this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2026
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after a stint at ministry of education i'm convincing you don't even need to be evil or stupid to cause catastrophic consequences. that's baked into the institutions themselves.
There are material conditions to causing the actions which people think of as evil. Material conditions explain virtually everything about the actions of humans within capitalism. "We can't possibly know how people do evil things, they just are naturally evil in an unexplained way" is just admitting you don't know what material conditions would cause evil actions to happen. That is a *you* problem if you feel the same. You need to learn about dialectical materialism if you agree with their line of thought. This is your brain when you are ignorant of the incentives capital, both fiduciary and non-fiduciary kinds, does within capitalist societies.
A couple of really solid book if you like this:
a history of the world in seven cheap things by raj patel
exocapitalism by marek poliks
So capitalism is a problem for everyone in the world, but there's something more fundamental happening in the US. Capitalism is just an excuse, but people really do not give a fuck about their communities in the US, or at least a small minority do care. 90% of people of all walks of life, they just wanna make a million dollars and they won't flinch to kill a neighbor for it. Hell, half of them won't flinch to kill a family member for a million bucks.
Yes, it's human made causes, not supernatural, so of course they need human made solutions. Like human trafficking and infections will not get fixed by incantations, but can be fixed with data-backed solutions. Use Sagan's baloney detection kit to figure out what has backing and peer reviewed, and is best for healthy, happy humanity of the majority, no just the wealthy owners.
Yeah the system lets "evil" float to the top. Different systems would encourage different results.
Careful, this is his conservatives think too… othering people can be dangerous if you don’t do the ground work to understand why you think what you do. Metacognition is required
Humanity is perhaps the most valuable blessing and cursed atrocity ever conceived on this big ROUND GEOSPHERE earth.
(Note the All Caps)
As a video I watched the other day says, "it's that simple"
It's funny because I agree and disagree at the same time. I've had varying levels of "there's way more nuance to this" and "how the fuck is everyone complicating this???" throughout my life and have generally come to the conclusion that it's much more complex than that in that everything is both more nuanced and more simple at the same time because politics really is that stupid.
However, in getting involved in political circles and actually getting to know some legitimate decision makers toward the top, some of these fuckers are way more stupid than we think. Like, alarmingly so. I've had moments where some GOP dumbfuck is doing some evil shit and I'm like "I don't think they're doing this maliciously" and some of my more partisan left-ish friends get all offended think I'm defending them, when really it's so much worse; they're doing it because they're legitimately really fucking stupid... and they're part of world leadership. Don't get me wrong, some of them are both stupid and an asshole, but at the end of the day, people in general tend to get the overall picture of politics wrong because it's way more nuanced in how fucking stupid it is.
One more fun thought for y'all: many of the really dumb legislators I've met in the past predate the current GOP alignment. And you see how much dumber the current GOP is versus the GOP of not even a decade ago? Well...
This is the truth I see as well. I'm around a lot of upper crust events, old money decision maker millionaires. I'm taking pictures so I overhear a lot I probably shouldn't, literally the fly on the wall.
They are not doing things maliciously on purpose. It's more like what George Carlin said, it's a club and we ain't in it. They are ignorant to what the upper middle-class and below actually do and they really don't care to learn or can't grasp it. They do things based more on their perspectives in an echo chamber. They don't make friends outside that circle.
Ask them a basic question from highschool science and they will respond with a very wrong answer with absolute confidence. I've met homeless people on the street with more intelligence.
You have to experience things or work for them to gain any knowledge.
Basically: Hanlon's Razor
Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
I think there's a word for that: negligence
Yep. The older I get, the less of a distinction I see between the two. Stupidity and malice always seem to come hand-in-hand.
Evil geniuses and idiots with a heart of gold are mostly just Hollywood inventions. In the real world, intelligence and morality are highly correlated together.
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people respond to incentives.
that's all you need to know.
take the good and the evil, the smart and the stupid out of it, and it will make a lot more sense.
most people would be just as 'evil' as who you are talking about given they had the same levels of power. you false belief is that these people 'in power' are somehow superhuman and can resist the temptations and abuses that come with the power they have... they can't, and don't, and most folks are like that. it's exceptional when someone doesn't abuse their power.
There's so much to address here, it's crazy. I'll give it a shot, I guess.
Incentive in this context is not really that relevant. Sure, Incentivization of systems and all that, but in terms of actual outcomes and how people make decisions, incentives are a terrible predictor of behavior and motive. Additionally, to try and say the one factor is all that matters is ridiculous.
To dismiss morality and my original subject of how dumb some legislators are, conflate incentive and motive as one thing and the only legitimate explanation of evil legislative decisions, then conclude that people are inherently(or even just predisposed to) evil because power is uhh... yeah, that's pretty wild.
You also state that I believe people can/do resist abusing their power. This is a non-starter as nothing I said even suggests such a thing, you made that up. On top of that, I can explicitly state that is, in fact, not my position on the topic of abuse of power. I already reject the framing of power and abuse of it as presented in your comment before any argument is even made. There's so much more to it than just "power corrupts". And power isn't even a factor for many people anyway, even in the context of being in a position of power. People as a whole really aren't that simple.
The only thing I was getting at is that there are people in decision-making positions that appear to make a decision because they're evil or corrupt or whatever else, but in reality, they're just really dumb. This doesn't exclude other factors, nor does this make a definitive statement about reality, it's just an observation from my experience in politics challenging a common incredulity that "they can't really be that stupid" to which I'm backing up the common saying "never attribute to malice what can sufficiently be explained by stupidity".
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A lot of people are stupid, and there are a lot of people with anti-social personality disorders out there willing to manipulate stupid people.
Fixed
Me as a teenager: Someday, reality television is going to destroy the world.
Me in my 20s: That was a silly thing to think. People like different things, and there's good in everyone.
Me now: A reality TV star is literally destroying the world.
i can never tell which is supposed to be the original and which the reply on these posts. the higher up one is the original? but it has a thread bar next to it?
Yeah it's fucking atrocious
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Oh I kinda hate this attitude. Like shit, even evil has lots of nuance to it. And understanding that nuance can help you oppose it, or protect yourself from it.
True, but at a certain point the time and attention diverted into the nuances within evil becomes a big component of the banality part.
Yes, that certain point isnt anywhere near where we're currently at.
The line is a dot where we're at.
Only for those who've given up on rational thought and only want to react.
Kind of like those who fall for fascist propaganda.
I think the issue is people think "debatters" are operating in good faith. The nuances is for the crowd not for the grifters.
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To be fair, trump cleared a lot of this up for us.
What’s that bell curve meme? One end “people are stupid”, middle “people are complicated”, far end “people are stupid.”
I think it comes from the realization that dispels so many assumptions you didn’t know you had.
The realization that nobody knows what they are doing.
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence becomes, 'Why not both?'.
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1994 Simpsons (so i guess their writers in 1993)
I actually think it’s more based on greed but yeah same.
Well that and racism.
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