Sometimes I wonder about this. No matter how luxurious your bunker is, living there is still going to be a downgrade compared to how we live now.
Why not give a fuck about saving the environment? Not for unwashed masses, but for your kids and grandkids?
Lots of people (awful people) have kids for their own ego rather than because they want to raise happy and healthy offspring. They don’t care about the world their children will grow up in.
A conservative estimate is 30% of the population.
It’s because of the prisoner’s dilemma. It is broadly agreed that everyone would be better off if everyone curbs their emissions, but for any one individual the choice is not so simple. For infividuals, a large reduction to their impact will likely hurt them economically more than it will help them environmentally. This is exactly why a lot of green legislation is driven by global agreements with countries all trying to put pressure on each other to reduce emissions.
Likewise, increasing government investment in green technologies could benefit the economy and the environment, but for any given politician the cost of turning against big oil may be a significant risk to their chances of re-election if not balanced out by a politically motivated and educated populace that is resistant to corporate propaganda. Campaign finance reform would help with this, but once again it’s a bigger risk than it’s worth to the politicians in power. Thus, we can’t simply rely on the self-interest of the wealthy to prevent collapse; we must co-operate and coordinate our efforts to solve the problem.
Psychopathy is a spectrum. It undermines your values, makes you indifferent to normative and empirical reality, and robs you of all compunction, until the only salient feature of life is your own ego.
Many of those you find confusing fall somewhere on that spectrum. It’s a grim diagnosis, but you can use morally obvious cases to determine how bad things are. Opinions on abortion are a litmus test, as are attitudes towards obviously cruel and unvirtuous people, such as Donald Trump and various other celebrities.
Do you really think opinions on abortion are a litmus test? You can spin either camp as the psychopathic one, after all. I’m on Team Babykill but I don’t think everybody against abortion is a psychopath, it’s closer to a philosophical issue.
Yes, actually, I do.
There’s an academic survey that goes out every few years, and there’s more consensus among philosophers that abortion is permissible than about literally anything else. There’s less agreement that the external world exists.
Being against abortion requires one or more of these assumptions:
- That zygotes are actual people.
- That these zygote people have rights over your body overriding any of your own needs.
- That sex is blameworthy and constitutes some sort of implied consent regarding pregnancy.
Any one of these assumptions is, frankly, insane.
People are irrational, that’s hardly news. I appreciate this issue is important to you but that doesn’t make them psychopaths. I shouldn’t think a psychopath would care much either way, beyond which course of action might benefit them at the time. Again, this is coming from someone who flushed an aborted foetus down the toilet, so I’m really not precious about it.
I shouldn’t think a psychopath would care much either way, beyond which course of action might benefit them at the time.
I agree, but the fact that they don’t care is the problem. Abortion might be a means to an end, a way to immiserate a target demographic. Without compunctions and moral impulses, anti-abortion laws, witch-hunting, and racism become viable vehicles for collective punishment and self-gratification.
The Sociopath Next Door is full of case studies from a Harvard psychiatrist specializing in sociopathy. The extremes of the disorder are obviously disturbing, but what happens when the neuropathology is sub-diagnostic?
My interest is in how psychopathy connects to people’s epistemic hygiene. That is, the ability, habits, and motivation to correctly construe reality. Think about it. Moral facts are just like any other kinds of fact. Someone with ASPD would be unresponsive or insensitive to moral facts (as you said). But epistemic facts have the same flavor, and pathological lying is symptomatic of psychopathy.
What has to go wrong in a brain for a person to lose concern about misconstruing or misrepresenting reality?
What has to go “right”, though? I think that presupposes an idealised state of human development that can be deducted from. I’m not sure what the neutral form is for a human, but those kind of beliefs are so common I wonder if the pathology is baked-in, so to speak.
Plus, some people really do think embryos are people! They get triggered by abortion as if you killed their dog in front of them. I happen to think they’re wrong, but the urge to anthropomorphise things is very strong, and there’s at least some logic behind their belief.
I think that presupposes an idealised [sic] state of human development that can be deducted from.
If you don’t think that mental illness exists, then there’s no point having this conversation.
Plus, some people really do think embryos are people!
Yes, and some are flat-earthers (truly) and Trump supporters, and some compulsively eat dirt. That’s kind of the point. Insanity is strange and we want to understand it better.
Really interesting view here, thank you.
Looking at the groups of people that are so hard for me to understand (MAGA, KKK, flat-earthers, etc.) because of how ridiculous their worldviews are, as some sort of psychopathic mental illness on a scale from sort of psychopathic, to full-blown psychopath makes alot of weird sense. Kind of disturbing and comforting to me at the same time.
makes alot of weird sense
it really does not (specifically putting flat-earthers together with the other two groups). maybe don’t take psychiatry lessons from two paragraph lessons by author with unknown qualification on the internet 😆
That is not how this works at all. There isn’t an actual medical diagnosis called psychopath. The closest we have is ASPD. I am fairly sure people with ASPD don’t have as much difficulty with empirical reality as you are talking about. Delusions are more of a psychosis thing.
I also don’t think it’s fair to judge someone on an issue like abortion when entire religions shove the idea that abortion is wrong down your throat even when being a child. The indoctrination is strong. Stop blaming the victims here.
Psychopathy is detectable on an MRI and involves morphological abnormalities in some specific regions. Like all neuropathologies, psychopathy falls on a spectrum.
A Systematic Literature Review of Neuroimaging of Psychopathic Traits.
Your implication about religiosity is that it can influence moral attitudes. But notice that many religious persons are immune to indoctrination regarding abortion, child genital mutilation, and the like, recognizing these issues as morally obvious. Why? Probably because they have the mental means to do so.
Here’s an actual in-depth answer in the form of a philosophical essay article about the Greek concept of “amathia”, roughly translated as “willfull ignorance.”
https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/one-crucial-word/
Take some time here on Lemmy and explain to people that they should make individual efforts to lower their own footprint. You’ll be met with every excuse in the book why they won’t do something to decrease their own burden, even going so far as to “explain” to you how dumb the suggestion even is.
The problem is that no one wants to decrease their own quality of life, they expect everyone else to do it. The person who is sitting in their AC house, cruising the Internet on their multi-hundred dollar phone, after driving around in their own vehicle…have convinced themselves that they are no the wealthy of the year spewing out way more emissions…it’s really the people flying private jets!
Everyone points to someone else as a bigger culprit, they are the ones who have to act first.
That kid is going to be extra grateful when his dad explains how much money he helped make the shareholders.
This is such an asshole take.
99.99 percent of people are just doing what they can.
Just about everything and everyone works for, with, or adjacent to a heinous company.
Everything is immoral, including your comment since you used a computer (which was unethically developed and manufactured, and since critical advancements in computing were sometimes made by bad people, it’s now impossible to create a truly harm free computer. This software (lemmy) is connected in some way to bad people, either its users, contributors, or the contributors to dependencies ( or the contributors to their dependencies, and so on).
Waxing on about how joe blow worked an office job that made someone rich so he could save 50 grand for his kid and how that makes him a bad person is just needlessly cruel.
So then why are you criticizing people demanding change?
Did they demand change or did they belittle their peers?
No no, this is clearly a post apocalypse scenario… By that time only the .00001% will have any money to hand down to their kids… We can assume this is a corrupt billionaire
More importantly it’s just not really true.
Money will always be a part of human culture because we need some kind of default monetary value that says you’ve contributed to the betterment of your fellow man in some way.
This won’t go away when we have cold fusion and a Dyson sphere lol.
Despite this, the vast majority of these people are typing from well off countries in areas that won’t be affected by the severe parts of climate change.
You know who mostly gets boned from climate change? Like, the literal worst climate change or severe nuclear winter. It’s not most Europeans, Americans, or Chinese I’ll tell you that lol.
Doomers are suckers who have eaten up propaganda meant to make the world worse through apathy and inaction. It’s worsened when they know they’re addicted to the internet but it’s easier to not care about their future and pretend everything is against them rather than try to better their and everyone’s lives somehow. It’s the bane of the mentally unwell, lazy, easily swayed, and non-curious.
Get ready for the Green washing comments lol.
https://concernusa.org/news/countries-most-affected-by-climate-change/
https://www.vox.com/22620706/climate-change-ipcc-report-2021-ssp-scenario-future-warming
Money will always be a part of human culture because we need some kind of default monetary value that says you’ve contributed to the betterment of your fellow man in some way.
I think this is just lacking in imagination. Why does everyone even need to contribute? If we survive along with our technology, we’ll eventually hit full automation for most tasks.
In a world like that, isn’t it enough to just live and be appreciated by someone? Why go around measuring contributions when only the very best and brightest could meaningfully contribute beyond sharing in the experience?
Because contributing in a utopia means living the shared experience by not hurting others.
A human system short of severe forced genetic manipulation will always require a visible way of showing that you’ve contributed.
That could mean making art all day. That could mean saying Hi to Grandma. It could mean getting a basic stipend for not being a criminal who hurts others.
Regardless, there will be a way to tell you who’s done more and who hasn’t. It doesn’t have to be money. It can be social credit ala China or more likely money just like it is now. That person WILL be selected to do something before the person in the basement doing nothing but synth-heroin. There will be a way to show to others around you that you are verifiably more deserving of something than another person is just through that fact that we live on a planet, solar system, or galaxy with finite resources and more importantly, finite time, and you’ve contributed unselfishly.
And by implementing such a system, you take from everyone. By tracking it, you cheapen it. You turn creativity towards making worthless kitche, you turn true moments of connection with Grandma into a chore to justify your own existence.
The solar system and beyond are finite, but not on a human scale. Even if we figured out cheap at-home immortality tomorrow, we’d never scratch the limits
Humans don’t breed infinitely. Already we’re coming up on that limit - the drive isn’t there anymore. We’re falling below replacement levels, partially because we’ve poisoned ourselves (and planet), but also just through lack of desire. It’s hardwired into mammals, if not all Earth life… We limit ourselves at a certain point
If you can’t see a future where you can just live without an accounting sheet justifying your existence, look to the past. They used money - not like us though
It’s funny cause no he didn’t
It’s bottle caps.
That’s dark. I feel sad now, also very glad I don’t have, or want, children.
Here’s another dark comic about children to cheer you up
Jesus christ I don’t need this gut punch and flashback, I’m going back to bed.
Is the implication that he can’t afford food or something?
Yeah - if I recall correctly, it was originally with a newspaper article about living cost crisis here in the UK
The dad should be drinking a beer.
Beer is expensive.
The whole point of this is to show the dad making a sacrifice for his kid.
If we want humanity to have any kind of future then we need more children not raised by cunts.
We are 8 billion people on this planet. There are enough humans already.
Yes, but if everyone gives up then there’ll be no-one in 100 years, and if decent folk give up then it’ll only be cunts in 100 years. I would like a future of non-cunty people.
You’re assuming that people whose parents are shitty will stay shitty, which is absolutely not the case. We should invest in education, mental healthcare, and child protective services to help prevent that.
Why would we need CPS if we have no children?
Yeah, go straight for the logical extreme, as if there isn’t a middle-ground here.
You said there are enough people already.
Bunch of bottle caps
What a great dad, he still even has his nose!
he seems like a pretty good father considering he is sacrificing his only source of oxygen so that his son can live.
Yeah but don’t let
redditlemmy hear you having a nuanced or thoughtful take.
I don’t think running out of O2 is in the cards. Poisoning ourselves in other ways sure. Turning land into desert also sure.
running out of o2 might not be, but having that o2 mixed with some fucking poison definitely is…
Yes, but you wouldn’t carry around an O2 canister necessarily, rather some kind of air filter I would imagine. I think we are a long way off making the air unbreathable though.
it is a comic pointing to a problem. don’t over-analyze it.
personally, i like this one better, but ultimately they both point to same issue.
Maybe the kid is Bubble Boy
Why does pop not wear oxygen?
Probably an anti-masker
Because he’s dead
Pretty accurate except for the giving money part.
lol right? They just need to hold onto it a couple more years until the “youth” really need it and are ready for it.
That’s been the response of my parents and those around me of people I know except for my Mother who just stole mine and said “So what? I need it more and money is all you think about.”
Greedy fuckers as far as the eye can see.
you laugh but that money will be handy to have when you gotta to pay for breathable air to Mr CyberBezos while working in his warehouses
Very cash money poggers of you father
when yo soil is prussian white
Way ahead of you. I’m poor and without oxygen at the same time.
less time suffering is equal to winning in my book
