These are excellent insights, well articulated. Thank you.

Genuine question. I agree with you. How many of us do you think there are?

To me it seems obvious that we can do better. We could have a fair, sustainable, non-hierarchical, global system, where the people making big collective decisions are genuinely prosocial and competent. Surely if enough of us coordinated our efforts, we could bring this about?

But the older I get, the more people I get to really know, the more I find this to be a very, very rare perspective. Most people seem to believe in the current system. We must be divided into competing regional factions (nations) and within those have a power hierarchy based on wealth, and individually be primarily motivated by greed.

Let’s be more specific. Which of these do you think is most likely:

1. folk like us—willing to sacrifice our immediate interests for a prosocial future—are common, but something is keeping us isolated (e.g., our communication networks—mass media, social media, etc—are being manipulated)

2. folk like us are currently rare, but most people just conform and imitate. If our position was sufficiently publicised/promoted, the majority of people could potentially get on board, we could change the world.

3. folk like us are rare, and most people are and will always be genuinely selfish. This system, where the strong exploit the weak economically, but in a way that leads to global economic growth, is the best we can do as a species, because most of us will always be selfish and short sighted.

LOL

Joke’s good enough it deserves a comment in addition to the upvote.

Derp. Now I get it. In my defence, I’m also an Aussie so understandably thick. But I live in the Arctic now, where we’ve got all three bears. But the scary white ones stay away from the woods.

Thanks, this is really interesting!

I mean, if your partner’s right and has demonstrated it, you could just update your perspective and be right too…

Got a source for that claim?

A polar bear in the woods? They’re an aquatic mammal that lives on sea ice… Where are you from?

I need the home-work separation, or both suffer. I constantly get distracted from work with home stuff, and can’t be fully present with family at home because I’m thinking about work.

I regularly move between countries with different road side norms. Handedness is not an issue. Makes no difference.

Only problem is if you set off with no other cars on the road, to use as a cue, and so accidentally go on the wrong side until you see someone coming towards you.

Each physical store can have different prices on the same goods, to exploit the average differences between the populations in each area. Already happens between countries/continents, now it can happen on a neighborhood scale.

I’ve got some surprise gas, just pull my finger…

What’s the first rule of conspiracies? What are the other ones?

Yeah, because why blame the corrupt leadership for offering people shit to eat, blame the people for not being happy eating their shit, because look how much worse shit can be shoved down your throat if you don’t like it!

I’m not a fan of insurance companies, but the dental/medical insurance split makes sense. Insurance is fundamentally a risk hedging game. It matters what the risks are. Most medical conditions will only happen to a small percentage of people, so we can all put money into a pool and pay out to the unlucky people who, for example, get cancer. Almost everyone needs some dental work eventually, everyone’s teeth wear down. Dental insurance is more like a savings plan than a gamble on rare outcomes. It doesn’t make sense to pool those risks together.

Sorry for the delay in reply, I’ve been off of social media lately. Thanks for the cogent reply, I appreciate the time you put into it.

I think you make a solid case, except for one central fallacy. I am galvanised away from the right by the atrocities you list. However, you smuggle in the assumption that pushing away from the selfish, parochial right must push me towards the contemporary political left—both the formal political parties, and the informal zeitgeist of leftist culture/ideology. I can (and I believe morally should) reject that too.

The space of alternatives is much larger, and varies on many more dimensions, than the current political dichotomy. I believe that insistence on that dichotomy, that you must pick between left and right, does far more long term harm than even right wing bigotry does. I’d even go as far as to let the selfish right wing bullies win, whatever the immediate costs, if I believed it would eventually bring about a system that is fair and just for future generations, to escape this historical trap of perpetually short-sighted left-right swings. My views are more nuanced than this, but that’s beyond the scope here.

This position makes me a centrist, because I support neither contemporary political party and oppose both. However, I find that zealots from both sides insist that it means I must be on the side of their enemies. You’re with us or you’re against us, if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem, blank and white, no alternatives. It’s that kind of thinking that keeps the pendulum swinging, prevents conversations about long-term, global solutions and dooms future generations to more vicious bickering about which bathroom 0.1% of the population should use while the world around them burns.

Pretty sure that’s the move that makes you starve to death or be arrested for vagrancy…

Only winning move I can see is to be born into the exploiter class.

Not an American

No, the bigotry is lumping all centrists, who have a diversity of views, in with the hateful ideology, despite having zero information about what they actually believe.

Counterargument: Centrists are actually a diverse group with many very different positions, that just have in common the fact they don’t agree with either of the currently dominant political factions.

Aggressive reposte: what you just did (political stereotyping, where you label everyone who disagrees with you as basically being the same cartoon villain) is, in my experience, an example the left-wing bigotry that drives centrists away from your political faction. Disagreeing with your doesn’t mean that I agree with the hateful morons on the right, it just means I also see and won’t tolerate your bigotry.