This was not what I discovered in my research on virality. The first was outrage, yes, spot-on there. But the second was AWE. If people saw something beautiful, amazing, brilliant, they want to be associated with those things, so they share. And the third indicator of virality is humor.
Do you have numbers on this? I’d love to see them. Sounds fascinating.
As a much-maligned “social justice warrior,” I find that we’re often misunderstood when we discuss these rich motherfuckers.
I mean, I envy the rich in my “off” hours — who doesn’t want a helicopter sitting on your own private yacht anchored off the Virgin Islands?
But justice — which motivates a great many SJW’s — doesn’t give a shit about those things. In fact, if I had them I probably couldn’t enjoy them, because I’d be off somewhere battling for something or other.
As someone who is admittedly very often critical of SJ, I honestly think SJ misses the boat by not focusing on wealth enough, in the right places. Most of what the SJs attribute to “white privilege” is just “wealth privilege” that happens to be bound up inside the white population, because wealth itself is heritable in the same way genes are, and the advantages of being raised with wealth tend to reinforce the path to wealth.
I honestly think SJ could do itself a lot of good if it pivoted away from this “intersectionality” thing and towards a raw understanding that most of the things it’s complaining about are purely driven by how slowly wealth moves through the system.
Conservatives value the individual above all (the left calls this selfishness and sociopathy). Progressives value tribe above all (the right calls this collectivism and tyranny). The left literally gets our self-esteem by being of service to the community.
This is a reasonable analysis of the fringes, I’d think. But I don’t think it gives the conservatives enough credit. They do a lot of things individually for the community, more in fact statistically speaking that the left does. And there’s the question about overall societal efficacy of the left’s policies, if they’re too broad. Communism was very bad for the community, objectively speaking, so at the minimum the lefts tendencies have to be held in check.
In terms of the overall drive, though, I think you nailed it. It is an individual vs a collective interpretation of the world. The main problem I think with collectivist thinking, is that collective reward and collective responsibility come with collective blame, and collective blame leads to a dark path.
