Memes

Is it really so simple?

No.

No. Life is not a Marvel movie. Instead, the world is driven by material conditions, and the continuous effect these conditions have in guiding future conditions. The capitalists overtook the fuedal lords not because they were more moral, but because of the steam engine and the expansion in industrial production. The Statesian north didn't free the slaves of the south out of any moral reason, but to gain access to more wage laborers better fit for industrial production. Socialism is overtaking capitalism because imperialism is dying, and rates of profit are falling.

There's no idealist "good vs evil." If you'd like, I wrote an intro Marxist-Leninist reading guide that might help!

'There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’
‘It’s a lot more complicated than that—’
‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.'

—Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

Idealist horsecrap,

Nah, it isn't, at least most of the time.

the world is rich versus poor, has been and always will be.

change my mind.

What do you even mean? Good and evil are moral terms, and the world doesn't even have objective morality, let alone 'is' it. Making a meme where your position is in the 'right', doesn't make it true or even sensical.

"Good" is whoever ends up winning at the end.

Proof. We seek to prove that regardless of the existence of an objective morality people will only adhere/accept their own personal morality, thus making objective morality irrelevant.

We have three cases:

1. Objective Morality doesn’t exist: If there is no objective morality, people can only default to their own morality.
2. Objective morality exists and doesn’t align with an individual’s own moral compass: Imagine objective morality was defined by some Aztec or eldritch god and tells you it is morally imperative to torture people. If you have a sense of empathy your moral compass will not align with this and you will choose to disobey this morality. Hence, if an objective moral compass exists and does not align with one’s own morality, the individual will reject it and default to their own morality.
3. Objective morality exists and does align with an individual’s own morality: Trivially this means an individual is still just following their own default morality.

In all cases the individual will only act on their own morality regardless of the existence or nonexistence of an objective morality. Hence, objective morality is irrelevant. QED.

Because the existence of objective morality has no relevance one can assume objective morality doesn’t exist which, by Occam’s razor, is already the most likely case. Your ideas of right and wrong or good and bad will never be objective in a way that would matter. It is, in my opinion, a much better idea to explain what you think the positive effect of your “moral” actions are because those cause effect relationships can be objective. “I think we should provide free basic needs to everyone because a significant portion of crimes are committed as crimes of necessity, and I would like my country to feel safer” is much more objective than “I think we should provide free basic needs to everyone because it’s the right thing to do.”

Anyone can claim their ideas are “right” or “good” without any explanation of why. I mean that’s basically the strategy of the Republican Party. “Being trans is wrong” “Anti-capitalism is evil” etc. And you saying “Anticapitalism is good” is just as empty and meaningless.

Also, fun fact the proof above works for the existence of god as well. Basically just swap out morality with god and ta-da it is morally irrelevant if god exists, you’re only going to do what you personally think is right regardless.

The more I learn, the more I realize that a lot of political leaders who do horrible do what they do for a reason, with some exceptions. This isn't an endorsement of their actions or their reasons, but Putin, Netanyahu, and (kinda) Biden/Obama/Bush all have reasons for what they do. The rare exceptions are the super corrupt ones. Boris Yeltsin, Viktor Orban, Trump, the office of US president generally, Scott Morrison, etc.

In other words it's not so much good vs. evil as corruption vs integrity.

There are almost no people who see themselves as evil (except some really fucked up lunatics like serial killers). Everyone normally wants to be and do good. Where does all the evil then come from?

Sometimes people do evil things because of ignorance. They just didn't know/ thought of the consequences of their actions.

Often people do evil things for their own or their close one's advantage like corruption.

But most of the time people do really evil things because of projection. The pressure from "outside" (mainly during childhood development) to be good can be so forcefully and rigorously that people can't accept parts of their own self which they then project onto others. Thus invoking evil actions against these others to protect themselves from them, in extreme cases this can go until dehumanising others "allowing" all the great atrocities we know from human history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)

World oscillates, just like everything else.

The world is ignorance/greed VS knowledge/cooperation.

I am more and more learning about how personal interests often conflict with societal interests (as simple as it may sound). We are globally going to understand soon enough that democracy isn't worth shit as long as feedback loops that allow personal interests to creep in are "meta".

Loads of people have lots of ideas on how to run countries and communities, but ideology and doctrines are not really proven concepts.

And the other big problem is that to declare new forces within existing infrastructure (creating counter power to prevent positive feedback mechanisms), societal interest must still be powerful enough to not require a revolution to be enacted in a sensible and effective way.

A lot of countries have already in my mind gone way over that threshold, it's recognisable when actual societal interests, long term initiatives and big questions about the future are not asked anymore because the political power is working at consolidating their position and redistributing favours they owe to the soon to be oligarchy.

But you can't really allow anyone to be a defeatist because cynism is the last nail in the coffin, staying awake and fight hoping that enough will join soon enough is the only way to keep existing.