this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
239 points (98.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43916 readers
953 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The issue for the commenter you replied to is that they think that laying the blame for a specific incident at the personal responsibility of the people directly involved somehow means that the diffuse responsibility of wider society in creating conditions wherein those incidents are guaranteed to regularly occur is somehow no-longer relevant.
All that seems to matter in their assessment is who gets the finger pointed at them when the problem happens, not, why does the problem happen and what can we do to avoid it?
Okay, yeah. These people definitely find comfort in hiding behind "personal responsibility" as a means of abdicating social responsibility.
But have you seen the Alt-Right Playbook video, "Always a Bigger Fish" ?
In that video, Innuendo Studios lays out the idea that there is a base, core, philosophical difference between conservatives and progressives in how we think the world ought to be, and what kind of world we think is possible.
To the conservative, nature is full of hierarchy. The strongest chimp gets the most bananas, you know? (Yes, I know that's not actually true. But it's the way they see the world.) The smartest, strongest human survives and hunts well and eats well. (Yes, I know early hunter-gatherer societies hunted in worker cooperatives and raised children cooperatively. So I know this isn't really a well-researched scientific hypothesis. But it is believed by a particular group of people.)
When they say, "take personal responsibility," it's kind of a code word for, "accept your rightful place in the hierarchy. Accept that you are simply the weaker, stupider chimp and you are inevitably going to get less bananas and society can't be expected to coddle you and give you more than you deserve."
According to a worldview that asserts humans are naturally divided into the strong, the weak, and the in-between, a person complaining about their own outcomes is just in denial of this fundamental, universal "truth." A whiner unwilling to admit they receive less because they provide less. A deceiver attempting to usurp a more deserving person's place in the hierarchy because they are unwilling to accept the consequences of their "actions."
There's no better frontier for this idea than the open road, where a single mistake can kill you and everyone in your vicinity. Transit activists, who want to take people off the roads, put them on buses and in trains where they will be safe even if they aren't "vigilant" and "responsible" and "alert" (read: unlucky), are trying to spend society's limited resources coddling people who will never really provide a return on that investment -- because they are weak. Which wastes money, since the money could have been spent on responsible people who will lead society to better places.
To these people,
Hence, roads are a convenient way to cull the weak.