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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38185 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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I agree with @Soriek, while the early settlers and people in previous historical communities didn't control everything that happened around them, there were faces they could either love or hate depending on their circumstances. They could go to another person, beg forgiveness or extension, and generally make sense of their world in a more comfortable way.

The modern issue of dealing with "machinations in a distant court" is the exact problem here. Humans have lived with tribes and been comfortable dealing with powerful people in their direct, personal experience for almost all of our history after language, probably even before. Dealing with your life being ruined because of an indistinct rule created by a bureaucrat you've never met and will never meet is much more emotionally difficult than having your life ruined by Steve down the street.

I'm of the opinion that this alienation is why so many modern movements are focused around spite and anger, such as the Alt Right or whatever name they go by now. Our current way of living in the Western world forces us to constantly repress anger, and there's no good outlet for that anger because we don't personally see the people screwing us over.

Edmond Dantes was in deep despair while imprisoned in Chateau D'If for an unspecified crime on the accusation of an unknown person. Only when he finally deduced what his "crime" had been and who was responsible for his wrongful imprisonment did he regain his will to act.

I think this is an accurate reflection of how many people internally experience oppression by a specific person with intelligible motives versus oppression by an impersonal, alien force to which they are merely unnoticed collateral damage.

"Why is my rent going up this month? Isn't there anything you can do?" "Nope, sorry, the computer system says your rent goes up $125 this year. Corporate sets the rules, there's nothing I can do."

Indeed, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Without a "why," the "how" is often unbearable.

That presents different problems. The tyranny of the ten most powerful people in your village might be genuinely and significantly worse than the tyranny of the central government, which doesn’t care about anyone in the village specifically but might care about upholding broad rules that protect you from those ten people. Often local politics is far more aggressive, far more bitter, even far more violent than national politics.

That's kind of orthogonal to the argument, no? Your point is about the objective conditions of the system, whereas the argument was about the subjective ease the people in the systems have dealing with the systems.

At least the person in the village could be ousted if not appealed to. Modern decisions are made in such a way that most decision makers have never been to the places affected nor bothered to meet, much less talk to, those people who would have to live with the decision. To the modern tyrants you aren’t a person, you’re a number in a spreadsheet. Your town, your street, your school? It’s a couple of charts. You are data you aren’t an autonomous agent, you’re a statistical model.

Dealing with your life being ruined because of an indistinct rule created by a bureaucrat you've never met and will never meet is much more emotionally difficult than having your life ruined by Steve down the street.

I disagree, or at least I would warn against generalizing on this point

When I say emotionally difficult I don't mean it's always better, I just mean in terms of having an outlet for your anger or being able to process the emotion it's easier. You're mad at Steve - you can imagine punching him in the face.

So many folks nowadays are angry, depressed, manic-depressive, anxious, etc etc etc because they have a massive amount of repressed emotions and don't know how to cope or process them.

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