The Sucker Complex

&gt; The psychological effect on most is that they start to feel like suckers for not pushing the envelope themselves and it’s dangerous because a country of jaded people is not one that can work together to solve common problems.<p>Absolutely. Thank you for hitting the nail on the head!<p>Problem is, the looting can only last so long, until everything has been looted.<p>I suspect not much longer; if you put some of your wealth someplace undebase-able (say, gold or crypto), there is a chance you will make it to the other side.<p>See also Atlas Shrugged, where the producers keeping the world afloat (&quot;Atlas&quot;) decide to go on strike and hide due to populist politics bleeding them dry of their hard work (&quot;shrugged&quot;).

The author’s message - which includes concluding that he’s morally superior to most people - is undermined by his blatantly partisan selection of examples.<p>Personally, I’m of the view it’s a bad idea to spend time documenting in detail how “our tribes have failed to unite, and it is your tribe’s fault”. It implies a lot of pride, and a willingness to turn a blind eye to all sorts of bad behaviour.<p>I mean, if you just want to criticise a politician or individual you don’t like - fair enough. You should feel free to make a point how you like. No one should be expected to be pain-stakingly fair in every post or comment.<p>But if you want a grand narrative that includes, say, 10 examples of bad behaviour, demonstrate some thinking has taken place. Include 2 or 3 examples from whoever you consider to be your tribe. Don’t act like all the problems are other people.

&gt; All that is required to beat this, honestly, is a few people serving as positive role models with transparency and not abusing their authority. I can manage my little corner of the universe but I’m not holding my breath on the rest of the country.<p>Totally lost me in the last paragraph.<p>Can&#x27;t everyone agree that these role models already exist? They&#x27;re just hard to name because they don&#x27;t do anything outrageous to steal our attention. The problem isn&#x27;t that we don&#x27;t know how to act properly -- the problem isn&#x27;t that we need role models. The problem is that there&#x27;s no reason to follow their lead.<p>The solution is nothing short of punishment of these people and enforcement of the law. The problem is the bad people.

We live in a time when the anchors on TV as well as the politicians running the government are telling their supporters to break laws.<p>Be it January 6th or the riots and looting we have seen for the past two years. Both sides have figures in their parties that are advocating for this madness and normalizing it.<p>I am a bit of a patriot who is pretty intent on leaving the world better than how I found it. I help people. I try to set good examples. This whole behavior of the right and left has left me thinking they are both morally bankrupt.<p>I disagree with the article. I do not feel like a sucker. I just feel all of this extremism is really sad and depressing.

&gt; Picture your cousin invited you to go do a little looting last summer and you demurred. Eventually he shows up with a bunch of new Nikes but is later arrested only to have his charges dropped and record expunged. How does that make you feel?<p>The clear intent from the author here is to make the reader feel like they too should have gone looting. This implies, to me, that the author perhaps doesn&#x27;t have a particularly strong moral compass of their own because my honest answer is:<p>&quot;My cousin is incredibly stupid and lucky that they got away with this, I&#x27;m glad I didn&#x27;t join them because even getting away with it I would hate myself. I&#x27;m concerned my cousin thinks this behaviour is ok, think it&#x27;s time to dial back the contact with them&quot;<p>I absolutely don&#x27;t feel: damn I should have gone looting too.

Hard to take anything the guy says seriously when he calls this tweet &quot;objectively amazing&quot; a couple of paragraphs in: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;1470899663087747072" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;1470899663087747072</a>

PSA: it is ok and optimal to merge while driving at the last second, not cheating as the author claims<p>It’s called a zipper merge. Per the state of Minnesota, doing so<p>Reduces differences in speeds between two lanes Reduces the overall length of traffic backup by as much as 40 percent Reduces congestion on freeway interchanges Creates a sense of fairness and equity that all lanes are moving at the same rate<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dot.state.mn.us&#x2F;zippermerge&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dot.state.mn.us&#x2F;zippermerge&#x2F;</a>

&gt; This only gets worse if we do something crazy like forgive massive amounts of debt, whether it’s student or mortgage. The psychological effect on the people who have lived within their means and met their obligations will be radicalizing.<p>Yep.

&gt; Innumerate politicians who themselves mandate harsh covid restrictions living their lives ignoring their own mandates - serial violators Gavin Newsom and Phil Murphy got re-elected!<p>In the Newsom case, his opponent was someone claiming it was all a bunch of nonsense and if elected he&#x27;d do away with all restrictions immediately, so not a very strong vote for the person who&#x27;s upset that he didn&#x27;t take the whole thing seriously enough.

&gt; All that is required to beat this, honestly, is a few people serving as positive role models with transparency and not abusing their authority<p>Good article, but not sure about this conclusion.<p>You don&#x27;t need a few role model, you just need rules that applies to everyone, ref: Singapore. Nobody has a moral compass? No problem, just pretend you have one while there, or else.

I&#x27;ve thought similar things: why am I paying rent &#x2F; mortgage &#x2F; student loans if it&#x27;s all going to be forgiven? What kind of sucker am I? I do it because I know it&#x27;s the right thing to do, but together with a sort of &quot;rebel worshipping&quot; that I see in the startup community (e.g. ycombinator at least used to have questions trying to figure out which rules you&#x27;ve broken in some clever way), I do often come away feeling a little too much like a goody-two-shoes.<p>There&#x27;s often good intentions behind these things, but the argument made here is, I think, an important one to think about.

I really caution people against tying together every bad thing they see into a grand theory of badness. It&#x27;s very seductive, very satisfying, and inevitably leads to weird niche ideas you&#x27;d never endorse from first principles. I remember for a time I was absolutely convinced that most of the problems the author describes (some of them hadn&#x27;t yet happened) could be solved if the police would just be harsher on criminals.

these are just edge cases that get a lot of media coverage. By in large, people in tech, law, finance , etc. are making a lot of money and while being ethical and hard-working. The fear that society is overflowing with opportunists who are just looting the system or getting by without work, is overblown. I understand the author&#x27;s frustration, but incompetence, favoritism, lying (except perjury), and nepotism are generally not crimes, and very few people are able to get by without doing the necessary work. Also, plenty of non-famous people also engage in shitty behavior too but it&#x27;s not newsworthy.

To my ears the author is describing corruption in society. I often wonder if America is getting more corrupt or if we just hear about it much more now due to the internet and social media. I think it&#x27;s the later.

Regardless of the politics, it is frustrating to see people cheat the system and get away with it, that is universal.<p>I have this vague notion that this was less of a problem 30-50 years ago and people would be punished or more against doing this kind of thing just by way of culture and ethics, but I can&#x27;t verify if that&#x27;s true or not, or just the sense you get from movies and tv. I feel like every time people got away with things, the entire society slipped a bit and little by little it eventually eroded to where we are today, where it feels like we are hitting that exponential growth on the curve for societal shittiness.<p>There always seemed to be a notion of &quot;that person can&#x27;t do that and get away with it, it&#x27;ll be all over the news&quot; and that would ruin them or get them punished, but it feels like the last few years people have just called the bluff on that and taken it to it&#x27;s extreme conclusion and can get away with saying or doing anything and it doesn&#x27;t matter if it&#x27;s reported on, people will just go &quot;I can&#x27;t believe they said or did that&quot; and nothing happens or changes (It just got normalized). The smart cheaters took this as an invitation to get away with things more frequently and openly now realizing there are very few repercussions. The only punishment seems to be for a small scale person or business that&#x27;s really only serving a local community. I guess there is no larger sense of community anymore?<p>Do role models exist or have any power to inspire or do they have to become something they aren&#x27;t just so they can be big enough to be seen for their message? Perhaps in a world where there were only like 30-100 tv channels and no YouTube and shitty internet it was easier because there was really only so few options of who you get to see and they were more curated, but now anyone can be seen and the algorithms will just optimize you into something you maybe curiously or accidentally clicked on and take you into (and trap you in) your own tribe, healthy or not. It just feels like there is no way to dig society out of it&#x27;s direction as all the holdouts will eventually give in or their children will. Why is every future sci-fi dystopian pretty much? You take today to it&#x27;s logical conclusion.

The article doesn&#x27;t have an argument or a conclusion. The author FUDs on the floor.<p>We get that things aren&#x27;t perfect, but being afraid helps nobody.<p>It&#x27;s fine to vent to the world, but I think the &quot;publish&quot; button can wait.

This dog-eat-dog &quot;if you don&#x27;t steal, you won&#x27;t survive&quot; endemic level of corruption and ubiquitous legal broken windows is IME not uncommon in shitty third-world countries (of one of which I&#x27;m an expat) where scarcity leads people to prioritize their own needs over common decency and consideration towards others. The &quot;everybody else is cheating, this is the baseline&quot; attitude always felt wrong, but, just like the article said, you were made to feel a fool if you didn&#x27;t participate in it. The US felt like a place that, while not immune to cheating, had strong social and legal norms around it.<p>The most recent phenomenon of this kind I can recall was people lying to vaccination centers about having medical conditions that would help them skip the line ahead of everybody else. I was and still am vehemently opposed to lying about that, despite having been told numerous times that the government would have just thrown the doses away if nobody used them up by lying about their status. Again, you were made to feel a sucker.

&quot;This only gets worse if we do something crazy like forgive massive amounts of debt, whether it’s student or mortgage. The psychological effect on the people who have lived within their means and met their obligations will be radicalizing.&quot;<p>Not nearly as radicalising as a debt-laden permanent underclass.<p>And this just assumes debt comes from living beyond one&#x27;s means, ignoring complexities like historical or systemic unfairness in how it&#x27;s sometimes created and inherited. Investing in education to escape debt cycle is good for people and economies. It&#x27;s so often subsidised because it generally pays for itself many times over. But when it doesn&#x27;t, allowing it to deepen the cycle just keeps people in debt and suppresses economic growth.<p>The productive carrying the less productive is an ancient problem. They usually feel like suckers until they learn it&#x27;s for the good of the society that sustains them.

Disappointed this one didn’t make it in there:<p>Chris Christie Closed New Jersey&#x27;s State Beaches — And Then Went To The Beach<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;thetwo-way&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;03&#x2F;535335917&#x2F;chris-christie-closed-new-jersey-s-beaches-and-then-went-to-the-beach" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;sections&#x2F;thetwo-way&#x2F;2017&#x2F;07&#x2F;03&#x2F;535335917...</a>

I agree with this article in premise. I think about it a lot when it comes to masking up. I&#x27;m pretty religious about that, but when I see people on the subway going maskless, I sometimes think about whether I&#x27;m being ridiculous or not (the latest wave has been a bit of a reassurance, but the point stands).<p>I think the layer that gets left out is the abuse of power in these situations. If someone is unable to pay their rent and they get public assistance, I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s getting off with bad behavior; that&#x27;s a policy decision put into effect. If Nancy Pelosi is benefitting from insider trading because of her ability to steer and change governmental policy, that is abuse.<p>It sounds like I&#x27;m being picky about the examples here, but I think the part that rang the most true was about holding people in the positions of leadership responsible, much like the author&#x27;s Navy Seal friend telling his AOIC&#x27;s to lead by example. If the people in charge get away with something, and I&#x27;m way less publicly visible than they are, what&#x27;s to stop me from trying?

&gt; Jimmy Carter was a bad president but a great role model.<p>Jimmy Carter was a good president in an unfavorable period.

&quot;Jussie Smollett staged a hate crime, and was convicted of such.&quot;<p>Doesn&#x27;t the fact he was convicted and received widespread ridicule everywhere disprove the author&#x27;s point.

I feel* like having to chase returns in an increasingly expensive equity market is a form of avoiding being a sucker. &quot;Only a sucker&quot; would let cash sit in a bank and let inflation eat away at its value or even invest at risk-free rates.<p>This is a bit institutionalized, for example, with housing prices. Anecdotally, I know people who make great salaries but can&#x27;t manage to save up for a place close to work. I was part of that for years until my bitcoin investment solved that problem quick.<p>The point is that if anything is a moral hazard that encourages avoiding being a sucker, it&#x27;s this.<p>* I don&#x27;t have clear examples

It is necessary to train oneself and others to keep on doing the right thing even when no-one else is doing it.

Actually, cutting in at the last minute results in the most efficient traffic flow for everyone. I wish more people would do this, it would help ease traffic!

I think this is (or feels like?) a bigger problem the more you look &quot;upwards&quot; towards celebs, billionaires and politicians. Every media outlet talks about the same ~20 people most of the time - Trump, Elon, Boris etc. while the local news disappears and the local role models go with them. In a small circle everybody knows who the cheater is, they get penalized socially (even if not legally), you see the penalty, and there is little reason to feel like a &quot;sucker&quot; (i.e envy them).<p>The darker spin is that there are now mortals and gods, and us mortals should be content with our lot and not look up at Olympus even as they cheat and loot us. Corruption, inequality, moral decay.. which one comes first?<p>My answer is to be the change you wish to see in the world, which will of course be quickly dismissed as cliche or moralizing. But hey it feels better than calling myself a sucker and joining the looters.

the author has some good points, but mixes corrupt&#x2F;criminal activities with activities that are meant to protect the economy (paying covid rent)

This is a case of the Broken Windows Theory.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.britannica.com&#x2F;topic&#x2F;broken-windows-theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.britannica.com&#x2F;topic&#x2F;broken-windows-theory</a>

The government is easy to abuse and cheat. That is why we want the government to just focus on being a referee to society rather than taking resources from one party at gunpoint and giving it to another. When that happens, pork barrel politics cause massive corruption.<p>We also need to get rid of the outrage culture that prevents the smooth process of law and order.

&gt; All that is required to beat this, honestly, is a few people serving as positive role models with transparency and not abusing their authority<p>In corrupted countries such people are getting killed.

Is the point of the article that the US, already the absolute worst country in the world, and in history, bar none, for percentage of its population behind bars, should ramp up punishment and somehow jail even more of its own people?<p>The first example given is about Hunter Biden selling art. So he&#x27;s not an artist, he&#x27;s the son of the sitting president, and he manages to sell things for a good price, that mainstream critics don&#x27;t find interesting or beautiful (&quot;widely panned art show&quot;)... Good for him!<p>Yes, it&#x27;s quite obvious that some of the buyers are trying to get political favors; but that doesn&#x27;t mean they will get them! The author just sounds envious.

Hang on, what&#x27;s morally wrong with merging late? Speed is lower, and you&#x27;re using the highway more efficiently.

How is this different from the typical authoritarian appeal for incresed &quot;law and order&quot;?

Also happening on an international level with countries ignoring climate change?

Curious about his examples involving liberal politicians, Chris Brown, and one extremely mild one for Trump. He&#x27;s not fooling anyone though that this is mainly a hit piece on &quot;libruls&quot;.

Stopped reading at &quot;Hunter Biden.&quot;

not new

clown

Climate Change Champion Elizabeth Warren Arrives On Her Private Jet<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vavV0Q94MhA&amp;ab_channel=TheDCShorts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vavV0Q94MhA&amp;ab_channel=TheDC...</a>

He conveniently forgets the biggest looters are in congress or the board room

&gt; My friend, a former Navy SEAL, used to tell his AOICs “If you drink two beers the enlisted guys will drink ten. If you punch a dude in the bar, the guys will kill someone. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think it’s a big deal.” At the end of the day, leadership by example is so incredibly important and ours are systematically failing.<p>Amazing that he takes that list of bad behavior and concludes that “and that’s bad because it means that normal people will do much worse things”.<p>Well at least normal people can’t do things like start wars.

&gt; People who don’t pay their rent are getting back-rent forgiven or paid off by taxpayers, same with people who haven’t paid their mortgage in 18 months.<p>This is grotesque. There&#x27;s a pandemic on. Many people had their industries destroyed. Of course they need a hand. While there are parts that are good points about the hypocrisy of power, this is childish.

Boy does this guy have an axe to grind:<p>&gt; For a long time, people didn’t feel like suckers for acting ethically, they felt honorable.<p>&gt; Some notable exceptions to this, and their starkness really highlights how rare these cases are:<p>&gt; …<p>&gt; All that is required to beat this, honestly, is a few people serving as positive role models with transparency and not abusing their authority.<p>Sure, he cites some examples (and there are many more) but in my experience people everywhere try to do the right thing (and if they didn’t, nothing would work, which most people understand intuitively). And I say this having lived not just in wealthy countries but poor ones too (I’m an old fart).<p>Also, his examples are dubious: “flash mobs killing people”, really?<p>If it’s bad news it’s news (maybe I should learn about a possible threat). If it’s routine good news it’s not newsworthy. The author should put down the remote and go outside.