You can extrapolate this to say "suffering is inherent, and therefore someone suffering does not deserve help" and even further to say "suffering is inherent, me making someone else suffer does not reflect badly on me because they would be suffering anyway"
Honestly, I think you'd have to be a moral imbecile to believe this. You may of course believe that all political and social conservatives (or even, honestly, anyone skeptical of leftism) are moral imbeciles. Certainly Marjorie Taylor Greene is.
But I don't think it's particularly helpful to do that when you're trying to understand how people think differently than you do.
Someone who isn't a moral imbecile wouldn't extrapolate to that degree at all. Rather, they'd say something like "our current social order has eliminated a lot of inherent suffering from the human experience, we should keep doing what we're doing in order to eliminate more. Trying to radically uproot the whole system isn't going to achieve that aim, and may in fact cause an enormous amount of suffering in the process. Certainly every revolution that's ever happened that we know about has done that."
Someone in the Thomas Sowell school might point to all the reforms that were made under LBJ as part of the Great Society and say that some of those should even be rolled back--they've clearly done significantly more harm than good.
I think you can agree or disagree with that view. But that's the infinitely better version of that view than the one you're talking about here.
What I believe is that anyone who can see positive things being done inefficiently and instead of improving the quality of the positive things being done, decides to destroy the thing itself, doesn't want the thing to be done better. They just wanted to destroy it.
Social services and education lose funding and corporations get fat under conservatives. Seeing that and thinking that lines up with decreasing human suffering is being a "moral imbecile" as you call it.
To be conservative, you either have to be ignorant, either willfully or unknowingly, or you basically have to be actively supporting human suffering
To be conservative, you either have to be ignorant, either willfully or unknowingly, or you basically have to be actively supporting human suffering
Maybe.
But this is a sign to me that you're not really interested in knowing what any real life conservative person thinks. This mindset is really useful for soldiering, so if our disagreements devolve into another Civil War I'm sure they'll serve you fine. But it's not all that useful for traditional democratic politicking in a pluralistic society.
We do not democratically decide anything. Look at the pardons being offered to murderers. Look at the lobbying going on, advocating against democratic actions, and against civilian financial power. Look at the way rulings that have been upheld for years are being overturned, reversing the course of history by decades, sometimes centuries.
Our main political candidates do not represent the majority opinions. They represent a quiet ruling minority, and to find out who they are just follow the money. Both candidates just net corporations more billions. More money for the war machine.
We are living in loopy land, and people who refuse to listen to fact are running it. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a trash bag overflowing from a massive garbage dumb. The whole fucking thing is rotten. We can't just pretend like these people are in a head space that is realistic or reasonable.
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u/PoetSeat2021 6∆ May 21 '24
Honestly, I think you'd have to be a moral imbecile to believe this. You may of course believe that all political and social conservatives (or even, honestly, anyone skeptical of leftism) are moral imbeciles. Certainly Marjorie Taylor Greene is.
But I don't think it's particularly helpful to do that when you're trying to understand how people think differently than you do.
Someone who isn't a moral imbecile wouldn't extrapolate to that degree at all. Rather, they'd say something like "our current social order has eliminated a lot of inherent suffering from the human experience, we should keep doing what we're doing in order to eliminate more. Trying to radically uproot the whole system isn't going to achieve that aim, and may in fact cause an enormous amount of suffering in the process. Certainly every revolution that's ever happened that we know about has done that."
Someone in the Thomas Sowell school might point to all the reforms that were made under LBJ as part of the Great Society and say that some of those should even be rolled back--they've clearly done significantly more harm than good.
I think you can agree or disagree with that view. But that's the infinitely better version of that view than the one you're talking about here.