Actually, democracy dies in H.R.
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I understand that research needed to look for credible data in order to advance, but these conclusions are really close to what Hannah Arendt tells in the Banality of Evil: regular citizens trying to get their promotion and advance their careers, doing untold damage in the process because they happened to be working during an autocracy. It's nice though that data eventually corroborate what philosophy first observes, even if the observation doesn't necessarily directly prompts an investigation.
Humans tend toward doing things that are best for them. The challenge of large-organization-designers (governments, companies, etc.) is how to design a system that 1) leverages this behavior; ie maximize the value of ambition to the system, and 2) is not vulnerable to this behavior; ie checks & balances
Small organizations can get around this because outcomes are easier to share, and selecting people who aren't selfish is possible.
We can do our best to put guidelines around selfishness, but history tells us this is hard
I don't think that assumption holds. People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives, gamble, smoke, don't exercise, some people even don't brush their teeth.
On the other hand, there's as many examples of people being selfless as of people being selfish.
Human behavior is much more complex.
Reminds me of debating Bentham in high school. If the feeling of self-interest of a murderer acts upon is greater than the self-interest of someone not to be murdered, etc...
Maybe the point is not to reduce judgment to one qualitative idea.
It’s also subjective and dependent on the persons values, beliefs, etc.
The broader point is that self-interest is not purely logical because humans are not purely logical beings.
What act exactly do people believe to be in their self-interest? Why are you claiming it's the anti-social ones and not the pro-social if the believe is not rooted on reality?
Humans are intrinsically irrational. That is a plain and simple fact. Humans operate exclusively on what they think is true instead of what is objective fact. Subjectively an individual human acts in ways that are roughly rational and coherent within their belief system and world view. The problem is that this frame of reference is entirely subjective and is only tangentially related to consensus objective reality. Assuming that you can apply your own reasoning and logic to all other humans is fallacy.
You must accept the fact that other people do not share your world view and will not act with what you, personally deem to be rationality.
Yes
> That is a plain and simple fact
No
You've not examined the cognitive resources required to properly locate "fact" when humans have other interests, like staying alive and providing for their families. The mechanism seems to encourage directional stances rather than comprehensive ones.
* I wave some sort of unreal RFC 2119 wand at you *
a) Internet privacy is in one's self-interest
b) Many erroneously believe privacy on the internet to be goal of terrorists, hackers, etc.
c) A subset of these people then act against their own self-interest by vocally supporting mass surveillance, or voting in candidates who do so, in the name of the apparent self-interest of safety
I also didn't say anything about pro/antisocial people... different person.
"People act to their own benefit" is an empty generalization that adds no useful information by itself and free of context like that only serves to mislead people. It's only true if "benefit" is explicitly undefined, and only useful if you contextualize it to an specific action and benefit that you can empirically determine it's validity, like in the article.
> I also didn't say anything about pro/antisocial people
The article, and the entire discussion is about pro/antisocial behavior.
I think it is a useful generalization when you possess a theory of mind, however. In low-trust environments, assuming criminal self-interest is often what keeps people safe... if you're basing your decision on a lack of information, wariness is warranted. Not every social environment is a conversational environment.
Calling voters selfish because they didn't vote for your candidate is just pure idiocy. Politics is a game of convincing and some strategies are more successful than others, one of the worse things you can do in politics is simply advocate (talking to others); which is why the majority of online discussions around politics revolves around advocacy, it's the cheapest and lowest impact thing an individual can do.
The GP did not call voters "selfish". It said
> People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives [...]
Now, I would personally reword that as "People routinely vote for candidates despite evidence that these candidates policies will worsen one or more aspects of their lives ...".
But nowhere is there the suggestion that "you didn't vote for my preferred candidate and therefore you are selfish".
The suggestion wasn't overt, it was kind of implicity - telling people that they don't know their own self interest, even when they manifestly don't, is not very ahh "politic" :)
It’s inherently an argument that democracy does not work.
Clearly, voters are not casting votes based on objective measurements of the things that some candidates believe are important to them (e.g. household income, life expectancy, health care quality etc).
But that means either that they are voting based on other issues that they consider important, or they are not voting based on likely outcomes of a candidate's policy preferences at all.
It's not trivial to differentiate these two (and of course, there may even be a mixture of all 2, or even all 3, reasons to vote).
And sure, people may vote for a candidate (implicitly, for a policy) that benefits society as a whole even if it negatively impacts them. It does stretch credibility, however, to try to make the case this is what is happening when people earning median incomes or below vote for candidates who cut taxes on the wealthiest in a society, as well as reducing the share of GDP going to labor, and claiming "well, those folks just think this candidate is doing a good job on <cultural issue>". I'm not suggesting it is impossible that this happens sometimes, but across the entirety of working class Republican voters (for example) ... I find it hard to believe.
"Stupid people are the most dangerous people" -- Carlos Cipolla, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
https://gandalf.fee.urv.cat/professors/AntonioQuesada/Curs19...
"All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die" Says the man next to me out of nowhere It's apropos of nothing, he says his name is William I'm sure he's Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy And he's plain ugly to me And I wonder if he's ever had a day of fun in his whole life We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday In a bar that faces a giant car wash The good people of the world Are washing their cars on their lunch break Hosing and scrubbing as best they can in skirts in suits
These are regularly rich and at upper echelons of politics.
Having actual ethical limitations is what limits enrichment and gain of power. And while most gamblers loose, some win big and then gain power.
This is a line I see often by people (not you, just to be clear) puzzled because somebody didn't "vote for their own self interest" or at least that is the perception of the person making the statement. I've seen variations of it for at least 30 years. You'd often see it around pressure campaigns to unionize especially.
The shock about the perception is always funny to me, because it reads as shock that someone refused a bribe or was not easily manipulated.
So when someone "votes against their self-interest", this person tends to think of those others as malfunctioning. Perhaps they're too stupid to correctly deduce the path to achieving the results they want. Though he might be willing to consider they're mentally ill.
If he were forced (somehow) to consider that other people want things different from what he wants, it could be some sort of existential crisis as far as he's concerned. How could two competing interests even exist in a sane or fair universe, and which should prevail if they are mutually exclusive? What if, somehow, his own interests were destined to lose out?
There are examples where "what he wants them to do" can actually be for them to vote to help themselves.
For example, people voting to give themselves, their family, and their friends better access to health care; instead many people prevent themselves from getting better health care because if they did that would mean other people (and specifically the 'wrong kind' of other people) would also get it:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness
So people are screwing themselves/family to screw other folks over. They are actively harming themselves out of spite.
This simply isn't the case. It presupposes that you should know what the other person wants. You don't... and even when you know it (because they've told you), you ignore it because it's not what you would prefer that they want. It's a really simply concept, but you're probably incapable of conceiving of it. Other people in the world around you are props that the universe invented so the world could be as you envision it.
>For example, people voting to give themselves, their family, and their friends better access to health care;
I don't want "better access to health care". I know what you mean by that phrase, but I do not want this. My brain doesn't work like yours, I do not have the same preferences or desires that you do. I am not "voting against my interests", it's just that my interests are alien to you. I understand your preferences quite well (to a degree, at least) and I acknowledge that those are different than my own. You, though, can't acknowledge the same of me... the best you can come up with is that I'm somehow mistaken, confused, or brainwashed. Even this comment is likely incomprehensible.
>So people are screwing themselves/family to screw other folks over.
My family wouldn't be better off from this... we're not cattle for the farmer to provide health care for. It is not harming me or mine, we're up to the challenge.
> This simply isn't the case. It presupposes that you should know what the other person wants. You don't... and even when you know it (because they've told you), you ignore it because it's not what you would prefer that they want.
I'm not ignoring it. I do know it (in certain cases) because they've said so: they want to see certain people(s) suffering:
* http://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/...
They often don't want to suffer themselves and are indignant when things come back and bite them in the ass:
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Leopards_Eating_People%27s_Fa...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkeys_voting_for_Christmas
Though some don't care how much it costs them as long as it costs someone else more (or perceived as such by them):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
But someone's interests/desires of what they believe to be good, and what is actually good can be two different things. (And even if choosing between things that are actually good, one can choose a good that is not as good as what one could choose.)
Invoking Godwin's law: what the Nazis did was not objectively "bad", but simply something you do not agree with.
What? Left-leaning folks are stereotypically more secular and less likely to believe in the supernatural, so as materialists would have less of a foundation for any kind of "objective" morality.
Sorry, but sometimes people really do just vote against there own interests because they've been convinced of things that are wrong, or they misunderstand something. I expect you could even think of some examples if you tried.
And your whole post is just wildly making assumptions about someone you don't know: - "thinks of others as robots..." - "Everyone in the world must, as some precondition of the universe, be interested in all the same things" - "He cannot imagine that people external to himself have any real interests at all" - "this person tends to think of those others as malfunctioning" - "...it could be some sort of existential crisis as far as he's concerned" - "How could two competing interests even exist in a sane or fair universe" -
Perhaps you could have some faith? I doubt you've never voted for something you came to regret.
Incorrect. I do recognize their differences of preference. They do not want the same thing as me. The reverse isn't true. I do not think they're idiots because they want different things than me... you've mischaracterized what I've said. They are idiots because, they (and you) can't recognize that I want something different than what they (and you) want.
And, in your convoluted way of thinking, you can't even get the argument right. You stoop to accusing me of misunderstanding.
>And your whole post is just wildly making assumptions
What exactly is wild about it? You didn't hear me screaming this, mouth frothing, as 6 cops try to drag me to the ground from where I'd perched up on some platform with a bullhorn. No violence occurred. Nothing uncivilized, just carefully chosen words. My "assumptions" if they can even be called that at all, required decades to form. Nothing wild about that. Really, they were boring words, maybe even timid. I'd be wrong and I would know it if you hadn't even chosen to respond. But it itches in the back of your mind somehow, doesn't it? Just couldn't let it go?
>Perhaps you could have some faith? I
I would like that. I would want to have faith so very much. It's all I've ever wanted, even before I knew to articulate it as that. Why does everyone make that so impossible though?
"But it itches in the back of your mind somehow, doesn't it? Just couldn't let it go?" You think you're so damn clever don't you?
Every time I comment on any form of social media, I remember why I usually don't. Good day.
The point is, that the 'Right' are living in a bubble of cognitive dissonance, fantasy, simulacrum. Barely able to put one foot in front of the other as far as logic goes...
Literally the same group that were convinced by rich land owners that the having a Civil War for the land owners benefit, was a good idea. Going against their own self interest.
Bush, Obama, Biden. All the same, can't really tell the difference.
This time, it is different. Accepting a Jumbo Jet bribe? with no questions? Manipulating Oil Markets with a war? Having the IRS setup a 1.7 billion fund to pay off friends from a coup attempt?
This is the end.
The bubble is not a one side issue.
More false equivalences. Oh no, Hunter Biden had some Porn. That totally justifies going to war to distract from Epstein, and just as a bonus, its ok to make money on manipulating oil markets and make that mooola.
To the extent this is true, that is only because they believe those candidates will make their lives better. People often declare how their outgroup "votes against their own interests", and use it as some kind of indictment of those people's intelligence. But that is nothing more than a failure to understand people. Essentially nobody is out there voting for someone whom they believe will make their lives worse m
At any given decision point, people are more likely to pick the option that provides some benefit to them. That looks very different from consistently picking the choice that is eventually best for them.
I largely agree with you, but I would tweak it to say "Humans are decent at doing what's best for them given their own values and knowledge".
^as in any situation, there is always the <1% of outliers
There certainly people who are selfless but in the distribution of personalities selfless feels more rare. And their is always a question to what extent. I think what Hannah Arendt really is getting at is that is possible to build a system that reinforces small compromises for reasonable benefit that leads the system to meltdown when everyone starts making small compromises
Maybe in a welfare society centered around the community you'd see people naturally acting different.
That's without disputing the naturalization of an observation of state (people act this way so they must always act this way) which I think is also problematic.
There is always some selfishness in people but it is a choice to structure society and economic activity around it.
Most of the coalitions you mentioned are, ultimately, born out of the realization that, sometimes, you have to give a little now, to gain more later. Even charity at its pure idealistic form requires the altruistic individual to feel they made the world better in their own view (psychic profit, thus ultimately selfish) to happen.
This isn't the "default capitalist view", this is praxeology, plain and simple.
1. Social pressures. Failing to care for others can result in social stigma, with increasing levels of alienation depending of culture/society; 2. Setting examples for reciprocity . One can help others today to set the expection to receive support later. All become old, sick and/or disabled at some point (if they don't die beforehand, immortals notwithstanding); 3. Friends and relatives are valuable in multiple ways; 4. Some just see value in helping others, either in the act or the results.
These are the examples I can state on top of my head. They all require each individual's evaluation scales to favor such motivations.
How these social pressures could arise if all people in society acts out of selfishness?
> 2. Setting examples for reciprocity
What kind of reciprocity exists if we talk about healthy adults taking care of disabled children that would likely die in few years?
> Some just see value in helping others, either in the act or the results.
Oh, how close it is to saying "people are often being selfless"!
Eventually we benefit from it in our old age and teach our grandkids to remember about it as they get older.
Possibly due to point 2, for instance.
> What kind of reciprocity exists if we talk about healthy adults taking care of disabled children that would likely die in few years?
You do realize that people may become disabled in their lives, right? It's not just children.
In any case, that can also be explained by point 3.
> Oh, how close it is to saying "people are often being selfless"!
But it isn't, and that's the point. This is a case of self-actualization, the highest expression of the "self". Some may argue that this is "selflessness", but I argue that this is "selfishness" in its purest form: the pursuance of one's highly personal goal, i.e. psychic profit seeking.
I agree that many traditional cultures engage in egalitarianism, but genocide and mass-rapes, wars and slavery campaigns, are baked into the anthropological history.
Economic activity, expressed in water and caloric access, is the root of numerous ongoing conflicts (“tribal” and national), and the cause of many historical eradications of competition.
Capitalism seeks to maximize capital, anthropology says life just as brutal as it was before we named and systematized it. Cost benefit doesn’t need dollars as a unit of measure to be effective.
Survivorship Bias.
Humans that exhibit altruistic behavior get to stay around and make more history. When selfish behavior society collapses and that history is pruned, generally in some horrific event involving a lot of death and genocide.
Now, the mistake you are personally making is thinking you're going to make it because in general humans have stuck around after selfish people fucked everything up.
From this perspective, the main advantage of technology has been to increase how much a single person can do, leading to more capable small organizations. And this should also make us wonder whether an LLM-heavy org is going to be better or worse aligned than one that has just people and more predictable tech.
But I do sometimes hold those in contempt who I know have the means to not do evil and choose to anyway.
That is all to say, no it’s not just human nature.
That's why the article actually mentions it.
I gotta mention that Arendt relationship with actual NAZI ideologue Martin Heidegger might have somewhat colored her analysis of evil. I mean, she had a reason to dismiss the importance of ideas, propaganda and prominent intellectuals in creating "evil" regimes when she had a connection to such things (just as she and others covered up how much of an overt NAZI and antisemite Heidegger was, even Hitler took power).
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt#Marburg_(1924%E2...
And naturally this is a controversial take since Arendt and Heidegger have defenders to the present day.
Eichmann wasn't just some bureaucrat but wanted to be seen as just a cog in the system. She basically ate his act and now everyone has to bring her up whenever something evil happens which people seemingly don't seem to care about. In reality Eichmann was a man who had genuine ideology, was personally driven and extremely calculated.
Raul Hilberg holocaust expert is a better source for information on Eichmann, he wrote (one of) the best works on the holocaust and is a genuine historian, was one of the first people to write an extensive history of it . He's not exactly as promoted today (in the media/general public) as actually following his view would poke some holes in the 'holocaust industry' (this doesn't mean that I in any way minimize or doubt the holocaust and its cruelty).
And the idea that Hannah Arendt needs "defenders" because she had an affair with Heidegger is just bizarre.
Heidegger aimed to use the NAZI movement to promote his own ideology, which he viewed as compatible with and appropriate to the movement. It was different from other versions of NAZIism and they were different from each - only at point the NAZIs fully consolidated their state control and wielded top-down state propaganda did things become uniform. But the idea-point leading up to that point (say, about when Heidegger resigned his rectorship, after The Night Long Knives) should most simply and clearly be called "NAZI ideologues".
And yes, that's not something those who like Heidegger's writings like to hear.
When you're looking to get laid you don't ask a lot of questions about politics. Same goes when you're looking for a job. Soon enough, you -- or your offspring -- are part of the machine. And that's the banality of evil.
But moreover, Heidegger didn't just "turn brown". He saw NAZIism as a potential realization of his philosophy. Such a belief definitely influences my view of Heidegger. Any summary of Heidegger's philosophy and it's problem naturally either involves a lot of simplification or is book length. For book length critiques, I'd recommend The Jagon Of Authenticity by Adorno. My simplification of Heidegger's weakness is that he among a number of philosophers criticizing the lacking of authenticity/awareness/true-being/etc in the modern world in isolation. Such critiques tend to fall for political movements promising the violent reconstruction of tradition - such as NAZIism but limited to that. Michelle Foucault's despicable endorsement of Ayatollah Khomeini on the eve of the overthrow of the Shah is quite similar Heidegger's turn.
The point is that even someone as brilliant as Heidegger could be captured by insane ideology.
You are obviously also captured by an ideology,if you can see it or not.
TFA mentions Hannah Arendt in the introduction and discusses the holocaust (if briefly, because most of its focus is on more modern regimes.
This is not to say she got it wrong, I think the banality of evil absolutely holds up in a number of readings of historical events. I just don't think Eichmann was a good example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_trial
> When he took the stand in his own defense, he portrayed himself as a mid-level functionary following orders.[32] He repeatedly claimed he was "merely a little cog in the machinery" of genocide, not a policymaker.
Speer was tried in Nuremberg. He indeed played a "I was just an emotional artist and I never knew anything about the Holocaust" game during that trial. Given that they weren't able to disprove his assertion that he left the Posen Speech early (that was a speech in 1943 where Himmler openly discussed the Holocaust), he got away with his life, though not with his freedom. He got a 20 year sentence and served it in the Spandau Prison.
(Also, he was present at the Posen Speech, which he later acknowledged in a letter.)
Eichman, on the other hand, was only caught in Argentina a long time after the war, and everyone who came into contact with him described him as a pathetic mediocre personality with a strong tendency to suck up to everyone stronger, including the very Israeli commandos and jailers who held him in custody.
At first, Mr. Scharpf thought the man was just being insulting. He soon realized that the official meant the comment literally — that the military junta’s secret police had been, in his view, incompetent losers.
Let me just cue up Jesse Welles and Join ICE real quick...
Seriously, it’s a good article. Read it. And yes, it explicitly discusses ICE.
https://archive.ph/2026.05.18-091508/https://www.nytimes.com...
Being clever and lazy forces you to determine what should not be done, as opposed to just doing everything because you can because you're clever and industrious.
As you climb higher and higher in decision-making, it becomes clear that the things you say no to at some point becomes more important than the things you say yes to.
Think back to the three virtues of a great programmer: hubris, laziness, and impatience.
Simple example… they get others to do the work while they reap the rewards. That’s clever and lazy.
Guess you didn't come up writing Perl
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/give-a-little-whistle
People being asked for blind loyalty or to step aside.
It is ironic hear people whose whole life was dedicated to chase immigrants being surprise when it evolved to chase each other: police state.
https://politicalscience.ku.dk/about/news/2026/banal-but-bru...
https://www.hertie-school.org/en/news/detail/content/why-ord...
Two points that the NYT article does not emphasize as much:
* Career pressures can go both ways - "the same career pressure that drives some officers to do the regime’s dirty work drives others to join coups against it. Both are all-in gambles by people with their backs against the wall – one bets on the current regime, the other bets on its replacement."
* Meritocracy and professionalism in itself is not protective - "The Argentine army maintained a remarkably meritocratic promotion system for over a century – through democracies, personalist dictatorships, and military juntas alike" and "The policy implication is sobering: professionalisation alone won’t protect democracy. We need to think carefully about what happens to those who lose in competitive systems and what pathways we offer them."
In other words, there is a structural challenge - how do we treat "losers" in a system that is constantly present, and then there is the authoritarian's take on that challenge. Realistically, this is just highlighting a mechanism, and once someone is actually in a position to take advantage of such a mechanism, there's typically not much you can do to engineer an institutional safeguard within that system.
To badly paraphrase some guest on a half-remembered economics podcast on debt forgiveness:
To really understand a system, you have to study its waste pipelines. What is discarded and why? What do those discarded things ultimately become?
For that matter, it also applies to the relentless swarming horde of nanobots known as biological life.
An effective, professional workforce is important, but ultimately professionalism and process can only enhance or blunt power.
It's absurd to act like a dataset of Argentinian military promotions is rigorous or valid enough to make any kind of conclusion about how authoritarianism works. This type of "science" is no help in how we all live and work together and our individual experiences are all we really have to help us navigate society.
For example, in Italy the judiciary has a governing body of its own whose members are partially elected by the parliament, but also partially by the judges themselves. Lower judges are exclusively appointed by the judiciary governing body or through a civil service exam, and neither the government nor the parliament have any say on it.
Really needs some citations to demonstrate researchers believe other factors could be at play.
I wonder if there isn't also a parallel to criminal activity - aren't prisons full of low academic performers/ disadvantaged - who are resorting to crime to 'thrive'.
ie if you set up the game so some people feel they can't win then they will refuse to play.
And so is this a danger of a meritocracy with an insufficient safety net - those you leave behind - will either be angry and resentful and vote in a facist and/or turn to crime?
Look, society for a while now has been incentivizing a “fuck you got mine” attitude in workers at all levels that has fostered immense dysfunction in work, governance, and society itself. We reward exceptional individualism and punish any sort of community action that doesn’t do the same.
This is why mediocre actors will enable and support authoritarian goals: it gets them ahead, society rewards them for it, and they (naively) believe their rewards will somehow protect them from the harms they force unto others. Except that never happens, and eventually when society course-corrects those very same enablers find themselves ostracized from both society at large and the remnants of power that remain; everyone expects to accelerate upward forever, forgetting the roller coaster has to return to the station at some point.
I consider myself both a worker (in that I don’t see myself ever stop working, even if given the resources to do so) and a more-selfless-than-most individual, and I’m quite sick and tired of getting used up and tossed aside by these mediocre miscreants to preserve personal power. The net result of a career of soldiering through bankruptcies, layoffs, downturns, redundancies, mergers, contract changes, and downsizing while mediocre power brokers above ride off into the sunset flush with cash and homes (plural) and wealth has consistently pushed me harder and harder to the left over time. It never matters how many millions I save in costs, or how many hours I work, or how many months of build time I reduce, or how many roles I juggle or councils I sit on, because I’ve never truly been rewarded proportionate to the cost I’ve paid, let alone merely kept around longer than milquetoast leadership or layabout colleagues - and that’s a very strong lesson to try and overturn when it’s been beaten into you for twenty-odd years.
I also know I’m far from alone in this perspective. There’s a growing throng of us who did everything asked of us and then some only to get tossed aside in the name of someone else’s personal wealth or success, and we’re increasingly bitter about it. To limit this only to authoritarianism is missing the forest fire for a single burnt tree.
From what I can see, this attitude has become widespread specifically because our societies aren't holding the rich accountable for anything, so why should we play nice if they won't?
I recently left a company where WHO made the decisions became more important than if they were good decisions or not. An active board had different goals than company leadership, burned through 3 CEOs, 3 COOs, 4 CFOs, and 4 HR chiefs in 18 months, and refused to listen to anyone inside the company when the board plans failed. Why so many C suites? Board would demand we do X, so we'd do X even though it was a bad idea, it failed, and then we'd fix it, do extremely well, and then the board would demand another change.
After 2 years of that, the board started firing C-suite and telling the replacements that the plan was to try Plan X, but not let on it had been tried 2 times before. Plan X would fail, there's be a C-suite sacking, replaced with a new group, and they'd try Plan X again. Repeat until we had tried Plan X 5 different times with 3 different sets of C-suite in 3 years.
In December the PE firm got tired of waiting for results and is selling off that company at a fire sale. My equity is worthless. Everyone's equity is worthless. The managing director got a $14m parachute with his pink slip.
I did everything right, and I got screwed. This is why line workers are adopting that attitude.
Who told you that everything you were doing was right? Were they, perhaps, the same people who screwed you?
Was one of the things you did right "organize with your fellow workers to form a union and bargain collectively against management and the board"? If not, why not?
Why didn't you bail?
I agree that extreme individualization in the last few decades has resulted in some really bad actions. We're starting to see Western societal decline because of this, whereas collectivist cultures are thriving. It takes tremendous emotional labor to care for the well being of your community, so it's easier to just worry about only yourself. This is unsustainable just like you mentioned that enablers of authoritarians are never protected. Leaning right and being selfish will eventually hurt that person. It may not hurt them now, or tomorrow, or until 1-2 generations from now, but that course will be corrected. They are prioritizing short term gains over long term benefits, and the good part about this is that a lot of smart hard working people are choosing the long term.
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" -MLK
On another note: I wanted to shared something about the word "mediocre". I once made a comment to a coworker and friend that we are all just average mediocre people doing mediocre things at work and that is OK. During this same time, another coworker called me a superstar for solving his problem.
The original coworker I had made the mediocre comment to was so offended that they went home, designed a T-shirt and wore it work "Mediocre man. Because not everyone can be a superstar". I saw it. I felt bad and commented to him that I did not mean to call him mediocre or offend him, but the damage was already done. At this same time, I kept getting called superstar by everyone on the team, including by the manager of our team (in retrospect, yikes!). We had a (toxic) culture of nicknames, and this too was going to stick for a while.
At some point, the coworker who made the t-shirt had raised concerns with the manager and eventually the manager pulled us all aside and said "no more superstar, it ends today, we're done with that nickname". Ok, cool.
However, in subsequent conversations, the tshirt coworker would share some of his views of the world with me. He had a very difficult life growing up, so one of his takes was "why do black people get to say black lives matter, but why can't I say white lives matter, my life is difficult too, do I not matter?". I was shocked, but also unsurprised by this. I work in tech, and these kinds of takes are widely prevalent. I don't remember how I tried explaining to them, but I walked away disappointed that they had taken all of the injustice and difficulty of life and instead decided to take something away from a group of people who faced the same :(
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/37491/is-it-truly-il...
The holocaust couldn't have been carried out without the willing participation of mostly mediocre, apolitical carreirists that followed orders without ever questioning them, and for whom, anything is licit if ordered by am hierarchical superior.
This has been known for a while. If you take a look at where most of the stuff in the world has been made back to the late 1980s, it's not in countries in the former Eastern Bloc where people organized to remove authoritarian single-party governments and introduce democratic republics. It's in an authoritarian single-party state.
Companies themselves aren't really democracies, either. Unless you work for a cooperative where employees are the primary shareholders and are given equal voting power over the company's affairs, you're probably working in an authoritarian oligarchy. It would make sense that there is a lot of overlap in how people doing the groundwork are handled in corporate systems and authoritarian regimes.
Maybe with AI? In the future?
Many EU countries' current obsession with E2EE and age verification is fucked, but we are still (thankfully) a way from the state of the States.
- We don't need to submit a history of our social media accounts before crossing a border
- (Most) of our libraries aren't having to make joint statements about free speech (https://www.orbiscascade.org/free-speech-statement/)
- And regarding free press - https://www.wfae.org/2026-01-20/stars-and-stripes-top-editor...
Americans don't have to do that when crossing between states either. Are you saying that Americans' social media histories aren't considered when they wish to travel to Europe?
> And regarding free press - https://www.wfae.org/2026-01-20/stars-and-stripes-top-editor...
Weird example. Stars and Stripes is a government-created periodical that covers the military.
That's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.
> Are you saying that Americans' social media histories aren't considered when they wish to travel to Europe?
Yes.
> Weird example. Stars and Stripes is a government-created periodical that covers the military.
Which typically had editorial independence - exactly the kind of free speech Americans used to be proud of.
(1) "Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust", Richard Rhodes, 2002.
"Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen’s role in the Holocaust. These 'special task forces,' organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943."
(2) "Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich", Richard J. Evans, 2024.
"Through a connected set of biographical portraits of key Nazi figures that follows power as it radiated out from Hitler to the inner and outer circles of the regime’s leadership, one of our greatest historians answers the enduring question, how does a society come to carry out a program of unspeakable evil?"
I guess I'm a victim of The Cold Equations story, but almost by definition firm bureaucratic rules are sociopathic. This isn't inherently "bad", but mediocre people deriving all their worth by following a bad bureaucracy have capacity for nearly-infinite evil by being able to launder all the negative feelings through the bureaucracy itself.
At some level I'm no better; I'm typing this message on a computer almost certainly made from parts sourced from questionable labor practices. I would like to think that at least when I'm involved semi-directly I have capacity for empathy and wouldn't just blame a bureaucratic nightmare for the bad things I do, but of course pretty much everyone thinks they're a good person.
Shows up for immoral industries such as gambling and smoking too.
In Nightcrawler, some characters are trying to get ahead, and others are desperate not to fall behind, but their opportunism (driven by the necessity to make money in order to survive in our capitalist society) makes all of them vulnerable to exploitation by an ambitious psychopath. In that case, he is profit-motivated, whereas the article here is about dictators retaining power, but the same principles apply. The movie does an amazing job of exploring how these individuals can wield power irresponsibly, poison everyone who gives them an inch, and sound almost reasonable while they do it. It is a masterful portrayal of how much some people can be willing to compromise on their morals for their job.
If you haven't seen it, you should watch it. If you have seen it, but don't remember it being deeply critical of capitalist society, you should re-watch it. (It's easy to get so engrossed by the truly suspenseful and thrilling moment-to-moment action that you miss the big picture.) The deterioration of American news media is a more overt theme in the movie, but in my opinion, that serves as a complementary backdrop to the anticapitalist message, which is the engine that drives the movie inexorably onward. Also the acting, directing, and writing are great.
Don't spoil it by reading the plot summary, just watch it.
At least in America, HR has a reputation for claiming that they are here to help employees but actually only prioritizing the desires of the corpos. The common saying is "HR is not your friend".
Unions were the institutions that actually helped employees. It's a shame they had their reputations smeared and many were busted, leaving workers out in the cold. The worst run union probably does more for employees than the best HR department.
That said, in the USA the pendulum has swinged too far the other way so as of now, unions don't have any capacity to be this bad. Unionizing would be a huge improvement for every employee in pretty much every situation.
The Bosses and Owners have the money, the property, the machines, and political connections.
And power/money builds more power/money. And because its a boss vs worker arrangement, the worker's power will invariably get whittled down year by year.
The real solution here isnt socialism or communism. Its Worker Cooperatives. This makes the worker = the boss. And the previous conflict between the 2 go away. And the workers can make better decisions with all the information.
For example, when a dictatorial company announces layoffs, it just happens. But losing people also loses knowledge of the company, which is bad long term. In those cases, a worker cooperative could explain the situation, and make a decision together to temporarily cut wages INSTEAD of laying people off.
Unions used to solve this issue by occasionally dragging a boss out of their home and killing them in the street, or kneecapping scabs. To end such violence, we enshrined in law pretty strong protections for unions, so that they could fight in the courts rather than in the streets. A couple generations of prosperity later, business folk and their bought politicians who wouldn't know Chesterton's fence if it fell on them decided those protections were inconvenient. And so here we are.
The CEO class thinks their lives matter more than the masses. But talking about history or giving a nudge that violence did work certainly makes the CEO fellators come out en masse.
The reason why we're seeing firebombing, shooting, arson, etc is because the public feels they have absolutely no legal way for grievances. And with the NLRB at 2/5 and no quorum, and inequality so extreme, its true. So its illegal. And violence absolutely does work - just you cant ever admit it. Violence is how the USA got the NLRB, and a decent legal process for grievances.
I still look at unions and companies, and the real problem is still the unresolved split between the 2. And the only counter to massive resources and money is violence. And we're already seeing it. Only good solution is worker cooperatives. It the only path that solves the arbitrary dichotomy of owner/worker, democracy in the workplace, and allays feelings powerlesness leading to mass shows of violence.
Layoffs happen when bets don't pay off. If you want a world where people are guaranteed a job, look at Europe. Also, they don't innovate and have no interesting industries.
They go hand in hand. Companies need to be able to innovate. And yeah that means hiring and firing teams as they see fit.
The second part of your proposal always, always goes unsaid: companies will hire less under a scheme where layoffs are harder.
Cut wages? That sounds horrible and demoralizing. I guess you've never led a team before. Please explain how that company would remain competitive in the marketplace when their salaries are 20% lower than a competitor? They lose talent, fail as a business, and suddenly everyone is out of a job.
Think about any job you ever worked at.
When layoffs happened, did the work ever get easier or done to a higher standard because of the layoff, or did the sudden loss of knowledge and manpower make your job harder?
When things were bad enough that layoffs were being talked about, who jumped ship, the low performers who don't really do anything or the high performers who can get a job anywhere?
When innovation happened, did it tend to come from the team that would be fired for screwing up, or the team that could confidently experiment and incorporate lessons from past trials.
The idea that weak labor protections is a key requirement for innovation doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
Sometimes (believe it or not!) companies over hire. Or they try a thing and it fails. Or you need to pivot. (called "innovation")
Why is this so hard to understand?
America is, indeed, an outlier in terms of innovation right now.
Honestly, do you think high performers are ever mad that people just coasting are let go? Do you think a team has great morale when 20% of the team aren't pulling their own weight?
Every layoff is different, so your generalizations don't make any sense. But they are, in fact, a necessary part of an innovative market. The alternative is a company paying people to do nothing productive because they can't fire them.
Because a functioning neocortex prevents it.
Over-hiring is inneficient. If not being able to easily lay people off prevents that issue, it's a good thing.
You're making an logical leap that trying a thing and it failing, or otherwise pivoting requires layoffs despite clear evidence to the contrary.
I can tell you for a fact high performers don't want to see their coworkers laid off, and layoffs destroy team morale more than anything else.
The generalizations make perfect sense because what makes something a layoff makes all the conditions I described true.
I can't imagine any intelligent person arguing in good faith that there is no middleground between freely laying people off on a whim and paying people to do nothing because they can not be fired.
Nobody said layoffs are happening on a whim. Companies obviously would like to avoid them when possible. No idea what your argument actually is. Layoffs cost a lot of money to do. They don't just "happen". I have done them - the company, and employees, in the long term, were better off. Guess what? People are resilient, they don't need coddled their entire lives.
Yeah, overhiring is inefficient. Guess what is even more inefficient? Keeping those people on the payroll forever. 10 dollars > 5 dollars. :)
Please use your "functioning neocortex" to understand that if a company is limited to fire people in 5 years, they are much, much less likely to hire anybody. Please talk to literally anybody in a hiring role.
Your ideal, I guess, is to have people sitting around in jobs doing nothing (or less busy than they could be) so they aren't building experience, learning, challenging themselves, etc all because company XYZ is legally bound to not fire them? So people's feelings aren't hurt? What a sad, low-ambition, pathetic worldview that is. Nobody wants to work in that environment, that's for sure.
I'm not going to respond any more to this chain because you clearly don't have team leadership experience or have built a company, so are not equipped to engage in this topic at full throttle. Maybe when you start your company you can guarantee the jobs for life! Let me know how that works out for you. :)
I personally am reverting to early 2000 tech, because today’s American tech is unusable.
The average American would be far better off with union protections than with corporate “innovation”
No thanks.
And AI isn't innovation? Take your head out of the sand bozo.
Communism is this weird monopoly/monopsony structure. Dont like what you do? Too bad, its the same owner you're working for.
Whereas with a worker cooperative, there could be 10's of thousands of them. You dont like one? You can go to a different one.
The most embarrassing example is Hugo Chávez, who took over a country with paramilitary death squads and brought the living standards of the indigenous and lower classes higher than they'd ever been in history, and they accuse him of "crushing" protests that were constant and allowed during his entire rule (even when they resulted in civilians hung from streetlights.) The NYT finds it important to refer to the Colectivos, made up of civilians, as stupid. Evidence that the National Guard was dumb? A single sentence from some anti-Chavista NYU professor.
The only reason they mentioned Argentina is because they had to; it was the actual subject of the paper. The NYT didn't know that Argentina was bad at the time though, because Argentina wasn't a CIA enemy like everyone else mentioned in this article. Democracy dies when upper middle-class people write articles for the NYT supporting Argentina.
edit: it's so evil that this starts with Putin and Iran, for no particular reason, never mentioned again. Then it goes Hitler -> Stalin -> Dirty War -> Orban (?) -> Chávez/Maduro (?) -> Trump.
Pretty sure that Hitler murdered like 40 million people, Stalin liquidated millions, the Dirty War disappeared tens of thousands. Meanwhile, Orban is simply someone that they don't like, Maduro they claim killed "dozens," and they support Trump's wars and genocide (Putin! Iran!), they're actually pretending to be upset about ICE.
Although the right's problems in this regard are fairly apparent; they despise the diversity programs and social safety nets that could help protect the disadvantaged. However, even the left has sometimes had a habbit of neglecting the career and social concerns of "mediocre white males" in a way that is likely to make them vulnerable to the sort of recruitment that the article describes.
It was common to run into not just politicians, but people working for state agencies or influential community members who were shockingly incompetent. While we did not know him, Leon Finney is a great example of the kind of wheeling and dealing I'm thinking of.
At the level we were familiar with, this wasn't a right/left paradigm (state bureaucrats are at least nominally non-partisan). It had more to do with which party had comfortable majorities, and thus offered safe career options. Our state senator is not an intelligent person. He votes along with whatever he's told to by party leadership, and struggles to articulate what's even at stake in the bills he discusses. All he knows is that if he toes the line, the party won't fund a primary challenger and he'll still have a job after the next election cycle.
I think this is true of a lot of representatives at both the state and federal level in both the senate and house, in both parties. And it's a huge problem, because it means that the unelected party leadership wields a tremendous amount of power.
My republican operative acquaintances report the same deal on the other side of the isle of course, though usually with more idiots as the right tends to disdain politics and smart people go into business, whereas many more smart people on the left go to politics.
While judging that at such a remote is hard, the Roman Republic was such a culture, with strong patronage networks. And while we may or may not agree with Rome's goal, that culture didn't seem to produce mediocrity.
It's a representation of power, and reality is that some people are leaders, and some are loyal vassals or subjects. Most legislative people are idiots and are really supposed to be idiots. Typically an executive cares about a set of issues or objectives, and puts the A-Team there.
At a state level, you may have 3-5,000 appointments to make in a big state, so there's a hierarchy of need. The A-players go to the priorities, the more professional "players" go to the operationally critical entities (Think your DMV and Tax Collections) and loyal idiots get scattered around the various places where the staff keep the plane flying.
The cult of personality around MAGA brings more different people. They'll absorb into the system or go away eventually.
IMO the right broadly misses the fact that government can be efficient, and that a robust universal healthcare system can be good for business dynamism by helping small businesses.
The left loves the government too much and always seems to think if we can just government and NGO a bit more, that'll work (generalization). And that businesses are kind of a dirty idea.
This is "yet more evidence" that science likes to collect, there's no new paradigm hidden there.
On your second paragraph, that's because the people you are talking about are anti-democratic themselves. Even the way your phrase is written singles out "mediocre white males" outside of "disadvantaged" despite what the actual conditions those people have in the real world. That's anti-democratic by itself.
This is a distinguishing feature of USA politics, but it isn’t universal. Several right-right parties in Europe tend to be pretty pro-welfare state (they would just prefer that foreigners not have access to it). It’s generally the centre-right, as the party of the country’s largest business interests, who put up the most opposition to such benefits due to the level of taxation required to provide them.
Meanwhile, in China, run by a party that is still regarded as left by several international leftist umbrella groupings, social safety nets are intentionally kept to a minimum: it is a core principle of the CCP’s anthropology that labour is what makes people human, and people should always be compelled towards some kind of work, like it or lump it.
I live in the southeast US and get to talk politics with a lot of people on the right. This isn't accurate.
The dislike diversity programs because those programs naturally take away opportunities from people who are better qualified. Sure there are many candidates who will be both the most qualified for the position and meet a diversity standard, but when you force the diversity qualification you force the organization to only draw from a smaller section of the pool. It's the same problem that people on the left have with restrictive policies around immigration potentially depriving organizations of the top candidates from around the world, just more localized. They are exactly the same issue, just viewed from different angles.
Regarding social safety nets, the primary concern has always been fraud. I've heard variations of this conversation for decades and it's always fraud. The idea that a safety net is not intended to be a long term lifestyle. They prioritize the idea of a "hand up, not a hand out" with a goal of providing temporary assistance with financial education, career training, etc. It has nothing to do with removing something that can protect the disadvantaged and everything to do with trying to solve the disadvantage itself long term.
Hope that provides some context.
"Better qualified" generally boils down to "people who look like me".
"Fraud" is usually code for "make someone else pay". People make all sorts of passionate appeals to all sorts of moral culpability and scamming, which are mostly bullshit. Specific to the Southeast US, basically that translates to we don't want to have people on social services rolls that the state/locality has a cost share, but we're happy to lobby to make the rules such that the "hand up" is a transition to Social Security Disability, which is funded by not them.
...it's math. If you hire from 60% instead of 100%, you're intentionally eliminating potential candidates. Whether you're talking about immigration policy or diversity policy. It's just math.
On fraud, I hear just as much concern about disability fraud. If it's coming out of taxes, either state or federal, taxpayers are paying for it or going into debt for it or seeing the currency inflated for it.
They complain that black people are admitted to fancy colleges despite being "less qualified", but reality is the DEI/affirmative action really protected white kids place in the social order, especially the legacy people whose qualifications are marginal. Those kids are being squeezed out by smarter, harder working Asian kids, so those white kids are going to southern prestige schools.
People laugh at culture warriors because of stuff that is targeted at stupid people like the Starbucks "war on Christmas". But there's a more serious/malignant aspect to it as well.
He also would be less likely to be in office the second time had the judicial system of New York State respected the outcome of another democracy - a jury in a criminal trial - and sentenced said man to actual punishment instead of not sentencing him at all.
In 2024, Trump made a deliberate play for the popular vote, holding rallies in California and New York City. And there was a major swing in his direction in both states. E.g. Biden won California by 29 points. Harris won California by only 20 points. Trump also targeted immigrant communities in blue states. Biden won foreign born voters by 26 points. Trump won them by 1 point. That swing alone accounts for half the 2020-2024 swing.
It came out later that the internal polling available to both campaigns had Trump ahead the entire time. So he likely felt comfortable taking a risk and spending time in California and New York. But you’ll notice that he parked his surrogates in places like Pennsylvania the entire time. The popular vote has marketing value but it doesn’t count and nobody is trying to win it.
You can’t brag about his popular vote for one election then disregard it for another. He lost if by a lot more in 2016 than he won it by in 2024. Both elections were decided by the electoral college and the popular votes we are comparing both happened in that context. 2.7% margin vs. 0.5% is a stark difference.
Republicans had the stones to call his victory margin “a mandate” yet they would never say Hillary Clinton had one. You’re playing funny with numbers here.
Either way you can’t selectively use it in conversation and then dismiss it when others use it.
My point is that if we took democracy more seriously, we'd be in a better spot right now.
By the smallest margin since 1968 (one of the smallest in history) with the aid of a rough economy he helped create but got no blame for and a terribly mismanaged Democratic primary/election.