Does anyone else feel like they’re living in an insane asylum or some sort of alternate reality? Fortunately I do have a few people in my life who see how serious this all is, but at my job and out in public it seems like everyone is going around business as usual.
Aside from going to the protest on April 5 and one upside down American flag on someone’s house I’ve seen nothing to indicate that other people realize the turmoil we’re in. No bumper stickers, no protest signs on lawns, nothing. Everyone seems to be doing their thing exactly as if the country wasn’t collapsing beneath us.
What is going on?
Originally Posted By u/one-man_dragon At 2025-04-11 04:41:13 PM | Source
Because they live in a news or ignorance bubble. To them, everything is fine. And for them everything is often fine, in their own little neck of the woods.
I work in a logistics company and people on the west coast are confused that their packages were delayed last week. They completely missed the giant storms happening in the Midwest. No-one bothers to be informed about anything in this country.
If you looked at me IRL, there would be almost no outward sign that I was concerned. This isn’t because I’m not concerned, but rather because I’m so concerned that I jumped straight to hiding from the regime.
I’m more likely to go do some anonymous anti-regime graffiti than I would be to fly a flag upside down at my house, or anything else publicly connected to me.
It has been given me some hope that this whole tariff situation has gotten several of the twenty something male coworkers openly discussing how batshit crazy this all is, in an environment where people tend to have to be more tight lipped about politics
I don’t simply “feel” like we are - I think it’s an undeniable fact that we are.
Virtually everyone lives under one or another hierarchical system of control.
There are two main avenues of control - wealth and political authority - and they’re inevitably interconnected, with individual systems set up broadly either so that wealth is rewarded with political authority or political authority is rewarded with wealth.
Individuals compete for positions in hierarchical systems of control, and those who constrain themselves - who have choices or courses of action they will not take due to morality, ethics, integrity, empathy or the like - are at a disadvantage to those who do not have such constraints - who will not alter their behavior to accord for morals, ethics, integrity, empathy or the like.
So effectively, hierarchical systems reward and thu,s select for sociopathy/psychopathy.
That becomes a self-reinforcing loop over time too, as individuals who gain power undermine the aspects of the system that might check sociopathy/psychopathy - government ethics laws, checks and balances, investigative journalism, the right to criticize, etc.
So hierarchical systems tend to sociopathy/psychopathy, and ever more so over time.
So Trump and Musk et al aren’t aberrations - they’re just the most extreme manifestations of a system that’s been heading inevitably toward them all along - a system that has been so warped by the actions of past sociopaths and psychopaths that it is, for all intents and purposes, insane.
So yes - we live in an insane asylum.
