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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Generally speaking, consideration for others is inversely proportional to the desperation of a given community. Think about how hard people have to work these days and still can't afford a decent place to live and food to eat. It makes perfect sense that someone who feels that the system is keeping them down, and wearing them to the bone won't be conscientious of how their actions will affect others. That mixed with Western ideals of extreme individualism, and a political climate that promotes divisiveness, it's truly a wonder that anyone has any consideration at all for their fellow countrymen.
Is it not true that struggling groups of people form the strongest communities?
It seems to go either way, depending on all the little local variables. Strong communities, or dog-eat-dog.
Also, you can have situations where if you "conform", you're protected by the growing-together, but if something makes you different, that community comes after you, out of fear that you being different will bring even more hardship down on everyone's head.
My social group is made up of basically goths, queers, nerdy weirdos who grew up in fundamentally conservative and religious towns and families, and are (now as adults) generally very supportive and chill with differences--but we got a hell of a lot of bullying from our natal families/cultures growing up. Based on individual personalities, there's honestly little reason we were rejected...we don't go out committing crimes, or bully, or be mean. But the differences we do have seem to scare or make our families feel ashamed of us--so, rejection. And so we lose the protection that the community offers others.
I recognize communities supporting each other is important--but the bit where perfectly good people who are kind and smart and aren't committing crimes are just thrown on the curb like trash because we don't believe in religion like others do, or because we ask questions when things don't make sense...I struggle with that bit, for obvious reasons.
Usually, but that's what the fierce individualism, and divisiveness prevents.
Yeah but it’s often in contrast to that which causes it. When everyone feels fucked by society they don’t feel a strong community with society as a whole.
Yes and no and also the people being "rude" or "not following the rules" see the people they are offending as not in their community, as they feel their community has been shrunken or destroyed
Yeah, desperation in a community does seem to break down a lot of social niceties, make people meaner, smaller, crueler. So focused on surviving personally that there's no effort left to give to help anyone else or make things better for everyone.
(An aside below--but it's related to survival turning people selfish and cruel.)
I follow Kamilkazani on Twitter. He's a historian of Tatar descent (a minority in Russia), and I think did most of his scholarly studies on China and Chinese history originally, but when the Ukrainian war started, he did a lot of threads about Russia, and how we got here today from a historical standpoint.
He's been very eye-opening for me, sort of demystifying what happened, and more importantly, laying out the historical and CULTURAL reasons behind it happening. Like, there's cause and effect, even if it's not the sort of cause and effect that I'm familiar with in my own country and culture. (His thread alone on "salt" is really astute.)
He looks at things from a very pragmatic historical background, and had a long thread that was the first thing that adequately explained to me why Russia was doing/saying the things it did, things that seemed quite bizarre if you're looking at it from an American cultural lens.
Part of it is that there's (and I'm paraphrasing my understanding--you guys should go back and read his threads for the original as I might have misinterpreted) an exaggerated individualism, far beyond what Americans do, in Russian culture.
Like, there's a lot of "me and mine got ours, so you're on your own", or things like "sure, that guy is lying, but it's MY guy lying so it's ok." Hyper-focused on the individual and their family and their local in-groups. And probably an artifact of how brutal the government has been for centuries.
And that "sheer struggle to survive turning people cruel, petty, and mean" has sort of been circling around my head, over and over.
It doesn't need centuries. Just look at the nineties in Russia and you can easily see how someone would decide to not care about the greater good.
God damn you've verbalized so many things I've had in my head but haven't had words for.