#as if looking at human fear and thinking 'i can profit from that' isn't deeply

[pardonthelitany]

insurance companies literally sell the promise of compassion and then dick you down while telling you to plan better

[whereserpentswalk]

Capitalism's narrative of eternal security

Sometimes I think about people who, in 2023, still make covid the main part of their politics. Like people who legitimately want full lockdowns to have been constant for the past three years. It feels like they're still stuck in 2020, like, looking at their posts, their weird shrinking subreddit, makes me feel strangely nostalgic. There's a point where it goes from a coherent ideology (because I think we understand by now that there's not going to be some magic event to make covid go away) to something closer to "the world is terrible and people suffer, so any happiness is morally wrong".

I feel like there's a deeply conservative trend to want to regulate the world into something completely safe. It goes back to 9/11, both in the very tangible things like the no-fly list, and the narrative people had around it. I don't know this for a fact because it predated my birth, but there were people who wanted to cancel Halloween that year, or asked if there would ever be comedy again, after the attack, which isn't logical, but is the type of thing that makes sense to a traumatized brain. This idea that society must be regulated by an overarching authority to keep everyone safe, the idea that everyone's ability to live their life is secondary to a vague idea of security.

Even the idea that a group is unsafe is the core emotion behind a lot of bigotry. It's a big reason why a lot of people want closed borders, it's why a lot of people want to regulate the rights of trans people, it's created a type of policing that disproportionately hurts poor people, poc, and the homeless, its why mentally ill people have basically no rights in this country. There's this idea that the freedom, and often even the life of marginalized people, is limited by standards of public safety. Even going back to covid, the idea that no harm done by covid was acceptable is based on the idea that harm and death from unemployment, abuse, and mental health issues are acceptable. So much of humanity is more confident that we can abolish nature then that we can abolish capitalism.

We always present safety like it's this trolly problem every society must grapple with, with no easy answer. But once you realize it's the freedom of the marginalized, and the safety (or often just the feeling of safety) of the privileged.

In a way the entire system of capitalism is just forcing people to give up their freedom for safety from things capitalism caused. And when people make fortunes off of making people sell their freedom for safety, they end up really hating when you want to abolish the danger they profit off of, rather than just passively "protecting people" from it.

I don't think I'm wording everything well. But I think it's something to think about. I feel like the prime emotion behind conservativism for the average person isn't hatred but fear. And fear isn't rational, it's why it's hard to use rational arguments for any of this. When someone says something like "we need to regulate trans healthcare to prevent any cis children from being harmed" it's hard to defeat that with pure numbers, statistics are only calming to people who want to be calmed by them, you could mention that it's harming trans people to regulate these, but that doesn't help because their fear narrative is about cishet children having their status as socially conforming taken from them, not about trans people being tangibly harmed. The only real way to refute this line of thinking (especially as it starts to infect our own communities on the left, and not just outside ones) is to break the narrative that there's some amount of nebulose harm that takes away our rights. There's a reason why deaths under capitalism aren't a concern for the type of people who say our society should prioritize safety, it's more about

An airport with strip searches would be safter from terrorism. A world where lockdown was a permanent policy for the rest of the foreseeable future would have less people harmed by illness. A world where people were chemically castrated until marriage would have almost no sexual assault. For the most part we reject these worlds, even if they're safer we've decided that there are reasons why we don't want this level of safety if it means being subject to certain conditions. And we can extend that to more radical things too, we can say that we don't care if the world is safter with cops, we still don't want cops to exist. We can say we don't care if the world is safter with borders, we still don't want borders to exist. We can reject more narratives of fear. And that includes ones we see popping up in our own communities.

God this post was long, and I didn't even mention ecofascists being a thing, or the leftist argument against gun control. Maybe next time.