I caught a video on YouTube by a guy monologuing about how horrible working in an Amazon warehouse is. I then noticed how many more there are by other commentators, with tens of thousands of views. Even Joe Rogan (a.k.a Bro Brogan) has a YouTube clip with Krystal Ball that’s about the mistreatment of Amazon workers. This clip in particular has over 3.5 million views. That especially got me thinking about how many warehouse, delivery, and general service-sector workers are simultaneously right-wing and depressed by their work. I’ve read “What’s the Matter With Kansas,” “The Reactionary Mind,” and some other material on conservative ideology, but I still wonder why feeling alienated at work does not more often lead to a reversal and radicalization of erstwhile MAGAs and right-wing guys. I assume it’s all individualized and they don’t care about workmates. So, despite feeling dehumanized at work, do they merely tell themselves it’s a temporary stage until their BitCoin, NFTs, or other crypto investments pay out? Are they limited from hating bosses and landlords for the simple reason that soon enough they will be one, or both?

  • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    62
    ·
    edit-2
    20 days ago

    Speaking as someone who comes from a right-wing family, the reason is actually pretty sad and part of the reason I find capitalism so disgusting on a fundamental level (aside from all the obvious stuff).

    Their mindset is this: “People are shitty and selfish. The world is eat or be eaten. Survival of the fittest means the big dominates small. Leftism is naive and unrealistic because people are just selfish by nature. I’ve seen when [insert neoliberal party that people think is left] is in power and they’re just as corrupt and dishonest as my boss. Everyone just has to look after themselves and survive the day or they’ll go crazy. The best I can hope for is to save myself by getting a lucky break somehow. Maybe if I just invest in the right thing I’ll make it big.”

    Basically, they have been fucked over enough by the system that they no longer believe in empathy or kindness. They see the current system as inevitable and natural because school teaches us that’s the the way it’s always been. They think that everyone, every. Single. Person. Is only “kind” to get ahead. Everything is cynical and transactional and that’s just how we are as a species naturally.

    This is why I hate the way we teach ecology. It is still taught in a way that promotes misleading and incorrect interpretation of the natural world and how animals survive and interact. Eugenics may not be explicitly taught any more but it’s ideals are still carried forward in the social consciousness by the outdated and irresponsible way life, biology, history and social sciences are taught. That idea of natural order, of survival of the fittest meaning domination of the “weak” without any thoughts behind how social species succeed will be the death of us.

    It’s been absolutely heart wrenching watching my generation (millennials) have their souls slowly crushed to dust and their hearts hardened by this inhuman system. Millennial middle class liberals and rich chuds might be cringe, but millennial working class right-wingers are truly a tragedy.

    • FromPieces@lemmygrad.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      20 days ago

      Fuck, your creation of the argument reads exactly like it was written by an ex-friend of mine.

      “It’s not nice, but no one else is either. Just worry about your own…”

    • SouthEndSunset@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      20 days ago

      That with a bit of “you just need to work hard and you’ll make it” thrown in. I’ve always worked hard. Never made an amazing wage. Seen loads who do not work hard go on to great stuff.

  • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    43
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    20 days ago

    Only the libs are fine with plugging in their ears and thinking that things are mostly fine right now. Chuds hate their bosses and landlords, they usually can admit that things are fundamentally not-good in the world right now. The essence of reactionary ideology is recognizing that yet mistakenly attributing it to the social progress of the last x years. The world really sucks, but it’s because we let women vote; it’s because we let the coloreds into our kids’ schools; it’s because we let the gays marry; it’s because we let the etc. etc. They find a general problem, a systemic problem, but blame it on something in particular, and fetishize a mythologized past that they seek to return to when they imagine that the problem wasn’t present.

  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    31
    ·
    edit-2
    20 days ago

    Primary distinction between conservative ideology/mindset/brain and … hell, even a lot of liberals, as well as other thought modes:

    Preservation of social hierarchies is the prime directive.

    Basically all of conservative thought derives from this, and its often so completely innate that it is not even consciously realized, or formulated.

    The fish doesn’t realize it’s been swimming in water its whole life until it is removed from it sort of thing.

    A conservative is likely to not like their particular boss, or perhaps even realize that bosses in general, or in some kind of limited category (likely a category that is foreign to their lived experience), are encouraged to be shitty, selected as bosses because they are shitty.

    But its not capitalism, its crony capitalism, its a lack of law enforcement stopping crime.

    Its not all bosses, its Wall Street execs, its Jewish Bankers, its that one no good old money family.

    They will conclude that this unequal social power structure is inevitable, unavoidable, necessary for society to exist without collapsing into chaos, and thus the idea of power abusing bosses in general is good.

    The dullard conservative hopes to become the boss simply for the material benefits and the ability to abuse others as they have been abused.

    The ‘enlightened’ conservative learns some surface level pop or psuedo history or sociology or politics to justify their own position as ‘temporarily embarassed millionaire’ as well as their boss’s position, because ‘society would fall apart otherwise’.

    IE, the bootlicker mentality.

    Seriously, go find an actual conservative and don’t use any scary trigger words like socialism or capital or means of production or Marxism…

    … and attempt to explain to them how… well democracy is good, right? Bosses often make arbitrary, stupid, incompetent decisions, right? Wouldn’t it be better if all the employees got together and voted every quarter on a company strategy, instead of just having it dictated to them? And then the current work hierarchy stays in place, but is directed toward executing the goals everyone agreed on?

    What you’ll find is that actual conservatives, in this kind of conversation, will usually basically outright reject the concept of democracy within a workplace, because that would upset the existing, clearly defined power structures.

    They’ll even tell you they don’t trust their own competence or the competence of other employees to make such decisions, despite usually having previously agreed that their boss is incompetent.

    Conservatives often do not actually believe in democracy…they’re just kind of good at going through the motions of pretending they do, which they ironically only do to fit in with the perceived current status quo.

    That’s why we’ve seen so many of them basically go full mask off fascist in the Trump era. Now they no longer have to pretend that democracy is all that important, as Trump managed to basically break it, while openly mocking it, which to conservatives is a huge relief: See? Might makes right, we can stop pretending otherwise now and just accept reality as it always has been.

    It isn’t logical, it isn’t coherent, it doesn’t parse if you lay it out in symbolic logic.

    But that doesn’t matter. The conservative, deep down, wants and believes in a rigid social hierarchy.

    They really, really like the idea of everything fitting neatly into categorized boxes which do not change, never need to be updated, and which do not have exceptions.

    That’s why they knee jerk hate LGBTQ.

    That’s why they still cannot admit climate change is actually happening.

    That’s why they basically cannot create art, why their ‘comedy’ punches down and is based on cliches and sterotypes, why everything they learned in high school 30 years ago is totally correct and does not need alteration or further expansion or context, that’s why the Bible is the unchanging, infallible word of God, etc.