A society in which it’s everyone for themselves, that refuses to care for one another, is no society at all. Then everyone acts shocked and horrified at someone who understandably snaps, like modern western culture doesn’t run entirely on schadenfreude.

That was the crux of the idea of a social contract, which is long dead in the US. Now people line up to revel in the suffering of their fellow citizens with “well you were stupid to do xyz in life, so you deserve your suffering haha.”

  • Rodeo
    21·
    11 months ago

    Have you ever worked as a retail clerk for any length of time?

    I’ve met one person in all my career who genuinely felt like that after being in retail.

    You don’t realize how much people suck until you spend 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year cleaning up their messes and dealing with their behavior.

    • Bobert@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      11 months ago

      5 years in a pharmacy, so about the most vitriolic you can imagine. People with withdrawals mad you won’t break the law for them, people lying to your face hoping you’ll unknowingly break the law, and then people upset because theirs or their child’s medicine cost more than they make in a month.

      I get what life can do to people, or worse, what people can do to people. But if you just stop and look you’ll find good people in this fight with you. And giving up on them is not something I’m going to do, it’s why I even made my original comment. OP is (imo) misguided, but that doesn’t make them a bad person and it doesn’t mean they’re beyond hope. And I like to imagine that most of the people they’ve seen that caused them to so harden their outlook are in the exact same boat that the OP is in. Simply misguided but not even close to being beyond redemption or belief.

      • Rodeo
        12·
        11 months ago

        But if you just stop and look you’ll find good people in this fight with you.

        This appears to be the sum total of your argument, and doesn’t really address his statement of the social contract being broken. Just because some “good” people remain doesn’t mean the majority haven’t been pushed by the system to something worse.

        I’d also like to advise you just how arrogant your statements here are:

        And giving up on them is not something I’m going to do … OP is (imo) misguided, but that doesn’t make them a bad person and it doesn’t mean they’re beyond hope. … Simply misguided but not even close to being beyond redemption or belief.

        So, you think your outlook is so superior that it grants you the authority to not only judge them as misguided but further imply that they are so wrong as to require redemption? Oh, but by the sheer goodness of your heart you still grant them the gift of your hope.

        This is called toxic positivity. You are using the notion of positivity in a negative way: it is a tool to assert your moral superiority and thereby belittle others.