Skip Navigation
No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world
mecfs @lemmy.world

Why are people on the internet (and Lemmy) so quick to say someone "deserves to die"

On so many different news items, threads, etc. People are the first to claim pretty much anyone who has made a mistake, or does something they disagree with deserves to die.

Like, do some people not have the capability to empathise and realise they might have been in a similar place if they were born in a different environment…

I genuinely understand, you think a politician who has lead to countless deaths, a war criminal, or a mass rapists deserves to die.

But here people say it for stuff that falls way below the bar.

A contracted logger of a rainforest (who knows if they have the money / opportunity to support their family another way). Deserves to die.

A civilian of Nazi germany of whom we know nothing about their collaboration/agreement with the regime. Deserves to die.

Some person who was a drug dealer and then served their time. Deserves to die.

Like I don’t get it? Are people not able to imagine the kind of situations that create these people, and that it’s not impossible to imagine the large majority of people in these positions if born in a different environment?

107 comments

  • It's the result of the "bombastic" mix of false dichotomy, assumptions, and social media dynamics.

    False dichotomy prevents you from noticing nuances, complexities, third sides, or gradations. Under a false dichotomy, there's no such thing as "Alice and Bob are bad, but Alice is worse than Bob"; no, either they're equally bad (thus both deserve to die), or one of them is good.

    In the meantime, assumptions prevent you from handling uncertainties, as the person "fills the blanks" of the missing info with whatever crap supports their conclusion. For example you don't know if Bob kills puppies or not, but you do know that he jaywalks, right? So you assume that he kills puppies too, thus deserving death.

    I'm from the firm belief that people who consistent and egregiously engage in discourse showing both things are muppets causing harm to society, and deserve to be treated as such. (Note: "consistent and egregiously" are key words here. A brainfart or two is fine, as long as there's at least the attempt of handling additional bits of info and/or complexity.)

    Then there are the social media dynamics. I feel like a lot of users here already addressed them really well, but to keep it short: social media gives undue exposure to idiots doing the above due to anonymity, detachment from the situation, self-reinforcing loops ("circlejerks"), so goes on.

  • Its a product of global connectivity but lack of in person connection. If I interact with someone regularly and personally I am unlikely to wish harm on them because they are "part of my tribe." Via the internet and social media I dont really have a connection with this person, so its easy to think of them as an outsider or them. Once they are outside of my tribe I can remove their humanity and then their death has no moral or emotional cost to me.

  • In my local city subreddit yesterday, something like this happened.

    Up until last year, high speed police chases were illegal in my state because of the increased chances of deadly accidents with uninvolved innocent citizens.

    A few days ago, the first deadly accident from a police high speed chase happened.

    After the cops laid down spike strips and ruined her tires, she kept driving, and eventually plowed into someone, killing them.

    To me, seeing that it all started because she's a drug addict looking for fentanyl, I don't see it as her doing this on purpose, but it being split between her and the cops. She could have stopped, but the cops could have also chosen to not exacerbate the situation with hot pursuit and shredding her tires.

    The people in the thread were comparing her to mass shooters and demanding she be in jail until she's dead. They even pulled the FOX News and dug up her entire criminal history to show how evil she was. I get it, she fucked up and killed someone, but I would personally still call it manslaughter, not murder, since she clearly wasn't trying to kill people, she was just trying to escape cops.

    This is in a so-called progressive city deep in the US northwest.

  • I've once read somewhere that the human brain is only REALLY able to include about 100 people at any time in the list of "people one truly cares about", that we are neurologically unprepared for the level of exposure to other people and their problems that we get nowadays.

    But I never bothered checking the veracity of that statement. It might be complete bullshit. A lot of stuff online is. Either way it's irrelevant because if it IS indeed a problem, then "overexposure to someone else's problems" is a concept at least as old as the printing press. What the internet adds to the mix is... Well...

    .... It's far easier to act like a psychotic jerk to someone that exists as a few paragraphs of glowy text on a slab of silicon and glass. You aren't forced to look another human being in the eye while you talk about all the horrid shit you wish upon them.

    • Remembering from my social psychology classes in undergrad, I believe number is 150. But yes, that's a good point. It's one of the reasons people in major urban areas like NYC are capable of moving on with their lives when terrible things happen to those around them. We biologically can't care about people once we reach our 150 limit. Btw, I think the authors of that theory argued that that number is one of the major differences between us and other social species.

  • Along with other things said here, people tend to "forget" that there's a real person on the other end.

    I vaguely recall Nicholas Christakis talking about a study they made, where they created a bot which would simply remind people of the fact that there's a real person on the other end, and they found that it would help. (That study was done in some university platform and is centuries old in internet time, though. I think he spoke about it about 6 years ago on podcast with Sam Harris.)

  • We judge others more harshly than ourselves or our friends and family, it's often a tribal artifact of the environment our species grew up and evolved in through its infancy that has in part informed our acceptable behaviors as a social species who relies on groups for survival (justice, altruism, fairness, social contract, etc).

    Sometimes it's hyperbole, sometimes it's incorrectly treating people different than ourselves as less than instead of different to, and sometimes someone violates common morality so abjectly that capital punishment is a popular acceptable outcome.

    1. People say whatever on the internet and anonymous areas. Often for shock or the extremist idealism as if something was dead things would be different
    2. Your examples. Both of these are extreme differences in people's views and principles. The logger is killing and ruining someone's country for profit. Yes the individual guy needs money but he put the principal of doing something wrong aside to make money. The logger could do something else or he doesn't care. He has no empathy towards future generations or the health of species of animals. Why should someone have empathy for them.

    Nazi example is easy while I am sure some people were ignorant or born into being a child of a nazi one should be resisting the horridness if you reap the benefits of your nation's success at the downfall of others of course they are going to wish you dead. To put you into a perspective of nazi haters why should they get to live a peaceful life or be forgiven or left alone even if they saw the error of their ways or to desperate to fight back when people lost their future and families because of their group.

    As for the drug dealer people see the worst that comes out in people as a druggie and blame the person who keeps enabling. If the druggie could be cut off then someone's life wouldn't be ruined.

    In every example you gave someone was ruining someone else's life or future. Of course people personally affect by similar circumstances aren't going to have as much empathy for these people it takes a lot of compassion, self reflection, love, and forgiveness to be able to be kind to someone who hurt you and your family. Not everyone is in that place.

    1. Every day or year we have unbalanced people entering huge amounts of hormones causing their feelings to be imbalanced and every a new person is getting hurt leading to a life where kindness is locked off for awhile maybe forever.
    2. Our culture is about retribution many people don't see proper steps to make things right or see people continue to do bad things. The easy solution is having things not exist anymore so you don't get hurt again. If you trust bad people they may hurt you. Every decision has a consequence and rarely is it fully made whole even in forgiveness. You can't give someone back their family, you can't give someone back an extinct species, you can't give back the world a stable climate. Of course people will hold hatred

  • Why do so many people post on this community and other “asks” about stuff that I have literally never encountered at all yet purport it to be a rampant trend?

107 comments