Comment by undecisive | Hacker News Reader

Comment by undecisive | Hacker News Reader

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I think the point is that Humans are stupid. Very few people nowadays think that seatbelts are a bad idea, or that smoking should be encouraged, or that lead in your makeup is the best way to make your skin look like porcelain.

And often we only really realise that with 30-40 years of hindsight - sometimes more - once the smoke has cleared, once the big companies have stopped their misinformation or lobbying (though I wouldn't be surprised to find out there was still some low-level lobbying for relaxing car safety laws).

> To prove how futile it is to resist government power

I guess the real question is, what is government there for - if not to enact laws that keep people safe and prevent profiteering companies from hoodwinking the common folk to help their own bottom lines?

Because as this pandemic has shown, given anything even slightly inconvenient, people will quite happily hoodwink themselves. Personal liberty is king, social responsibility is treason.

(I'd welcome any examples of small inconveniences to help our fellows that did NOT illicit massive backlashes. I can't think of any ever - no matter how obvious the benefit or small the inconvenience.)

> what is government there for - if not to enact laws that keep people safe and prevent profiteering companies from hoodwinking the common folk to help their own bottom lines?

Well put. Are our governments guilty of systematically oppressing us? In many cases yes. That doesn't mean that every government-imposed regulation is brimming with evil. But it is easier (and probably more dopamine-releasing) to believe in a world where the government is the bad guy 100% of the time. It requires less work than acknowledging the occasional good fruits of otherwise inimical regimes.

Absolutely.

Putting on my hypotheticals hat, part of it will be:

- not being in the room where it happened, and presuming that the only impetus for change is evil, which feeds into our own deep-seated resistance to change.

- not knowing which voices are being paid to speak (news media, social media, etc) and which voices are completely under-informed - compared with knowing which voices are definitely being paid to speak (government mouthpieces, propaganda) and conflating "don't know whether to trust" with the much simpler "don't trust".

- knowing that sometimes Governments do good things for good reasons, but even then they often end up producing terrible unintended side-effects, or end up being polluted by less-than-wholesome agendas as a price of getting enacted.

So yeah, I totally get that it's hard work overcoming all that to get to a point where you trust anything the government does.

The real irony is that it's often government inaction that we should be more suspicious of - it's the status quo and anaemic half-arsed reforms that more often feed into the pockets of the powerful while giving a veneer of progress.

> Very few people nowadays think that seatbelts are a bad idea

Just look around this very thread, you may be surprised.

The main problem, I believe, is that most of the people really don't like the idea of being ordered to be even minorly inconvenienced even for their own supposed benefit, much less for benefit of the others.

I've known several smokers, and they all complained how the laws keep getting stricter on where you can legally smoke, and that the tobacco prices keep going up, and that people keep asking them to not smoke near them, etc. And every time I asked "why don't you just give it up then?", oh boy, the replies I got and their tone... let me just say I've never asked that question again to the same person because I feel that'd actually turn me into their enemies.

I feel like it's a pretty sad person who gets steaming mad about being told about something that's good for them. Very childish

I know, it's a personal question, but: do you drink? If yes, how would you feel about new prohibition? How would you argue against it?

By the way, I've heard economical arguments against soft-banning smoking: after all, tobacco companies are a part of the economy, and if they'd go out of business, the economy will suffer. A lot. And I heard the arguments from the personal freedom. And the "there are bigger issues" kind of arguments too -- funnily enough, the most common example of a "bigger issue" is road traffic crashes.

I think for some people, the root of the behavior is addiction.

A relative of mine was told by their trusted doctor that they have to quit smoking, or else it would kill him.

My relative expressed the idea that he'd rather lose a day of his life (possibly longer) for each cigarette he smoked than have to give it up.

He was addicted. He couldn't kick the habit. And I have never smoked a thing because of that, either out of fear for me getting addicted myself, or just as a lesson learned that it's a lot easier to avoid the addiction than fight it once it's latched onto you.

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