You are expressing something that I have tried to articulate, but have never really been satisfied with. I always end up leaning on Popper’s Paradox, which is excellent, but I’m often disappointed with myself for defaulting to that.
There is a fundamental difference between people who have such limited vision that they can’t share the world with people who are different than them in who they are; and people who disagree, and maybe even hate those people, but who actually have little problem coexisting with them. And this touches on so many things. Free speech absolutism as an example. I can happily coexist with anyone who thinks and hates just about anything; but when they express bigotry, even just as speech, they are actively doing harm. Because words can cause harm; and words prompt action. And that I cannot abide. So I’m definitely not a free speech absolutist, because to be one means that harm to marginalized people is acceptable.
Likewise just about everything bigoted. Bigots exist; but that doesn’t mean I have to accept their actions. If they keep it to themselves, then there’s no problem. But, as the saying goes, as soon as their “freedoms” impinge on other’s existence, that’s a problem.
Well, in any case it looks like the proper framing has been restored – on a topic about despicable Republican behavior, we have all still been brought to defending not being nicer to bigots even as they try to hurt us. It always has to be us on trial.
And exactly how many of the 8 billion humans have you encountered in your life? Enough to assume that they are the normal in human experience? Even if you’ve met hundreds of people in your life, there is no way you’ve met enough of them to be able to fully define normality. None of us can.
Well, if we shut up those pesky libruls, then we won’t have to worry about anyone pushing for change now, will we? The “normal” people can prevail and we don’t have to worry about the people whose necks we’re standing on whinging about being trod upon! /s
Except if supportive of genocide is normal, somehow we manged not to completely genocide each other, to the point that there are 8 billion of us on this little rock.
I completely and utterly reject YOUR assertion that the natural state of human beings is genocidal. Completely and utterly.
This Hobbesian assertion that the natural state of humanity is “a war of all against all” is also at the rotten core of Libertarianism, used to justify an ideology that enshrines selfishness and greed and encourages the bystander effect on a personal and societal level. It’s what they use to sell us on the idea that their allies/stooges --the hateful, bigoted Know-Nothing 27% – are the “normal” we have to accept (instead of an ignorant and cruel minority that the rest of us should write off if they don’t come to their senses on their own).
That assertion is also BS, as demonstrated again and again in the aftermath of disasters when people come together in the spirit of mutual aid. Community and empathy and co-operation are humanity’s superpowers, and in the face of the evidence it takes willful ignorance or just plain stupidity to assert otherwise.
People are almost universally polite to each other in all face to face contact. We see video all the time of people blowing up at each other, but that’s a tiny, tiny minority of all human interaction.
You see this every day as a trans person in conservative spaces. Everyone is by and large very nice to you face to face. They are polite, often friendly and helpful, but then quietly go vote to take away all your rights. Then they rant about you on social media where it’s safe for them. This is how it works- nobody has the guts to tell you they hate you to your face.
There is a good deal of truth to that… the question we need to wrestle with is the larger context… WHY are people willing to do that. The answer lots of centrists have come up with is that they are “economically anxious”… a bullshit excuse, of course. The reality is that either they were taught to hate and fear people who are different from them, and to assume that those “different” people are “out to get them.” Some of that might be from how they were raised (maybe they went to a particularly bigoted church, etc) and some of that might be from their nightly viewing of Tucker Carlson… but it’s pretty clear that this kind of irrational hatred of human difference is a learned behavior, and sometimes it can be motivated by greed and the lust for power, such as people in power activating hatred of the “other” in order to get into positions of power - classic authoritarian techniques.
Mostly they do not… unless of course they get into a group and violently attack the people they do hate (see most of modern history, where the fear of some other is used to divide and conquer, etc). This current crop of authoritarian “strong” men we’re dealing with have made it more okay to be openly hostile to people they blame for the woes of the supposedly 'common white man"… it’s now okay to threaten drag shows with guns, to take children away from their parents if they’re migrants, to strip women of basic access to health care, to deny trans folks all the care that they need to live happy and fulfilled lives. The quietly voting away your rights is one aspect of it, but we’re quickly entering a phase more similar to what we’ve seen in places like Hungary, Russia, and Poland - open hostility that is supported enough by TPTB to cause open violence against already marginalized groups. It’s terrifying!
And the thing that gets me is that there are SOME who just think, oh well, this is how people are, so we can’t do anything, but keep giving the brutes what they want, so maybe they won’t turn their brutality on me. They are perfectly willing to sacrifice the rights and safety of people they think are somehow “abnormal” to retain their place in the pecking order… THOSE are the people we must watch for, because they’ll happily hand us (meaning anyone they don’t like) over for their own protection.
I always thought my family made an interesting case study in this. The hardcore hatemongers were actually not on the side that had been a colonial family. That family just kept going on and through time, disability, and changing demographics became, maybe, humbled through acceptance eventually. But the eastern euro side desperately wanted to blend in and carried a lot of their trauma with them leading them to become pretty isolated and surrounded by hate. They picked up the hatchet and turned it on neighbors over and over again never quite becoming what they wanted to be in the process and resenting everything under the sun for it.
After a while we become like the people we surround ourselves with whether through acceptance, avoidance, inclusion, or isolation.
People who hate are actively choosing it because of their own problems though. There is no “default” state but I think we are inherently more pro-social than anti-social or else we would be extinct.
Most primates live in small groups where they recognize everyone. By now most humans live in towns or cities where they regularly interact with strangers, and do so without constantly getting in fights. No question we are pro-social.
Even our wars depend on cooperating with strangers, and often take a lot of training and dehumanization to get people to kill. “You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
For sure! That whole angle should be used as a subject for teaching college students about confirmation bias. Show me ten “economically anxious” bigots and I can show you a thousand economically anxious non-bigots.
Exactly, but somehow there were never any exhaustive news reports about what was leading so many well-to-do white Americans, who had time to criss-cross the country attending rallies, to vote for him.
I remember seeing somewhere that the average income of Clinton voters was like around 60,000, but the average income of Trump voters was 70,000. I have no doubt some of the actual white working class voted for Trump (as I’ve known enough of the white working class to know they’re most certainly not immune to forms of bigotry, etc), but it was more a bunch of middle and upper middle class white people cosplaying as working class who carried him over the line.
to 
Starbucks chat.
