this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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Leopards Ate My Face
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I've speculated about this a bit.
Our society protects and/or hides from the general masses, a lot of the bad stuff that happens in the world. It's the media and our lawmakers, but it's also very cultural.
The Internet has also been very dumbed down. 20 years ago it used to be easier to find videos of some of the horrors that occur around the world. Drug cartel videos, war videos, terrorist videos. Remember rotten.com, etc?
I think seeing stuff like that, or maybe not the extreme detail but at least hearing about it, gives you a different perspective. At least it did for me, towards the empathetic and cautious.
If people are protected and hidden from the bad, how will they ever know? The people I've met that lack empathy seem very childish like they've never been exposed to anything.
This, in my opinion, is very much on purpose and by design. If our population had all the gruesome details about what really goes on in the world, the wars, the trafficked children, terrorist and drug cartel tortures, all the suffering in 3rd world countries and poverty...
They would be less happy, and therefore less enthusiastic to go buy stuff. Also, many would be causing a ruckus for our leaders to fix it all.
Your purpose is to produce and consume, to prop up the billionaire and elite leadership class. And not cause any problems, or at least kept in control. This is best when you're "happy" and content. Or at least content enough to keep the machine churning.
Looking critically I think it really started at Nixon.
That was the first real crack in the idea that government and society will work for the people, even if they don’t now. The draft was repealed then. When the us went to war it was everyone’s problem. Now it’s not.
Regan took the ball and ran with it. Radically slashing social safety nets while improving wealth for most. I wasn’t alive for it mentally Ill people didn’t used to live on the streets by the 10,000’s of thousands. Unions protected workers much more than what we have now before that.
There used to be some kind of idea we were all in ‘this’ together.
But maybe since I wasn’t there none of that was true then either.
I feel like empathy is the Hallmark of a healthy soul. Unfortunately, a soul has to be earned through struggle, inner turmoil, forgiveness and growth. Many people just haven't made the effort or gained the experience yet
A lot of them aren't in the yet column, they actively and knowingly refuse to
What happend is that corporations took over. Sites like Reddit, Facebook and such have their "code of conduct" that limits what you can post and violating that results in losing your account. Both examples made this a very painfull punishment as a Facebook account uses your real name and Reddit make sure that you can't really make a new account after being banned. The last decade it's been very noticeable how people start to self censor with bullshit like "PDFile" or "unalive". We're living in a 1984 Big Brother re-enactment.
Januari last year I was banned from Reddit over nothing. I did manage to get a new account for allmost a year until I got banned again, again over nothing. But during those months I did experience a lot of selfcensoring because the thread of another ban.
It's not so much "dumbed down" as it's become company territory with workplace like rules and policies. And we're being treated as unpayed personel.
While also making everyone afraid due to violent criminals roaming the streets.