Hot take: corporatism and infotainment. You control money and information, you control the world.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the system we've built to buy and sell products, owning, trading and hoarding capital? No, that can't be it...

The question "Where did we go wrong?" being asked on 4chan in /b/ is funny to me.

Don't vote Conservative

so many people are getting to the point that they can identify that capitalism has caused human society to self-digest and go to shit, yet so many will give the most asinine dog-brained reasons as to why. It's reassuring to see people starting to wake up but frustrating to see them groggy, incoherent, and still half-asleep. 95 times out of a hundred they'll blame "corporatism" or welfare queens or race mixing or overpopulation or some shit and it's just exhausting

Everything under neoliberalism is assessed primarily in terms of money. It thrives on selfishness. Doing things to improve climate and reduce carbon emissions doesn't have immediate profits and is therefore ignored. The wealth inequality results in the more wealthy thinking they deserve the wealth and seeing the poor as inferior thus destroying social cohesion.

The purpose of your life is to be a productive asset for people who make their living owning productive assets. They are in charge of the government and the economy and will never vote themselves out. They will kill to maintain their status as owners of productive assets because they do not want to become owned by someone else. They do spend a lot of time making sure you're over stimulated because not only do you make the product for them you also buy the product from them. You're a little blood bag in multiple ways and they are leeches.

They need you to vote for them, to make their actions legitimate so the whole thing doesn't erupt in violence and get them killed. The most effective way to do that is to build a bunch of windmills at which you'll tilt. They can't make you hate other people for owning productive assets, so they have to come up with other reasons. And those reasons also have to work in their favor, as in make you hate their competition and enemies. You hate their enemies, who also own productive assets, but you hate them for largely abstract reasons detached from the actual reality of your exploitation. This dissonance creates malaise unless you feel like you're discovering a deeper truth by buying into more propaganda. You get on another dopamine treadmill which ultimately leaves you unsatisfied no matter how angry you get. Because it's never about recognizing your actual situation.

They need you to keep making product for them, because if you run out of product to make, they lose their livelihood. You also need to keep buying product. They sell you everything you need, making sure there's as many people between it and you as possible, each extracting some profit. This causes friction which causes malaise. Once everyone has everything they need, they don't sell as much product. This is bad so they invent need, they try to make you want stuff so you keep buying. This means they need more productive assets like yourself, this grows their empire. They come up with more abstractions for why you're unhappy and how buying product will satisfy you. But with the accumulation you are still left unfulfilled.

This isn't new and owning productive assets isn't as profitable as it used to be. You need more and more to make the same amount of money, to keep the same amount of power. So the expansion and accumulation of more involves people like yourself being made miserable. They need war to go into other places and take over those productive assets. They need you to be on board for war so they have to demonize the other productive assets like yourself. They need you to fight in the war so you lose your friends and family. But to make up for that they abstract that exploitation away with fictions as well.

A society that allows a few people to collectively own all or most productive assets (ie, labor) will always result in this malaise. It will never bring you contentment. And if, by some chance, you get to own productive assets are now happy because you're free from being owned, millions of others will take your vacancy from the working class. So you're happy but they are not and their discontent will ultimately bring conflict, which makes you unhappy again.

Human experience is not profitable, or I should say, it is. As you've noticed, the amount of human experience you can afford or make time for is almost none. Your entire human experience is consumption and production. Even when you have fun you must consume product. You must pay a series of people who own the productive assets that produce your enjoyment. Reality is not helpful to the owners of productive assets. It just gets in the way.

You can't imagine an alternative because the prospect of another promise of freedom from being owned is just too scary. You're better to go with the devil you know.

You're not unhappy because you're possessed with bad spirits. You're not unhappy because of some abstraction living across the ocean that exists to threaten your other coveted abstractions. You're unhappy for a precise and easily explainable material reason. That reason is that you are exploited and are actively prevented from stopping it. You are manipulated into believing that exploitation is actually freedom. So in chasing freedom you either further exploit yourself or exploit others, adding to the general friction of society and life, causing misery.

Eat the rich

Where did we go wrong?

The bad guys won the Cold War.

Somewhere around 20 years ago/b/ was one of the first aggressively "us vs them" communities I was ever exposed to, and it only got worse from there.

Everything is about money, not about having an actual human experience.

Human experience is still there, everywhere. You have to make the effort to get out of your burrow and do things outside with physical people.

Where did we go wrong? We stopped killing fascists. Appeasement never works when one party has no interest in concession.

A lot of chud energy has understandable sources but is funneled anywhere and everywhere but against the ruling class.

Welcome to being poor .... I mean poor poor ... not the kind of poor where you can't afford a Lamborghini ... the kind of poor where you no longer have any luxuries like being able to go to the movies.

Where life is a constant hassle and struggle to survive. And where you constantly have to fight to stay above water. A kind of life where someone is constantly either trying to screw you, is screwing you or has screwed you. A kind of life where you no longer trust the people you see, the people you meet, or the people you live with. A kind of life where you know from the time you are born that everything and everyone will be hard.

I grew up like that and it became a normal part of life.

I learned to make a bit of money and survive and I've done good but not great ... good enough to travel the world. It gave me the insight that the majority of the world is poor ... I thought that before but after traveling, I realized just how true that really is.

The world we're complaining about now is the world that most of the world already knows.

Welcome to being poor and hopeless.

Every interaction is now "us vs them."

Two posts later:

it's DA JOOOZ!

And then there's the idiots who try to use this reasoning to glorify a nonexistent nostalgia based version of "the good old times" when really capitalism is the problem

Of course, the big question with the line "I'm tired of being told to hate my fellow man" is whether they're referring to the constant fearmongering being pushed by conservative news and politicians against everyone who isn't in their in-group.

Or are they referring to non-conservatives calling out the bigotry being pushed by conservatives and doing that calling out is "pushing hatred on your fellow man" in this person's eyes?

Since a lot of 4chan is the latter while actively being a part of the former.

Is this supposed to be a "the world has turned into shit" take, even though it's been like this for ages (way before the 4chan poster, or anyone alive for that matter, was born)?

I've found that disconnecting helps. Leave your phone at home and go out. Chat with the guy you see every day at the grocery store. Go play chess or pétanque in the park with a friend. You don't have to do this too often, and you'll feel less like a product yourself.

It was leaving the trees that did it, really.