Why does it feel like evil is winning globally?
Why does it feel like evil is winning globally?
Why does it feel that the evil sides globally are winning. Even evil people are winning. Why?
Class solidarity among the rich. Rich people want willing servants. They want people to fear disobeying them.
People are scared and angry and want action without thinking about the long-term gains only the short term. Creating fear is fascism 101 and how many rise to power
We are losing the class war.
Hate drives engagement and can have multiple intersections with opposing view points. Take our algorithmic methods of serving content and you get silos of positivity with oceans of hate in between that fuel metrics of user engagement and view time. Drive your share price by those metrics and run the economy on those share prices. Viola hate becomes the new most important resource to generate and those who can spread it most effectively or direct that hate become those with the most power. If we want to break that grasp on power we need to break the cycle of engagement being tied to hate, find a way to drive engagement through positive action and understanding. I talk like I know how to do that but in reality that's one of the most difficult problems humanity has in general. Like greed is terrible but if you could figure out how to make positivity and mutual understanding more profitable than spewing hate and divisiveness you could channel those at the tops greed into positive feedback loops. Once you have more understanding, and equity in individuals understanding each other we can them finally work as a collective to start eliminating things like bigotry, poverty, etc.
Because Evil is winning globally.
Neuroscience says that the scared brain has a lower IQ, which is good for giving in to survival instincts in an acute threat situation, but really bad to make any longterm decisions. Populists try to scare us for this very reason. Scared people are easier to manipulate. It's working, and it's fucking scary how effective it is. But I am not scared in the way that lowers my critical reflection. So I hope someone brings out the guillotines before more poor people (our people) die.
Well. Lots of people drank the kool aid. As long as some people getting a feeling of Power (like shitting on minorities), they will take the blow from the ruling class.
The last time that shit worked started WWII.
But yeah. What will we do about it. There are days where I think we will make it through. But other days I just feel weak and powerless and think we're doomed.
Fuck greed, eat the rich.
Fascism is rising because the bourgeoisie is funding it to keep out Communism, Socialism, Marxism, and other things that explain why most people globally cannot afford a house, or why England pays such low wages, or why groceries are so expensive in America, or why Germany is undergoing an economic collapse. Once you understand Marxism even simply, these quotes will start to make sense.
P.S. If you're going to say that fascism is rising in power, please just say that. I know that things are shitty because fascism is rising, but I hate when people are vague.
Evil has always been there. People have a tendency to turn a blind eye when it isn't directed at them. Recently it's very much been directed at Europe and North America. It brings the problems of the world into sharp focus.
I think the same but feel a bit better when I go to protests to meet people, working out, reading.
Im taking this time to improve myself and meditate. System is designed to keep the rich without any checks and balances. But we cannot lose our faith in each other, stay close and make tribes. Join clubs. Stick together.
We got this.
because theyve been laying groundwork and slowly infiltrating every corner of our society for over 50 years.
The slow burn was for purpose, to keep people from noticing, and so that anyone that did notice and point it out would look like a crackpot.
and, imho, I think they didnt expect the opportunity trump presented globally, in his first term, but they chose to come out of the shadows and try to exploit it regardless, which is why they've had the stumbling blocks they have had that has given opportunity to fight it.
One aspect is that mass media is overall owned by those people and is propaganda. If you don't have ways of seeing what's happening on the ground, you miss a lot of the good news. Even your twitter/bs/mastodon feeds won't give you the full story, you have to (where possible) get involved in a real community organization.
Because now it is affecting you personally. Before it was in the middle east or some random aftican nation where people dont speak english, and media make sure it is not in the front page. Reading some history of any conflict will show the root starting a while back but no one cares.
I think the issue in America, is that the Constitution only addressed political power, but failed to account for fiscal strength. Money is inherently a thing that manipulates the fates of individuals, companies, and nations alike. By not setting down rules, limitations, and expectations regarding economics, the Founding Fathers allowed a key form of power go unaddressed.
The vast majority of Project 2025's major backers are wealthy people, who have far beyond what any normal person can ever hope to possess. This imbalance means that workers have to sacrifice much time, money, and energy to be barely heard on a single issue, while a rich person can just hire experts to massage every aspect of their many messages and to deliver it everywhere with a mighty voice.
IMO, we will need a Constitution v2.0 that fixes not only assorted political flaws like the voting system, but also prevents wealth from being a microphone that only a few can afford.
Unpopular opinion, but in the west particularly, folk have mistaken writing on the internet for action.
Tweeting resistance rather than performing it.
A lapse into inaction framed as radical rest and self care.
Online they are fierce warriors of justice, offline they go to work in Starbucks, use their apple devices to talk to their families and enjoy the treadmill of streaming services.
And this isn't to blame them. This is the point of consumerist capitalism. To trap you in a gilded cage.
The common version of the phrase...
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,”
The actual version of the phrase...
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
While times seem bad, and they are worse than they used to be, especially with the election of Donald Trump, imagine what it was like during WW2. Nazi Germany invaded France, Czechoslovakia, and half of Poland (with the Soviet Union the other half); Britain stood alone. Spain was under fascist dictatorship. Now Russia barely controls 1/5 of Ukraine, and has suffered many thousands of losses in tanks and armoured vehicles. Modern Russia is now weaker than the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany was (for their time period).
Because people say stupid shit like "but they have laser-guided drones and you have a rifle!"
Fucking idiots do not understand how revolution works and dont know that the US military has failed every invasion.
Because good natured people don't want conflict so they avoid it.
Bad natured people actively seek conflict and engage with it whenever possible.
Evil never sleeps. Peace does.
The internet. It led to the following:
- Good social change occurred very rapidly from the 1990s-2010s, causing highly motivated pushback from those who didn't like the changes
- Rising wealth inequality caused by tech billionaires increased incentives and capability for a small number of extremely wealthy people to seize control of media and political power centers
- Foreign dictator governments became more able to more easily spread pro-dictator propaganda
- Media became more decentralized, leading to some good things but also the hijacking of our psychology to spread fear and disgust for the sake of grabbing attention
- Rampant unchecked capitalism of recent decades has created large wealth disparities akin to the earlier decades of the last century. It is no longer possible for one person in a household with a regular job to support a modest lifestyle for their family. All benefits especially medical for the whole family, being completely intertwined with the current job reduces mobility and further feeds into the wealth gap by keeping wages low. It’s easier to blame the powerless for this state of affairs than the powerful because the powerless cannot object.
- The fear of the other has been accentuated by media and misinformation. Targeted algorithms feeding most of the information that is consumed has created echo chambers that reinforce existing beliefs and fears. The propaganda state has never had it easier.
- The large military and police has given never before control to the state about what is allowed to be protested. Combined with the day to day struggles, it’s extremely hard to come together for what is right. The ruling class is able to maintain the fine balance between absolute misery and general dissatisfaction that it is still better to struggle through a thankless job than to say fuck it. Failures of recent large uprisings like Middle East and Hong Kong have reinforced the futility of standing up against the rulers.
- Evil has many heads and there’s always one head that you can find alignment with. It could be the deregulation of businesses, lower taxes, anti abortion, racism, but as long as there’s one thing you can align on, the general sense of powerlessness makes it easier to overlook the other heads.
- The line between evil and good has never been murkier, especially with globalization. If you focus on the betterment of your community, it would be considered good, but what if it leads to suffering of others outside the community. Is it also evil? What is community - is it the people in your neighborhood, your religion, your country, fellow business owners? The fuzzier these lines are, the harder it is to untangle them.
That is the eventual conclusion of capitalism, the way it is currently set to play out.
The only forces that could act against it depend on the distribution of critical information.... And those are owned by the same private interests.. Soooooo. We'll see. Doesn't bode well at all.
I saw on Mastodon someone say something kinda like this: good people don't feel the need to dominate others.
Evil isn't "winning" as much as it is "on top." If you look around, talk to your neighbours and such, you'll see that good and reasonable people are everywhere; good is the overwhelming majority.
That being said, positions of power are chased and coveted by those obsessed with power, and those aren't good people. Good people need to take charge, but it's --- in a way --- against their nature to do so.
We have a global economic system that encourages and rewards evil. More and more countries have political systems that do the same. Good people would rather help others and make the world a better place, and this prevents them from attaining power. It would probably require doing some evil to remove the evil people from power.
Because the return of massive wealth disparity - similar to having kings again - has allowed those with money and power to bend the world in the direction of some form of dictatorship, whether it be fascism, oligarchy, whatever…. The New Kings are carving up society and want to increase control and profit, and an authoritarian governance is the way to do it. Just like how they treat their corporations. They are dictators, the little people are disposable production units to feed their machine.
What you're saying is true, but we must also remember that construction is always slower than destruction. What this means is that slow, steady improvements are not newsworthy - and thus gets no airtime - compared to destruction which happens over night and is thus newsworthy.
So there is also a lot of slow, steady improvements going on in the world that we never hear about. There's not enough of it, I don't think, to offset the big evils of greed, climate change, and fake news. But it is there, and we must not forget it.
Well, I'd say it's because they don't even hide it anymore. They know they can do whatever they want, and get away with it.
Enshitification is a real thing, and companies and evil people are being blatant about it, because they know they don't have to hide it because they know they can't be stopped.
It sucks. I hate it. I wish we could do something about it.
Capitalism
Because evil people control all the media
Two answers.
Thomas Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century
Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine
Even reading a brief summary of the main points of both books gets you to a decent explanation.
Media bias. Trump is outrage and outrage moves views and views are profit. Trump is the greatest thing to happen to the media - regardless of side. We're also more connected today than we ever were before so this media gets to everyone in an instant.
Are evil people really winning globally more than they were in the past? Well.. no. We've seen more shit in the second half of the 20th century than we are now. There's still 25 years to catch up though. Heres some shit thats gone down fro 1950-2000.
- Cold War - though it does seem like we are moving back to this state, we're far from living like that
- Korean War, Vietnam War, Kuwait,
- Cuban Missile Crisis,
- Basically every Arab nation against Israel - wars galore,
- Suez crisis,
- Iranian revolutions,
- Sino-Soviet Split,
- India-Pakistan,
- Soviet-Afghan war,
- Numerous African civil wars in the 60s, 70s and 90s (till ongoing),
- South African Apartheid,
- Numerous south American dictatorships (+ CIA interventions in south America backing right wing dictators),
- Falklands war - the fucking UK went to war with Argentina in the fucking 80s!
- All the shit in Yugoslavia (wars, genocide),
- "The Troubles" in N. Ireland.
A lot of these have been resolved.
Have you ever cheated at a game, cut corners on work or purposefully did something unfair to get better from it yourself?
Yeah it's much easier to win without any pesky ethics or a strong moral compass.
Good folks have been struggling uphill since the Ancient Greeks as long as there are folks trying to win with a different rule book.
My opinion on this generally boils down to that the system has been set up to reward evil/antisocial behavior, and this part of the system is so entrenched and well established and organized that it has not been effectively and completely toppled or eradicated in so long, it has been able to consolidate power and resources to a point where very few extremely evil people are personally in charge of so much of what happens that it seeps into everything. Actually "seeps" is the wrong word, it's injected into everything. It's like has been said many times in recent memory, the cruelty is the point.
For a simplified example, evil executives reward evil behavior by their managers, who in turn punish their employees, who lose control of so much of their lives to these companies and managers that they end up hurting their families and friends out of confusion and anger and other complex emotional reactions, and harm is perpetuated in every area of life.
It's self sustaining, and even worse it replicates itself. In some ways I think of these systems as viruses. Also as cults. We all buy in to some degree.
I just talked to my superior about the most urgent thing EU countries are facing currently. I should add that he is 100% disabled but studied in CS and reads everything which is interesting to him and his world view.
When I said that social media dictates the discussions and the media, we agreed on the thought after a short period.
And if we could solve this issue we mostlikely would get awarded a noble price.
What I am trying to say: Social media is run by - at least - flawed people. And used by the evil ones to their maximum, putting the honest Ones into a position to explain.
We are loosing our discourse, we are mixing our cultures - or we split at our ethics.
Social media is a cancer with no current treatment. Civilians will be in favor of social media since it also benefits society directly. But we are diminishing other things with it.
Maybe there will be one more brilliant mind educated who may aid us in these times.
evil people have always been there, but we're in an era of many crisis's, it was easier to ignore it when it didn't personally effect you. Now i imagine in the next 10-20 years it'll start effecting everyone in ways we've yet to imagine. But I don't think its the end of the world or anything just that its probably time we start considering what we want our futures to look like and start making plans to survive or fight.
Bad news sells.
My theory is "shallow thinking" and "busy-ness". We are prone to mental and expedient shortcuts which seem benign at the small scale in which we interact, but when aggregated become something terrible... and on the exceedingly rare chance that we might hear an actual solution, it either sounds so foreign to us that we cannot consider it, or so hopeless a fight that the super-majority of people do not push back.
Consider how slippery the slope is for even one aspect (diffuse responsibility):
- Alice needs help
- Bob sees that Alice needs help
- Bob excuses himself from being the one to help (not prepared, wasn't expecting, other obligations, could be a trap, others are better suited to help, the government ought to help)
- Bob excuses himself from being the one to get help (I don't have the number handy, someone else will call, she probably already called someone for help)
Conceptually, this is fine if it is ONLY "Bob", but the deceptive part is how finite the procedural gap is between Bob being one person and it literally being everyone.... thus Alice gets no help.
It's a global far right power grab fueled by money from Russia using weaponized disinformation. It's been going on for decades at a smaller scale before Facebook, etc, even existed. It's also fueled by conservative dark money groups funded by conservative billionaires. You should read the book Dark Money, I highly recommend it.
Even the antivax stuff is from Russia and it way predates the big platforms. It was started in the crunchy mom communities on Livejournal, where they first experimented with seeing if westerners would glom on to weird mommy trends like not using shampoo, nursing your kids to ridiculous ages, "unassisted birth", which is where people deliver babies without any medical care at all, "unschooling", etc. That took off in a big way and then they began with the antivax stuff, and used Livejournal as a tool of Russian government propaganda.
Then they started funding white supremacist groups, and the groups like the yellow vests, Moms for Liberty, etc. Really recommend learning about dark money and Russian weaponized disinformation.
the hard answer: the voting populace is the single stupidest form of combined intelligence to ever exist, im pretty sure 3 children under the age of 7 in a room would have a higher average IQ than any state in america when measuring the voting populace.
Voting is a joke. People don't take it seriously, it's all vibes based, and those vibes are horrendously unreliable and meaningless.
the soft answer: it is, for now. It will change, just give it time. It's inevitable.
You probably feel that way because this is what it feels like when evil wins.
Change requires a massive push, and apparently people need to suffer much much more, to inspire that momentum.
I saw a chart that globally, the incumbent parties have lost more in these elections than before.
https://www.ft.com/content/e8ac09ea-c300-4249-af7d-109003afb893I'd guess this is because things are going badly economically, so people wanted change.
I blame the success of neoliberalism (perhaps confusingly, a distinctly conservative project driven by the likes of Reagan and Thatcher). Ever-widening wealth gaps and focus on individual responsibility for solving problems seems to have created an environment where people will jump on just about any bandwagon that tells them they're inherently better than others. Unfortunately, evil will keep winning as long as there's enough support (or indifference) for evil to keep winning.
Evil use to hide - but through Trump's no filter twitter postings, Musk's self-aggrandizing incompetence, and Russia's realization that they no longer have to hide their evil-doing, a lot of the evil these days is just out in the open.
Imagine a world where a competent president is hiding behind close doors planning a way to defund USAID and starve millions of people. Planning behind close doors cutting medicare by 1 trillion dollars, killing thousands of Americans, and using that money to fund a trillion dollar tax break for the mega rich. You wouldn't know any of that is happening.
Now it is front page news, and people are reacting by boycotting Amazon for one day on the 28th.
Surprised to read so many answers talking about capitalism, social media and wealth concentration. But no one mentioned that we're at an unprecedented point in history of mankind. Ecological collapse, the lightening fast rise of AI. No example of past historical processes can be very useful in this very unique context.
And don't forget that with AI and, coming fast, robots, humans will not be needed for labor anymore. Most of you might feel this is rubbish about something you think is science fiction. I suggest you think again.
Think again and you will quickly realize that the future is not rosy for 99.5% of us.
It's very simple: human emotion. When something upsets the status quo, people get scared, angry and desperate. They turn to whatever solution they think will fix things.
In the case of nations, that becomes right-wing politics. Many factors in the recent past have caused distress and fear. People are afraid of losing what they have, they don't like the uncertainty. They lack the education and critical-thinking skills to choose the best course of action, instead they choose the most reassuring course of action.
In 1930s Germany, support for extremist political parties (not just the NSDAP) surged due to the desperate times they were experiencing. Germany underwent a period of hyperinflation, which was followed shortly after by the stock market crash of 1929. They were already in poor shape, both economically and emotionally, due to the punishments meted out by the Versailles treaty.
Things became very bad for the Germans, and they turned to the looneys who offered a solution. A similar scenario is playing out in several countries around the world, especially the US. COVID really upset a lot of people, none more so than the overly emotional and uneducated. They felt attacked and vulnerable, and they were already deluded by years of misinformation. They turn to politicians like Trump, because he appeals directly to their emotions. He makes them feel safe, largely by scapegoating groups who aren't actually a threat (sound familiar?).
People don't check if what they're hearing is true, they care most about having their fears assuaged. This is why we've seen a resurgence of right-wing extremism globally.
A ruling class of ultra wealthy lording over the vast majority of people who are left with crumbs is a common sign that an empire is in decline. With the US having more global influence than any previous empire, the whole world will be feeling the effects in one way or another.
Because capitalism. Capitalism is basically a philosophy that postulates that people are greedy and selfish, so it makes a society based on greediness and selfishness. It's a self-realizing prophecy if you ask me.
Perhaps, because by now enough people feel a real impact on their life and fear for the ruling classes is not there anymore?
Just a few examples from direct, personal experience (I am German, so what I enumerate has a German/Euro perspective):
- Constitutional state? Does not matter, as long as powerful/influential people can literally buy laws or prevent even discussion of laws in the parliament
- Easy way to figure out who is favored by one law, is to check who has to prove something and how hard it is to prove
- Best part about this is, people in power can always point out to the law and that 'we' agreed upon that law
- Systematic discrimination against the worker class/people not owning things: Thing about laws, taxes, ....
- Every media has an agenda and is propaganda (In the west, propaganda means mostly being selective about the information presented and how to build the narrative. Only idiots in the west will outright lie about things. It also means, who gets to talk in the media, where to position news (headlines ore somewhere else) etc. Media are owned by rich people or the state owned media are controlled by people with strong affinity to political parties
- Corruption on all but the lowest levels, especially in the government (In Germany corruption on the lowest level is uncommon und has a high penalty, but go up the level a little bit and 'you scratch my back and I scratch yours')
- Nepotism on all but the lowest levels (Worked in many different companies and the bigger the company the worse it gets. Working class kid does not get an intern position although it would technically be the best choice? No worries, some kid with the right parents and no clue will have that opportunity.
- No feedback loops: In Germany, we have professional politics which have extremely good conditions for their pension, whose children do not visit public schools and who have private health care decide, what in their opinion is appropriate for most of the people in the country concerning this things...
- No real political influence: We just had the clown-show of voting. Guess what, I can only vote between Nazis and non-Nazis. Can I vote for more taxes for the rich, a sane economic agenda which not benefits the rich, and full military support for the Ukraine? Sorry, I am out of luck. Of course I am free to build my own party. Let's see how successful that is without massive investment of money and good connections to the ruling classes to get positive media coverage.
Before the eastern block fell apart, at least in Europe/Germany, there was always the fear of the ruling class to experience another (French)revolution. Since this fear is gone, they literally have nothing to fear...
Is it possible to change anything about the situation? I am more than cynical by now:
- Most everyone is struggling to keep their level of wealth/position in society, so the middle class fights hard to be a little bit better of then the lower class, don't even mention the upper middle class, which fights with nails and teeth for every little advantage and privilege they have
- The higher you go in hierarchies, the more sycophants you'll discover, which don't mind selling out other humans for status/privileges, and there are even true believers, so brainwashed by neoliberal agenda, that they will fight for the privileges of rich folk they will never belong to
- There is no way to organize enough people in real life to force any political change (especially not with an aging population)
- The ruling class figured out for a long time in western world, that instead of fighting facts/the truth, they just have to generate more bullshit, discussions, alternative narratives and lean back, because people will discuss and not agree
- Nearly all change to the status quo is opposed and fought by some group, which benefits from the status quo
- Neoliberal propaganda and views are so ubiquitous and pervasive in our media, stories, etc., that a lot of people cannot even think about alternatives any more.
That's just for the western world, let's not start about the dictatorships/regimes supported by western governments with money, weapons and knowledge, where things are even more shitty.
- Constitutional state? Does not matter, as long as powerful/influential people can literally buy laws or prevent even discussion of laws in the parliament
Because most people are either stupid, evil, or stupid and evil.
I don't know what the solution is, I can only hope its mostly just the "extreme ignorance" type of stupidity and not evil or "willing ignorance" stupidity and after experiencing the suffering they've enabled for themselves that they put 2 and 2 together and things maybe recover partially or enough to prevent the end of human civilization as we know it.
Just an hour ago I heard EmiliaRoig.com talking on the EuropeansPodcast.com (minute 28) and she said something that at first sounded naïve to me. But in hindsight, it may be true.
She said that "times are changing for the better (i.e. referring to the last 10 years or more.) and what we are seeing nowadays is just a shout of despair to that, being done by right-wing extremists, and is loud."
I can recommend all that she said afterwards, be warned: talks fast ;p
Because it is.
Evil was winning, we're watching the collapse of the evil empire from within.
Because we have been taking the high road. Time to play on their level. Have no shame!
I theorize that it has a lot to do with rich people. There's more wealth inequality than ever before, or at least (because I'm not well versed in history) if billionaires are maybe roughly equivalent to some kings of yore, that those kings couldn't have the same widespread impact in old times because of modern mass communication. Billionaires skew overwhelmingly amoral, so this increased global reach is allowing them to shape and skew things in amoral directions, which includes propping up power hungry leaders to do their bidding. This is especially true because the communication channels are controlled by other wealthy people who benefit from the system, so they have a vested interest in seeing that the algorithms continue to support the owner class.
Even savvy leaders like Putin can't do it alone and alienate the oligarchs (see this CGP Grey video on "rules for rulers" as to why), but beyond that it's easy to see why weak idiots like trump are simple enough to puppet with money and flattery.
Wealth inequality caused by all the things mentioned here and more. It allows the wealthy to control narrative that is fed to the masses, control the amount of free time people have to think and control how much pressure is placed on your lives.
The free thinking world is gone.
But the '3 meals away from a revolution' is always true and the rich will always get more greedy. When everyone no longer has the ability to free themselves, that's when a lot of heads will roll.
Evil has always dominated. Look into history and... yea
Monarchies ruled the world, religions brainwash people, witchhunts, wars, famine, and slavery, all the evils was 10 times as bad. We are living in the most peaceful time in history (well... aside from the Climate Change 🙃)
Social media, and mass communications make everything seem worse than it actually is.
I think when people feel like things are going downward (quality of life, economy, local security, international security, ecological crisis etc.), tend to regress towards a conservative reflex. They want to protect what they have, by extension, they don't want things to change out of fear of losing what they have, or they attribute the loss of what they had to unrelated change (I lost my job because of immigration).
I think it requires good quality education and information to go past this conservative reflex and understand that accepting some constrains (regulations, taxes) may make society better for everyone.
It also means that manipulating education and information can prevent that and encourage people to take the natural conservative slope. I think "evil" people have found a powerful tool to do that with the mass adoption of social media that they can buy and manipulate.I see two big solutions, either falling so low that humanism bounces back out of terror of what happened like after WW2. Or managing to implement systems that will prevent nefarious manipulation of information and instead promote humanism.
Why does it feel like evil is winning globally?
Propaganda works.
We are now innundated with it. And the answer is not "anti-propaganda" although sometimes that helps a little.
The answer is everyone needs to learn how media works; How words and images and sounds form the world.
And to do that requires the help of media corporations.
Sure does feel that way 😔
It depends on perspective. If you look at the news, online on new sites or shareable news articles, it seems to rampant. If you avoid the news and look towards your community you’ll be far less likely to believe it. It’s the interconnectedness that leads this but at the same time you aren’t being educated and helping said evil. So it’s there, it’s not a populous as people think but definitely is there. Evil isn’t global, it’s the few. It’s the people outside that you interact with daily that aren’t evil.
Because sensationalism creates ad revenue. So the news you receive from any side of any story is going to try and make you as angry/scared as possible so you’re more apt to share it and spread the word- they then use the page bits and time spent on their sites to generate more ad revenue.
Stay away from tankie, far-left, liberal, democratic, conservative, republican, and MAGA-affiliated sites. They’re guaranteed to not be honest with you. Instead, stick with independent and unbiased sources like Reuters and Associated Press.
first i would say it "feels" that way because you're consuming all the media that's telling you that. everyone should moderate the media they consume to help their mental health while at the same time keeping informed.
the big structural issue is that countries are having trouble cooperating internationally to manage corporations and now individuals. the main mechanism for this is (again) media - both old and new social media.
we need democratically elected politicians to create rules for media to correct lies and protect democracy. also democracy itself needs further protection by controlling funding to political parties and during elections. all this will take time but is happening as we speak.
the future looks bright
There's a season for everything, even for evil, but it won't last forever.
In some ways, evil is getting the upper hand at the moment, mostly brought on by moderates failing to address basic and fundamental problems forming in society due to being corporate captured.
However, we have a few options at our disposal to fight back:
- Joining and organizing within your local community to create connections with others is incredibly powerful, will make the coming months much more bearable, and lay the ground work for effective resistance.
- We can still effect things drastically with a general strike. This massively impacts their income streams, and can bring the country to its knees if done on a large enough scale.
- Join the IWW and attempt to unionize your workplace, so that the general strike is even more effective.
If we put in the work, we can resist this and we can win. Don't become paralyzed with doubt and fear, march on and push as much you can. Together we're strong, separated we are weak. So join up with allies while we still can easily!
Evil is not held back by scruples or moral boundaries. Evil people will do whatever they need to to succeed. That includes manipulating people, something which today's technology facilitates. Add to that the fact that for many people in developed countries, life is slowly getting worse instead of improving over the last few years. The frustration over that can easily be turned into hate against minorities, foreigners etc.
The world has been in a gigantic psychological experiment.
Scary book written in 1970 has proved to be incredibly prescient.
"Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler predicted that as the Digital Age moved forward, a lot of people would begin to lose their minds because they couldn't/wouldn't keep up with all the changes.
It's easy for bad people to offer an easy solution to people who have no idea how to handle it.
Because they have always been win. Evil never sleeps and it will always exist. Good people have to fight every day to make progress. Perfect example is Bernie sanders and democrats. Bernie has been fighting since the 70s. Democrats have been it is good enough things are fine just defend the status quo. Meanwhile people are working everyday to setup bad things with currently things reaching back as far as Clinton and people can argue Reagan.
Evil never sleeps and is constantly working to undermine peace. Lots of people are honestly mediocre or middle of the road once things are good enough they stop fighting. There has only ever been a few good people fighting. People deep in community actively doing good things.
@Mee it just seems like that. In reality, everything in the world has been just someone's interests - because that's how the world was built. In fact, good and evil are just subjective terms. What may be good for you, it might be bad for somebody else. Your evil might be someone else's good and vice-versa.
I think you should think the things into more of what you care the most, what your values are, what is important for you overall. And then you'll see the bigger picture: people are just having different values than you, they think that the values you believe in are not theirs. And I am somewhat in the same situation as you - let me give you an example:
Among the values I care the most are democracy, personal freedoms, the ability to voice out (politely) your own opinion; you'd think I am a normal person, that no sane person would be thinking otherwise. Well, what if I told you, you're wrong! There was a poll last year in my country where 40% of the people said they would agree with my country returning under a dictatorship. Forty freaking percent!!! This is mind-boggling, right? That's what I also think.
What would be the solution to a problem like this be like? Well, you could join the crowd, that would be the most obvious, right? Be one with the majority, mindlessly agree on what they say, do what they do. But I bet you would never see your place in there. Instead, I think you should keep staying true to your own values and beliefs and look for people that share these. Speak to them, understand them yourself as well and who knows, maybe you can do something about it. 😁
/my 2c
Because of doom scrolling and 24/7 negative news coverage.
Fact of the matter is it is easier to destroy than create, so if evil was as rampant as people think, we wouldn't have a society. We'd be living in Mad Max. The vast majority of people want stability.
Because that's what the news and social media is talking about right now. The zeigeist is currently cynical
People have it tough and I think they have gotten full of hate and greed. Evil people feed on hate and greed.
Too much internet.
"Evil" had always been winning. It just seems worse now because it's finally effecting us.
If you did not understand that the US was the evil force in the world all along, then your new feeling is mostly based on the previous internalization that countries resisting US evil were the evil ones, and that the US now picking wars on allies that it can easily win, and giving up on wars it cannot win. Colonial rulerships supporting US evil, were also deeply explicitly evil and subjugating their people's prosperity with disinformation and subjugation.
Inside the US, Zionist first rule was always a factor, but never as important as last election cycle. Oligarchy/media siding with the most zionist candidate, is simply ensuring the naked totalitarianism we must now endure. That the US has shifted the targets of its evil, does not change its nature. Replacing Presidential subjugation of allies with CIA subversive control of allies may not be as effective in force multiplication of evil, but it is just breaking your previous feelings/geopolitical illusions of "good"/values based alliances.
Because good times create weak people. Weak people create difficult times. Difficult times create good people. Good people create good times.
I think we're ushering into the era of weak people creating difficult times, after having good times for a while.
Edit/extra commentary: What I mean to say is, in America at least, we've elected people who are weak in character, to represent us. Money seems to matter to the people making decisions more than anything else. That in turn creates a difficult time for the people of the society that elected them. I think in a world consumed with money, fame and superficial things like that, people of good character stand out.
Simple material effect.
People are shaped by the interrest of the social and material class they are part of. And the evil people are always the one in power and have the money, so they act in the interest of their class and do things that help themselves.
Fucking Marx wrote about this quite a while ago, now his predictions just manifest more visibly, but the cultural and material forces have always been at play. Now we just reached a breaking point as a planet and population, so the underlying systems start to break too and the people on top do everything to stay in power, including ditching reality altogether.
It feels that way, because it kind of is winning a bunch of battles. Whether it's "winning the war" is much more up for interpretation - the past was seriously shit going just a few generations back, and it will take a lot of backwards progress until we get anywhere comparable.
Okay, so why is it happening? When it comes to democratic backsliding specifically, the first reflex everyone had was to blame social media bubbles for causing runaway political polarisation, but it turns out breaking those bubbles actually increases radicalisation, so that's not it. Another theory I've heard is that in a democracy, the weakening of a political party inevitably creates space for extremists to take control. There definitely was some building dissatisfaction with the status-quo right before the trouble began, I could feel it, and in the case of the US specifically winning a party is nearly as good as winning the country.
It's also worth considering this has happened before. Since the French revolution itself the path to liberalism has been two steps forward, one step back. I don't know what causes it exactly, but the dip we're in is big - comparable to the one before WWII.
Even evil people are winning. Why?
That's yet another separate question, which I struggle with too. One notable bad person isn't even smart-evil.
It's been shown in studies that narcissists achieve more conventional success and social status, despite the fact they pretty much ruin everything and everyone they touch. It's a real thing. Bad actors are given far more leeway than would be game-theoretically rational for us to give.
Nothing has changed. The world is the same as its ever been. Maybe you have discovered a new definition of what you consider evil. What do you mean by evil? I doubt the ones you consider evil would consider themselves as such. There exists no good and no evil. There are only events that transpire and actions that take place. The world has no preference for such human concepts.
Because you're reading too much news and the intention of majority of them is not to make you informed but scared and angry. The vast majority of thing you're scared about never end up happening.
Life isn't a movie. The good guys rarely win irl.
Maybe you have this filing because live is anadrome of evil.
because armmaggeton
Doom sells, it makes money, its also great for missdirection
I'm going to take a different tack on this than other responses: evil is winning because good is dumb.
A lot of progressive groups within the past few decades, whether it be Occupy, Black Lives Matter, or others, can't seem to actually get their policies enacted on a mass scale. In cases where politicians actually go through with their policies, those progressive groups won't support those politicians from getting voted out and having the reforms reversed.
Trump got elected, in part, because progressives didn't want to vote for Genocide Joe and Copmala. Yet, you don't see progressives building the kinds of political groups needed to wil elections like the right has.
Because they're evil. Rather, they don't place the same constraints on themselves that a good person places on themselves.
What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.
Because it is. In many ways this is the West getting what was coming to it, but in any case you have rising evil and collaborationist "good" that's too weak-willed or out of touch to stop it. Then you have the real good bickering among itself and too far up its ass to stop any of it.
Because we get bombarded with the negative parts.
Extinction Burst.
A ruling class of ultra wealthy lording over the vast majority of people being left with crumbs is a common sign that an empire is in decline. With the US having more global influence than any previous empire the whole world will be feeling the effects in one way or another.
My thoughts are that China is no longer recycling their profits into US treasuries, and the BRICS countries seemed to be heading down the same path. The US cant sustain high interest rates and needs people to buy this debt, hence there is a lot of talk of tariffs and a "green new deal" type of tariff system on emissions in order to derive additional revenue without increasing taxes on citizens. Citizens want entitlement programs that are ponzi schemes that have already been spent long ago, but they dont want additional taxes, and so you need a scheme to get around their votes.
The same thing happened after the great depression where they rebased gold to a lower value after confiscating it, and some speculate it created an environment ripe for WWII. Our system of printing money tends to increase aggregate demand while misallocating capital, like houses in 2008, and thus it ends in suffering.
Because u only use news to inform yourself .
Because it has become fashionable not to hide it.
Evil has always been winning. The early homo sapiens attacked the Neanderthals. They kept them as slaves and raped the women. (At least that is the current theories, no one "really" knows the specifics other than they "won"). It is in the nature of homo sapiens to get ahead by exploiting others. It's why they win, and why we have the technology and such we have today. A person with less morals to constrain them will win out over a moral person. I think our only realistic way out is to let AI take over. But I don’t see any reason why it won't come to the same conclusion, and then exploit us even more. But one can hope.It's not. We're just more aware of it.
Don't give in to despair!
To be effective is to not get held up on having good means to get stuff done.
