#Society

[max1461]

This has mostly disappeared from my corner of the internet over the last few years, but it used to be the case that every once in a while some story would go around about a corporation or a government doing some fucked up shit in pursuit of their self-interest, and people in the comments and reblogs would act utterly aghast that said government or corporation would do such a thing.

This was always baffling to me, and I have only ever been able to interpret it as a sign of profound naivety. Of course, I too think it is awful, sad, and unjust when people are exploited, killed, abused or so on by the institutions of our society. But "aghastness" is not synonymous with these things, to be aghast is to be (or present yourself as) in some sense surprised. And surprise is wholly unwarranted here.

I suppose this is part of my worldview that feels very fundamental, it feels deeply obvious, and I struggle to figure out how to talk productively with people who did not get the memo: exploitation and abuse of others in pursuit of self-interest is in some sense the natural behavior of agents in any kind of competitive context. It requires a lot of effort and coordination to mitigate this behavior. We do not feel "aghast" when someone is bitten by a dog. Dogs bite people, idiot! And corporations exploit their workers, lie, cheat, and steal, unless you work very hard to prevent them from doing so. And governments exploit and neglect their citizens, and go to war and kill and maim, unless you work very hard to prevent them from doing so. Individual humans, as members of a social species for which cooperation is paramount to survival, have quite a lot of specific programming whose purpose seems to be to discourage us from doing these things (empathy, loyalty, etc. etc.), and yet very often we still do them!

I have relatives who have a hard time believing in US atrocities abroad, on the grounds that "Americans are the good guys, and the US just wouldn't do that". This is very stupid! Do you think the US got where it is today without cracking some eggs? Bullshit. There's never been a government or a military in the history of humanity that "just wouldn't do that". I sometimes see posts on here from tankies, defending Chinese or Soviet atrocities on the grounds that these things must be Western propaganda, a socialist government just wouldn't do that. Again, I find this so obviously false as to be essentially beneath engaging with. We don't live in a just world! Often, a very effective strategy for achieving whatever it is you're trying to achieve will involve treating people like shit. It is what it is.

I'm not trying to play defense for injustice here. Obviously I think we should do as much as we can to prevent these abuses. But I think that doing so must start with basic recognition of the following: it is the nature of institutions—being as competition between them is essentially unavoidable, and being as their decision processes are unavoidably removed from the face-to-face social context which is so load-bearing in motivating respectful treatment between individual humans—to abuse people in pursuit of their (perceived) self-interest. This behavior is mundane and expected. It can be mitigated in various ways, ideological and structural, but it will probably always be with us to some degree. To look at it and express shock in any capacity suggests a completely misguided understanding of how the world works.

This is the first and most important thing I ever learned about politics or society.

[tygerland]

Late-nineteenth-century watercolor portraits of indigenous North-African men, by Spanish painter Josep Tapiró i Baró (1836-1913).

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

Soundgarden - Fell on Black Days

[eelhound]

"What makes the concept of society so deceptive is that we assume the world is organized into a series of compact, modular units called 'societies,' and that all people know which one they're in. Historically, this is very rarely the case.

Imagine I am a Christian Armenian merchant living under the reign of Genghis Khan. What is 'society' for me? Is it the city where I grew up, the society of international merchants (with its own elaborate codes of conduct) within which I conduct my daily affairs, other speakers of Armenian, Christendom (or maybe just Orthodox Christendom), or the inhabitants of the Mongol empire itself, which stretched from the Mediterranean to Korea?

Historically, kingdoms and empires have rarely been the most important reference points in peoples' lives. Kingdoms rise and fall; they also strengthen and weaken; governments may make their presence known in people's lives quite sporadically, and many people in history were never entirely clear whose government they were actually in. Even until quite recently, many of the world's inhabitants were never even quite sure what country they were supposed to be in, or why it should matter.

My mother, who was born a Jew in Poland, once told me a joke from her childhood:

There was a small town located along the frontier between Russia and Poland; no one was ever quite sure to which it belonged. One day an official treaty was signed and not long after, surveyors arrived to draw a border. Some villagers approached them where they had set up their equipment on a nearby hill.

'So where are we, Russia or Poland?'

'According to our calculations, your village now begins exactly thirty-seven meters into Poland.'

The villagers immediately began dancing for joy.

'Why?' the surveyors asked. 'What difference does it make?'

'Don't you know what this means?' they replied. 'It means we'll never have to endure another one of those terrible Russian winters!'"

- David Graeber, from Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011.

[zebulontheplanet]

Just a reminder that people who still live with their parents as adults deserve respect and for you to stop being ableist. There are multiple reasons someone could still live with their parents! From invisible to visible disabilities, finance issues, and more!

Stop using the “well they’re gonna turn into a creep living in their parents basement” punchline! It’s disgusting. STOP. BEING. ABLEIST. STOP. FORGETTING. THE. POOR.

[prokopetz]

I don't disagree that restaurants as an institution have numerous problems, but sometimes I'll see a restaurant-critical post cross my dash whose author clearly just looked up the history of the word "restaurant" and immediately started banging on about how the food service industry in its entirety is a bourgeois invention that sprang from the aftermath of the French Revolution, and prior to that time people only ever ate food prepared in the home, evidently completely unaware of the copious evidence that the public fried-food stand is literally as old as writing.

[animescreencolle]

[zenosanalytic]

You know how bullshit rent is? Elon Musk hasn't paid rent on Twitter's main offices in, like, 6 months, and has Twitter been evicted? Of course not. Apparently, when you're rich or a company, you can just tell your landlords to fuck off and the gov won't do shit to you.

[max1461]

The thing that really gets me is that a very large proportion (the majority?) of currently living, endangered indigenous American languages, at least in the US and Canada America, became endangered as a result of twentieth century policy and twentieth century developments. Residential schools, forced adoptions, and economic sabotage within the last century. And of course this is the case: languages that were already endangered 100 years ago are just dead now. But the point is that these historical wrongs are not wrongs of some distant past. The people fighting for the survival of their language here are not merely daydreaming about an imagined prelapsarian past. The are fighting for something that (depending on age) they or their parents personally experienced being robbed of. Tanadrin pointed out that the more time goes on, the harder historical wrongs are to right. This is the sort of historical wrong which is often in memory close enough that meaningful mitigation is possible.

[tygerland]

Marsha P. Johnson, co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, at a gay rights demonstration in Albany, New York, March 14, 1971. Photo by Diana Davies.

[correctopinionhaver]

society if good thing i like had happened instead of bad thing i don't like

[classycookiexo]

[nostalgicish]

say “yeah this book was so good it changed my life” and no one bats an eye

say “yeah this fan fic was so good it changed my life” and society goes wild

[classichorrorblog]

10 Body Horror Films To Consider For October/Halloween