Why do some people try to humanize the wealthy and people in positions of power?
When it has been demonstrated over and over again, how little they think of anyone beneath them.
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.
They are not in fact human in the ways that matter. Their organs are compatible. That is all.
Those who would commit atrocity use dehumanizing language to justify horrible things. Let's leave that to the fascist of the world. We don't have to act as if a person isn't human to recognize their evil. Humans are capable of great love and great evil. Avoiding dehumanizing someone is not forgiving them for the terrible things they have done. Why do you need to view something as not human to recognize it's evil? That, honestly worries me. We can serve justice to these terrible people and still call them human.
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?
They are human.
Humans are just like that.
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.
What matters is how much damage they cause.
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 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.
If given a chance they will kill. To obtain that level of wealth one generally has to have a sociopathic level of lack of empathy. Maybe not all are like Trump and itching to blow people up and put people to death. A lot are probably less actively bloodthirsty (thankfully) but at the same time have no issue taking away your health insurance, your income, your housing, etc if it impacts their bottom line even though they already have enough resources to last 100,000,000 lifetimes in extreme excess.
“Oh but if they let these things change they would lose their wealth” exactly - when it comes down to it, they would rather leave you to die than risk losing their obscene wealth. So this is violence, and therefore violence is an appropriate response, especially when the state continually and repeatedly fails over decades (arguably from its inception) to rein them in.
There are plenty of people who are sociopathic around you right now. What they usually lack is the power/opportunity to do harm. Under capitalism the crimes of capitalists are made normative and legal. All sociopaths are human, and depite what some may think, you can't just punish/shoot your way out of a systemic problem.
But how to do that without removing their head?
Ah, that was some clever wordplay, given that one of the definitions of capital is "of or pertaining to the head"!
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.
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.
There's science that backs this, but you don't get that way without being a piece of shit beforehand.
That level of wealth power privilege does in fact damage your brain, everything precious about humanity drains out through your orders.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Because they are human. What is the difficulty here? They're not reptilians or space aliens or inter-dimensional beings. It's in all of us.
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.
In every era, the ideas that rule are the ideas of the rulers.
This point is expansively detail in capital and ideology by Piketty
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
Boot lickers. Just boot lickers. Hoping to become one of them one day.
Because a person deserves to be considered person whether they think you worth of being so or not.
A faceless, dehumanized enemy will forever be out of reach, unsurpassable in reach and power. A flesh a blood human doing a skin and bone job is replaceable by most any of us because no matter how much power they might have, they are only people.
Because we are surrounded by the media that the rich owns that propagandizes us to put the rich on a pedestal.
To try to understand someone is not the same as respecting them. One can try to understand one's enemy to better fight them.
I think it is important to recognise people as people. I'm not making excuses for intentionally malicious wealthy or powerful people -- but the wealth or power itself isn't the whole problem (although the various systems that perpetuate and enable certain wealthy or powerful people are problematic of course), and we shouldn't give these adults that as an excuse.
They're wealthy, yes. They're also human beings who choose to be cruel, callous, selfish, uncaring arseholes.
They're powerful, yes. They're also adults who know what they're doing and consistently make the decision to harm people with their choices.
Netanyahu's political power wouldn't be as much of a problem in and of itself if he wasn't choosing to enact a genocide. Murdoch's wealth wouldn't be as much of a problem in and of itself if he didn't choose to use it to buy media outlets and push right-wing lies to millions.
No excuses for cruelty; the money and power didn't "corrupt" these people, because we don't live in a fantasy world where money and power are magic cursed items. These people intentionally decided to be cruel.
Why do the working glass poor vote Trump
Because they're fucking stupid.
Most of the voters who vote Republican are usually rural. They're the people out in the middle of bumfuck no where, with their farms, their farm animals and what little family they have. And all that they can afford are things like dial-up internet. So they're completely out of touch with more 'civilized' people who're in towns and cities.
And even so, there are people who are completely nuanced and naive to what is before them even with better access to information. They can't and won't challenge their intellect, they won't question information as to what's infront of them. Nothing. Just deliberately clueless and oblivious.
Because the aforementioned billionaires, and previously multi-millionaires, have been spending untold billions over a period of nearly a century to keep them trapped in a propaganda bubble.
It's important to remember that the actions of the working class are primarily derived from their class interests, not because individuals are dicks. Humanizing even shitty individuals is an important part of persuading people away from thinking in terms of individual people and more about the dialectics of class.
Maybe bc they are human?
I personally am skeptical
Some.people priase Hitler.
Because they "earned" or achieved wealth, i.e. worked really hard to become rich
You mean because people think the rich earned their wealth?
Like Jeff Bezos slaving day and night, as he does, to get all those parcels sent out.
Or Elon coming up with, like, cool ideas. And shit. After smoking another blunt and thinking about how great Adolf Hitler really was.
I believe that's because they are the same as them (or would like to be) and would behave the exact same way if they were in their position.
Because they get paid to do so.
People are brainwashed. They have been for generations. And only very few even like to admit that they are brainwashed. I was too... Luckily I woke up, and became both woke and able to think critically...
At what point is someone wealthy using gapminder levels of income where level 1 is earning $2 a day, level 2 is $8, level 3 $32, etcetera?
And at what point is a person in power?
Is Zelensky in power? Xi Jinping?
Greta Thunberg? John Oliver?
JT Chapman? Karl Marx?
The admin of this site?
The OP made a distinction between wealth and power. Your question salad conflating the two, even if wealth does grant power, is muddying the original question with “What is the definition of ‘is’?” It isn’t meaningful.
What the fuck does any of that rambling have to do with the question?
This is an idiotic post. Yes, they are human. Yes they may make bad decisions, but so do poor people. They just don't make enough to matter.
From personal experience from people that I know who love to defend the wealthy they believe that if we defend the wealthy and give them everything that they want eventually thry will give us something back as well and we will enjoy a better life. Somehow?
Warm piss tinkle down economics?
Stockholm syndrome
Because they’re cucks
They're trained to.
They be dragons.
It makes me wonder if some of the dragons written in literature are just an allegory for the ultra wealthy and powerful of their time that were hoarding unimaginable wealth while the huddled masses starved.
They are human. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that, while also reiterating that they basically shouldn’t be in that state.
Also, I think it’s important to draw a line between the “rich” (well-off working professionals like researchers, doctors, small entrepreneurs), and people with more wealth than many sovereign nations put together.
I think it's increasingly easier to feel empathy for a killer the more steps there are between them and the trigger. I personally find it much more jarring when someone can just fully turn off empathy when given context. A lot of the time what you're talking about goes hand-in-hand with dehumanizing the impoverished, that's the one I can't fathom.
Hot take, we should deliberately dehumanize rich people.
they're just subs that are into bdsm
Financial domination
The rich people are almost all psychopaths and probably got that way because of the way wealth warps people's minds.
I'm aphantasic. Until people started really talking about how they "see" things in their heads, I assumed it was all just a figure of speech. Flashbacks, thought bubbles, daydreams in media... I assumed that was all just, you know, an easy way to get the information across. Now I know you freaks actually see stuff and the mind's eye isn't some convenient turn of phrase. Weirdos!
In a similar vein, I have empathy. It is difficult for me to intuitively understand the perspective of someone who doesn't have any. As an example, it's hard for me to understand a person who's exploiting children a la Epstein. And in truth, I don't want to understand them, either. Even knowing how many of them are the way they are... if I had a little less introspection, I'd probably just default to "they're just like us."
I am not sure it is really about Capitalism but the broader human Centralization whatever its political or economic system. We Centralize and someone has to be at the top as that is our nature and those at the top exploit as power corrupts. This is wired into us a species and it has brought us a long way for better and for worse.
There are lots of poor narcissists too...
Numerous reasons.
Lots of people don’t want anyone to disturb the system…”upend the apple cart” as it were. A known, even if shitty, is still better than the unknown. Like people pining for lives under the rule of some harsh autocrat. Even if your neighbor disappeared one night thanks to the State Police, it was better than worrying about the less-harsh policing that lets kids get away with graffiti-ing everything or the petty theft you’re always hearing about.
Also, if they come for the rich people, they’ll come for you. If they tax the rich, they’ll tax you. If you support the rich, people will remember that, and they’ll come for you.
Maybe a little of the “I could be rich someday” idea too, so they support obscene wealth with the idea they could somehow also be rich no matter how minuscule the chance. The irony being the wealthy are the ones supporting barriers preventing you from even achieving financial security, forget ever being wealthy.
This isn't really a question.
Propaganda, trolls, paid shills
Maybe because they think one day they will be rich, so obviously rich people are still people.
But they will never be poor, because poor people aren't people.
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.
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)
Isn't dehumanizing kind of the whole Nazi thing?
Dehumanising and giving no quarter are different things.
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.
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?
Yes, but it makes us feel better about ourselves.
/s but also not.