- cross-posted to:
- climatememes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- climatememes@lemmy.world
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Sometimes I wonder about this. No matter how luxurious your bunker is, living there is still going to be a downgrade compared to how we live now.
Why not give a fuck about saving the environment? Not for unwashed masses, but for your kids and grandkids?
It’s because of the prisoner’s dilemma. It is broadly agreed that everyone would be better off if everyone curbs their emissions, but for any one individual the choice is not so simple. For infividuals, a large reduction to their impact will likely hurt them economically more than it will help them environmentally. This is exactly why a lot of green legislation is driven by global agreements with countries all trying to put pressure on each other to reduce emissions.
Likewise, increasing government investment in green technologies could benefit the economy and the environment, but for any given politician the cost of turning against big oil may be a significant risk to their chances of re-election if not balanced out by a politically motivated and educated populace that is resistant to corporate propaganda. Campaign finance reform would help with this, but once again it’s a bigger risk than it’s worth to the politicians in power. Thus, we can’t simply rely on the self-interest of the wealthy to prevent collapse; we must co-operate and coordinate our efforts to solve the problem.
Lots of people (awful people) have kids for their own ego rather than because they want to raise happy and healthy offspring. They don’t care about the world their children will grow up in.
A conservative estimate is 30% of the population.
Psychopathy is a spectrum. It undermines your values, makes you indifferent to normative and empirical reality, and robs you of all compunction, until the only salient feature of life is your own ego.
Many of those you find confusing fall somewhere on that spectrum. It’s a grim diagnosis, but you can use morally obvious cases to determine how bad things are. Opinions on abortion are a litmus test, as are attitudes towards obviously cruel and unvirtuous people, such as Donald Trump and various other celebrities.
Really interesting view here, thank you.
Looking at the groups of people that are so hard for me to understand (MAGA, KKK, flat-earthers, etc.) because of how ridiculous their worldviews are, as some sort of psychopathic mental illness on a scale from sort of psychopathic, to full-blown psychopath makes alot of weird sense. Kind of disturbing and comforting to me at the same time.
makes alot of weird sense
it really does not (specifically putting flat-earthers together with the other two groups). maybe don’t take psychiatry lessons from two paragraph lessons by author with unknown qualification on the internet 😆
Do you really think opinions on abortion are a litmus test? You can spin either camp as the psychopathic one, after all. I’m on Team Babykill but I don’t think everybody against abortion is a psychopath, it’s closer to a philosophical issue.
Yes, actually, I do.
There’s an academic survey that goes out every few years, and there’s more consensus among philosophers that abortion is permissible than about literally anything else. There’s less agreement that the external world exists.
Being against abortion requires one or more of these assumptions:
- That zygotes are actual people.
- That these zygote people have rights over your body overriding any of your own needs.
- That sex is blameworthy and constitutes some sort of implied consent regarding pregnancy.
Any one of these assumptions is, frankly, insane.
People are irrational, that’s hardly news. I appreciate this issue is important to you but that doesn’t make them psychopaths. I shouldn’t think a psychopath would care much either way, beyond which course of action might benefit them at the time. Again, this is coming from someone who flushed an aborted foetus down the toilet, so I’m really not precious about it.
I shouldn’t think a psychopath would care much either way, beyond which course of action might benefit them at the time.
I agree, but the fact that they don’t care is the problem. Abortion might be a means to an end, a way to immiserate a target demographic. Without compunctions and moral impulses, anti-abortion laws, witch-hunting, and racism become viable vehicles for collective punishment and self-gratification.
The Sociopath Next Door is full of case studies from a Harvard psychiatrist specializing in sociopathy. The extremes of the disorder are obviously disturbing, but what happens when the neuropathology is sub-diagnostic?
My interest is in how psychopathy connects to people’s epistemic hygiene. That is, the ability, habits, and motivation to correctly construe reality. Think about it. Moral facts are just like any other kinds of fact. Someone with ASPD would be unresponsive or insensitive to moral facts (as you said). But epistemic facts have the same flavor, and pathological lying is symptomatic of psychopathy.
What has to go wrong in a brain for a person to lose concern about misconstruing or misrepresenting reality?
What has to go “right”, though? I think that presupposes an idealised state of human development that can be deducted from. I’m not sure what the neutral form is for a human, but those kind of beliefs are so common I wonder if the pathology is baked-in, so to speak.
Plus, some people really do think embryos are people! They get triggered by abortion as if you killed their dog in front of them. I happen to think they’re wrong, but the urge to anthropomorphise things is very strong, and there’s at least some logic behind their belief.
I think that presupposes an idealised [sic] state of human development that can be deducted from.
If you don’t think that mental illness exists, then there’s no point having this conversation.
Plus, some people really do think embryos are people!
Yes, and some are flat-earthers (truly) and Trump supporters, and some compulsively eat dirt. That’s kind of the point. Insanity is strange and we want to understand it better.
Take some time here on Lemmy and explain to people that they should make individual efforts to lower their own footprint. You’ll be met with every excuse in the book why they won’t do something to decrease their own burden, even going so far as to “explain” to you how dumb the suggestion even is.
The problem is that no one wants to decrease their own quality of life, they expect everyone else to do it. The person who is sitting in their AC house, cruising the Internet on their multi-hundred dollar phone, after driving around in their own vehicle…have convinced themselves that they are no the wealthy of the year spewing out way more emissions…it’s really the people flying private jets!
Everyone points to someone else as a bigger culprit, they are the ones who have to act first.
