will gladly take them in, as long as they fit a profile they are looking for.
"Are you a young, white, male, that is dissatisfied with their life, and the world? Well, we accept you here. These things are not your fault, it is the fault of others. You aren’t the reason you cannot get a relationship with a women, it is the women who are fault for this. The reason it is so hard to get a good paying job? Immigrants. Why is housing so expensive, and hard to get, at least anywhere with a large enough job market to really advance somewhere? The Jews. Why can’t you rise on the corporate ladder where you work? Progressive policies… also jews, and immigrants. You are a white man, you should be rightfully at the top of the hierarchy. Women should be given, by their fathers, to men, on a mutually beneficial, transactional, basis. Women should submit to your authority. "
Or, in the case of incels “Are you depressed? Have no friends? No social life? No relationship with a woman? Are you an adult virgin, loser? Well that is because women are evil. We will accept you, unlike the evil female species.”
They love building strawmen dont they.
Everyone loves building strawmen. If you think only “they” do it, it’s because you’re unquestioningly accepting the ones that confirm your biases.
So in that thought women are prostitues? Because a beneficial transaction?
Not prostitutes. A lot of these groups believe we need to go back to when women were literally their property. You got a women because it created bonds within the community, and they often paid you to take her.
As I don’t believe in women being property but I would totally take Majorie Taylor Green as property. Then I could smack the shit out of her until she quits saying stupid ass shit that riles the American public in anger
Well, if she gets the hyper conservative, very old school, way of doing things, that she wants, you wont have to worry about seeing, or hearing, her again. She will be in the house, and not be allowed to be in the government. I mean she won’t even be able to vote.
Echo chambers which most social media apps and websites really love to create
When you hollow out the middle class (in the US sense of the term), people go looking for a narrative to explain it, to give them a reason they don’t get (or can’t give their children) the lifestyle they were promised in the media.
One narrative that fits is corporate greed, late-stage capitalism, enshittification and staggering corruption.
Another narrative, however, is all this rampant social change going on, people changing the demographics, changing the rules, changing definitions, changing the comfortable rules of thumb they were used to - and now everything’s shit, the two must be connected, we need to slam the brakes and catch our breath, perhaps even go backwards, and maybe conditions will follow suit. Even if they don’t, change is a loss of control, and that’s scary. We need to pull our heads in, hunker down and take back what’s rightfully ours from those we’ve been forced to share it with.
Once people start looking through that lens, everything starts self-selecting to fit - and they start thinking yeah, maybe those guys had a point.
Yes, there’s horrible shitty filter bubbles on social media and 4chan and everything else, but this stuff doesn’t take root without the underlying socioeconomic issues driving it.
As for incels - I don’t think people realise just how much social privilege is involved in having a peer group during childhood and adolescence to develop the give and take of social skills necessary for actually courting a partner. Consider the weird kids, the fat kids, the (disproportionally) poor kids, the ones with a fucked up home life, who didn’t get to form stable relationships, who didn’t get the practice at human-wrangling, who maybe ended up in a socially-isolating job, who had no ‘third place’ to hang out with people, to socialise and to meet people they might be interested in.
And once people start out without social skills, it can be really hard to pick them up; the embarrassment and exclusion that can follow small fuckups get exponentially worse as time goes on. And you don’t have to be painfully awkward, you just have to… not have game. Just enough to kick you to the bottom of the rankings, so failure (or the likelihood thereof) stacks up and becomes progressively discouraging, so you don’t try and don’t get practice.
And then it’s the same situation: the world doesn’t work for them the way they were told it would; they do all the things that they’ve heard were supposed to work (but without any of the nuance needed to do it successfully), and it just doesn’t.
For some of them, they feel like they’re getting singled out to get ripped off, or that the whole damn system is rigged; it’s a big club and they aren’t in it, as it were. So they look for a narrative, they look for someone to blame, they look for the bad guy, they look for a coherent explanation of why they’re the victim here. And of course that spirals out of control and ends up in a very bad place.
Fantastic summary! Thank you!
It makes a lot of sense when you put in like that, and makes me feel like helping people instead of ignoring/hating/looking down on them. How did you get these insights? Are you in the field of psychology?
As for helping - I think that once they get far enough down the path, there’s probably not much you can do for them. But compassion is always a good thing no matter who you spend it on.
As is sparing a thought for the poorly-socialised, and for the lack of opportunities people have to just hang out in any kind of casual social setting, if you’re not already part of a friend group.
Someone works a shit job in a dingy office with three people they hate and no general public flowing through, they’re exhausted at the end of the day and even if they had a place to go they just want to go home. Weekends are for laundry and chores and recovering from the week - and besides, what are they going to do, head to some bar and spend all their money drinking alone, just getting aloner?
Most of the opportunities out there rely on having either a pre-existing set of people to hang out with, or enough acquired charisma that they wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place.
Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.
Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.
I know. At least in the US. It sounds wonky, but think it through: Cars and zoning law. Between the two of those things, there are fewer and fewer third places. There’s nowhere to go to just be around other people. First (home) and second (edit: work) are incredibly isolated, too. You get in the car and pull out of the garage, and interact with nobody until you pull in to the lot at work. At best, you interact briefly with fast food workers for a few seconds at the drive-thru window. There’s no “local,” no stores, no restaurants, no cafés in the neighborhood; you drive to those. They draw from a large area, so you never see the same people twice there.
Proximity has always been the best builder of community in human history, and we’ve done away with it.
A little empathy goes a long way. There are some truely shit evil people in the world, but most people are good people who werent given the same chances, lost their way, etc.
Nah, I’m just old - and I was the weird homeschooled kid; there but for sheer blind undeserved luck go I.
The people who claim that women are too emotional to be leaders, are themselves too emotional to make rational life decisions
I maybe wrong in this but has any world leader that is a woman ever gone to war?
In modern times? IDK, but historically female leaders tended to engage in more war as a way to legitimize their rule, whether instigator or not. Kosem Sultan, Queen Isabella of Spain, and Catherine de’ Medici to name a few, but to quote a Quartz article:
“In fact, between 1480 and 1913, Europe’s queens were 27% more likely than its kings to wage war, according to a National Bureau of Economics … And like Isabella, queens were also more likely to amass new territory during their reigns, found the paper’s authors, economists Oeindrila Dube and S.P. Harish.”
Bigotry has never been about ignorance. It has always been about manufacturing social division through propaganda.
Prob bcs they believe in conspiracy theories or watch and use and engage in sites that show this info
Why the link to conspiracy theories?
Why would knowledge of MKUltra or the Iran–Contra turn someone right wing?
I’ve seen more than a few people assert “horseshoe theory” on this subject. Since the Far Left and the Far Right are the same, they turn you right by sending you left.
Anti-Americanism makes you a Trump supporter or Xi supporter or whatever. And these fucked secret programs from the 60s and 70s make you anti-American. Ergo…
Bcs before I would see them believing in conspiracy theories most of them where in Instagram
It’s been going on long before insta lol
yeah like those “free speech” social media and propaganda sites
I mean before social media lol, before the internet even.
oh yeahhhh during the late 1930s till mid 1940s,etc
I would imagine it gives you the taste of “everyone is lying to you” and then latch on to… Other people still lying to you, but it’s just randoms online, they’d never lie like govt or the MSM.
It’s easy to fall into if you don’t have the critical thinking skills to sift through what is/isn’t bullshit.
Other people still lying to you, but it’s just randoms online, they’d never lie like govt or the MSM
I’m still not getting it. How does this lead to right wing? Why can’t conspiracies lead to left wing support?
Why should they lead to any particular political persuasion?
I think it leads people to the fringe in general, I wasn’t making the case for right wing specifically.
OK. I see.
I think this occurs most when a mainstream source mixes opinion and fact. People hear the opinion, over time it turns out to be incorrect so people move away from the mainstream.
When a fringe commentator states an opinion that later turns out to be incorrect, those errors are forgiven (or forgotten) or a similar replacement fringe content provider is consumed.
Blaming others for things going wrong doesn’t require thinking and being self reflecting.
External locus of control.
Bad things in someone’s life is not their fault, but the fault of whatever scapegoat.
Can’t get a girlfriend? It’s women’s fault.
Can’t get a job? It’s illegal immigrants.
Can’t afford to do the things you like? It’s the government taking too many taxes.
Whatever problem someone has, they are looking to blame someone rather than make any changes in their own life.
Social media algorithms present different things to different people. So if you fall for a grift, the algorithm will just show you things that support the grift and never show anything that debunks it.
Someone going down a weird rabbit hole will stay on that for a long time, watching many ads along the way. Someone that starts to think “hey maybe there’s something to this thing” then immediately sees something debunking it may conclude “well that last video was a waste of time” and may decide to go do something else that’s a more worthwhile use of their time. End result, they watch fewer ads. Less revenue for the social media companies.
Weird internet rabbit holes are more profitable than seeing contradicting opinions. So the algorithms are tuned to send people down rabbit holes and not offer information contradicting them.
Yes, but it’s important to note that confirmation bias is always present in our views of the world because our brain tends to keep things simple by prefering confirming to contradicting information. It just has been amplified by recommendation algorithms meant to increase engagement by showing you “more of the stuff you like”, thus trapping you in a filter bubble you might not even be aware of.
I just confronted a guy I know who told me with a straight face that poor people struggle with budgeting and that’s why they’re poor.
I asked him where he got that info. He then sent me a bunch of YouTubers.
Payday loans sort of suggest this. Bit it’s more how society is biased to keep poor people poor.
Payday loans don’t suggest this. Those are predatory businesses aimed at the poor and desperate.
When you’re one month from disaster and you break a leg, it’s a payday loan or your family doesn’t have a home/food when you work a job without paid leave. And good luck with the disability approval, because even if it eventually comes through, you are on the hook until it does.
Being poor has very little to do with budgeting. I’m sure a substantial portion, if not the majority of them, could figure out how to budget with a $100k income instead of a $30k income.
I agree. My point was that rich people don’t take payday loans, but i recognise that not being able to afford a safetly cushion doesn’t necessarily imply bad planning.
rich people don’t take payday loans
Some do, depending on their circumstances. But when you’ve got a big income it’s easier to get out from under the debt.
Most rich people just use credit cards, though. They’re arguably worse than payday lenders, since the credit limits are much higher. But they’re also very risk averse, so they don’t extend credit to the lower income groups.
Payday lenders and other loan sharks have to spend more on collections and run tighter margins as a result. Far easier to be a credit card company and simply wage a finger at someone’s credit rating to extort payment than to actually execute a repo.
Those are predatory businesses aimed at the poor and desperate.
society is biased to keep poor people poor.
Seems like you agree
This youtube series is a great way to show how someone gets inundated and can turn https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ&si=Vi0nUXZmyOhQ1-Pv
But here is somethings I noticed from my journey out of the right wing from my high school days.
First we were religious and we choose good decisions and other people’s choices were unwise and their fault but even though we lived in the same projects, our choices and how we lived their was unfortunate and their’s was their fault. It wasn’t explicit racism it was culture of racism. We were scared because we didn’t understand and thought we were superior since we were trying. Then we got better off and were in church more we got inundated with right wing propaganda on the economy and Frieman econmics blaming the government and socialism. We wanted to protect our jobs and our jobs blamed the government why they had to end manufacturing jobs in America. I graduated high school in 2010. I saw hatred towards Obama and noticed my side was with the KKK and I questioned it. That is how I got out. But if I kept to my beliefs I would have hated black people and others more. Thinking I was superior as a WASP (White Anglo Saxon protestant) since I made good decisions. My parents told me I could work through college and buy a house and everything and not to take out debt. So I tried that. It was impossible.
I blamed myself for not being good enough but I also didn’t do it right because I was testing it out and not using and abusing my connections. Which is how you get ahead. When I figured out I wasn’t enough and started to work with the people I know I was able to do more. But I could have blamed DEI stuff why I couldn’t get into college or get better jobs. But it was I just wasn’t good enough and the market is barren in Delaware.
My few relationships break ups I could have blamed it all on women and got a negative attitude with that too. Also since I was raised in the church a bit I could have said they should be a trad wife. But bleh
Back to being a Wasp. I could have blamed my failures and society failures on racist things or the color of my skin but I was lucky to realize it was the rich who fucked us all and the governments fault for letting it happen.
Short answer: it’s basic human nature if you don’t specifically work against it. Many people work against it, but not everyone. The ones that do not work against it mostly don’t because the environment they grew up in doesn’t do this, so they never started working against it. Later in life it’s difficult to change and admit you were wrong.
Hating other people is not basic human nature. It’s learned behavior.
I mean the specifics like who you hate, in what way, is learned, but the hate itself is basic. You can’t tell me hate isn’t one of the most basic human emotions.
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Disenfranchisement is a hell of a drug. A lot don’t believe in the ideology at first, but are forced into it because they lacked proper role models when they were young.
Good use of the D word haven’t heard or read it in a while…no sarcasm
Armok and Alad at Anagra.
Garfield is wise. I vote for Garfield as dictator for life.
Lisan-al Gahib!!
