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Comment by vishnugupta | Hacker News Reader

> unfortunate that people have become so entitled and myopic ... where they actually favor strongmen as heads of governments...

And yet in nation after nation hundreds of millions are voting strongmen to lead them. If one is serious about understanding the reasons a good place to start is to stop blaming them ("entitled", "myopic", "curmudgeons"...) and make a genuine effort to understand their world view.

These are not fringe elements but hundreds of millions dissatisfied with status quo and want something to change, and are willing to give strongmen a chance. They don't care how the life was 50 or 100 years ago or that life today is 99% better. Their lived reality has lead them to believe they are leading a shitty life. Telling them they are myopic or entitled will only lead to further disconnect.

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I always find it hard to understand if someone wants to give up their human rights whats stopping them, just do it and be done with it and enjoy all the oppression and atrocities you want heaped upon yourself, why do they want to drag the rest of humanity into their fetishes.

Their goal isn't to "give up their human rights" or to heap oppression and atrocities upon themselves. Their goal is to escape their current position in the social hierarchy.

That's one of the reasons why it's important to make sure that everyone in society is provided for; because if their needs aren't met under the current society then they have an incentive to destroy it in favor of a different society.

But they are deliberately choosing a society that would be even worse for them and actually repressive, so regardless of their stated goal this is what they actually want. They want to be oppressed, kept in the dark, have atrocities committed upon themselves. Instead of a solution they want to dive head first into the death trap rather. It is my viewpoint that we should fast track the process and give such people exactly what they want, and isolate them into their authoritarian dream shithole so that the rest of the world does not have to be involved in their personal fetishes.

> isolate them into their authoritarian dream shithole so that the rest of the world does not have to be involved in their personal fetishes

That sounds like a rather authoritarian approach to this problem.

This is the hard problem of society. What to do with the % of your population with that are capable of being conned by charming, but obviously bad tragic lying narcissists (Trump / Boris Johnson) or have some fundamentally anti-human streak like racism.

Perhaps it isn't so much that we're sufficiently far way from WWII now that people have just forgotten the dangers, more that we haven't been explicit enough about the red flags and lessons offered by people like Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin (and then Mao, Pol Pot etc).

It's no surprise that strong men usually go for educators first.

One problem is that most people just don't really examine what's going on, either because they don't have the time, skew gullable, are generally trusting or don't have the relevant critical faculties.

Education can help with some of those. I was very heartened by this recent news piece

https://www.theguardian.com/education/article/2024/aug/10/uk...

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