Ask Lemmy

26707 readers

1894 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics.

Rules: (interactive)

1) Be nice and; have fun

Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them

2) All posts must end with a '?'

This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?

3) No spam

Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.

4) NSFW is okay, within reason

Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].

5) This is not a support community.

It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.

Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Will human societies always enshittify themselves? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

33 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It seems society always goes down the shitter over and over following the same path. People rise to wealth and power extracted on the repression of the masses, massive disparity, ignorance exemplified, xenophobia and blaming minorities for any possible issue, laws signed with golden pens but becoming more meaningless when they’re only enforced to protect the wealthy…. Then some sort of collapse, fragmentation, and/or dystopia usually in conjunction with war, purges, and killing in the name of tribalism.

History seems to rewind the cassette and record right over the top with the same old song.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd like to think there's a way to keep shitty people out of power and concentration of resources to a minimum, but unfortunately, that conflicts with human nature.

The people who have power are generally the type of people who want power over other people. We haven't solved the problem of preventing sociopaths and psychopaths from becoming powerful yet, and it's hard to believe that society will ever solve that problem, since sociopaths and psychopaths will always exist. People who care about others generally aren't the type of people who seek power.

Even if, for example, we have a proletariat state, people who seek power will find a way to gain power. For example, if it's a direct democracy without representatives, propaganda will be a very useful tool. If it's a communist government with centralized planning, there will be a way to control the centralized planning. We already know how representative democracies can fall since we're living it. With social democracies, capitalism still exists, so that's pretty easy to exploit and revert back to straight capitalism.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

We haven't solved the problem of preventing sociopaths and psychopaths from becoming powerful yet, and it's hard to believe that society will ever solve that problem, since sociopaths and psychopaths will always exist.

Yes, and it even works the other way around - we are choosing our leaders and we are choosing craziest ones. That is how group dynamic is working like, according to Bion:

And perhaps one of the most important findings in his experiments was that whenever a group is formed, it always seeks a leader to follow. The group then searches for someone who has questionable attributes with his or her mental health. Initially, the group will search for someone who is paranoid schizophrenic or someone who is malignant hysteric. If the group is unable to find someone with those attributes, the group looks for someone with delinquent trends and a psychopathic personality. Otherwise, the group would just settle on the verbally facile high-grade defective.

You might find his "Experiences in groups" quite interesting.