FanonFan
Yeah, they either obfuscate, co-opt, ignore, or reject.
Which, given some changes in material conditions, could give materialists a leg up in analyzing and interacting with the world as it is, rather than an abstract, fetishized morass of discordant concepts.
Absolutely, it's class analysis 101. Not wrong per se, just not the whole picture. But a good starting point.
People get too fixated on the class definitions and delineations. They're a reduction that's useful for explaining to baby leftists, but developing a more comprehensive understanding of class analysis is essential.
What are a person's material interests? Do those material interests influence them to be revolutionary or reactionary? Understanding a person's material interests, we can determine how to engage with them and how much effort to expend on them.
Attempting to define strict arbitrary lines between classes misses the point. The real world is complex: there's financial bourgeoisie, industrial bourgeoisie, international and national bourgeoisie, precarious petty bourgeoisie; there's comfortable labor aristocrats, there's educated people in managerial positions and academia, there's people working trades, there's people working in the service industry, there's enslaved workers. Of these many may have investments or retirements or social demographic experiences that further influence their material interests. There's people who own apartment complexes, people who own their home outright, people who have a mortgage, people who are entirely subjected to rent. A working renter/homeowner who sublets a room has a distinct material interest both from their tenant as well as large landlords.
The point is, these are all unique experiences. We don't group them arbitrarily, we do so in an attempt to unify people (in the real world with action, not just in concept) along common interests. The way certain subclasses move is not deterministic, all sorts of cultural and political and environmental and military and economic variables can push them one way or another.
Furthermore, the creation of class traitors, people working against their primary material interests, is incredibly important. No revolution has happened without class traitors, or people acting on moral grounds rather than materially self-interested ones.
it's either that or something chromium-based
i mostly degoogled years ago
firefox just works most of the time. still have chromium installed for edge cases
I do that kinda shit all the time with my personal scripts, mistakes happen.
This happened quite a few times on Reddit with multiple bots.
reddit culture sucks and I left it behind as a social media site a while ago.
still have to use site:reddit.com to get half decent search results tho
Regarding the latter concern, I think a lot of this type of thinking comes from misconceptions about how evolution works, largely perpetuated by our culture to be fair.
But most people think evolution is an external pressure on the level of the individual. Which, it is, kinda-- that's one scope of evolution. But evolutionary pressure happens on all levels in different ways: one family against others, one tribe against others, one social group against others, one species against others, etc. And networks of cooperation are just as influential as networks of competition, all happening at the same time in a churning mass of energies.
So rather than thinking that individual humans are losing hardiness to evolution, think of it as our species gaining hardiness through specialization and technology, evolution taking place outside of our individual bodies. It's why we have language instead of tusks.
I mean, malevolent to the degree that their interests are diametrically opposed to our interests. To the NSA, more avenues of data collection are good, so they will do what they can to expand. To Amazon, more profit is good, so they will sell as many devices as possible and sell as much private information as possible for as much money as possible. To police and federal agencies, more arrests and more political control is good, so they will use information gathered by these devices to the extent allowed by law (and further).
If you're someone who values privacy and freedom then those entities' actions could be called malevolent, even if they're just acting in their best interest. If you don't care about those things then it's probably no big deal I guess.
Honestly sounds like a high school argumentative essay lmao
Damn gave me a tinge of that feeling in the legs and stomach from one of those "flying" dreams. Been a while since I've had one of them.
Empathy is probably your best bet as far as a single variable goes. But otherwise we're talking about something that's incredibly complex on multiple levels, making it near impossible to address as a whole.
I like to envision human behavior and consciousness as a network of tensions and influences. (Perceived) material interests are one such tension, a particularly strong one. Strong enough that I feel confident saying that in general, people will tend to drift towards approximating an ethic that aligns with their material conditions.
The archetypes and behaviors modeled for us in our childhood and throughout our lives are a sort of structure that these forces interact with. We may have empathetic or selfish responses modeled for us by our parents, so those are the responses that spring to our minds when decisions arise. Good behavior modeling could mean the inherent tension towards self interest may be mediated or tempered by the limits of behavior we think to enact. Parents have a big impact on this early on, but so do later role models as well as media portrayals of people.
Social cohesion can be a big tension on people, incentivizing them to not act outside of group norms out of fear of being ostracized. Or on a more subconscious level, perhaps acting out of a "self" interest that benefits the social group, because the lines between Self and Other become blurred. Extending beyond the small self to consider the well-being of the large "Self", sometimes even at the expense of the small self.
Critical theory may be of interest to you.