I guess they see themselves as high officers in those states. I fail to understand how someone could read about living in a dictatorship and go "yeah, I would like to live like that"

▲ anigbrowl 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Evidence suggests ~30% of people are content to be worse off in order to inflict a larger loss upon others. This paper makes for rather grim reading but imho provides a very useful heuristic for understanding the political enfironment in an era of mass communication.

Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451

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AnthonyMouse a day ago | parent | next [-]

> Evidence suggests ~30% of people are content to be worse off in order to inflict a larger loss upon others. This paper makes for rather grim reading but imho provides a very useful heuristic for understanding the political enfironment in an era of mass communication.

Pinning this on human psychology is ignoring how the game is set up. If you structure something in such a way that the person who gets the most points wins and gets a prize, a move that causes you to lose one point but causes your only opponent to lose two points will put you ahead. That's arithmetic, not psychology.

The issue, then, is when we allow things to be structured that way -- as zero sum games. Instead what we should be doing is stamping out anything that fosters artificial scarcity.

Moreover, as the paper points out, that's what happens in dyadic systems. Which is to say, two party systems. If you have the option to cost yourself a point but cost one of your opponents two points, that's an advantageous move in a two-party system, but not in a five-party system even with a zero-sum game, because then you've cost yourself a point against three of the four other parties. So if you want to get rid of that, have your state adopt score voting (specifically score voting, not IRV or any of that mess) instead of the existing voting system which mathematically constrains us to a two-party system.

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SchemaLoad 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't 30% roughly the percent of people who voted for this situation?

	▲	a day ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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spencerflem 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This really feels like the best explanation for what's happening right now :c

▲ jfengel 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You don't have to see yourself as a high officer. You just have to imagine that you will be restored to your deserved state. In that state you are slightly better than average, and only those who are morally defective suffer. (Those are the ones who are now unjustly keeping you from succeeding on your merits.)

The high officials are the truly great ones who have restored the natural order. You don't need that. You just require being recognized as somewhat better than most.

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Larrikin 2 days ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

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janice1999 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

You reminded me of the Lyndon B Johnson quote which seems more relevant that ever. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

	▲	AnthonyMouse a day ago \| parent [-]
		The trouble with this quote is that it's too easy to misinterpret it exactly in favor of the people it's criticizing. Racism is a system for pitting poor white people and poor black people against each other. But the perpetrators are not the people in the other tribe, they're the people telling you that there should be separate tribes.

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GolfPopper 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Bacon's Rebellion [1] in colonial Virginia, 1676-7, was a a multi-race and cross-class uprising against the colonial government and the aritocratic planter class. The rebellion's failure was followed by measures that served to alienate the poor white population from the enslaved black population.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_Rebellion

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Hikikomori 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Racists were just temporarily embarrassed by the civil war.

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e40 2 days ago | parent [-]

Were they? If so, embarrassed about what? Losing it?

	▲	Hikikomori 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think they and right wingers are only embarrassed by losing, it explain their behaviour.

▲ andrekandre 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

  > I fail to understand how someone could read about living in a dictatorship and go "yeah, I would like to live like that"

fwiw there are religious people who read about the great kings in the bible and wish they had one of those today, and they vote (not endorsing, just sharing my experience)

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padjo 2 days ago | parent [-]

There are also religious people who look forward to the coming of the “end times”. They also vote.

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andrekandre 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

yep, they definitely do

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cess11 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

More importantly, US oligarchs are religious. Mostly evangelical, mormon or some postmodern derivative, like Thiel, Yarvin, Musk and their ilk.

In the US, even people who aren't very religious in practice still harbour religious beliefs like the state of Israel being a divine entity. I.e. like Ted Cruz, who knows some english biblical phrases but isn't religious enough to stop himself from playing golf with the pharaoh, and yet strongly holds on to the antisemitic zionist belief that jews must move to the state of Israel and eradicate their neighbours.

	▲	phatskat an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think Cruz is likely a lot more religious than he puts out only because his brand of religion is, or at least was, too extreme for a lot of people. His father is a fundamentalist leader a la Handmaid’s Tale, which should have been a lot more worrying a lot sooner for a lot more people.

▲ johannes1234321 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Democracy is complicated. The world is complex, but you get only a limited set of choices (in some implementation a few more, in others a few less) which means the burden in the end is on you. Now you take the wannabe dictator, which takes that all of you "I'm like your dad and will care about all those problems, so you only have to care about your direct environment, doing your job, taking care of your family, all else will be handled"

▲ g-b-r 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Partly being submissive, partly betting on being among the rulers, partly distaste for most of the world, and partly just idiocy and insanity