Having empathy in this society run by psychopaths is depressing and anxiety-inducing indeed.
It bleeds into everything in this whole place. You know when you’re using something — a government system, a website, a support line, an application — and it feels like nobody thought about how shitty the experience would be for you? That’s what it feels like to live in a society that has no empathy. The people that design these systems do not give a shit about how you’ll feel being subjected to them, because they have no empathy and have never considered nor cared what your experience would be like.
I was raised in a family of people that had no empathy.
My grandmother met all of the criteria to be labeled as a sociopath, psychopath, something, and she raised her kids accordingly.
So when I was a kid, like my little sister would grab my arm and rake her nails down my arm to just grate as much skin off as she could because she was upset over something.
And I would complain, and I would be told that maybe I shouldn’t have upset her.
And also being a kid, sometimes I would cry.
And my grandmother came to me and was like, you’re bigger than her, why don’t you just do something about this?, implying that I should physically beat my younger sister up.
And I said, I do do something about it. I cry.
She thought that was hilarious. She told that story as a joke any time I was brought up for the rest of her life.
To me, when I see someone else crying because of something I did, that causes me emotional pain because I’m normal.
So I was attempting to cause emotional pain, not on purpose, but because I was actually hurt, as punishment for the action that my psychopath sister, who was raised by my psychopath mother, who was raised by my psychopath grandmother, had taken.
But the concept of feeling emotional pain as the consequence of your action choosing to hurt another person is and was so alien to the people in my family that it being explained to them comes across as humor.
Needless to say, I don’t associate with my family anymore. I have not talked to any person that I am blood related to in four months, and even that was just a quick text.
People say I’m weird. Okay, I was raised by a very weird family in very weird circumstances, doing my best to be sane and normal in a weird situation.
It’s very much the same for being woke when opening your eyes to be woke today is like eating lunch in a room full of dead bodies.
People say I’m weird. Okay, I was raised by a very weird family in very weird circumstances, doing my best to be sane and normal in a weird situation.
I feel for you. At least some members of my family are either psychopaths, have narcissistic personality disorder, or both. I think the comorbidity there is pretty common.
The lifelong damage caused by being raised around sociopaths is real — as is the continuing damage from living in a country run by them.
If you aren’t at least a little bit anxious and depressed about the state of the world, you haven’t been paying attention.
I also refuse to believe that all the racist, misogynist, bigoted snowflakes out there are living anxiety free, considering how quickly they blow up at the sight of a pronoun.
To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, the fact that a MAGA racist is happier than a woke person is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.
They put ICE in the airports, they’re sending them to polling places, they bought the voting machines. Soon there will be a critical mass of people who have nothing left to lose. A Constitutional crisis and a confrontation between the civilian population and the fascist uniparty regime like nothing we’ve ever seen in modern times is imminent.
Don’t forget, this is a bipartisan effort that has been planned continuously for decades, with constant escalation. It’s kind of funny that Trump fucked up a war the MIC has been planning for that long, I dare say fortuitous for all parties, but we can’t lose track of the fact that the Democrats are running “block tackle” for republicans on the war powers resolution, and that ALL of the war mongering taking place has the ultimate goal of confronting China.
The uniparty is real. The ratchet effect is real. The “deep state” IS real.
I haven’t listened to Knowledge Fight for a while because I’m watching my own mental health a bit, but ol AJ has never sounded actually happy for more than an episode or two. Hatred like they have sounds like they sleep well, but they’re fucking miserable too. J.K. Rowling could shut up and just enjoy being rich, but she still has to find someone to hate and hurt. You wouldn’t really hear about a happy person.
I’m part of a mutual aid group that delivers groceries to people every 2 weeks.
We sometimes get urgent requests on off-dates.
I don’t think I can explain how satisfying(?), motivating(?) it was to randomly get off work one evening last week with instructions to buy $50 worth of groceries for someone I’d never met and to drop it off.
To be part of someone finding relief in a terrible situation.
The hardest part was honestly finding a group with flexible opportunities that I could contribute to regularly. Most organizations that ask for volunteers often want business-hour availability, and 6+ mo commitment - ie, good for retirees.
let me guess. you believe in a simple concept: being a bystander is better than resisting fascists. and you love letting MAGA bang your wife and daughter.
I believe you that you, personally, in this moment, are acting exactly like the worst red hat pricks. And that just like them you’re acting against your own interests, making your life (and everyone’s you touch) just a little bit worse. Because just like them you’re a useful idiot. Keep your words out of my mouth.
It was maybe a month or two ago that an article showed that studies like these - all usually done as surveys - are highly susceptible to changes in input from users, just by word choice. In their example, they showed that if you use terms like ‘mental health’ while surveying people, a discrepancy emerges between non-conservatives and conservatives. This discrepancy disappears when you instead ask other questions, such as ones about sleep, worries , and fears.
So I don’t really know if I overall trust the data on happiness overall.
You might come to that conclusion: if you associate wokeness with empathy then it makes sense to think that such people are emotionally influenced by all the shit in the world and therefor must feel worse than those who don’t have such a burden. All other things being equal, that would probably be true; but it overlooks the fact that the proudly antiwoke are fucking miserable.
I’m not sure to which extend this is true but this might be correlation. I guess MAGA people are more often privileged while marginalized people are more often woke and due to their marginalization they are depressed
That’s only because most “woke” people are radical liberals, who have good intentions but don’t have a scientific view of political economy and still have a soft-imperialist worldview. As conditions in the imperial core decline, they succumb to despair. The failing power of the empire and the rising resistance of the global south instills them with a sense of nihilism, because we are supposed to be enlightened and civilized (though we can no longer be said to be, with the rise of overt fascism in the west), while our enemies are regressive, authoritarian barbarians - two equal evils fighting each other, with no hope for anything better.
You only need to gain a greater understanding of the world, and particularly of imperialism, to break out of this mindset. We’ve occupied a privileged place in the world, bought off by the oligarchs to ensure support at home while they plunder the world. But this was always a gilded cage. It’s easy to look at the gold leaf peeling off the cage, revealing the rusting steel beneath it, and despair at how the world is getting uglier, but this only reveals that you haven’t imagined a life outside the cage. The rust is ugly, but it also weakens the substrate.
In short, the tide has already turned, and the day of liberation is approaching. It can’t come quick enough, but it’s coming nevertheless. If wokeness has made you despair, it’s only because you’re half awake - gripped by sleep paralysis and tormented by shadows. You only need to wake up, to become more woke, to see that the sun is beginning to rise.
There’s a simpler explanation: people who aren’t shitbags are made unhappy by being beaten down by shitbags, and the shitbags becoming more openly shitty.
You don’t need to bring a geopolitical philosophy into it.
The failing power of the empire and the rising resistance of the global south instills them with a sense of nihilism, because we are supposed to be enlightened and civilized (though we can no longer be said to be, with the rise of overt fascism in the west), while our enemies are regressive, authoritarian barbarians - two equal evils fighting each other, with no hope for anything better
No one is being instilled with a sense of nihilism because of a loss of American influence in the global south, and no one really gives a shit about our enemies and their moral character. People care about stuff like “healthcare”, “poverty”, “civil rights”, “not burning the world”.
The world, and life itself, is complicated and messy in 2026, and an awareness of it and the constant, always on vigilance of keeping up with all of the moral responsibility of trying to build a life that allows you to look yourself in the mirror every day in a world built to usher everyone into maintaining exploitative systems is draining and crushing.
If you don’t have to do that because you’re either ignorant of the machinery you’re part of, or don’t care, you just get to go about your life.
e: I misread your original post, I thought you were saying that both sides in the war were shitbags. I still think it’s too simple of an explanation in general, though. Such circumstances deserve a deeper look.
people openly supporting nazi’s are indeed simply shitbags
and yes non shitbags are sad to see people suffer, that is called empathy, it is only confusing to the shitbag party in the US because they generally lack said empathy
Yeah, definitely, but the world is much more complex than that. The current state of affairs is a result of historical contingency, and it isn’t going to last forever. As I have attempted to get across, the tide is already changing.
My point is that, even if the meme is true and woke people tend to be sadder than reactionaries, it’s because they aren’t woke enough. For instance, you have generally well-intentioned progressive liberals who support equal rights and oppressed people at home, i.e. they support gay and transgender people against social reactionaries, but when they see Iran and its religious and socially conservative allies actually striking hard at the fascist empire, actually turning the tide back, and rather than being happy about it they just see it as two equal evils fighting each other. They don’t see the broader situation and context - they’re woke to discrimination, but they aren’t woke to imperialism.
For the last 600 years, the world has been dominated by European empires. These empires enriched themselves through their colonies, using that wealth to grow ever more powerful and take over a greater and greater proportion of the world, eventually overcoming and dominating their former equals in India and China.
World War I was fought to divide up the world between blocs of these empires, with the Anglo-French-American bloc triumphing and taking the holdings of Germany and the old Ottoman empire (a relic of the previous era), and breaking up Austria-Hungary. But this arrangement was not stable - Germany wasn’t down for the count, and more importantly, the old European empires were declining while America was rising.
This was settled into a more stable system with the end of WW2 and the decolonization that followed, but this decolonization was only giving way to a new kind of imperialism - that of finance, currency manipulation, loans with conditions that made extraction easier. Soft power, in other words, with the occasional bout of violent domination. But the violent domination wasn’t official conquest - rather, new and more amenable governments were installed, enabling the continued expropriation of labour and resources from the colonized countries. Thus, the new empire, formed from the old European empires but headed by America, came to dominate the world from World War 2 until today.
Social progress tends to follow from economic progress. The women’s rights movement was born out of women entering the workplace. The gay rights movement emerged in the post-war period of prosperity. The colonized countries of the global south did not have these same prosperity, and social progress came to them later than in the imperial core. At the same time, aspects of social progress often came to seen as aspects of colonialism and foreign domination, clashing with traditional culture. Indeed, the imperial core uses socially regressive attitudes and policies in the colonized world to justify our domination over them. Just look at the war with Iran (the repressive mullah regime that executes gays and makes women wear veils) for an example. They aren’t as developed as us, and therefore we must crush and dominate them, and seize their natural resources for private capital. Thus, a lack of social progress in the global south (or third world, or whatever you want to call it) creates the justification for imperial domination, while imperial domination creates the conditions that hinder progress.
The victory of the colonized and the overthrow of the imperial yoke will create the conditions that foster social progress. It’s a precondition, so interpreting the socially conservative Iranian state resisting the American empire as “one evil fighting another” is wrong-headed. It’s historically progressive. The victory of Iran will be a victory for the world, which will help move history forth into a new post-imperial era. 600 years of this, over half a millennia, and it’s finally coming to a close. There is therefore every reason to hope and little reason to despair. Woke liberals do not see this, because they are not woke enough.
Oh. Yes, I think we can. It will come with progress. Racism is a powerful tool the ruling class uses to keep people divided and weak, but it can’t last forever.
Nord.red
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As they say, (willfull?) ignorance is bliss.
Wouldn’t say their ignorant, most people know and choose to believe what they believe regardless
Smarter people are more likely to be depressed. Just a filter there not a direct correlation.
I’d argue there’s nothing normal about being a well-adjusted person in a terminally ill society.
I would rather be a John Brown in a horrid world than be “sane man” in the same such world and boy am I about to give into my madness and zealotry.
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society” - some guy
Having empathy in this society run by psychopaths is depressing and anxiety-inducing indeed.
It bleeds into everything in this whole place. You know when you’re using something — a government system, a website, a support line, an application — and it feels like nobody thought about how shitty the experience would be for you? That’s what it feels like to live in a society that has no empathy. The people that design these systems do not give a shit about how you’ll feel being subjected to them, because they have no empathy and have never considered nor cared what your experience would be like.
I am a somewhat empathetic person.
I was raised in a family of people that had no empathy.
My grandmother met all of the criteria to be labeled as a sociopath, psychopath, something, and she raised her kids accordingly.
So when I was a kid, like my little sister would grab my arm and rake her nails down my arm to just grate as much skin off as she could because she was upset over something.
And I would complain, and I would be told that maybe I shouldn’t have upset her.
And also being a kid, sometimes I would cry.
And my grandmother came to me and was like, you’re bigger than her, why don’t you just do something about this?, implying that I should physically beat my younger sister up.
And I said, I do do something about it. I cry.
She thought that was hilarious. She told that story as a joke any time I was brought up for the rest of her life.
To me, when I see someone else crying because of something I did, that causes me emotional pain because I’m normal.
So I was attempting to cause emotional pain, not on purpose, but because I was actually hurt, as punishment for the action that my psychopath sister, who was raised by my psychopath mother, who was raised by my psychopath grandmother, had taken.
But the concept of feeling emotional pain as the consequence of your action choosing to hurt another person is and was so alien to the people in my family that it being explained to them comes across as humor.
Needless to say, I don’t associate with my family anymore. I have not talked to any person that I am blood related to in four months, and even that was just a quick text.
People say I’m weird. Okay, I was raised by a very weird family in very weird circumstances, doing my best to be sane and normal in a weird situation.
It’s very much the same for being woke when opening your eyes to be woke today is like eating lunch in a room full of dead bodies.
I feel for you. At least some members of my family are either psychopaths, have narcissistic personality disorder, or both. I think the comorbidity there is pretty common.
The lifelong damage caused by being raised around sociopaths is real — as is the continuing damage from living in a country run by them.
oh yeah, if you come out of this whole event cycle, whatever the hell it is as normal, then something’s wrong with you, lol
“People incapable of guilt usually do have a good time.”
Yeah… there are normal people and then there are psychopaths, who are unable to feel empathy towards others.
Life would be easier if I just believed that I am superior and that my president is good, too bad I have a brain 🙃
If you aren’t at least a little bit anxious and depressed about the state of the world, you haven’t been paying attention.
I also refuse to believe that all the racist, misogynist, bigoted snowflakes out there are living anxiety free, considering how quickly they blow up at the sight of a pronoun.
Yeah, they seem to be more afraid of shit they made up than anybody else.
Like part of the reason small town conservative types don’t like the ideas of cities is because they’re scared of being mugged.
To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, the fact that a MAGA racist is happier than a woke person is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.
Breaking: people with empathy affected by other people’s suffering.
Fucking accurate.
The only time I’ve seen racists sad is when Trump didn’t kill enough immigrants fast enough for their liking.
They put ICE in the airports, they’re sending them to polling places, they bought the voting machines. Soon there will be a critical mass of people who have nothing left to lose. A Constitutional crisis and a confrontation between the civilian population and the fascist uniparty regime like nothing we’ve ever seen in modern times is imminent.
Don’t forget, this is a bipartisan effort that has been planned continuously for decades, with constant escalation. It’s kind of funny that Trump fucked up a war the MIC has been planning for that long, I dare say fortuitous for all parties, but we can’t lose track of the fact that the Democrats are running “block tackle” for republicans on the war powers resolution, and that ALL of the war mongering taking place has the ultimate goal of confronting China.
The uniparty is real. The ratchet effect is real. The “deep state” IS real.
See:
https://resistir.info/livros/rebuilding_americas_defenses.pdf
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/06_iran_strategy.pdf
https://archive.org/details/gov.gpo.fdsys.CHRG-111shrg52971
https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=%2Fcontext%2Fmonographs%2Farticle%2F1420%2F&path_info=2395.pdf
And all deliberately incompetent things Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, et al have been saying. Fucking traitors.
I haven’t listened to Knowledge Fight for a while because I’m watching my own mental health a bit, but ol AJ has never sounded actually happy for more than an episode or two. Hatred like they have sounds like they sleep well, but they’re fucking miserable too. J.K. Rowling could shut up and just enjoy being rich, but she still has to find someone to hate and hurt. You wouldn’t really hear about a happy person.
Rather be unhappy than live in fear.
Which is what the asleep people have.
I live in fear of the “asleep” people being in charge.
My woke ass actually feels empathy for others, so of course I am depressed watching them get disappeared.
Honestly, I am pretty happy as a woke person.
The trick is to watch less news and do more things to actually change anything.
I’m part of a mutual aid group that delivers groceries to people every 2 weeks.
We sometimes get urgent requests on off-dates.
I don’t think I can explain how satisfying(?), motivating(?) it was to randomly get off work one evening last week with instructions to buy $50 worth of groceries for someone I’d never met and to drop it off.
To be part of someone finding relief in a terrible situation.
The hardest part was honestly finding a group with flexible opportunities that I could contribute to regularly. Most organizations that ask for volunteers often want business-hour availability, and 6+ mo commitment - ie, good for retirees.
Yep, (social) media is optimized in fueling your emotions, and well the strongest emotions are negative, so it’s mostly optimized towards that.
Avoiding this, doing something more healthy leads to a better mental (and likely physical as it’s connected) health IMO/IME.
It’s probably 300 times harder to be depressed and anxious when you are braindead, so this tracks.
No shit. it’s really depressing seeing all of those filthy pedophiles and nazis getting sexually aroused by dead kids.
and even more depressing watching 2/3rds of Americans refusing to deal with 80 million terrorists in America.
Eighty million terrorists? Think I finally get what “blue maga” means x(
let me guess. you believe in a simple concept: being a bystander is better than resisting fascists. and you love letting MAGA bang your wife and daughter.
I believe you that you, personally, in this moment, are acting exactly like the worst red hat pricks. And that just like them you’re acting against your own interests, making your life (and everyone’s you touch) just a little bit worse. Because just like them you’re a useful idiot. Keep your words out of my mouth.
Everyone who shows up to wave a sign at one or two No Kings parades as the extent of their “resistance” is a MAGA enabler as far as I’m concerned.
Start fighting or stay the fuck home, you virtue-signaling clowns.
and let me guess… you would fight but you don’t have the balls to do anything other than jack off to ICE agents slipping on ice.
Ah, of course, Canadians must show up and fight your fight for you.
How’s the fighting going?
Simple worldviews tend to be happier. Ignorance is bliss.
It was maybe a month or two ago that an article showed that studies like these - all usually done as surveys - are highly susceptible to changes in input from users, just by word choice. In their example, they showed that if you use terms like ‘mental health’ while surveying people, a discrepancy emerges between non-conservatives and conservatives. This discrepancy disappears when you instead ask other questions, such as ones about sleep, worries , and fears.
So I don’t really know if I overall trust the data on happiness overall.
You telling me you dont trust the data for a shitpost?
jokes on you guys I’ve already moved on to woke 2 and my mental health is great
Protip: dot ml might not like “woke 2.0” for too long.
Good. Fuck’em.
Yes, it has to be quite nice and comforting to be stupid. I can only imagine…
This just in, ignorance is still bliss
Yeah, but ignorance makes you ignant.
Most of the MAGA sphere spends all day watching all the things the news people tell them to be afraid of. I don’t buy this for a second.
Yeah I think I recently have read here on Lemmy that the amygdala is bigger for MAGA, so I think the opposite is true indeed.
Which would also make more sense, because of all the irrational anxieties those scum has…
I believe its called “amygdala maxxing”
You gonna tell me a shit post may not be factually accurate?
Shit but verify, that’s been my motto.
Sir, my pearls have been clutched!
Good
I always thought it was funny how tough that steak seems based on his chewing.
I too am happiest when I’m asleep.
Username……relevant? I guess? This post makes me sad…
Username relevant? That’s what happens when you don’t sleep/stay awake/confront the horrors.
I couldn’t take current events anymore and now I’m in therapy haha long overdue really.
Depressive realism
My favorite
You might come to that conclusion: if you associate wokeness with empathy then it makes sense to think that such people are emotionally influenced by all the shit in the world and therefor must feel worse than those who don’t have such a burden. All other things being equal, that would probably be true; but it overlooks the fact that the proudly antiwoke are fucking miserable.
That’s why you also need a cat
No. You need a cat because everyone needs TWO cats.
But, only two. Don’t get eight. That’s too many cats.
Source?
https://nypost.com/2024/03/17/health/woke-people-more-likely-to-be-unahppy-anxious-and-depressed-new-study-suggests/
Ah yes. Prime them with loaded questions then ask them happiness in a scale.
Ah. NY Post.
You
Yeah I wonder why that is.
I wouldn’t call myself woke and I’m not happy. This is NONSENSE!
So the less you care the less you stress? Makes sense.
& those with the MarALago Mind Virus? Do tell!
Idk I feel pretty fine not giving a fuck what other people do
You have to be racist to be happy! Obviously
I’m not sure to which extend this is true but this might be correlation. I guess MAGA people are more often privileged while marginalized people are more often woke and due to their marginalization they are depressed
This is 100% a nazi meme
I’m confident you dont know what that means or haven’t put any critical thought into your statement before making it
That’s only because most “woke” people are radical liberals, who have good intentions but don’t have a scientific view of political economy and still have a soft-imperialist worldview. As conditions in the imperial core decline, they succumb to despair. The failing power of the empire and the rising resistance of the global south instills them with a sense of nihilism, because we are supposed to be enlightened and civilized (though we can no longer be said to be, with the rise of overt fascism in the west), while our enemies are regressive, authoritarian barbarians - two equal evils fighting each other, with no hope for anything better.
You only need to gain a greater understanding of the world, and particularly of imperialism, to break out of this mindset. We’ve occupied a privileged place in the world, bought off by the oligarchs to ensure support at home while they plunder the world. But this was always a gilded cage. It’s easy to look at the gold leaf peeling off the cage, revealing the rusting steel beneath it, and despair at how the world is getting uglier, but this only reveals that you haven’t imagined a life outside the cage. The rust is ugly, but it also weakens the substrate.
In short, the tide has already turned, and the day of liberation is approaching. It can’t come quick enough, but it’s coming nevertheless. If wokeness has made you despair, it’s only because you’re half awake - gripped by sleep paralysis and tormented by shadows. You only need to wake up, to become more woke, to see that the sun is beginning to rise.
There’s a simpler explanation: people who aren’t shitbags are made unhappy by being beaten down by shitbags, and the shitbags becoming more openly shitty.
You don’t need to bring a geopolitical philosophy into it.
No one is being instilled with a sense of nihilism because of a loss of American influence in the global south, and no one really gives a shit about our enemies and their moral character. People care about stuff like “healthcare”, “poverty”, “civil rights”, “not burning the world”.
It’s actually even simpler than that.
The world, and life itself, is complicated and messy in 2026, and an awareness of it and the constant, always on vigilance of keeping up with all of the moral responsibility of trying to build a life that allows you to look yourself in the mirror every day in a world built to usher everyone into maintaining exploitative systems is draining and crushing.
If you don’t have to do that because you’re either ignorant of the machinery you’re part of, or don’t care, you just get to go about your life.
e: I misread your original post, I thought you were saying that both sides in the war were shitbags. I still think it’s too simple of an explanation in general, though. Such circumstances deserve a deeper look.
people openly supporting nazi’s are indeed simply shitbags
and yes non shitbags are sad to see people suffer, that is called empathy, it is only confusing to the shitbag party in the US because they generally lack said empathy
Yeah, definitely, but the world is much more complex than that. The current state of affairs is a result of historical contingency, and it isn’t going to last forever. As I have attempted to get across, the tide is already changing.
x to doubt
I dont understand
My point is that, even if the meme is true and woke people tend to be sadder than reactionaries, it’s because they aren’t woke enough. For instance, you have generally well-intentioned progressive liberals who support equal rights and oppressed people at home, i.e. they support gay and transgender people against social reactionaries, but when they see Iran and its religious and socially conservative allies actually striking hard at the fascist empire, actually turning the tide back, and rather than being happy about it they just see it as two equal evils fighting each other. They don’t see the broader situation and context - they’re woke to discrimination, but they aren’t woke to imperialism.
For the last 600 years, the world has been dominated by European empires. These empires enriched themselves through their colonies, using that wealth to grow ever more powerful and take over a greater and greater proportion of the world, eventually overcoming and dominating their former equals in India and China.
World War I was fought to divide up the world between blocs of these empires, with the Anglo-French-American bloc triumphing and taking the holdings of Germany and the old Ottoman empire (a relic of the previous era), and breaking up Austria-Hungary. But this arrangement was not stable - Germany wasn’t down for the count, and more importantly, the old European empires were declining while America was rising.
This was settled into a more stable system with the end of WW2 and the decolonization that followed, but this decolonization was only giving way to a new kind of imperialism - that of finance, currency manipulation, loans with conditions that made extraction easier. Soft power, in other words, with the occasional bout of violent domination. But the violent domination wasn’t official conquest - rather, new and more amenable governments were installed, enabling the continued expropriation of labour and resources from the colonized countries. Thus, the new empire, formed from the old European empires but headed by America, came to dominate the world from World War 2 until today.
Social progress tends to follow from economic progress. The women’s rights movement was born out of women entering the workplace. The gay rights movement emerged in the post-war period of prosperity. The colonized countries of the global south did not have these same prosperity, and social progress came to them later than in the imperial core. At the same time, aspects of social progress often came to seen as aspects of colonialism and foreign domination, clashing with traditional culture. Indeed, the imperial core uses socially regressive attitudes and policies in the colonized world to justify our domination over them. Just look at the war with Iran (the repressive mullah regime that executes gays and makes women wear veils) for an example. They aren’t as developed as us, and therefore we must crush and dominate them, and seize their natural resources for private capital. Thus, a lack of social progress in the global south (or third world, or whatever you want to call it) creates the justification for imperial domination, while imperial domination creates the conditions that hinder progress.
The victory of the colonized and the overthrow of the imperial yoke will create the conditions that foster social progress. It’s a precondition, so interpreting the socially conservative Iranian state resisting the American empire as “one evil fighting another” is wrong-headed. It’s historically progressive. The victory of Iran will be a victory for the world, which will help move history forth into a new post-imperial era. 600 years of this, over half a millennia, and it’s finally coming to a close. There is therefore every reason to hope and little reason to despair. Woke liberals do not see this, because they are not woke enough.
But how would we?
How would we what? I’m not sure what you mean.
No longer be racist
Oh. Yes, I think we can. It will come with progress. Racism is a powerful tool the ruling class uses to keep people divided and weak, but it can’t last forever.
Yay. Politics