Saturday 2/15/25
Little stymies human growth--or is less of a spur to it--than false positivity. You are not doing anyone a favor but rather the opposite. Further, you're being selfish; you'd rather go through the motions and in effect lie--because that's easier for you--than have the respect for someone to tell the truth or, that failing, behave more truthfully yourself which we can accomplish to some degree by not stepping forward and serving up bouquets of lies.
People don't hold themselves to personal standards. They answer to external stimuli; their gods are the noise. If someone is doing something poorly, but others are lying to them and issuing false praise that they don't mean, the person doing that thing is not going to self-motivate to try and improve. They have the words of praise. That's enough for them. They won't take it upon themselves to be honest and then put the work in. They'll try to believe the bullshit and people--on some level--can get themselves to believe anything, especially in this environment and as they devolve; they're not going to correct it in their head and say, "That's not true, I must do so much better." They certainly won't take it upon themselves to deal in what might be hard and--for a time being, at the least--painful truths.
False positivity is worse than even troll-type negativity because the latter can serve to motivate--someone gets pissed and they find the good anger and channel that--whereas false positivity almost always enables stagnation and the propagation of lies. When we tell ourselves lies, and when we accept lies as if they were truths about ourselves, we make no progress. You sure as hell won't write well.
We are a country where people bill themselves online as financial experts and coaches and planners and yet don't know that the dollar sign goes in front of the number. People who call themselves writers have no idea how then and than work and that "have" and "of" are not the same word. People who cover sports think Super Bowl is one word. Not only does no one know anything, people no longer even understand what knowing something is or what it looks like when someone else actually knows something. They can't recognize it. We can't tell what hardly anything is.
Among the most telling aspects of our world right now is that people are equally okay with receiving credit for something they didn't say or do or come up with on their own as if they did. They don't differentiate in their minds. Simple example: Someone writes something stupid and gets 200 likes on social media. Someone can't think up anything on their own--even something stupid--so they take someone else's stupid thing and post it as if it were their own stupid thing, and they receive 200 likes. That second person will credit themselves for those 200 likes the same as the first person. They will find a way to think that way just as the first person will find a way to think that they didn't say something stupid--after all, look at those likes, and they will be too stupid to realize why they got those likes and that not only don't they mean anything, they actually mean the opposite of what they'd like them to mean.
Extrapolate this as far as you wish. David Remnick steals an idea for me, David Remnick credits himself. Of course, on some level--and it's a level where there lives a voice regarding which such people can never escape, amounting to a reason why they deservedly hate themselves--they know. The person who steals will also hate the person they stole from when they know that person is the real thing in ways they could never be. "I hate you because I have a need to take from you and you would never have a need to take from me."
The term "Nazi" is now thrown around with most of those who do so having no idea whatsoever what Nazis actually were. Everyone should know enough about history to know what a Nazi was, what they believed, and most importantly, what they put into practice. I find it offensive the glibness, the ignorance, the lack of compassion for so many millions of human souls, with how that term is now used. He's a Nazi, she's a Nazi, they're a Nazi, here a Nazi, there a Nazi, everywhere a Nazi. That's not what a Nazi is.
Disagreeing with someone doesn't make them a Nazi. Someone's depressing, mind-rotting stupidity doesn't make them a Nazi. Being a Nazi makes you a Nazi. Putting humans in ovens makes you a Nazi. Believing that's the best way to go makes you a Nazi. Genocide makes you a Nazi. Millions of people were tortured, raped, murdered. Have some respect for them.
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