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Joe's avatar

My take, from my little corner of the room (Detroit) is that you are correct that most people want to be told what to do, but that desire to follow orders is most definitely not contingent upon "so long as it is evil." What I see in my daily life, including but also quite apart from the COVID nonsense, is that upwards of 90% of people follow the path of least resistance, regardless of who is leading, good or evil. Five per cent of the people here, or less, keep the quality of life here absolutely miserable for the rest of us, and five per cent are pushing back. Our responsibility lies in the fact that we have free will and that we could choose to empower ourselves and enlighten ourselves and not just follow any old leader, but it has become harder and harder with the ubiquitous nature of social media and a few dominant media outlets. Most information is controlled by a few sources, and those sources are indisputably (in my eyes) corrupt and beholden to evil.

I'd venture to guess that 95% of Detroiters have no idea of who RFK Jr is, even as we battle an epidemic of autism here in the black community. The few who have would be the white liberals from the University District, who are ashamed of him for having "betrayed" his family's legacy by putting on the tinfoil "anti-vax" hat, as they see it.

The good news is that a large percentage of people could be fairly easily swayed to support the side of goodness, fairness, justice, love etc were that what they were exposed to all the time. The bad news is that what we are actually consuming, relentlessly, voraciously, is a steady diet of lies, hate, divisiveness, fear-mongering, hero-worship and so on.

Another reflection, for what it is worth: no matter how egregious the behavior, no matter how brutal the conduct, no matter how obvious it is that someone is acting from an evil impulse and doing horrible things, whether in the context of Covid or not, once it becomes frequent and repetitive enough to become, by default, normalized, most reaction to the bad behavior will drop off to almost nothing and people will simply incorporate the new reality into their lives, and daily narrative. I think it is at the same time a defense/survival mechanism and also an inexcusable cop-out, but I understand where it is coming from.

I don't know where the answers lie, but I do know that most of us have the sum total of the world's accumulated knowledge hidden away in those little phones in our pockets, an access to knowledge unprecedented in human history; it is incumbent on us to make the most of it, in whatever way possible. You know...to whom much has been given, much will be demanded....

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SL's avatar

I am surrounded by bougiecrats every day and one of the key problems is that they seem unable to grasp that this country can be led by evil people (unless Trump, but not the norm in their minds). They also cannot understand the true character of Pharma in that they recognize that they are not saints, but they have no clue about the depth of evil. The same for the media and public health officials. They think they sometimes do shoddy work, but generally they are not bad people and want the best like you and me. They generally trust the government and the media at least somewhat. They just do not get that all of the bad shit you read about in history in not confined to history. We are not really more enlightened. The very same type of bastards run the show today, but they do it with more of a smile. They are basically clueless about the real world.

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