Will human societies always enshittify themselves? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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It seems society always goes down the shitter over and over following the same path. People rise to wealth and power extracted on the repression of the masses, massive disparity, ignorance exemplified, xenophobia and blaming minorities for any possible issue, laws signed with golden pens but becoming more meaningless when they’re only enforced to protect the wealthy…. Then some sort of collapse, fragmentation, and/or dystopia usually in conjunction with war, purges, and killing in the name of tribalism.

History seems to rewind the cassette and record right over the top with the same old song.

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[-] refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago

I'd like to think there's a way to keep shitty people out of power and concentration of resources to a minimum, but unfortunately, that conflicts with human nature.

The people who have power are generally the type of people who want power over other people. We haven't solved the problem of preventing sociopaths and psychopaths from becoming powerful yet, and it's hard to believe that society will ever solve that problem, since sociopaths and psychopaths will always exist. People who care about others generally aren't the type of people who seek power.

Even if, for example, we have a proletariat state, people who seek power will find a way to gain power. For example, if it's a direct democracy without representatives, propaganda will be a very useful tool. If it's a communist government with centralized planning, there will be a way to control the centralized planning. We already know how representative democracies can fall since we're living it. With social democracies, capitalism still exists, so that's pretty easy to exploit and revert back to straight capitalism.

[-] monobot@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

We haven't solved the problem of preventing sociopaths and psychopaths from becoming powerful yet, and it's hard to believe that society will ever solve that problem, since sociopaths and psychopaths will always exist.

Yes, and it even works the other way around - we are choosing our leaders and we are choosing craziest ones. That is how group dynamic is working like, according to Bion:

And perhaps one of the most important findings in his experiments was that whenever a group is formed, it always seeks a leader to follow. The group then searches for someone who has questionable attributes with his or her mental health. Initially, the group will search for someone who is paranoid schizophrenic or someone who is malignant hysteric. If the group is unable to find someone with those attributes, the group looks for someone with delinquent trends and a psychopathic personality. Otherwise, the group would just settle on the verbally facile high-grade defective.

You might find his "Experiences in groups" quite interesting.

this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023

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