Rose, Skaven Mars PriestessRoseRaven@eldritch.cafe

Oct 23, 2026, 6:37 PM

Hmmm.

Please bear with me because I'm not entirely sure how to frame my disagreement with this.

1) I am NOT saying people aren't complacent and stupid.

2) I am saying that we have a LOT of evidence that they've always been so. Read old newspaper articles from before 1920 and they are filled with people crying out about these problems in people.

But that really isn't the disagreement.

It is the idea of... bother what is the word.

I'm writing this as I kinda work out the problem.

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Okay so I like to say "People are people." Which sounds stupid but has a meaning.

"People aren't stupid. People are people."
"That group isn't lazy. People aren't lazy. People are people."

The idea being, that by assigning an attribute to people of lazy or smart, we lose track of the fact that on the whole, people aren't significantly different from children.

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But this is a bit flawed because you can take "boys will be boys" and enable a ton of abuse.

I'm not trying to say "actions are excusable because people are people".

That is inherently false. Careful thought about actions and consequences MUST exist because people are people.

But this has always been the case.

We just have better visibility on it than ever before. And people are developing skills to encourage it better than before.

using cheep tricks to distract groups of people and keep them stupid and complacent has ALWAYS been the game of conmen, corrupt priests, selfish merchents, etc.

They just didn't have the ability to do it at scale quite the same way as they do now.

There have always been people, who, because they were hurt or because they were taught or because they saw it happen to others called out the complacency and lack of awareness of others.

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Okay I think that those thoughts enabled me to say this:

I think your framing assigns a level of blame to others that shouldn't exist. (eg: they have gotten WORSE) People have always been that way.

I think you are correct that people like to blame a subset (boomers/lead) for the problem when that is simply one factor in a much larger calculation. And that doing so is bad.

I think you are correct that complacency and stupidity have enabled an amplification of the problem.

I don't think that lack of complacency or stupidity on the broad scale would remove the problem entirely. I don't think it is possible for people en mass because that isn't how we work. We are individuals but as a society we work more like a hive.

We advance because some of us are busy keeping things running while some of us are doing new things while some of us are... etc. But like a mass of "stupid" ants we only do the individual things because of our limited programming and improvement is made when we make minor improvements to the whole at a macro scale.

There is problems with this thought/logic but it feels more like the actual picture than just "everyone is stupid and thats why things are fucked."

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Addendum thought:

It is a bit like when people say the south or texas are just filled with stupid people and that is why they vote red.

Sure there are a lot of stupid complacent people in the south and in texas.

But that isn't why the states are red. They are red because over centuries people have manipulated small advantages into a situation that will take catastrophic change to revert. There are smart, passionate, people who are fighting against this and live there. But once you get a certain amount of entrenchment it takes significantly more fighting to break it up.

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