They get to feel superior to vast swaths of the population without doing anything.
Probably generally starting with either an inferiority complex, or being a sociopath.
If you remember the post trump election memes about economic anxiety being mediaspeak for racism, this is basically where that came from.
Bigotry is a despair response, when the promises of normalcy fail someone, there’s a chance for them to start looking for new meaning to understand a seemingly indifferent world, and in that state of mind, being told you’re part of an exclusive club of inherent superiority is the ego stroke that gets them off.
From the moment they take that poison pill it basically plays out as an analogue of addiction. Even as they watch the sludge they’re mainlining destroy everything around them it doesn’t cut them off from, they just can’t stop, because the validation of feeling that it’s the entire world that’s wrong instead of just you being shit out of luck is too much for a lot of folks to be willing to part with.
It also doesn’t help that these people tend to get fired from jobs that don’t put up with racist bullshit, turning the whole validation needing into a vicious cycle sort of deal.
This is also why some very stupid self described leftists seem to have zero worry about the rise of fascism (even as they insist that they’re the only ones who truly take it seriously as a threat), they think “just do a socialism bro” will instantly fix everything as if economic hardship would never happen to a socialist society even within a vacuum.
They literally think you can just pay the racists to stop being racists, and that you can pay a heroin addict to stop shooting up.
This is also why some very stupid self described leftists seem to have zero worry about the rise of fascism (even as they insist that they’re the only ones who truly take it seriously as a threat), they think “just do a socialism bro” will instantly fix everything as if economic hardship would never happen to a socialist society even within a vacuum.
I have to admit - I’m having a hard time picturing how this would be expressed. Any particular examples you can point to?
All the “don’t vote” leftists that think democrats not voting Bernie is less forgiveable that the Republicans closing abortion clinics and kicking gay kids out onto the streets.
They think perceived direct opposition to socialism is worse than something they believe will just magically go away once they finish bribing the racists to not be racist.
I think the viewpoint of those folks currently is essentially that Dems will see a direct line between their support of Israel (for example) in the current Gaza genocide event and the fact that they did not heed in any way the voices of progressives, leftists, and others, and realize when Trump wins (again parroting what I believe to be their viewpoint) they should be more inclusive of those groups the next time around.
I personally don’t think that’s a strategy that will have long term or short term benefits, because I don’t think politicians in general seem capable of strategizing to that level of nuance regarding public opinion, but I can see where they are coming from.
Which is a just maddeningly privileged take.
Someone spouting that line off is basically all but admitting they see everyone a second term would put in harm’s way as pawns they can sacrifice at will for the sake of some war against this spectre of an evil conniving and completely unified in purpose and goals DNC establishment.
It is a PoV available only to white kids and those who get their politics from mainly white kids.
Not to mention on the Palestine issue, only a white kid could see the man who handed the Israelis East Jerusalem and West Bank about to get back into power and think the play that helps the cause is threatening to let it happen if we don’t stop everything and listen to their “Imagine” soundboard platitudes and shit.
I agree with you, but that’s where I perceive their viewpoint to come from. I actually think I did see at least one person say something like “it’s bad for gaza now, but will be better for gaza later” or something like that. Happy to be corrected by any folks of similar mindset who want to chime in though.
The Internet is like a library: repository of knowledge, it’s also like cable TV where every crackpot has a broadcast license.
How you use it is up to you.
Racism and bigotry aren’t logical positions, but emotional ones. People have an emotional need to be part of a group and feel included. If the group a person joins is antagonistic towards other groups then the person will internalize that and become bigoted. The dislike of other groups becomes a part of their identity and belonging.
The documentary Behind The Curve illustrates this pretty effectively. They follow some flat eathers around and interview them and they all say the same thing. They love being a part of the group. They didn’t have a group before and now they do. Their beliefs keep the group together and they’re not going to get rid of them just because the beliefs can be proven to be wrong.
The desire to be a part of a group is strong enough that people will believe anything as long as it gets them some friends. There isn’t anything wrong with that unless the beliefs of the group are harmful and hateful.
Additionally to what has already been mentioned: People are susceptible to politics that confirm their prejudices. Right-wing political thought is largely based on confirming that whatever prejudices people hold, they are morally good and justified. Thus elevating an in-group above out-groups. That is a powerful lure.
Remember that racial segregation in the US wasn’t that long ago, historically speaking.
Some of children who lived through that era were raised with racism and these values were passed to their children who became Gen X and Y.
Religion also had a bigger influence in the previous generations. Homophobia and transphobia was normalized and you could even be arrested for being any of LGBTQ up until very recently and it’s still the case in some regions.
Nazi ideology never really left either. And the way this ideology came to be was through disenfranchised people who were angry and needed someone to be angry against. Someone came at the right place at the right time and gave these people a scapegoat.
Fascism is kind of the same but with a cult of personality.
Emotions are stronger then intellect, much stronger. And most of these people suffered in bad childhoods and were drilled or neglected into disempathy. (That’s not the necessary reaction to such childhoods but it’s a common reaction.)
suffered in bad childhoods
Just to say, but what causes those things are hate and fear.
The second one doesn’t require trauma.
Fear is a general human trait woven into our existences and should/could be reduced in a loving and supporting childhood. If love and support are missing in your childhood you don’t learn to handle your fears in a mature and stable way.
(I know I’m painting this picture with a very broad brush. It’s to point in the general direction of feelings as the most plausible and applicable answer to OPs question.)
To be fair, those involved in the bad childhoods also are likely to have bad childhoods themselves (the adults I mean).
Transgenerational stuff, victims becoming offenders and the likes.
Yep, you’re right, that’s what’s meant here.
Ok so your telling me since when I was bad in my childhood and spanked with a switch that I can become one?
No. Your response to such childhood is very individual. It’s a very common stance to live your life the opposite way of your parents lifestyle. That’s what produced the 1960s air of change in culture - hippies lived the very opposite of their parents ideals.
I simply point out well researched patterns in childhoods and their influence on character traits. Look up developmental psychology and transgenerational patterns. In Germany there’s a lot of research and publication about “war children” and “war grandchildren” (Kriegskinder und Kriegsenkel) which in general attributes a lot of the countries troubles and shortcomings to the upbringing of kids in a war and post war society with a lot of shame and guilt.
That’s certainly their rationale.
It’s weird how some people turn into neo-nazis or incels after that and I just pay sexy Russian dom mommies to beat me within an inch of my life.
Anyone can become filled with hate.
There’s a lot of information, there’s also a lot of misinformation. Many people don’t trust authorities, sometimes for understandable reasons, so they end up in the fringes.
Also, the Nazis, and even the Confederates, weren’t all that long ago in the grand scheme. A couple generations. Many people learn these tendencies from their family.
Also incels are somewhat different from Nazis/fascists. There’s obviously a lot of overlap. There’s always been men who had trouble with women, but I think being a male virgin after a certain age is enormously more vilified these days than it was in, for instance, the 50s, even among more progressive, left leaning groups. Admittedly, that’s anecdotal so I could be wrong.
Part of it is education and critical thinking. People don’t know what to trust because they don’t know how to test information for truthfulness and can’t reliably fact check. So they depend on an authority figure to tell them what and how to think, with expected results.
Note this isn’t limited to these people; some people just pick better authority figures than others.
but I think being a male virgin after a certain age is enormously more vilified these days than it was in, for instance, the 50s, even among more progressive, left leaning groups.
Not sure if this is true, but I’m pretty sure that research says that people were having more sex back then. So probably fewer virgins back then.
There was less to do for entertainment in the 50s, lol
Still a culture shift. Back then you were a stand up guy waiting for a dynamite gal to call his own, now you’re that weird 30yo who couldn’t get an easy lay in college and is too socially akward to date now.
It’s engineered into society by power people. if you are too busy looking down on someone. You won’t notice them robbing you blind.
engineered into society by power people
C’mon man! That’s conspiracy thinking if I ever heard it. The truth is far simpler, and scarier, people are people just being people. And there are a lot of people trying to navigate a wildly complex world we didn’t evolve for, one that’s changing at breakneck speed. We almost have to boil our experiences down into more digestible chunks to make sense of it.
This article is so old that the formatting’s been trashed, but I think you can parse the order of the text with a little effort. Few things I’ve ever read gave me a wider view of the world. It was so important to me I saved a PDF a few years back. If you don’t like the humor, fuck it, there’s still a strong message.
https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
While we’re at it, here’s another game changer from the same author. I’ve thought nn this, and observed it, for nearly a decade.
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about
you are correct that I was a little lazy in not clarifying my statement and I can see that coming off as a Them conspiracy theory mind set but the powers at be that I’m talking about are NAM and people long dead now like birch and pew.
Also NAMs role in the Taft hartley act that hurt unionisation in America that we feel today. and how NAM with the help of James Fifield warped churches across America as a response to The New Deal and FDR and fearing churches being a source of socialist thinking in the US.
If you follow this movement you will find people you know like Billy Gram and Ronald Reagan. Just look up the Spiritual Mobilization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft–Hartley_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_of_Manufacturers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_W._Fifield_Jr.
Use the full quote
I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
-Lyndon B. Johnson
You’ll find a lot of arguments for believing such things if you look for them. Some of these arguments are simply angry rants (and they appeal to angry people who aren’t inclined to think analytically) but others are quite sophisticated. Have I refuted all the sophisticated ones I’ve come across? No, that would take a lot of effort, and maybe some of them are even technically true. I’m not convinced by them primarily because I have certain assumptions about the world: conspiracy theories are generally not true, most people just want to live a good life, kindness is usually reciprocated, and so forth. Someone who holds the opposite set of assumptions (every organization is corrupt, many people are inherently evil, kindness leads to being exploited, etc.) won’t be convinced by your “knowledge against it” without even hearing you out in the same way that I’m not convinced by the arguments for it.
Here’s a great Ted talk from a guy who got pulled into the neo-nazis and got out.
“When dealing with people, and remember that you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion. Bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.”
– Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
Man, this sounds cringe. What’s this guy been through?
The title makes it sound like a book on manipulating people, but it’s merely an archaic headline. It’s about the author’s quest to understand people, his frustrations due to the lack of such an “instruction book”, and learning how to become a better person. We might call it psychology or sociology now, but Carnegie visited and wrote many scholars of his time trying to find such knowledge.
If there’s any book I’d say everyone should read, it’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Neat thing about it is, as the author says himself, you don’t have to read and parse it front to back to benefit. Pick it up, flip to a random chapter, read. It pays to read over and over again, occasionally reminding ourselves of our common humanity by internalizing the things he learned.
One quick example; He learned to shut the fuck up and listen. He tells a story about a dinner party he and his wife attended. We get the impression the host was quite the talker, dominating the conversation. Mr. Carnegie sat and listened to the man, hardly speaking at all. At the end of the evening the host went on and on about what a fine orator and clear thinker Carnegie was!
And if it’s the quote you take issue with, I don’t know how to respond. That’s simply how people are, you and I both.
They are being constantly bombarded with algorithm-fueled targeted media designed to make them feel just good enough about themselves to keep watching the next video of ‘woke woman gets owned on camera and everybody claps’. Source: my childhood friend gets recommended this trash daily on his youtube homepage. I try to push against it without re-enforcing the narrative that The Liberals are the reason why he doesn’t have any friends. I don’t think it’s working.
Access to knowledge doesn’t imply successful absorption of said knowledge. And a lot of the thing isn’t about knowledge, but moral premises - things that are neither true nor false, but that you consider good or bad, and as others said here emotions and self-interest play a huge role on the later.
Yea but isn’t knowledge a tool for understanding good or bad. If something someone tells me is bad or whatever I go and look it up read about it so I can have a discussion with them and understand their point of view. Am I wrong in doing so?
Not quite - knowledge alone is not enough to label something as good or bad. Because good/bad aren’t attributes of that thing, they’re only your attitude towards it.
That’s important here because it’s perfectly possible that a bigot knows that what other bigots use to justify their bigotry (like frenology etc.) is false, but still says “nah, screw them, I’m defending my own group at their expense”. And that person would be still a bigot and should be treated as one.
I know some people are born into these mindsets. I know what it’s like to have been raised by a bigot; indoctrinated thoughts are the hardest to change.
I am convinced a large part of the problem is some people prefer convenient answers which make immediate sense, as opposed to nuanced truths.
Could it be that racism creates conditions which lead to a higher frequency of situations which will reinforce racist stereotypes? Too much thinking involved, it makes more sense that the blacks are inherently different.
You should do an AMA it would be nice to hear about your exp growing up like that and how you changed your life.
Unfortunately my experience is nothing short of common. Our current generation is the most tolerant in history, so naturally our parents will hold bigoted opinions.
If you want to hear a fascinating story, listen to Megan, who left the “God hates fags” church, and now tries to explain indoctrination.
Could it be that racism creates conditions which lead to a higher frequency of situations which will reinforce racist stereotypes? Too much thinking involved, it makes more sense that the blacks are inherently different.
I have struggled to communicate what you said in your first sentence in less than paragraphs several times and failed. Thank you for giving me an example of how to say it succinctly. Let’s hope I can remember/replicate that the next time I try to get the concept across to someone.
