When it has been demonstrated over and over again, how little they think of anyone beneath them.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    They are human. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that, while also reiterating that they basically shouldn’t be in that state.


    Also, I think it’s important to draw a line between the “rich” (well-off working professionals like researchers, doctors, small entrepreneurs), and people with more wealth than many sovereign nations put together.

    • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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      Because Hitler restored the German economy and German pride after decades of it being shit. That’s how he won the average citizens over.

      Germany was a fucking mess throughout the 1910s and 1920s. The Weimar republic was a shitty government. Hitler came in and a few years later Germany was a superpower again.

      • davel@lemmy.ml
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        6 hours ago

        That was 90+ years ago. Those people aren’t praising Hitler today because they’re dead.

        There are people around the world, who’ve never even been to Germany, praising Hitler.
        It’s because they’re fascists.

      • flamiera@kbin.melroy.orgOP
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        7 hours ago

        I’m pretty sure you’re trolling but, Hitler took advantage of a weakened Germany after everything in WW1. When someone is weak, that’s what you do. He was an opportunist, a cunning one at that. Nothing he did was bold or bright, things just fell into place after little to no effort on his part.

        And Hitler did not make Germany a superpower. He only had maybe 3 or 4 good years of a run before whatever so-called “brilliance” he had on the field of war, ran right out and plummeted Germany’s reputation and impression on the globe with it.

      • ScrooLewse@lemmy.myserv.one
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        8 hours ago

        Hey not to ruin your fun but did you know Hitler embroiled Germany in an unwinnable war and ordered a few million people be executed, as well?

          • ScrooLewse@lemmy.myserv.one
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            6 hours ago

            Except he didn’t. His plan to ‘rebuild the economy’ was military conquest. He stole enough from ‘undesirable’ German citizens to get the government liquid again, reneged on all the war debts that were keeping the German economy depressed (I’ll give him that much), then kiboshed all the social and economic programs he’d platformed on to go all-in on one titanic military push.

            They simply did not build the infrastructure for a sustained war. And they certainly didn’t build the infrastructure for a functional economy.

            • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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              5 hours ago

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany

              https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Economic_development_of_Germany_1930-1950.jpg

              growth is growth. jobs are jobs. you are just arguing/moralizing that military spending is bad/fake or something. that’s cool, but that isn’t how economics works. all it cares about is growth, and Hitler massively grew the economy to the benefit of the average citizen.

              Regan gave a massive boost to the usa economy in the 80s based om military spending and cutting social programs and taxes… is that ‘fake’ too?

              • ScrooLewse@lemmy.myserv.one
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                3 hours ago

                Holy shit hahaha did you really just link me an article that agrees with me? Bro mortgaged 70% of what was left of the German economy to hit Vegas and bet it all on lebensraum, only to discover that invading farmland destroys the farmland. He couldn’t even keep his shit running with slave labor, lmao.

                Never learn how to read, bud. This was precious.

                • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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                  1 hour ago

                  no dude, you just don’t understand what economics is. apparently the GPD going up 20% in a decade is ‘fake’ in you weird mental world, and governments taking out loans is ‘fake’, despite the fact it’s the underlying financial system of every nation in the world.

  • HopeOfTheGunblade@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 day ago

    Because, for all of the awfulness they bring to the rest of us, they are human.

    Humans who the other humans desperately need to be stripped of their wealth and power, and for whom the doing of which might offer them some small chance to save themselves from the yawning void of more more moremoremoremoremoremore

    • m0darn@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      Yeah we humanize them because it’s important to remember that essentially anyone that ends up in their position will behave similarly. They aren’t demons, they’re humans. We should stop putting people in their position.

    • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      This. As soon as we treat them as “only monsters,” we start to think that “regular humans” aren’t capable of monstrous things.

  • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    Because they are human. What is the difficulty here? They’re not reptilians or space aliens or inter-dimensional beings. It’s in all of us.

    • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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      because treating them as ‘other’ makes it easy to justify violence and hatred.

      realizing they aren’t that different, or worse, that you’d be the same as them in their position, makes you less likely to justify violence and hatred against them, because you’d justify it against yourself, which of course, most everyone is 100% against. further, the rhetoric among leftists is the wealth is original sin, you can never be washed clean of it and there is no good wealthy person because wealth is inherently evil.

      i have spent time around legit wealthy people. what nobody gets is that they don’t think they are wealthy. human psychology adjusts such that no matter how much money you make you always think you need more, and that amount is usually double what you currently make. and like most people, the wealthy want to live in a bubble-existence where they are only around people who are like themselves. the major difference being that the wealthy are more capable of doing this than most of us, but the drive to bubblefy their existence is the same as every other person.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    We cannot understand class behavior by examining individual morality. Viewing the capital owning class as a collection of mustache twirling villains is not a useful framing. Rather, we should look at them as the human personification of capital itself. Their social being, their entire material condition, is defined by the accumulation of private profit and the protection of property relations that enforce their dominance.

    Their inability to relate is not a personal failing but a direct result of their objective position in the capitalist mode of production. They live in a world insulated from the precarity of rent, medical debt, and wage slavery that defines life for the working majority. Their consciousness is shaped by them being insulated from the problems regular people experience. Therefore, critique of their lack of empathy is a liberal dead end because it mistakes a systemic outcome for a personal choice.

    The focus must be the capitalist system itself, which necessarily produces the inequality and the divide between the capitalists and the workers. The fundamental contradiction between the socialized nature of production and the private appropriation of wealth is the core issue. The solution is to dismantle the economic base that creates them as a class and move towards a system where the means of production are socially owned, abolishing the very material conditions that breed alienation and disparity.

    • ScrooLewse@lemmy.myserv.one
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      7 hours ago

      Because the aforementioned billionaires, and previously multi-millionaires, have been spending untold billions over a period of nearly a century to keep them trapped in a propaganda bubble.

    • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      because trump appeals to them. the democrats don’t, and tend to shit all over them as being unworthy pathetic losers for not having college degrees and high paying office jobs.

      • agent_nycto@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Can you give us an example of Democrats shitting on people for not having college degrees and high paying jobs? I’m asking because can certainly quote wealthy Republicans shitting on people for being poor, through their words and actions, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a Democrat just up and insult someone for not having an office job.

        • 3abas@lemmy.world
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          22 hours ago

          Hillary was probably the worse:

          I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product… So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again’, was looking backwards,

          Obama:

          Referring to working-class voters in old industrial towns decimated by job losses, the presidential hopeful said: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

          John Kerry:

          You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq

          These are slip ups, if you search for coded ways they describe their opponents, you can find a lot more “low information” and “uneducated” examples.

          Remember Joe the plumber? He was a reaction to republican voters feeling unrepresented as blue collar workers.

          This kind of class contempt absolutely isn’t unique to Democrats, but their obsession with courting higher educated voters has branded their contempt for those who aren’t.

  • titanicx@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    This is an idiotic post. Yes, they are human. Yes they may make bad decisions, but so do poor people. They just don’t make enough to matter.

  • deathbird@mander.xyz
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    2 days ago

    They are as human as anyone else. We should be cognizant of that. They are human beings within a human system. Move beyond anger and hate, and ask what must be done to end suffering and injustice.

    For all the quips about guillotines, the first fix needs to be removing their excess wealth, not their heads.

    • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 days ago

      If given a chance they will kill. To obtain that level of wealth one generally has to have a sociopathic level of lack of empathy. Maybe not all are like Trump and itching to blow people up and put people to death. A lot are probably less actively bloodthirsty (thankfully) but at the same time have no issue taking away your health insurance, your income, your housing, etc if it impacts their bottom line even though they already have enough resources to last 100,000,000 lifetimes in extreme excess.

      “Oh but if they let these things change they would lose their wealth” exactly - when it comes down to it, they would rather leave you to die than risk losing their obscene wealth. So this is violence, and therefore violence is an appropriate response, especially when the state continually and repeatedly fails over decades (arguably from its inception) to rein them in.

  • apt_install_coffee@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    It’s important to remember that the actions of the working class are primarily derived from their class interests, not because individuals are dicks. Humanizing even shitty individuals is an important part of persuading people away from thinking in terms of individual people and more about the dialectics of class.

  • npcknapsack@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    I’m aphantasic. Until people started really talking about how they “see” things in their heads, I assumed it was all just a figure of speech. Flashbacks, thought bubbles, daydreams in media… I assumed that was all just, you know, an easy way to get the information across. Now I know you freaks actually see stuff and the mind’s eye isn’t some convenient turn of phrase. Weirdos!

    In a similar vein, I have empathy. It is difficult for me to intuitively understand the perspective of someone who doesn’t have any. As an example, it’s hard for me to understand a person who’s exploiting children a la Epstein. And in truth, I don’t want to understand them, either. Even knowing how many of them are the way they are… if I had a little less introspection, I’d probably just default to “they’re just like us.”

    • ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works
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      I am not sure it is really about Capitalism but the broader human Centralization whatever its political or economic system. We Centralize and someone has to be at the top as that is our nature and those at the top exploit as power corrupts. This is wired into us a species and it has brought us a long way for better and for worse.

    • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      that isn’t what empthy is.

      epstein has empathy. it was just for donald trump and his friends and family. most people only have empathy for their immediate family and friends. that’s normal. it’s the scope and target of the empathy you have issue with.

      • npcknapsack@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        Hm. I think that if you don’t have empathy for more than your own immediate friends and family, you don’t have empathy. You have concern over how other people’s pain directly impacts you. That’s egoism, not empathy.

        Plus, Epstein considered all the rest of them targets too, just a different type.

        • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          right, so it’s only empathy if i’m upset about people who i will never meet who i have no connection to and have no interest in… and why would ever empathize with such theoretical people?

          or are you saying empathy is purely a theretical construct totally devoid of my immediate real world experience? hence i can’t have empathy for my friend who just had to put down his cat, because he is my friend! i can only have empathy for who… people starving in africa?

  • Ardens@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    People are brainwashed. They have been for generations. And only very few even like to admit that they are brainwashed. I was too… Luckily I woke up, and became both woke and able to think critically…

    • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      yep. pretty much everyone who screams about how much they hate the rich… would act exactly the same way if they were rich.

      human beings act in their own self interest and that of their tribe.

      • CanadaPlus@futurology.today
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        Money Identity Coercion Ego. Those are the primary motivators.

        Being rich means you’ve solved money and probably coercion. You can either rest on your laurels or chase the other two, for good or for evil. There’s rich philanthropists - some who give almost everything away - and then whatever Elon Musk is, but most go for the rest on their laurels thing, and so you probably haven’t heard of them.

        Dehumanising someone also serves our identity and ego, FYI, which is where this thread came from.

        • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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          yep, dehumanizing them boost our ego, because it makes us feel superior and justifies hate and violence. because it’s good to hate and hurt those who are ‘bad people’.

      • folaht@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        No they wouldn’t.

        Even the capitalists are behaving differently and more humane compared the fuedalists of the middle ages.

        That’s actually the main reason why communism and socialism even exists, as a prediction to say what will come after capitalism to the naysayers saying that there’s no such thing as social progress.

        • CanadaPlus@futurology.today
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          9 hours ago

          Even the capitalists are behaving differently and more humane compared the fuedalists of the middle ages.

          Yes, because their source of wealth is fundamentally different. Lords had to project violence and play court politics to keep their position. Still do, in some places. The rich in developed countries, on the other hand, can rely on strong rule of law to protect their property with very little personal input.

          Also why if the apocalypse ever happened, they’d get owned and somebody else would take their bunker.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Numerous reasons.

    Lots of people don’t want anyone to disturb the system…”upend the apple cart” as it were. A known, even if shitty, is still better than the unknown. Like people pining for lives under the rule of some harsh autocrat. Even if your neighbor disappeared one night thanks to the State Police, it was better than worrying about the less-harsh policing that lets kids get away with graffiti-ing everything or the petty theft you’re always hearing about.

    Also, if they come for the rich people, they’ll come for you. If they tax the rich, they’ll tax you. If you support the rich, people will remember that, and they’ll come for you.

    Maybe a little of the “I could be rich someday” idea too, so they support obscene wealth with the idea they could somehow also be rich no matter how minuscule the chance. The irony being the wealthy are the ones supporting barriers preventing you from even achieving financial security, forget ever being wealthy.

    • TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world
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      bingo.

      easy to see in russia. in the 90s russia was democratic and free… but in economic collapse and choas. a lot of people quickly wanted to go back to soviet stability and the subsequent oppression and Putin capitalized on that and he’s popular because he vastly improved the russian economy, despite cracking down on freedom.

      people value stability and predictability. life is optimistic when you have a clear vision and path to achieve your goals. it is miserable when there isn’t a clear path to your goals.

      • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        Absolutely. And that also applies to some immigrants from harsh dictatorships. I worked with a pro-trump Russian. He liked trump specifically because he wanted someone to “crack skulls” and all that. (This was during the BLM protests.) He wanted the police state to shut up everything inconvenient to his way of thought.