this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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COVID proved a quarter of humanity would rather gargle their own lungs than tolerate change or admit mistakes. It proved beyond any doubt that conservatives think reality is a team sport. They're not just fucking with you while secretly knowing what's true. They don't believe in truth. Conservatives don't believe anything. Conservatives believe people.
There is nothing we can all agree on, because some of us don't understand agreement, as a concept. They think it means interpersonal loyalty. You've decided someone is Right.™ If the facts change, you're supposed to maintain allegiance to whatever that person says, because facts aren't real.
Yeah, basically this. 9/11 fundamentally changed the American psyche and ushered in a massive ramp-up of the neoliberal system. Covid didn't really change a whole lot of anything (the biggest problem with it in many ways) but did utterly and fully convince me that we're doomed as a species.
Nothing has ever illuminated for me so clearly that an unmanageable number of people are too stupid, hateful, or whatever else to work together to overcome an existential crisis. A significant amount of people would rather feel correct and kill all of us than work out their issues. So if humanity is like 30-40% evil, and about 40-50% "neutral" (aka myopically self-interested but not actively violent or hateful), that leaves only 10% "goodness" at most. And I'm sorry but a group that's only 10% good doesn't deserve to go on running things.
Rational argument is a learned behavior. Anyone can be trained out of that tribalist mode. We're just bad at recognizing when someone's in it. We have a kneejerk insistence that nobody's really going through life on pure kneejerk insistence.
If it helps, I think the amount of actually evil people is much lower, rather the evil peoples propaganda worked on around that percentage of the populous.