A society in which it’s everyone for themselves, that refuses to care for one another, is no society at all. Then everyone acts shocked and horrified at someone who understandably snaps, like modern western culture doesn’t run entirely on schadenfreude.
That was the crux of the idea of a social contract, which is long dead in the US. Now people line up to revel in the suffering of their fellow citizens with “well you were stupid to do xyz in life, so you deserve your suffering haha.”
I agree, but I’m not sure that’s an unpopular opinion. Most people who act like they don’t owe anyone anything seem to forget all the help they’ve received. Craig T. Nelson said it best: “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No.”
I’m down with that. I have been since I first figured out that my boss values office furniture more than he does people. He was bemoaning the lack of loyalty when I quit. I told him that loyalty flows both ways or doesn’t flow at all. Since he’d stopped the downward flow, I stopped the upward flow.
This scales nicely to society.
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Kinda trying to minimize OPs argument though. Sure be a good person, but steal and take anything that isn’t bolted down.
Consider it bonus points if they’re so rich they don’t even realize something was taken.
Fuck no society (or at least my country) does owe me, I pay taxes. Quite a bit due to where I live actually, I’m not upset about it but I get fuck all for it. And I’m just a working class person, I don’t have any connections … Imagine all the people just avoiding taxes.
Tax me more, honestly just give me working infrastructure, healthcare and other things that a functioning country should have. I’m so sick of footing the bill for all these fucking bailouts and subsidization of private interests, the do nothings in Congress are the real freeloaders. And yet they’ll bitch at you when you suggest we allocate some of the funds from the military into making sure our ‘strategic highway’ systems bridges dont just fall over.
I don’t mind paying but the service sucks 😭
My unpopular opinion is that if you evade all of your tax responsibility as a company you should have no legal protections in said country but they’d never bite.
Amazon’s semis and delivery trucks provide how much wear and tear on the highway grid but how much do we get in taxes for allowing that? $0 (maybe not exactly but you get the gist).I mean fuck cars but most Americans want working roads too.
And no it’s not smart to avoid taxes, that’s bad business that hurts the entire system in the long run.
Wear and tear on roads is paid for via taxes on fuel, so Amazon does indeed pay for wear and tear on roads.
This is also why lawmakers are looking at taxing EVs per mile driven.
This is a bit dated but shows that 41% of road upkeep on average is paid for by gas taxes (and other fees). So yes while they may have some tax paid on fuel (that they have likely negotiated down via bulk purchase), they’re not even paying for half on average.
Edit - just to include given we’ve seen landmark inflation over the last few years it’s likely the share of taxes on upkeep has gone down.
I’ve been telling people the social contract in America is broken for a long time. To me it’s just becoming more and more obvious. All the small things keep getting worse. No one cares about all the small social stuff anymore. People throw shit everywhere in stores, don’t return shopping carts, follow rules of any kind out in public.
People just don’t respect each other or give a fuck anymore. I mostly blame the boomers and silent generation folks who hurled contual abuse and insults and everyone for the last 20+ years. We’ve got a couple generations that grew up doing the Frontline jobs in retail and the service industry who just got shit on constantly. Maybe that’s just a small part of it, but whatever happened, it’s bad.
This makes me think of The Good Place and the book they reference: What We Owe To Each Other. It discusses the philosophy of Contractualism, and the morality of society.
perhaps the people who say “no one owes you anything” are in error
Yep, American exceptionalism became American Individualism. Don’t get me wrong, overall I believe most of us want to do the right thing, most of the time anyway. I’m also keenly aware to the fact that incredible narcissistic, self-serving people are constantly gripping the power that could change things at all levels (local community, city, state, country). The most any random citizen can do is take care of it’s own, and every once in awhile, when resources are plenty, take care of their neighbors. Life it’s hard and extremely expensive.
There are companies that their success depends on your statement is wrong. Companies like Gofundme would not have been able to operate if nobody helps out anybody.
A drop in the ocean, because we refuse to communally pay for a robust social safetynet. In fact, we had a pathetic one once, and spent the 80s and 90s dismantling even that to “turn the bull loose” for shareholders that already won at life through birth or luck.
Why should we owe anything to a society that actively exploits us and strips us of our rights? It’s not that individuals refuse to cooperate and help each other, it’s that everybody’s too busy fighting for their own survival to care about anyone else.
Your feelings are valid.
Thank you, sincerely.
It’s war. You see it in vets, you see it in cops, you see it in gangsters, you see it in abused people. Life is war imo. I didn’t start off like that until gangster raped my life. Chaos will always reign supreme above governments, and order that comes from natural chaos will always triumph over man made order.
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Yeah, but I like food and a roof over my head, so imma pitch in.
I like food and a roof over my head
Neat, so do a lot of people who work but cant afford rent, and a lot of homeless people who tried and got screwed over for their trouble, and a lot of people with mental and physical health issues it was a roll of the dice they’d get rather than you. If you feel that way about the people in your society, they shouldn’t care about pissing on your lawn or worse beyond getting caught by
policethe capital holder defense force, which isn’t winning the underlying debate, it’s just pointing a gun at someone when you can’t win the debate.Thank you for being a prime example of what I’m talking about, friend.
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