Am I projecting? What do you think, fellow lemmings?
Certainly, there is a grim atmosphere across many social platforms. Mainly, the last few days from my anecdotal experience.
Our wealth is taken, no one does anything.
Our health is taken, no one does anything.
Our privacy is taken, no one does anything.
Our voices are taken, no one does anything.
Our citizenships are taken, no one does anything.
The reason is apathy, which feeds inability, which feeds apathy, which feeds inability to do anything.
When our lives are taken, most people will be both ultimately unable and unwilling to do anything.
Even if people don’t know it outright, they feel it.
More than this, we feel a disappointment and a shame in our bones that can’t be shaken off because it is that outrageous and primal fear of losing anything more that drives our inaction, and so we feel ourselves to be cowards at our very core.
This is what grinds away at our souls daily.
When you eventually decide to do something, you will see you are no longer apathetic or unable. Your fears will begin to heal, and in this way it will save your soul. This is the power of courage. It is something you have to make for yourself, but hope is what drives it and hope is given.
I think apathy is a part of it, but its not that people shrug and arent moved by whats happening. They dont have anything meaningful or tolerable they can do about anything
Yes, I suppose I could have worded it better, but what I intend to say is that because people can do seemingly nothing (are prevented, or feel as though they will find no meaningful result from their effort), they figure there is no reason to try to do anything in the first place.
I don’t mean to say that they shrug anything off or are not moved. Quite the opposite actually.
Username checks out
You may be right, but I’m not sure which comparisons you are making specifically and am interested to hear what they are if you are interested in explaining them to me.
Honestly it was just a vibes thing. Golden because I agree with you and think it’s an important perspective, and zealot because of your almost religious manner of speaking. You’d make a good orator.
I see, thank you!
It’s the looming boiling point. More and more people understand things are going to come to a head Sooner Than Predicted™.
What we’re seeing is grief, but multiplied by billions
Don’t know why you were downvoted but you’re absolutely right. We thought we were moving in the right direction, only to have the foundations blown out from under us.
Not downvoted, I just remove the default upvote which comes with posts/comments, it irks me.
To add to that, most of us didn’t have a say in things. Boomers were kinda’ the last generation who still had some controls at their disposal, but the system got completely out of our control from Gen X onward. We’re just along for the ride as it’s crumbling.
Edit: I’ve realised this may sound as though I’m pointing the blame at Boomers - I’m really not, I firmly believe the game was rigged from the start, it’s not down to the average citizen. I was just trying to mark a shifting point.
Solidarity is the word, communists used and Americans banned. Without solidarity you get exactly the USA of today. A nation of egoists.
We’re already well on our way (Romania here, hey-ho!), except we’re going about it the exact way a couple of wise guys predicted back in the 1840s, so it’s all falling apart in what would be a hilarious mess had I not been living through it for the past 30 years.
Edit (and a partial vent, because what the hell): we’ve been trying to emulate America ever since the Revolution. People were so (understandably) riled up against that Totalitarian hellscape wearing Socialist clothing, that they acted impulsively when deciding that Capitalist Democracy was the way. Add to that a bunch of politically active people who saw their easy cash grab, and a bit of American “encouragement,” and it was inevitable.
Problem is, the Romanian people are very specifically themselves and, from what I’ve noticed, it’s non-negotiable. We have a tendency of, while living and playing “the game,” noticing that we’re playing a game and so we sort of… meta-game with who we are - it’s like we understand that society is a social act which we put on daily, that it’s not us, on a very essential level. It’s how we’re taught to interact with the world even before we reach school age.
So while we’ve been trying to emulate other cultures, our own ingrained way of being and perceiving practically nullifies every bit of the external “flesh” which we desperately attempt to slap onto our bones. The wise guys I mentioned were known as Pașoptiști (Forty-Eighters would be the direct translation), a group of Romanian thinkers who had a central role in the political shiftings of the times (around 1848, whence the moniker).
They noticed that we’re very plastic and curious as a culture, so we tend to absorb and incorporate foreign elements very easily - it’s basically how the Romanian people have formed, we’ve been colonised over and over and over by pretty much everyone around, so we’ve developed to be flexible and marginally more open than most. However, they also noticed that we were drifting away from our tendency to comprehend the essence of what we were absorbing, favouring surface-level, purely aesthetic grafts, which they said would lead to a superficial societal culture and an inevitable failure - the Theory of Baseless Forms they called it (Teoria Formelor Fără Fond). I call it the Plastic Society, because it looks and feels like those cheap plastic knock-offs which we occasionally got as presents because they were cheaper and parents had the excuse of “well, how the hell was I supposed to know which is the REAL Spider-Man action figure?!”
And since Romanians are also very inertia-bound when left to our own devices, sadly, we’ve been diligently working at fulfilling that very prophecy. And I’m not complaining about our immense cultural permeability, I love who I’ve become because of it, but I am deeply saddened that people around here are no longer in contact with their essence and have fallen into believing this game is the only real thing around…
This was a very interesting read
Thank you! I’m genuinely happy that my “and I must scream” outburst proved useful!
Chinese people seem pretty happy on Rednote.
They mostly empathize with us Americans for our life of economic struggle for our wealth class in exchange for nothing but Subsistence.
They’re confused as to how it’s allowed to happen. They thought a lot of true horror stories about our health insurance murder industry and living paycheck go paycheck statistically unlikely to be able to cover a 400 expense was their government’s propaganda, and are horrified it’s not.
It’s amazing how many protections non-wealthy people have there.
I now completely understand why our government doesn’t want us having casual conversations with actual societies of people, as opposed to capitalist slaughterhouses like we are here in the US. Mooooo…
Also their cars are so high tech ours are in the stone age by comparison. No wonder they can’t sell them here, they’d eat our lunch. App controlled call the car to pull up to you, captains chairs that power rotate into new configurations, on and on.
Not the whole world, but definitely the neoliberalized imperial core and its neocolonized vassal states.
This isn’t a case of viral, grassroots bad mood/fascist vibes. It’s the predictable result of grinding, late-stage/finance/monopoly capitalism, of zombie neoliberalism. Even the incorrigibly liberal Chris Hedges saw this coming fifteen years ago in his book, The Death of the Liberal Class.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. — Antonio Gramsci
Well humanity is dying a little bit due to climate change.
I feel that too. Doesn’t seem like anything good is coming anytime soon, and it’s -25 with 150k winds outside where I live.
Rent is due in 11 days
What is Guts doing to that poor man
Gutting rent outta poor folk.
Idk, some leftist people (including minorities) are energized and motivated, so it’s important not to get stuck in some weird self-defeating trap. Political up and downs happen every generation. Don’t fall for the doomer BS, it’s important to keep following through with your personal goals and persevere. Find a community and volunteer, take care of each other.
Ultimately people should seek to close gaps with others, and try to find common ground, while acknowledging that there are some values which cannot be compromised, like sacrificing someone’s humanity and (personal/psychological) safety.
Been outside or watched the news lately. What’s there to be in a good mood about?
Im in a bad mood. I cant speak for others. But the world is fucked up.
There’s an ongoing genocide and nobody is fighting it or even condemning it, bar a few weak powers like Yemen, DPRK, South Africa.
Seems like mostly just people in the west because western world order is now visibly collapsing.
America is not the Western world.
It does, however, control a lot of the Western World’s media, and there’s a clear agenda to make people frightened.
The US is at the centre of western world order. The rest of the west is tied to the states ideologically, politically, economically, and militarily. The global hegemony that the US created in the 90s is now starting to unravel and that’s having a negative economic impact on all western countries. Europe in particular has been hit very hard. And hence we’re seeing political discontent running all across the west.
The EU countries had a chance to cleanly decouple from the USA and mostly continue being neocolonialist and subsidised in the same ways, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Probably could’ve corrected it with the correct diplomacy or just looking the other way. Now the integration with the USA has been strengthened and all the messaging needs to be slowly undone and pivoted if we don’t want to sink together. And even then no one will be able to trust us. Trust matters more for financial and service industries than it does for manufacturing economies.
Maybe USA in their stupidity will try to cut us loose, and we can be forced into a miraculous late pivot just in time. Israel’s genocide crusade was a perfect excuse to aggressively decouple, since by Oct 2023 it was obvious USA lost. But we didn’t take it, getting to be Nazi’s again was too nice a treat I guess. So it’s perfectly possible USA starts exploiting us worse, and we just decide to cope with a lowered vassal tier status rather than actually clawing back some sovereignty. And the obvious result of that of course is more allies and members will want their own sovereignty enforced, and will break with or be pushed out of the EU-unity, which will make the remaining partners even weaker.
There is nothing to be optimistic about, so yes.
The world it just ain’t right, it keeps me up at night
