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Sick to my stomach (lemmy.world)

I was chatting with with my bro today. I asked "how do you just - do that heinous shit?" I remarked that I could never do what they did to those people if i got rich and powerful.

He's like "you sure? How do you know you wouldn't?"

And the more i think about it, I'm not so sure. Are we all just monsters forced to be good by the status quo? Are we brainwashed to be good? Is being evil the best way to live and we're all just suckers?

I honestly feel sick thinking about the implications.

How can good ever win? What the hell can we do?

Sorry for the cringy rant but I'm pretty broke up about it.

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[-] Alloi@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

we are products of our environement, to a degree. but to achieve that level of wealth and power, you have to be missing something that makes you a human being. and that thing is empathy.

some people become numb and lose it on the way to their "success", others are simply born without it and have no qualms.

but the truth of the matter is, that if they didnt have that money and power. their ability to organize the way that they did, to manipulate the population, to change our futures, would not have been possible. at least at this scale.

therefore. for the good of humanity to win. we must completely remove the option of anyone attaining that level of wealth and power, ever again.

basically. we have to adopt a form of global socialism, and then eventually an environmentally focused form of communism. equality, in balance with nature.

its either that, or we continue to be controlled by pedophile capitalists and techno feudal lords, focusing on the economy and how many things they can make us subscribe to or rent, while killing us off en mass, here and there. until we all die from some horrible resource war, or mass extinction from climate collapse and its related biproducts.

adapt or die.

[-] Elroc@lemmus.org 6 points 2 days ago

The process of getting rich and powerful tends to make people that way, they have to hurt a lot of people to get there and they have to lose a lot of empathy to sleep after doing it.

[-] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

Being a dick is a choice. You can be virtuous or vice-ridden. Most people walk the middle path while trying their best.

[-] Zozano@aussie.zone 6 points 2 days ago

The fact that you feel sick about it is a sign that you're not as susceptible to corruption as you think.

Here's another way to think about this; even psychopaths can be reasoned into acting compassionately because it is in their own self interest to ensure the people around them will act compassionately in return.

[-] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 3 points 2 days ago

you would have to had to predilictions paraphelias from birth, TRUMP likely had it, as did his father

[-] epsteinhater@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I think it’s important to remember, as disgusting as these vermin are, this is a small fraction of the wealthy people in the world. and i don’t believe many of the names did anything evil after seeing the available evidence. they went to try to make a deal, get money, go to a party, maybe had sex with an of age woman or prostitute. some were probably guilty of understanding what was going on and staying silent which is petty bad as well. Ghislaine even dressed and told girls to claim they were over 18 . but the abuse and horrific shit was done by a relatively small group of sadistic psychopath trash. at least so far.

[-] D_C@sh.itjust.works 24 points 3 days ago

Poor people can and have done astonishingly horrible things as well. If you aren't trafficking children to rape yet then I highly doubt you ever will.

The thing is people who are born in to money are shaped to think they can do anything. Just look at Andrew, the ex Prince.
He is rich and perverted but thought he could do anything and get away with it.
He wasn't beaten or abused, etc, which turned him into a monster. No, he chose to go that route.
But not all rich people choose to be evil, just like not all poor people choose to be angelic.

[-] flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 11 points 3 days ago

With the caveat that you almost can't get rich without

  • inheritance from someone who exploitef people, or
  • exploiting people
[-] snowdrop@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 days ago

A lot of the rich and powerful got that way by being psychopaths. Then they go to a party where they see other bigwigs of all stripes doing psychopath stuff and they shrug and figure they can get away with it — they’ve gotten away with everything else after all.

It’s just a small slice of the Epstein network that was doing the worst stuff. Chances are you or I would go to that party, talk to some interesting people, and maybe do some blow and fuck a trafficked adult (not knowing they are trafficked) and probably not even know about the truly heinous stuff that was going on in other rooms.

As a sophisticated kompromat enterprise they had to, on the one hand, facilitate truly depraved behavior while on the other hand not letting people see that who would be upset enough about it to do something. They probably sussed out the level they could entrap you into and led you down that path.

[-] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 19 points 3 days ago

Getting rich is kinda self-selecting for evil people, and once a family is rich, they're typically raising their children to be evil to some extent.

That said, power both corrupts and reveals.

[-] kingofras@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago

As far as I can tell there are at least 4 ways of getting rich. Either you luck into with lottery/inheritance, you’re born in it, you’re ripping of other’s labour, or you’re paid by a large community to do important work.

The ones that inherit it or leverage cheap labour to get ahead are the ones that are usually the ones we see.

Money itself doesn’t corrupt, it is the power it buys that corrupts. Money is one of the currencies. Owning a secret stash of tapes of very powerful men cheating on their wives with children is another currency with a much higher exchange rate.

[-] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago

If the status quo forced people to be good, there would be way fewer bad people maintaining the status quo.

If anything, the status quo too often forces moral compromise from good people. If anything, the societal brainwashing is done to get people to accept reprehensible actions as normal, not to prevent them.

That disgust is a normal reaction to a fundamentally fucked up world.

[-] Thcdenton@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago

Yeah I figure you're right. Just spun around by all this. Like im out of my depth with stuff like this. Things so evil is disorienting.

[-] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

Been there for years. I'm exceedingly bitter and full of a deep abiding sadness and overwhelming rage.

It's been deleterious to my health.

I can't continue like this. I do what precious little I can to help and protect my community, but it all seems so paltry and inadequate. And I see people with far greater power than I, who claim to want to help, enabling pedophiles and fascists and opposing people who want to make things better.

My soul hurts. At like a 7.

And it just tears me up that I'm the maddest at those who this doesn't seem to faze. Not the pedos or the genocidal or the fascists. The people who look at all of this and shrug it off like it's just the natural order of things and I'm freaking out over nothing. Don't they notice at all?

Sorry, I'm rambling. I'll stop.

[-] Thcdenton@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

Yeah that's where I'm at bro. People are sleepin on this. Letting it happen. Like a bad dream where no matter how hard you yell, people can't hear you.

I wouldn't worry about it. If you were handed money and became a billionaire you wouldn't turn what you read about regarding those files. People with certain proclivities such that they prioritise their greed as to accumulate so much wealth and power above anything else have personality traits that align with those abhorrent behaviours. Or are raised by people with strong personality traits that then are passed on. Handing someone a large amount of drugs randomly does not turn them into an addict automatically. Obviously it is way more complex than that because personalities are complex but most people try to do good by their community but there are exceptions and unfortunately those are the people selected for when it comes to wealth and power distribution.

[-] hperrin@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 days ago

For a while I had enough money that I could have done a lot of evil shit. Doing evil shit makes me really sad, though. So, I didn’t do any evil shit.

It’s about that simple. Some people don’t feel sad when they do evil shit. If those people happen to be rich (often getting there by doing evil shit, because capitalism rewards evil behavior), they do a lot more evil shit.

[-] Triumph@fedia.io 5 points 3 days ago

Those people who don't feel sad for doing evil shit have an easier time gathering power, because they'll do evil shit to get it.

What you need to understand is that the people who became rich didn't just win the lottery one day. The whole capitalist system is built to reward people with the kind of personality that these people have. They're sharks. They will take advantage and abuse others and do whatever is necessary to gain power and leverage over others. That's why THEY are rich and YOU AREN'T. Because they're psychopaths. ( Look it up. )

So you can rest easy. If you got rich like that one day, because of your personality and life experience, and mostly because you have a conscience and empathy for others, you wouldn't end up like these monsters.

[-] Goretantath@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

It really isn't the money itself, its the accountability. If you don't have a conscience you will feel like you are unstoppable. Until there are actual punishments in an actual system, bad people will continue to do bad things. The way that the system is designed currently just so happens to make it so only bad people can obtain a billion dollars since you have to trample on others to obtain such wealth.

this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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