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this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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Our people are horrible, vindictive morons.
And I don't mean that from a place of emotional response to bad things, I am saying all of this dispassionately and analytically. The country has a large population of people who are objectively horrible, and vindication has become our primary focus for political action, and this is all because they're generally morons.
I can't even really exaggerate or overplay this. The average American's intelligence is worse than abysmal. I used to lead a team of data-workers at a large company, we had nice, casual morning meetings and talked about the latest events for about a half hour before work. I ended up in the position of people bringing me news stories and headlines to "translate" for them. I had to explain what planets are, I had to explain how gravity works, I had to explain how democracy works, I had to explain history and math and facts and ratios and words like "industrious" or "ambivalent" every day, over and over. AND I'M NOT A SMART PERSON. I have always prided myself on being informed, but at some point I became the one-eyed king in the land of the blind and I hate it.
Everything here is going to get so, so much worse because I know how far down the barrel goes, and we haven't even touched the bottom yet.
Yup.
Remove Donald Trump and Republicans from the equation and you still have a nation overflowing with unrealistically ignorant and hateful people.
That problem doesn't go away with whoever's in charge of our politics.
Our situation is 100% guaranteed to get much, much worse. And probably for the rest of our lives.
The part that crashed me into a very deep period of depression (probably the high fever from Covid didn't help) was realizing that this is as good as it gets.
All of our current issues are the same issues we've been struggling with as a species for the last several thousand years, and likely a lot longer before record-keeping was a thing. As much as we can bend the forces of nature and manipulate the material world around us with flashy machines and complex systems, we're still irrevocably and immutably just primate animals adapted to an ice-age world of predators, and even if we had the perfect social systems with limitless resources, we would find ways to break everything because we're just not capable of more. We are animals who stole fire from the Gods but we do not have the minds of Gods, we have selfish, malicious, fearful and anxious animal brains that make us ignore facts and logic and reason and respond only to our reactions.
It won't be us venturing into the universe. If we ever get off this speck of dust drifting around a sunbeam, it won't be us, it will be some descendant made of silicon and logic-gates emulating our species at some level but synthetic and who knows if it will even be aware like us... who knows if we're even aware. We are so good at tricking ourselves we actually believe we have choice and freedom and awareness of the world around us.
Try to find the place in which your thoughts originate and you will find a chaotic realm where your brain has already made all its choices and it just wants you to feel satisfied with the explanation you think you came up with. It's deeply distressing. Don't actually try it.