I have read a couple stories lately where young people have been caught up in some kind of severe criminal activity and people who have known them have said things like, "They were a good person who fell in with the wrong crowd" and I wonder, is that actually the case or, were they bad people connecting with exactly the kinds of people like themselves - birds of a feather, flock together.
I was also wondering where the limits of this excuse may lay. For example, I have never heard anyone say that Dr Mengele and Joseph Goebbels "were good people who fell in with the wrong crowd". However, were they fundamentally broken as children in a way that led them into performing such atrocities?
If we are able to claim we are victims of our environment who do not have agency to make our own decisions in life as to whether we are fat or thin, rich or poor, happy or sad, good or bad - if we always are able to have an excuse for our behavior and blame society, doesn't this have to be applied to everyone, including those of the past?
While I would like to think that I wouldn't follow suit, if I was raised in an extremist family of some kind, can I really say that I wouldn't follow in the footsteps of me conditioning? After all, I am similar to both my mother and father in various ways and while some of it is genetic it, a lot of it is likely cultural. My father was a pacifist and charitable, probably to a fault, which has likely rubbed off on me also.
I notice that on Hive a lot of the same kinds of people tend to come together and support each other in various ways, whether they are acting in the spirit or against it. I do think that people do tend to flock together with like minds and perhaps on social media, this is even more pronounced when it is in the negative, as there aren't the same physical social restrictions in place that regulate behavior in the real world.
People are probably more likely to "show their true colors" when they believe themselves to be unknown, which is probably why Google datasets are so valuable, as they are able to track real digital consumer behaviors. But, this doesn't mean people who show their face are going to necessarily misrepresent themselves either, because there is a real-world social "checks and balances" that come into play where what is presented runs through the gauntlet of friends and family who know them. The greatest disconnect is between the people who judge without having any direct understanding through relationship. People feel that they know a famous person and how they think because they saw a movie, read an article and retweeted something of theirs on Twitter.
I was talking about this with my wife as I drove her to work this morning and how people end up in various situations that they might not have been in, had they had a different environment. I used the example of the normalization of sites like OnlyFans where people (mostly women I suspect) sell pictures and videos of themselves. These pages are getting promoted in mainstream media as healthy, without seeing that it is a reflection of the disconnection we have created in society, where people are no longer physically connected to the world, but seeking relationships of some kind to fill the void that our own hardwiring as humans creates to bring us together.
What I think is happening is that these kinds of tools are evoking our emotional response to the environment by mimicking the flavor of human connection, but not actually providing the nutrition required, causing us to seek out more food. It is a hijacking of our hardwiring to generate consumption, even though it does not develop a healthy outcome. Fast food is the same, where it mimics real food, but doesn't satisfy the requirements of what we need for a healthy mind or body.
At the end of the day, we can blame the environment for many of our outcomes, but since a large part of our world is now engineered, as consumers we have the ability to improve or degrade the conditions we live in through supply and demand. However, if we do not understand ourselves well enough, we will be subject to manipulation from those who understand us better and are able to build an environment that benefits them. Once this cycle is pushed to the masses and more people support it, society will shift to normalize through social proofing and peer pressure, making it increasingly difficult to break free.
For example of creating the environment, I know a lot of people who complain about not having enough money, yet they have advertising material come to their homes and they subscribe to consumer magazines that essentially say, "what you have isn't good enough, you need this". They end up spending more on stuff than those who do not surround themselves with junk mail. Same for those who are overweight. Keeping low quality food in the kitchen is unlikely to improve things, as the temptation is always there and human willpower is only so strong, and weakens depending on conditions and emotions.
Depressed people consume more, whether it be food, alcohol or products. I suspect that depression and loneliness creates a type of hunger that people try to fill through consumption, to avoid the call of the void and with so much "food" on offer, there is always another filler that doesn't bring satisfaction. Consumer behavior can be driven by leveraging the disconnections we have and providing services with a fee that treat the symptoms, but will never cure the condition.
Many seem to be crowding themselves with goods, services and content that doesn't bring out their best and leads them down a path that they don't want to go. Yet, when they look back, they will blame society on their outcomes, as if they never had a choice in the matter of their lives. As I keep saying, content matters and what we see as content should be evaluated and adjusted by the individual to help us be our best. It is the same in a healthy relationship, where the participants should look to bring out the best in each other. However, when we are disconnected from each other and filling the void with surrogates that do what we want instead of what we need, we end up in an unhealthy relationship with ourselves.
Perhaps, we are all falling in with the "wrong crowd" by consumer choice.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]