If "No one owes you anything," then you also owe nothing to a society that works against you, including allegiance, civility, or pacifism.
If "No one owes you anything," then you also owe nothing to a society that works against you, including allegiance, civility, or pacifism.
A society in which it's everyone for themselves, that refuses to care for one another, is no society at all. Then everyone acts shocked and horrified at someone who understandably snaps, like modern western culture doesn't run entirely on schadenfreude.
That was the crux of the idea of a social contract, which is long dead in the US. Now people line up to revel in the suffering of their fellow citizens with "well you were stupid to do xyz in life, so you deserve your suffering haha."
I agree, but I'm not sure that's an unpopular opinion. Most people who act like they don't owe anyone anything seem to forget all the help they've received. Craig T. Nelson said it best: "I've been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No."
Most people who act like they don't owe anyone anything seem to forget all the help they've received
It's not necessarily applicable. In the same way if I help someone that doesn't mean they owe me, taking help doesn't necessarily mean you owe someone else.
I'm down with that. I have been since I first figured out that my boss values office furniture more than he does people. He was bemoaning the lack of loyalty when I quit. I told him that loyalty flows both ways or doesn't flow at all. Since he'd stopped the downward flow, I stopped the upward flow.
This scales nicely to society.
This really just comes across like you decided to join in on the misery you detest.
You sound jaded, and I'm sorry you've had to experience the things that lead you to this point. But not everyone has had your life experiences and there are people outside of your box, your reality. You can give up and think the majority is beyond saving and only out for themselves in all thoughts and actions. But that's, like, your opinion, man. And it's not one I've experienced and certainly not one I'm gonna share in.
I hope you want to believe otherwise and I hope you can get there, cause man, that's a pretty bleak outlook. Best of luck.
Have you ever worked as a retail clerk for any length of time?
I've met one person in all my career who genuinely felt like that after being in retail.
You don't realize how much people suck until you spend 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year cleaning up their messes and dealing with their behavior.
5 years in a pharmacy, so about the most vitriolic you can imagine. People with withdrawals mad you won't break the law for them, people lying to your face hoping you'll unknowingly break the law, and then people upset because theirs or their child's medicine cost more than they make in a month.
I get what life can do to people, or worse, what people can do to people. But if you just stop and look you'll find good people in this fight with you. And giving up on them is not something I'm going to do, it's why I even made my original comment. OP is (imo) misguided, but that doesn't make them a bad person and it doesn't mean they're beyond hope. And I like to imagine that most of the people they've seen that caused them to so harden their outlook are in the exact same boat that the OP is in. Simply misguided but not even close to being beyond redemption or belief.
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Why?
For clarity, I don't disagree, but I want to know your reasoning.
Because you deserve to live in a world where people are decent to each other, and "people" includes you, and your behaviour is the first thing that's most easily controlled by yourself.
Because my conscience doesnt create constant alerts notifications and warning messages that disrupt my sleep and bother me constantly while awake if I dont try as far as I can to be a decent human being. Some people seem to have these alerts etc disabled or the entire conscience app disabled or not even installed to start with though, I cant imagine how they get though life otherwise
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Kinda trying to minimize OPs argument though. Sure be a good person, but steal and take anything that isn't bolted down.
Consider it bonus points if they're so rich they don't even realize something was taken.
It's weird though that this seems to be the case mostly in the US. I can't say that I know all cultures but most of the ones that I know of, or have experience with have a lot of compassion, especially towards people who have had bad luck or made bad choices. The US seem very brutal in that area
Oh, most of the fellow Americans I've encountered in my life revel in the bad luck or "poor decisions" (in hindsight, and often just good intentions and bad luck like student loans) of their own neighbors as if it were blood and they were a vampire. It's like a chain of everyone getting exploited by our oligarch class getting a little relief by punching down to people who were more screwed by our oligarch class to feel superior to someone.
That is what it means to be an American 🇺🇸🤮
Fuck no society (or at least my country) does owe me, I pay taxes. Quite a bit due to where I live actually, I'm not upset about it but I get fuck all for it. And I'm just a working class person, I don't have any connections ... Imagine all the people just avoiding taxes.
Tax me more, honestly just give me working infrastructure, healthcare and other things that a functioning country should have. I'm so sick of footing the bill for all these fucking bailouts and subsidization of private interests, the do nothings in Congress are the real freeloaders. And yet they'll bitch at you when you suggest we allocate some of the funds from the military into making sure our 'strategic highway' systems bridges dont just fall over.
I don't mind paying but the service sucks 😭
My unpopular opinion is that if you evade all of your tax responsibility as a company you should have no legal protections in said country but they'd never bite.
Amazon's semis and delivery trucks provide how much wear and tear on the highway grid but how much do we get in taxes for allowing that? $0 (maybe not exactly but you get the gist).I mean fuck cars but most Americans want working roads too.
And no it's not smart to avoid taxes, that's bad business that hurts the entire system in the long run.
Wear and tear on roads is paid for via taxes on fuel, so Amazon does indeed pay for wear and tear on roads.
This is also why lawmakers are looking at taxing EVs per mile driven.
This is a bit dated but shows that 41% of road upkeep on average is paid for by gas taxes (and other fees). So yes while they may have some tax paid on fuel (that they have likely negotiated down via bulk purchase), they're not even paying for half on average.
Edit - just to include given we've seen landmark inflation over the last few years it's likely the share of taxes on upkeep has gone down.
I've been telling people the social contract in America is broken for a long time. To me it's just becoming more and more obvious. All the small things keep getting worse. No one cares about all the small social stuff anymore. People throw shit everywhere in stores, don't return shopping carts, follow rules of any kind out in public.
People just don't respect each other or give a fuck anymore. I mostly blame the boomers and silent generation folks who hurled contual abuse and insults and everyone for the last 20+ years. We've got a couple generations that grew up doing the Frontline jobs in retail and the service industry who just got shit on constantly. Maybe that's just a small part of it, but whatever happened, it's bad.
I mostly agree with you except that I'll say the people are not a monolith. Many people still help others. Its the systems which treat you like shit. Attack them, not others.
While I agree nobody is technically OBLIGATED to aspire to be better, empathetic, etc...: how is this fundamentally different from the view of a Jeff Bezos or an Elon Musk? At the very least, it seems you can't simultaneously complain that things are shitty AND actively decide to live completely selfishly.
Being the punching bag doing the right thing won't fix our perverse incentive structures.
Look at Obama, spent two terms trying to combat sociopathic hate and greed with love and compromise. Legislatively, he got his ass handed to him for his troubles.
This society has institutionally set perverse incentive structures that has bled into to the culture. Greed is literally aspirational. Empathy as a career leads to poverty. It is wrong. Very wrong. I hesitate to say evil because evil is subjective but it fits my definition of it.
It will never improve when we reward people who do the opposite, the Musks and Bezoses as you say, and actively punish those that give of themselves and empathize in more than words with their neighbors.
My point is, we have a lot of people with nothing, who will never have anything by design, who will always be hurt more by our system as it is by trying to be the change they want to see in the world.
If we all decided to treat society with the same disdain the Musks and every other billionaire does, at the very least society would collapse and thered be the possibility to MAYBE make a better one, instead of propagating this miserable, exploitative chain of suffering in perpetuity.
As it is, we have our owner class telling us to play by the same self-serving rules they and their ilk bribed their middle managers in Washington to enact. Playing their game by the rules they set but don't themselves follow will just lead to generation after generation of suffering underclasses.
The people being hurt need to stop enabling their own oppressors and break the machines they're paid almost nothing to run, or their children and their children's children will suffer even worse.
Realized while writing that it is spurring me into a textual diaherrhia so please note wall of text ahead, which probably veers off into a rant.
If I had to surmmarise into tldr:
The system(tm) feels exploitative, and unless you partake in the exploiting then one must feel like their value systems are useless because it is not bringing in value.
Also rant about personal country government that seem to be failing upwards
End tldr
I read what was written and somehow felt a need to express, so apologies upfront.
I am not an American, but I have lived a life trying to do what I thought is the right or correct thing. It has left me with more regret and resentment. And as an observer I think it is more a societal problem.
I mean doing whatever the fuck you want and not only getting away with it but be rewarded seems to be in the loop of positive feedback. Like why suffer and do the right thing when you can take advantage of another and get rewarded.
The whole corporate monopoly-type culture isn't only an American problem, just have to look at the world where a narrative or agenda causes so much suffering.
Lets just take my country for example. South African, we have been sitting with a electricity issue for going on almost 20 years because there is only 1 power supplier and that is government mandated monopoly. The power issue concerns were addressed to government before it was an issue and they figuritively sat and twiddled their thumbs until it got to a point where they needed to stick their thumbs just a bit out their asses.
Added to that, we had an ex-president that is mired is so much scandal to the point where one( of many) of his great " achievements " is participating in state capture by selling sub-substandard/ ghost electrical supply contracts to special interest individuals for personal gain.
And to this day is playing the lawyer-long game to avoid any consequence add to that you get politicians saying we should leave him alone he is an old man.
So in essence it feels like a big : fuck the country, i got my own, you people deal with the shit I profitted off, not my problem.
And although I cannot equate to the struggles of minorities, I can relate a bit as I live with the a country that enforces quotas and it is shit feeling knowing no matter how hard you work or how well you do you cannot advance when a company is pushing government agenda in a bid to say " Look we are doing the thing, we are empowering"
I mean things had to be done with the history of our country, I wish it could have been done with a broader and more encompassing economical structure to ensure that the majority could actually be empowered and be able to uplift the country to allow it to flourish to allow it to open opportunities for all. But unfortunately the current economic system and structure has it sitting in a country with 32 % unemployment.
I mean maybe the goverment is trying, but they have piss poor accountability as there is constant news of corruption, mafia-like intimidation, mismanagement, incompetence, never-ending joke of broken promises and lately seems a constant rise in prices - which seems to be a world problem too. I am honestly surprised the country holds itself together, I suppose that is because of the taxman is a functioning government entity that collects its due and guess there is enough competent people trying to keep the boat afloat in the background
It is like if you don't know someone or have some influence you are stuck to the whims of the system and I personally feel there is an attitude that those above will personally do as little as possible and rely on those below to pick up the slack. I don't want to harp about 'oh woe is me' just feel that almost everywhere there are problems and unfortunately the structure of power demands that those in power must exert power or coerce others to maintain it.
This is probably coming from someone who has been broken by a system coming in with naivete, so please take it as such, I am relatively fortunate to have what I have because of help of family so I cannot be a total victim to the system. But I still feel disillusioned by it and human nature because it is exploitative by design and I am too pigheaded to want to become a unfeeling husk and give into that base nature completely.
> Now people line up to revel in the suffering of their fellow citizens with “well you were stupid to do xyz in life, so you deserve your suffering haha.”
It's not schadenfreude, it's psychological defense from injustice. People don't want to accept that bad things can happen to them if they don't deserve those. They want to think that if they do everything right, nothing bad will happen, and if they make a mistake, then something bad will happen, and so there'll be fewer and fewer mistakes and bad things as they go. It's scary to accept that this is a lie and life isn't fair.
However, not attacking others or their property is not something you owe others, it's normal behavior, and behaving otherwise you trespass. It's not a gift on your part to not steal what belongs to another person.
This makes me think of The Good Place and the book they reference: What We Owe To Each Other. It discusses the philosophy of Contractualism, and the morality of society.
Oh man, spicy and to the point. I love it.
This isn't common amongst all Americans. Just a loud minority. It's also overly emphasized on social media as well.
Yeah, well the majority aren't voting for politicians that would enact a UBI, or rebuild the safetynet we actively, jubilantly destroyed as a nation in the 80s and 90s under Democrats and Republicans. Our current President was a major player in that when he was in Congress then, including putting a lot of poor minorities in prison to boost for profit prisons.
I'm not just talking about rhetoric, I'm talking about actions as a society. A vocal minority didnt make both of our only 2 major political parties work exclusively for the haves against the have nothings.
Our political system pretty much ensures radical progressives can't get elected. Voting for someone who supports UBI could put a far-right extremist in office. This type of situation led to Trump. Pretending like people vote for what they want the most and not intelligently voting to stop something worse is extremely naive. If this is the foundation of your reasoning, it's 100% faulty. I'm not saying it doesn't have merit on certain points, but you can't build a house on a foundation of sand.
Yep, American exceptionalism became American Individualism. Don’t get me wrong, overall I believe most of us want to do the right thing, most of the time anyway. I’m also keenly aware to the fact that incredible narcissistic, self-serving people are constantly gripping the power that could change things at all levels (local community, city, state, country). The most any random citizen can do is take care of it’s own, and every once in awhile, when resources are plenty, take care of their neighbors. Life it’s hard and extremely expensive.
perhaps the people who say "no one owes you anything" are in error
Why should we owe anything to a society that actively exploits us and strips us of our rights? It's not that individuals refuse to cooperate and help each other, it's that everybody's too busy fighting for their own survival to care about anyone else.
Well, Trumpers, QNON, NeoNazis really do deserve every ounce of suffering and jail time as it's doled out to the brainless twits. There are plenty of great liberal havens out here in the U.S. that definitely still have society and community.
Lmao. Someone dove head first into the Kool-Aid. Sad, miserable existence.
There are companies that their success depends on your statement is wrong. Companies like Gofundme would not have been able to operate if nobody helps out anybody.
A drop in the ocean, because we refuse to communally pay for a robust social safetynet. In fact, we had a pathetic one once, and spent the 80s and 90s dismantling even that to "turn the bull loose" for shareholders that already won at life through birth or luck.
Yeah, but I like food and a roof over my head, so imma pitch in.
I like food and a roof over my head
Neat, so do a lot of people who work but cant afford rent, and a lot of homeless people who tried and got screwed over for their trouble, and a lot of people with mental and physical health issues it was a roll of the dice they'd get rather than you. If you feel that way about the people in your society, they shouldn't care about pissing on your lawn or worse beyond getting caught by
policethe capital holder defense force, which isn't winning the underlying debate, it's just pointing a gun at someone when you can't win the debate.Thank you for being a prime example of what I'm talking about, friend.
Your feelings are valid.
Thank you, sincerely.
Or maybe you just don't owe anything to the sort of people who say that phrase, instead of taking it out on the rest of society. Because the truth is there is quite some overlap between the people who would say something like that and something like you have.
It reminds me of rappers who are antisystem yet by the way they act and urge other people to act foster the most corrupt aspects of that system.
It's war. You see it in vets, you see it in cops, you see it in gangsters, you see it in abused people. Life is war imo. I didn't start off like that until gangster raped my life. Chaos will always reign supreme above governments, and order that comes from natural chaos will always triumph over man made order.
social contract was only a construct that the privileged push upon people like republicans push crt; gays, blacks, most women never agreed to it because i had no benefit to them, but where still forced into it with beatings, arrests, and/or having their livelihoods ruined for simply being what they were.
It's not an unpopular opinion, just a reasoning that anyone could realize.
I don't know, I always hear people telling people who've been at the ass end of society their whole lives here to just be like Charlie Brown and show up tomorrow with a smile to get fucked over again like it's their duty and obligation.
If you are from the USA perhaps it is less obvious, but in a European nation for example you can only accept to live in the society in which you find yourself otherwise you would not have education, healthcare and public services. if you don't accept it, you can change it with the tools they offer you or you can protest, emigrate or commit suicide.
Being oppressed isn't the same thing as being ignored. So if I simply refuse to help you, that doesn't mean you should feel free to take my stuff.
That doesn't make sense.
If you make it clear you don't care about the basic needs of your fellow citizens, what reason do they have to care about your property rights beyond the threat of violence by you or the state?
Why should they be responsible for respecting your property rights when you decline any responsibility for the basic well-being of your fellow citizens and human beings?
It sounds like you want the benefit of having your property rights acknowledged and respected while disrespecting, ie ignoring, the basic human rights of those you expect it from. Why shouldn't they ignore your property claims in the same way?
I think I see where you're coming from - "I respect your property rights, you respect my property rights" might sound equal but in practice what does a person with no property have to gain from such a rule? As the saying goes, "the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." My answer is twofold:
First, I consider respecting property rights a moral obligation. (You might find it strange that I think it's a more important moral obligation than helping people in need, but I do. I suppose that's why no one likes libertarians.) I wouldn't take from someone who had more than me unless I sincerely believed that he obtained it by unjustly exploiting me, not in the abstract sense of "the rich have rigged society in their favor" but rather in the concrete sense of "that guy stole my bike so I'm stealing it back." I imagine I would violate this principle if I was in desperate need (e.g. stealing a loaf of bread to feed my starving family) but I would feel pretty bad about it.
Second, I think everyone (including people who don't share my morality) is better off if we don't resort to violence. It's not just a personal matter of people stealing from me and my attempts to stop them via violence - individual acts of violence add up to create a violent society. I used to work with a guy from Brazil - he was trying to get residency in the USA because he felt like his upper-middle-class income was putting him in danger. In Brazil, people with money run the very real risk of being violently robbed or kidnapped. But people without money are also subject to more violence! Compare a slum in the USA with a Brazilian favela. So maybe if I'm rich and you're poor, you help yourself if you mug me but you're contributing to the creation of a society where no one except brutal organized criminals would be better off than they are in the USA right now.
How you conduct yourself is a reflection of you not of the people treating you poorly. Have some pride in your own conduct and let shitty people suffer consequences of their behavior.
>let shitty people suffer consequences of their behavior
Yeah, that's not how anything works here. Pretty thought though.
I feel like you think this until someone who 'knows someone' or otherwise benefits from nepotism gets to walk all over you and the facade of a system breaks down.
The fact alone that the courts in the us were packed with political interests during 45 already means the system is broken as your case could be "made an example of" at any time at any donors behest. That's the fundamental form of redress in a civilized society and we can't even guarantee that anymore.
Agreed, but I think the opposite point is more poignant: Yes, you are owed things. Take them.
Gonna need some firm evidence that the social contract is "long dead" in the US or this post is just nonsense.
https://time.com/5845116/coronavirus-bailout-rich-richer/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/opinion/sunday/inequality-america-paul-krugman.html https://www.opensecrets.org/news/reports/a-decade-under-citizens-united https://www.congress.gov/event/116th-congress/house-event/LC64096/text?s=1&r=3 https://apnews.com/article/black-lives-matter-10th-anniversary-trayvon-martin-c2d79ae4639934ca1eb77d6b54c16f8b
The social contract is broken when a state asks its citizens to obey the law but doesn’t give them equal benefit from fulfilling the duties of law.
I could keep cobbling links together as examples, but if your metric is a President going on TV and tearing up a piece of paper labeled the social contract while looking into the camera saying "the social contract is dead, officially. No take backsies, can't triple stamp a double no social contract double stamp." then I can't help you.