Non-rich conservatives. These people are just so ignorant and stupid.
With rich conservatives, it's like, I hate your views and think you're a smug, arrogant ******* that things just so happened to work out for, and could just as easily not have, and I hate even more that they will never admit it, because they are extreme individualists/egotists that think they are inherently superior beings and blatantly don't care to understand people's experiences and viewpoints outside their own. But at least it makes sense to me why you'd think that way.
With non-rich conservatives it's like, what are you even doing? What are you defending? The people and things that actually cause the conditions that make you miserable? Why? Some un-evolved, ass-backwards appeal to machismo? They keep working hard, keep being miserable, yet somehow still think THEY are the "chosen one" that things are somehow going to be different for. It's got to be that these guys are egotists too, they're just not successful ones like the rich conservatives. I think it's that Dunning-Kruger Effect again - these people are incompetent, but they don't realize it, and think they're actually competent, despite not getting anywhere.
I saw some random person today online talking about how "socialism is just for people that want free stuff" and "how no one who busts their ass would want it".
And I can't help but think, I don't know...
Have you ever noticed these days that you have to bust your ass MORE than you used to, just to have even LESS than you used to? If you have to bust your ass more, just so you can have less than you did before, doesn't that mean things are getting worse? And that maybe MORE busting your ass, isn't going to work, and isn't the answer?
Have you ever noticed how things seem to be getting worse and worse, faster and faster? And it's not a Republican or Democrat thing either, I've seen more than one of both now, and the result has always been the same - the middle class is left even more beat up than they were before. I can't remember a president since Clinton, where I've felt like things were better at the end of their term than they were at the start of it.
Do you remember how things weren't always this bad? How you used to be able to have a work life balance, and still get paid enough for a normal life? It's like people today don't remember the 90s and before, when things weren't as bad as they are now.
What if you had to bust your ass less? Don't you think you'd enjoy life more?
What if the people that say "you have to bust your ass more, that is the only solution" are lying, for their own benefit? What if they benefit from the conditions that cause your misery?
It's like they think that capitalism can't and doesn't fail people, only socialism does.
It makes sense that the people who suffered under communism don't like it - I don't blame them for that, I wouldn't like it either. It was really just brutal dictatorships that didn't care about its citizens either, and the top party people were just as bad as capitalists - it was just trading one bad guy for another. But people suffer under capitalism too. It's pretty bad, actually, unless you just so happen to be the "right" kind of person. But you can't tell these people this, because capitalism is more than just "the way it is" to them - it's their religion, and if you criticize it at all, to them it's blasphemy and they won't even consider it. Part of me thinks deep down, they know they're probably not going to get anywhere, but if they cling to capitalism hard enough, it will give them enough false hope to keep facing another day of bullshit. But if you criticize it, it's like you're taking their last shred of hope away, the last thing keeping them from total despair. So of course they fight for it. I wouldn't like being told I was hopeless either. I constantly struggle against that feeling that life is probably hopeless for me, too. That why would things be any different for me, than they are for everyone else, when I haven't been good at anything or had anything come to me naturally or easily either? Why would I think that somehow I'm the anomaly?
And another thing, I don't even consider myself a communist or socialist - I think what the Nordic countries have going on though, is pretty nice, from my admittedly cursory understanding of it. What I would like, is a bigger social safety net, and a society that actually supports self-actualization. Maybe then we'd see a reduction in crime, violence, and mental illness, if more people had lives that they actually cared about losing - cause clearly, this "bootstraps" bullshit isn't working for more and more people every year. Life's just becoming too much to handle for most people, unless you have considerably above-average intelligence to be able to do something highly skilled, or you're an A-list athlete, entertainer, or celebrity. It's like, I don't know, can't we make life LESS competitive? Wasn't that what technology was supposed to do, to free us from the brutal competition of survival of the fittest, and allow us to actually have lives? Can't we make society, a little more, I don't know...civilized, or nice?
And if that's too much, I'd at least like a return to how things were in the post-WW2 era through the 90s, at least economically (not socially).
It's really frustrating to see that people just don't get it. They think MOAR "hard work", MOAR competition is the answer, but I really think that all it's going to get them, is more stress, frustration, tiredness, and misery as they work harder and harder, only to be less and less able to keep up with the hamster wheel they're stuck on.
