When it has been demonstrated over and over again, how little they think of anyone beneath them.
Why do some people think dehumanizing anyone is fundamentally OK?
There are actual psychopaths and sociopaths. They are humans. They got that way not from Stan Lee’s pen, but by real experiences in our actual world.
Making them a caricature will in no way help with the problem.
I’m perfectly ok with dehumanizing literal flag waving Nazis. I give them no quarter. If a Nazi fell into the train tracks in front of me, I would just walk away.
They’re human, and should be destroyed mercilessly by any means necessary. There’s no contradiction in recognizing the humanity of people who will unfortunately need to be killed to stop them killing the rest of us indiscriminately.
Dehumanization is pointless, and leads to dangerous misanalysis (like underestimating them). Honestly, it’s also just a cowardly coping mechanism to avoid the harsh realities behind the idealistic moral frameworks we’re brought up with.
Dehumanising and giving no quarter are different things.
are you saying all wealthy people are nazis? that’s about the only way that I can see to read that statement (combined with the comment you are responding to)
I mean the vast majority of wealthy people are in fact happy and willing collaborators with Nazis because it’s advantageous to their wealth and power
They do not consider or even understand us as humans
vast majority of wealthy people
Honest question: how many Billionaires have you had personal interactions with?
I work for a huge corporation and once in a blue moon I’m on an email thread or God help me an actual meeting with the CxOs. Doesn’t mean I know them in any real sense. But I mean… as well as you know bosses 3 levels up if you have to report on projects once in a while.
I am very politically active in my swing state. Some Billionares have been happy to spend a little face time with me. Doesn’t mean I know them at all – plus, these ones are either directly politicians, or supporters of specific politicians. But I know them as well as you might know the guy at the mall kiosk where you had to get your phone fixed like 4 times in 6 months.
In none of these interactions do I feel like I’m dealing with a different species.
I can’t think of any I’d want to take care of my children. About the only common thread is the type-A high-acheiver type. Which is very common in US corporate management culture across the board.
I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with a few legitimate billionaires but mostly just millionaires
Last one said Mamdani needs to be euthanized for wanting to tax him
To be honest sounds like you don’t know them well enough
I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with a few legitimate billionaires
Unless you come from wealth yourself, I sincerely doubt this. Unless you think working at a corporation owned by a billionaire counts or something.
You underestimate the odds of encountering one in their own territory. There are only a few metropolitan areas in America where most wealthy people live and if you live/work long enough in one and get to know enough people you eventually have some chance encounters
Millionaires and billionaires are utterly different cats. Wage earners become millionaires all the time – save, invest wisely, yadda. I know many people in that category.
I know many people who’ve become millionaires and the vast majority are now apathetic collaborators who do not care about anything but their personal pleasure and permanent financial success
Some are still regular people who just have money, a few even do good things, but the vast majority are not like us anymore
What are you talking about?
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The comment they are responding to says “Why do some people think dehumanizing anyone is fundamentally OK?” [I agree btw]
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They reply with an extreme example of “anyone”: literal flag-waving Nazis.
At no point are “all wealthy people” mentioned in that statement.
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Indeed, the dehumanizing is always associated with collectivism vs individualism, and thence to collective guilt, and collective punishment.
All done with moral self-justification.
That’s because it’s morally justified to prioritize the needs of many over the needs of a few.
There’s a good argument regarding the tolerance paradox, and why it’s ethically and morally justified to not tolerate extreme levels of unethical behaviors.
I’ve come to view tolerance not as a default position, but rather as a contract which people are defaulted into, if you’re breaking it by refusing to be bound by it, you’re no longer protected by it either.
Tolerance is tangential to humanization. You can be tolerant of a human. You can also be intolerant of a human.
Tolerance and humanization are not the same thing. Understanding that terrible behaviors are human does not mean we must tolerate them.
What they need isn’t to be caricaturized, it’s to be put on a guillotine.
Human or not doesn’t mean shit: evil is evil.
so if i become wealthy by winning the lottery then i should get my head chopped off? after all wealthy is wealthy and they are all evil. …
that is the dumbest take i’ve seen so far.
just because you get wealthy doesn’t mean you are evil. how this is hard to understand is beyond me. I’m about done with lemmy and this type of thinking. are there evil people? yes. but just doing a blanket statement is just showing a lack of judgement and piss poor logic.
I’m not necessarily agreeing with the head chopping part on a general basis, but consider this:
If you become wealthy (which is a nebulous term, but w/e) in this system you automatically gain power over the life of other people, while you yourself break free from being forced into laboring for others. You are not going to spend it all on consumables, so you will likely use it to pay other people to do stuff for you, that you either can’t be bothered to do yourself or are not skilled to do yourself. So you’ll be able to live off of the labor of others, less fortunate. You are extracting value from them, maybe even creating some kind of dependency through the power imbalance.
TL;DR: Share your wealth or get fucked, parasite ;)
(and no, extracting value for your personal benefit is not sharing)
E: So, it’s more of: do you have the means to free yourself from labor, while at the same time you exploit the people that don’t have that freedom, then your wealth becomes a problem and through your wealth you do become a problem for the working class.
I’m just going to respond to the tldr.
I’m very small reasonable percentage. But that’s for me to decide what is reasonable. Not anybody else. After that, I’m going to live a better life and yes, I’ll hire people on to do stuff that I don’t want to do or not capable of doing. And I’m going to travel the world and see things that a lot of people can’t do. I don’t have to share beyond that. So I guess I’ll just go get fucked, but hey, you know what I don’t give a shit. As long as a person is sharing a reasonable percentage of their income, that’s good enough. Telling a person to share so much that they can’t afford to pay other people to do the stuff they don’t want to do or aren’t capable of is in my opinion, just stupid. Tell me a person to share so much that they can no longer travel around the world and see nice things and live a better life in my opinion is just stupid.
Also be cognizant that in that scenario you would have benefitted greatly from a system which does immense harm to a subset of the population by exploiting addiction.
Lol, go ahead and point me to a single example of a lottery winner being cited as one of the oppressive ‘elite’. And if you are able to actually fine one, my answer will be “yes, in fact, that would should have their head in a basket”. Having a mountain of cash dropped on you, vs exploiting a mountain of people to obtain mountains of cash are not the same thing. How this is hard to understand is beyond me.
I’m about done with lemmy and this type of thinking.
Yeah if you’re gonna come here and play damage control for evil people, you’re not gonna have a good time on Lemmy.
Read some of the comments in response to my comment. You will see people are including in lottery winners to this conversation. And no one said lottery winners weren’t part of the conversation. In fact what they were saying is all wealthy people. Let me say that again, all wealthy people.
And those comments sum it up nicely:
TL;DR: Share your wealth or get fucked, parasite
The message here being that it’s not inherently the wealth that’s the problem, but how that wealth is being used. If you land in that situation and immediately become some kind of Scrooge McDuck character: to the guillotine with you!
…but again, lottery winners are not the focus of the whole eat the rich mindset: if that’s an issue you think needs to be tackled, I’d direct your focus instead to lottery systems, not just the lottery winners. Focusing on things like lottery winners is a distraction from the insanely long list of higher priorities like the Musk and Bezos figures of the world. So why even bring it up unless that distraction is your goal?
Yes, but it makes us feel better about ourselves.
/s but also not.
Psychopaths and sociopaths who dehumanize others deserve to be dehumanized in return. Why should you owe them something they won’t offer you in return?
Well, they are in fact human. Trying to understand how they got the way they are is the first step to trying to not let more of them happen. That said, the rotten apple is still an apple. But in the end, I am still going to throw it away.
Is humanize the word you really mean to use, or do you mean something more like valorize or glorify?
Are you aware of what it means to dehumanize?Lemmy is such a weird site. Almost every thread I’ll read the most terrible dehumanizing shit said about working class people for just existing in a conservative U.S. state, but a thread asking why the rich are idolized every negative comment appears to have upvoted responses calling to recognize the humanity in everyone.
Weird.
Really depends on the instance. Most lemmy.world subs are cesspools. Hexbear and the like tend to be much better overall.
Hexbear remains winning
Hexbear is really the best social media sitr ever
They are human.
Humans are just like that.
What matters is how much damage they cause.
Also, kinda hard for me to imagine eating a god. Just…ew.
Depends on your religion, I guess. The Flying Spaghetti Monster seems pretty edible.
yep. pretty much everyone who screams about how much they hate the rich… would act exactly the same way if they were rich.
human beings act in their own self interest and that of their tribe.
Money Identity Coercion Ego. Those are the primary motivators.
Being rich means you’ve solved money and probably coercion. You can either rest on your laurels or chase the other two, for good or for evil. There’s rich philanthropists - some who give almost everything away - and then whatever Elon Musk is, but most go for the rest on their laurels thing, and so you probably haven’t heard of them.
Dehumanising someone also serves our identity and ego, FYI, which is where this thread came from.
yep, dehumanizing them boost our ego, because it makes us feel superior and justifies hate and violence. because it’s good to hate and hurt those who are ‘bad people’.
No they wouldn’t.
Even the capitalists are behaving differently and more humane compared the fuedalists of the middle ages.
That’s actually the main reason why communism and socialism even exists, as a prediction to say what will come after capitalism to the naysayers saying that there’s no such thing as social progress.
Even the capitalists are behaving differently and more humane compared the fuedalists of the middle ages.
Yes, because their source of wealth is fundamentally different. Lords had to project violence and play court politics to keep their position. Still do, in some places. The rich in developed countries, on the other hand, can rely on strong rule of law to protect their property with very little personal input.
Also why if the apocalypse ever happened, they’d get owned and somebody else would take their bunker.
In every era, the ideas that rule are the ideas of the rulers.
This point is expansively detail in capital and ideology by Piketty
I think the unfortunate truth is that many non-evil people would be just as evil if given the opportunity. Or to frame it slightly different: I believe that too much money and/or power is what turns most people evil over time.
Have you considered the possibility that only evil people are capable of acquiring that much power and wealth because that much power and wealth is only possible by evil means?
Lotteries exist. Boom, disproven.
It’s not even an exception, really. Being part of just the right startup at just the right time, or coming out of the right mother basically is a lottery. Meanwhile, poor mean assholes exist too.
Lottery winnings are paid out from a pool of money that’s filled by ticket purchases; every dollar won comes from the pocket of someone who bought a ticket and lost, after the lottery company takes their cut. Even if the winners aren’t exploiting the losers directly, the system itself is exploitative, and any winnings are derived from that exploitation. As the old saying goes, “the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math.”
Okay, but we were talking about the people themselves, so that point stands.
Sure, the system lacks.
Inheritance is an interesting aspect: if my grandfather stole and passed it to my father who passed it to me, I can acquire it by doing nothing.
This is not a counter-argument - it highlights that doing nothing is complicity in injustice.
If they would do evil given the chance, that makes them evil. It’s like a poorly forged piece of metal with a crack built in, that holds together until put to the test. The crack was always there.
There’s more angles to it of course - mistakes, temporary dispositions, the average of all behavior, etc.
From a philosophical perspective, I find it quite difficult to measure a person’s evilness objectively.
Assuming a person is born evil due to their genetic material, is it then actually their fault? Shouldn’t that be considered rather as a medical condition?
Assuming a person is not born evil, but they turned evil due to outer influencing factors (parents, society, economic situation, luck, bad luck…), is it then actually their fault? Or are the outer factors the ones to blame in such a case?
I agree to the ‘the crack was always there’ statement. But personally I think that all of us humans naturally have this crack. Given the right parameters, this crack can heal to a level where it’s barely notable. But under less optimal conditions I guess more or less every human can turn (be turned) into a monster.
In terms of billionaires my opinion is that a) we should implement measures to avoid them in the first place and b) find ways to take away their power.
But other than that I would prefer a way to heal their (often abnormal) crack and try to make them again valuable members of society again. Revenge and punishment (especially death penalty) should never be the focus of corrective measures, no matter the crime or misdemeanour.
It’s nearly universally learned behavior, and it’s just a metric of people’s disposition to act selfishly or malevolently versus selflessly and benevolently.
evil does exist, some people are too far gone to be saved…the world would be a much better place without Theil or Murdoch (and his chosen heir) in it, for example.
far as “dehumanizing”…kind of an irrelevant argument around semantics to me, they’re a massive net negative for society as a whole, simple as
Or to frame it slightly different: I believe that too much money and/or power is what turns most people evil over time.
What are the mechanics of this?
Instead, I believe the means of acquiring money/power from those who have enough of it creates pressures (say, a newspaper sponsored by Coca-Cola is pressured into not reporting on Coca-Cola’s problems), along with the hyperrealities created by conventional rich lifestyles (mainly associating with other wealthy people, being used to paying people to do work instead of doing it yourself, all that kind of thing) distorting ones worldview and alienating them from most of society and its issues.
I think most people are incapable of understanding just how much damage the rich do to the working class on a regular basis.
The rich kill more people every year, through business and political decisions, than any terrorist group or military. Often by being the puppet masters of those terrorist groups and militaries.
The rich are humans, that’s just fact. However, people need to wake the fuck up and see the richest and most powerful in the world fundamentally lack humanity. They are fundamentally isolated from human beings through their wealth and influence.
They are as human as anyone else. We should be cognizant of that. They are human beings within a human system. Move beyond anger and hate, and ask what must be done to end suffering and injustice.
For all the quips about guillotines, the first fix needs to be removing their excess wealth, not their heads.
But how to do that without removing their head?
the government.
Ah, that was some clever wordplay, given that one of the definitions of capital is “of or pertaining to the head”!
ask what must be done to end suffering and injustice.
kill them to stop them killing us
Because, for all of the awfulness they bring to the rest of us, they are human.
Humans who the other humans desperately need to be stripped of their wealth and power, and for whom the doing of which might offer them some small chance to save themselves from the yawning void of more more moremoremoremoremoremore
Yeah we humanize them because it’s important to remember that essentially anyone that ends up in their position will behave similarly. They aren’t demons, they’re humans. We should stop putting people in their position.
This. As soon as we treat them as “only monsters,” we start to think that “regular humans” aren’t capable of monstrous things.
We cannot understand class behavior by examining individual morality. Viewing the capital owning class as a collection of mustache twirling villains is not a useful framing. Rather, we should look at them as the human personification of capital itself. Their social being, their entire material condition, is defined by the accumulation of private profit and the protection of property relations that enforce their dominance.
Their inability to relate is not a personal failing but a direct result of their objective position in the capitalist mode of production. They live in a world insulated from the precarity of rent, medical debt, and wage slavery that defines life for the working majority. Their consciousness is shaped by them being insulated from the problems regular people experience. Therefore, critique of their lack of empathy is a liberal dead end because it mistakes a systemic outcome for a personal choice.
The focus must be the capitalist system itself, which necessarily produces the inequality and the divide between the capitalists and the workers. The fundamental contradiction between the socialized nature of production and the private appropriation of wealth is the core issue. The solution is to dismantle the economic base that creates them as a class and move towards a system where the means of production are socially owned, abolishing the very material conditions that breed alienation and disparity.
- they want to be them
- brainwashed workers
- ignorance
Take your pick theres no end to the reasons. There will always be an endless supply of bootlickers and hate.
I’m surprised “propaganda” isn’t in the top spots.
This video on conservative influencers and set building comes to mind.
Humans will anthromorphize anything
Because a lot of people aren’t paying attention to when their unethical behavior is demonstrated repeatedly, and they just assume billionaires are just like the rest of us.
A lot of these people are so lost that they genuinely believe anyone can become a billionaire if they put in the work. Propaganda machine go brrrr
Boot lickers. Just boot lickers. Hoping to become one of them one day.
