re: #227 HappyWarrior

Hate is learned. Yes, obviously humans have weaknesses that are exploitable, which means we can surely have evil tendencies, but we are not born to hate. If you watch young children together, you just don’t see hate. Disagreements yes, over toys and things and attention, but not outright hate.

What makes what’s happening now so insidious is we have created cultural norms that reward being an asshole. Just look at what ends up on TV and passes for “entertainment” on major networks during prime time. The reality shows like big brother, the bachelor and ette, hook up island crap and so on are just bad parodies of high school cliquery and being awful for the win. Bullies and liars get paid, being nice and having integrity? Not so much. And don’t get me started on throwing gender into what’s considered strong vs. weak in our culture. That doesn’t help what’s happening either.

Even if we do get the gears fixed and boot out the fascists, we have a serious cultural reckoning we’re going to have to face, so we can stop making the same dumb mistakes over and over.