“I have enough food *because* someone else is starving.”
“I am safe *because* someone else is in danger.”
“I am respected *because* someone else is despised.”

this may sound like an absurd caricature but I can assure you that I have met numerous people who think this way!

— ƨꭋɘƨꭋɘvdo (@obversers) June 16, 2021

Most people think this way, I believe. It’s what capitalism as we practice it tells us, and liberalism is worse even than conservatism in a lot of ways regarding their reinforcement of this ideology. All is a zero-sum game, in our current mythology. If you have something it must’ve been taken from someone else; otherwise, how did you get it?

Yes, the world doesn’t work and doesn’t have to work this way, but in believing it, we have made it so in many cases, and are worsening this. It’s possible to have a world that lifts everyone, but no one seems to really want this.

I think I’ve figured out why a lot of liberal types hate weightlifting and people who improve themselves that way. It’s related to the real reason many women (and more than few men) hate pick-up artist stuff: it’s that people are upgrading themselves “artificially,” achieving advantages they otherwise would not have been able to attain.

To many libs, there is the way you “really” are (whatever the fuck that means) and improving yourself beyond that is seen as an unearned advantage. They don’t see education that way, of course, because it’s the terrain on which PMC-class libs were born competing, so they just view that as the natural order of things — even though, logically, from their diseased viewpoint it should be no different.

Upgrading yourself outside the narrow spectrum of the approved areas elicits their scorn, which in truth should be worn like a badge of honor.