When it has been demonstrated over and over again, how little they think of anyone beneath them.
they’re just subs that are into bdsm
Financial domination
I think most people are incapable of understanding just how much damage the rich do to the working class on a regular basis.
The rich kill more people every year, through business and political decisions, than any terrorist group or military. Often by being the puppet masters of those terrorist groups and militaries.
The rich are humans, that’s just fact. However, people need to wake the fuck up and see the richest and most powerful in the world fundamentally lack humanity. They are fundamentally isolated from human beings through their wealth and influence.
Why do some people think dehumanizing anyone is fundamentally OK?
There are actual psychopaths and sociopaths. They are humans. They got that way not from Stan Lee’s pen, but by real experiences in our actual world.
Making them a caricature will in no way help with the problem.
Yes, but it makes us feel better about ourselves.
/s but also not.
What they need isn’t to be caricaturized, it’s to be put on a guillotine.
Human or not doesn’t mean shit: evil is evil.
so if i become wealthy by winning the lottery then i should get my head chopped off? after all wealthy is wealthy and they are all evil. …
that is the dumbest take i’ve seen so far.
just because you get wealthy doesn’t mean you are evil. how this is hard to understand is beyond me. I’m about done with lemmy and this type of thinking. are there evil people? yes. but just doing a blanket statement is just showing a lack of judgement and piss poor logic.
Lol, go ahead and point me to a single example of a lottery winner being cited as one of the oppressive ‘elite’. And if you are able to actually fine one, my answer will be “yes, in fact, that would should have their head in a basket”. Having a mountain of cash dropped on you, vs exploiting a mountain of people to obtain mountains of cash are not the same thing. How this is hard to understand is beyond me.
I’m about done with lemmy and this type of thinking.
Yeah if you’re gonna come here and play damage control for evil people, you’re not gonna have a good time on Lemmy.
Read some of the comments in response to my comment. You will see people are including in lottery winners to this conversation. And no one said lottery winners weren’t part of the conversation. In fact what they were saying is all wealthy people. Let me say that again, all wealthy people.
And those comments sum it up nicely:
TL;DR: Share your wealth or get fucked, parasite
The message here being that it’s not inherently the wealth that’s the problem, but how that wealth is being used. If you land in that situation and immediately become some kind of Scrooge McDuck character: to the guillotine with you!
…but again, lottery winners are not the focus of the whole eat the rich mindset: if that’s an issue you think needs to be tackled, I’d direct your focus instead to lottery systems, not just the lottery winners. Focusing on things like lottery winners is a distraction from the insanely long list of higher priorities like the Musk and Bezos figures of the world. So why even bring it up unless that distraction is your goal?
I’m not necessarily agreeing with the head chopping part on a general basis, but consider this:
If you become wealthy (which is a nebulous term, but w/e) in this system you automatically gain power over the life of other people, while you yourself break free from being forced into laboring for others. You are not going to spend it all on consumables, so you will likely use it to pay other people to do stuff for you, that you either can’t be bothered to do yourself or are not skilled to do yourself. So you’ll be able to live off of the labor of others, less fortunate. You are extracting value from them, maybe even creating some kind of dependency through the power imbalance.
TL;DR: Share your wealth or get fucked, parasite ;)
(and no, extracting value for your personal benefit is not sharing)
E: So, it’s more of: do you have the means to free yourself from labor, while at the same time you exploit the people that don’t have that freedom, then your wealth becomes a problem and through your wealth you do become a problem for the working class.
I’m just going to respond to the tldr.
I’m very small reasonable percentage. But that’s for me to decide what is reasonable. Not anybody else. After that, I’m going to live a better life and yes, I’ll hire people on to do stuff that I don’t want to do or not capable of doing. And I’m going to travel the world and see things that a lot of people can’t do. I don’t have to share beyond that. So I guess I’ll just go get fucked, but hey, you know what I don’t give a shit. As long as a person is sharing a reasonable percentage of their income, that’s good enough. Telling a person to share so much that they can’t afford to pay other people to do the stuff they don’t want to do or aren’t capable of is in my opinion, just stupid. Tell me a person to share so much that they can no longer travel around the world and see nice things and live a better life in my opinion is just stupid.
Also be cognizant that in that scenario you would have benefitted greatly from a system which does immense harm to a subset of the population by exploiting addiction.
I’m perfectly ok with dehumanizing literal flag waving Nazis. I give them no quarter. If a Nazi fell into the train tracks in front of me, I would just walk away.
They’re human, and should be destroyed mercilessly by any means necessary. There’s no contradiction in recognizing the humanity of people who will unfortunately need to be killed to stop them killing the rest of us indiscriminately.
Dehumanization is pointless, and leads to dangerous misanalysis (like underestimating them). Honestly, it’s also just a cowardly coping mechanism to avoid the harsh realities behind the idealistic moral frameworks we’re brought up with.
Isn’t dehumanizing kind of the whole Nazi thing?
are you saying all wealthy people are nazis? that’s about the only way that I can see to read that statement (combined with the comment you are responding to)
I mean the vast majority of wealthy people are in fact happy and willing collaborators with Nazis because it’s advantageous to their wealth and power
They do not consider or even understand us as humans
vast majority of wealthy people
Honest question: how many Billionaires have you had personal interactions with?
I work for a huge corporation and once in a blue moon I’m on an email thread or God help me an actual meeting with the CxOs. Doesn’t mean I know them in any real sense. But I mean… as well as you know bosses 3 levels up if you have to report on projects once in a while.
I am very politically active in my swing state. Some Billionares have been happy to spend a little face time with me. Doesn’t mean I know them at all – plus, these ones are either directly politicians, or supporters of specific politicians. But I know them as well as you might know the guy at the mall kiosk where you had to get your phone fixed like 4 times in 6 months.
In none of these interactions do I feel like I’m dealing with a different species.
I can’t think of any I’d want to take care of my children. About the only common thread is the type-A high-acheiver type. Which is very common in US corporate management culture across the board.
I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with a few legitimate billionaires but mostly just millionaires
Last one said Mamdani needs to be euthanized for wanting to tax him
To be honest sounds like you don’t know them well enough
Millionaires and billionaires are utterly different cats. Wage earners become millionaires all the time – save, invest wisely, yadda. I know many people in that category.
I know many people who’ve become millionaires and the vast majority are now apathetic collaborators who do not care about anything but their personal pleasure and permanent financial success
Some are still regular people who just have money, a few even do good things, but the vast majority are not like us anymore
I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with a few legitimate billionaires
Unless you come from wealth yourself, I sincerely doubt this. Unless you think working at a corporation owned by a billionaire counts or something.
You underestimate the odds of encountering one in their own territory. There are only a few metropolitan areas in America where most wealthy people live and if you live/work long enough in one and get to know enough people you eventually have some chance encounters
Indeed, the dehumanizing is always associated with collectivism vs individualism, and thence to collective guilt, and collective punishment.
All done with moral self-justification.
That’s because it’s morally justified to prioritize the needs of many over the needs of a few.
What are you talking about?
-
The comment they are responding to says “Why do some people think dehumanizing anyone is fundamentally OK?” [I agree btw]
-
They reply with an extreme example of “anyone”: literal flag-waving Nazis.
At no point are “all wealthy people” mentioned in that statement.
-
Dehumanising and giving no quarter are different things.
Psychopaths and sociopaths who dehumanize others deserve to be dehumanized in return. Why should you owe them something they won’t offer you in return?
There’s a good argument regarding the tolerance paradox, and why it’s ethically and morally justified to not tolerate extreme levels of unethical behaviors.
I’ve come to view tolerance not as a default position, but rather as a contract which people are defaulted into, if you’re breaking it by refusing to be bound by it, you’re no longer protected by it either.
Tolerance is tangential to humanization. You can be tolerant of a human. You can also be intolerant of a human.
Tolerance and humanization are not the same thing. Understanding that terrible behaviors are human does not mean we must tolerate them.
There’s a difference between not tolerating and dehumanizing. You don’t need to dehumanize someone that you don’t tolerate the behavior of, and it’s also possible to dehumanize someone but tolerate their behavior.
They’re simply two different things. Slightly related maybe, but distinct.
Numerous reasons.
Lots of people don’t want anyone to disturb the system…”upend the apple cart” as it were. A known, even if shitty, is still better than the unknown. Like people pining for lives under the rule of some harsh autocrat. Even if your neighbor disappeared one night thanks to the State Police, it was better than worrying about the less-harsh policing that lets kids get away with graffiti-ing everything or the petty theft you’re always hearing about.
Also, if they come for the rich people, they’ll come for you. If they tax the rich, they’ll tax you. If you support the rich, people will remember that, and they’ll come for you.
Maybe a little of the “I could be rich someday” idea too, so they support obscene wealth with the idea they could somehow also be rich no matter how minuscule the chance. The irony being the wealthy are the ones supporting barriers preventing you from even achieving financial security, forget ever being wealthy.
bingo.
easy to see in russia. in the 90s russia was democratic and free… but in economic collapse and choas. a lot of people quickly wanted to go back to soviet stability and the subsequent oppression and Putin capitalized on that and he’s popular because he vastly improved the russian economy, despite cracking down on freedom.
people value stability and predictability. life is optimistic when you have a clear vision and path to achieve your goals. it is miserable when there isn’t a clear path to your goals.
Humans will anthromorphize anything
Because they get paid to do so.
I think the unfortunate truth is that many non-evil people would be just as evil if given the opportunity. Or to frame it slightly different: I believe that too much money and/or power is what turns most people evil over time.
Or to frame it slightly different: I believe that too much money and/or power is what turns most people evil over time.
What are the mechanics of this?
Instead, I believe the means of acquiring money/power from those who have enough of it creates pressures (say, a newspaper sponsored by Coca-Cola is pressured into not reporting on Coca-Cola’s problems), along with the hyperrealities created by conventional rich lifestyles (mainly associating with other wealthy people, being used to paying people to do work instead of doing it yourself, all that kind of thing) distorting ones worldview and alienating them from most of society and its issues.
Have you considered the possibility that only evil people are capable of acquiring that much power and wealth because that much power and wealth is only possible by evil means?
Lotteries exist. Boom, disproven.
It’s not even an exception, really. Being part of just the right startup at just the right time, or coming out of the right mother basically is a lottery. Meanwhile, poor mean assholes exist too.
Lottery winnings are paid out from a pool of money that’s filled by ticket purchases; every dollar won comes from the pocket of someone who bought a ticket and lost, after the lottery company takes their cut. Even if the winners aren’t exploiting the losers directly, the system itself is exploitative, and any winnings are derived from that exploitation. As the old saying goes, “the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math.”
There’s science that backs this, but you don’t get that way without being a piece of shit beforehand.
That level of wealth power privilege does in fact damage your brain, everything precious about humanity drains out through your orders.
Next question is what happened that made one ‘a piece of shit beforehand’.
Yeah. There’s a lot of work to be done there, but once you’re a billionaire, you’re straight up not human anymore
If they would do evil given the chance, that makes them evil. It’s like a poorly forged piece of metal with a crack built in, that holds together until put to the test. The crack was always there.
There’s more angles to it of course - mistakes, temporary dispositions, the average of all behavior, etc.
From a philosophical perspective, I find it quite difficult to measure a person’s evilness objectively.
Assuming a person is born evil due to their genetic material, is it then actually their fault? Shouldn’t that be considered rather as a medical condition?
Assuming a person is not born evil, but they turned evil due to outer influencing factors (parents, society, economic situation, luck, bad luck…), is it then actually their fault? Or are the outer factors the ones to blame in such a case?
I agree to the ‘the crack was always there’ statement. But personally I think that all of us humans naturally have this crack. Given the right parameters, this crack can heal to a level where it’s barely notable. But under less optimal conditions I guess more or less every human can turn (be turned) into a monster.
In terms of billionaires my opinion is that a) we should implement measures to avoid them in the first place and b) find ways to take away their power.
But other than that I would prefer a way to heal their (often abnormal) crack and try to make them again valuable members of society again. Revenge and punishment (especially death penalty) should never be the focus of corrective measures, no matter the crime or misdemeanour.
I think it’s increasingly easier to feel empathy for a killer the more steps there are between them and the trigger. I personally find it much more jarring when someone can just fully turn off empathy when given context. A lot of the time what you’re talking about goes hand-in-hand with dehumanizing the impoverished, that’s the one I can’t fathom.
Because, for all of the awfulness they bring to the rest of us, they are human.
Humans who the other humans desperately need to be stripped of their wealth and power, and for whom the doing of which might offer them some small chance to save themselves from the yawning void of more more moremoremoremoremoremore
This. As soon as we treat them as “only monsters,” we start to think that “regular humans” aren’t capable of monstrous things.
Yeah we humanize them because it’s important to remember that essentially anyone that ends up in their position will behave similarly. They aren’t demons, they’re humans. We should stop putting people in their position.
Hot take, we should deliberately dehumanize rich people.
Some.people priase Hitler.
Because Hitler restored the German economy and German pride after decades of it being shit. That’s how he won the average citizens over.
Germany was a fucking mess throughout the 1910s and 1920s. The Weimar republic was a shitty government. Hitler came in and a few years later Germany was a superpower again.
I’m pretty sure you’re trolling but, Hitler took advantage of a weakened Germany after everything in WW1. When someone is weak, that’s what you do. He was an opportunist, a cunning one at that. Nothing he did was bold or bright, things just fell into place after little to no effort on his part.
And Hitler did not make Germany a superpower. He only had maybe 3 or 4 good years of a run before whatever so-called “brilliance” he had on the field of war, ran right out and plummeted Germany’s reputation and impression on the globe with it.
No I’m telling you facts that are inconvenient to your narrative that Hitler was absolutely evil and couldn’t possible do anything good. He did lots of good things. The question is, who was it good for? And for the average German they benefited tremendously.
No, he had 10 years of a good run until the war started going south in 1942/43. He came to power in '33 and spend a decade rebuilding the country, which the Weimar republic had failed to do.
Every politican/dictator is an opportunist…
Say what you will about Hitler— he made the trains run on time.
Yeah you’re trolling.
You must have a PhD in early 20th century German history, clearly.
Hey not to ruin your fun but did you know Hitler embroiled Germany in an unwinnable war and ordered a few million people be executed, as well?
In order to do that he had to rebuild the country and economy and military.
Except he didn’t. His plan to ‘rebuild the economy’ was military conquest. He stole enough from ‘undesirable’ German citizens to get the government liquid again, reneged on all the war debts that were keeping the German economy depressed (I’ll give him that much), then kiboshed all the social and economic programs he’d platformed on to go all-in on one titanic military push.
They simply did not build the infrastructure for a sustained war. And they certainly didn’t build the infrastructure for a functional economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Economic_development_of_Germany_1930-1950.jpg
growth is growth. jobs are jobs. you are just arguing/moralizing that military spending is bad/fake or something. that’s cool, but that isn’t how economics works. all it cares about is growth, and Hitler massively grew the economy to the benefit of the average citizen.
Regan gave a massive boost to the usa economy in the 80s based om military spending and cutting social programs and taxes… is that ‘fake’ too?
Holy shit hahaha did you really just link me an article that agrees with me? Bro mortgaged 70% of what was left of the German economy to hit Vegas and bet it all on lebensraum, only to discover that invading farmland destroys the farmland. He couldn’t even keep his shit running with slave labor, lmao.
Never learn how to read, bud. This was precious.
no dude, you just don’t understand what economics is. apparently the GPD going up 20% in a decade is ‘fake’ in you weird mental world, and governments taking out loans is ‘fake’, despite the fact it’s the underlying financial system of every nation in the world.
That was 90+ years ago. Those people aren’t praising Hitler today because they’re dead.
There are people around the world, who’ve never even been to Germany, praising Hitler.
It’s because they’re fascists.
They are human. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that, while also reiterating that they basically shouldn’t be in that state.
Also, I think it’s important to draw a line between the “rich” (well-off working professionals like researchers, doctors, small entrepreneurs), and people with more wealth than many sovereign nations put together.
Because a lot of people aren’t paying attention to when their unethical behavior is demonstrated repeatedly, and they just assume billionaires are just like the rest of us.
A lot of these people are so lost that they genuinely believe anyone can become a billionaire if they put in the work. Propaganda machine go brrrr
They be dragons.
It makes me wonder if some of the dragons written in literature are just an allegory for the ultra wealthy and powerful of their time that were hoarding unimaginable wealth while the huddled masses starved.
pretty sure that’s a metaphor
Think of Smaug from the Hobbit, tell me how Smaug is different from Jeff Bezos and his underground bunker of money.
smaug had less, and was (eventually) content just sitting on his pile long as noone stole from it?
Bezos is on a never ending crusade to take as much as he can forever
How we don’t know how vast the riches of Middle Earth were. Perhaps there wasn’t much more for Smaug to get unless he mined it himself and being a lazy dragon was satisfied to just have almost all available money and hold it. Bezos knows there is still so much more he can gather so he hasn’t gone over to “Sit on wealth hoard mode.”
To try to understand someone is not the same as respecting them. One can try to understand one’s enemy to better fight them.
