Footage of me disassociating for the next 4+ years

[pinstripe_bindi]

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxoGbsS3pA1M4s7_-NpMfFJITB6lFDJA5P?si=afJ23kWwSundtUmzI think I now understand ordinary people in the Third Reich who just kept their heads down and waited for it to be over one way or another. It's not that they hated Jews or even wanted to be part of a German empire. I mean yes, that was a lot of them. But some of them

Comments

[amw]

This is kind of how i understood China to work when i lived there. People there have the added bonus of theoretically being able to disclaim responsibility for their shitty government because nobody voted for it at all, but end of the day there's still a billion people just kinda sitting there, letting authoritarianism happen. The problem is, everyone still has to eat, still has to pay rent, still has to send their kids to school, still has to go to the hospital for emergency surgery... so what are you gonna do? Speak out against problematic party policies that your neighbors are (whether cynically or authentically) praising? Just dealing with everyday life takes up a lot of spoons, and challenging authoritarianism may cost a whole drawer full. Party leaders are careful not to cause too much mayhem in the mainstream of society, so that actually does allow most people to keep their heads down and survive it, more or less.

This has led me to believe that maintaining a society based on democratic norms is more difficult than just making sure the mainstream of society are doing kinda sorta okay, since authoritarians can do that too while promising even more glorious results. Let's all thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week! Democratic institutions need to offer something better than a moderately prosperous society. I used to think that what they offered was some kind of moral reward, the innate pleasure of knowing you are respecting other people's basic human rights... but turns out that doesn't motivate people the way i thought it did. If people are given the choice between cake or human rights, seems they'll pick cake every time. I'm not sure what the solution is. Better civic education? Poverty alleviation? A well-regulated media, i.e. one that isn't owned by billionaires and doesn't owe its continued existence to sensationalist reporting of nontroversies? Maybe humans just suck and we can't ever expect better.

The only "comfort" i can find is that this isn't necessarily a first for America. Even ignoring Trump's previous term, there's been Japanese American internment, McCarthyism etc and the country as a whole survived, as awful as it was for the minorities targeted by the fascistic policies.