Comment on The American Dream, minus 60%
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 hours agoFirstly, racism is always a thing. Xenophobia is how humans kept infectious diseases at bay for most of human existence. But then we did the agriculture thing and decided to try out larger societies. Throughout history, though societies have always had to contend with half the population hating the other half enough to get violent.
The whole point of post-enlightenment civilizations is to treat everyone equally. But the US’ economy depended on slavery, and we weren’t ready to give rights to women, and those left cracks fit for social wedges.
Secondly, racism is a tool and always has been. The owner class has always resented the working class, and now they can live so far removed from us that they don’t even pretend or develop empathy by sharing the street with us. Heck Thiel wants to make his own Rapture in which everything is automated.
Racism is the hook by which the massive, oligarch-owned, far-right, propaganda machine draws in its viewership before feeding them the MAGA ideology and encouraging them to isolate themselves from all other information sources (and the libs). It turns out in the last century we’ve developed a lot of psychology. It’s just not used as much to heal minds.
But the owner class hates us all. It may hate non-white non-Christians slightly more, but the thing that disgusts them the most about us, by far, is that we are poor. And they’re just as eager to deny us a means to survive as working-class white men would to black men.
bold_atlas@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
You’ve got that backwards. It’s the insular isolated groups that tend to get wiped out by a diseases. Larger intermixing populations means better immune systems via exposure.
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
Smaller insular groups get wiped out by infectious diseases, but they don’t communicate them to other insular groups. And that is the going hypothesis of why we really like to organize in small bands about the size of our Facebook friends list, and want to throw rocks at people from other tribes.
Larger intermixing populations gain their immunity by first having a lot of them die off. This is one of the benefits(?) of ranching livestock, since they’re a vector for diseases that commonly get transmitted to their human owners. The epidemics happen, and then the survivors have the antibodies, and even pass them on to their kin.
Nowadays, we have centralized disease control. It may be failing in the US but the rest of the developed world still have a robust system. But human beings haven’t had time to evolve (very much) towards large pluralistic societies that combat disease through science and proactive prevention.
Given enough time, I’d think we might, since large pluralistic societies also develop science, technology and arts much faster in general, often much to the chagrin of moral guardians like religious ministries.