Collective abuse has a much higher threshold of being tolerated in our world because there is no single person that can be held responsible for the decisions. It is obvious for instance that the vast majority of workplaces are essentially abusive when it comes to fairness and human dignity. No one would accept a life where they slave away for an ungrateful boss who keeps demanding more and more from them if they didn't need the job for their money. And in the case of a larger company, HR (a telling term, treating people as resources) can hide behind the effects of the market for their dehumanizing decisions, but the effect remains the same: workers are neglected as much as the company can get away with it, because everyone needs to work to provide for themselves.
The nature of neglect has undeniably changed over the past centuries, after all most people, at least if they are in decently wealthy parts of the world, do not need to go down in the mines or work with dangerous factory equipment all day long. But first of all, those jobs still exist (though in the case of mining, the methods are very different now), it's just that they have been exported to poorer countries, and second of all, just because we are no longer in physical danger doesn't mean that work has become a pleasant experience either.
Instead of physically grueling and perhaps dangerous work, we now find ourselves doing essentially meaningless tasks to keep up the illusion of growth in a bullshit economy, maintaining and expanding a bureaucratic world which keeps swallowing real value and real human qualities under its oppressive demands.
And we still have the fundamental problem that individuals are utterly dependent on companies, states and institutions for their needs, all of which are systems which can never treat human beings for who they are, but have to reduce them down to manageable, quantifiable parts in a giant machine-world. If this doesn't sound like abuse to you, then you have simply become calloused to the insensitivity (and insanity) of our world.
Because what it means is that regular people are completely dependent on inherently dehumanizing processes to even live a normal life. You have to interact with people who are definitely not on your side, just to live! Think of how insane that is in the entirety of mankind. People used to live in small tribes where they could trust one another, which is why, by default, we trust what we hear, we go along with the group, because those instincts are healthy and reasonable in the environments we evolved within. That doesn't mean that life was perfect, certainly not, hardships always existed and always will. But what it meant is that whatever troubles you had, you knew that there were people you could come back to which had your back.
Not so much in the atomized modern world. The teachers in school are not on your side, often expecting the worst out of everyone before it even happens. Many of the other students are not on your side either, some of whom are quite fine bullying others. Doctors aren't on your side, they don't really want to help you live fully, they just want to manage your symptoms and extract money from you. The same is true for therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists broadly speaking. Companies are not on your side, especially when it comes to food, the literal thing you feed your body, because the effects of poor-quality food are complex and take a long time to manifest. Insurance is not on your side. The people you buy a car from are not on your side, and you definitely need one because the place you live in is far from the place you work. The person you rent from is not on your side. And the people who get you to work for them are definitely not on your side, which is why they try to pay you as little as they can get away with, while extracting as much as possible from you.
It's not that interacting with other people is bad, or even depending on them, that would be an incredibly anti-social and even anti-human way to look at life. Of course we need others in our life, there is nothing wrong with some forms of dependency on others. But the crucial difference lies in one simple question: can you trust the people you depend on? And my assessment of modern life is a stark no in the vast majority of situation. No, the people I need things from are not trustworthy.
I can trust the person serving me coffee, because at the end of the day it isn't a very important thing, and also because I am paying money for their service, but by default I would never trust a politician, a marketer, an HR person, a manager, an academic, a doctor, a self-help writer, and all the types of professionals, the ones who mediate your access to other things.
And then we complain that young people are selfish and anti-social, or that workers do the bare minimum in their job, or that people are cynical about the future. Yeah, it's hard to want to engage with society if the main experience you get in it is a ruthlessly selfish transaction, where you must almost fight for your own right to be respected as a human being. People become insensitive in an insensitive world, not because human beings are inherently cold, cruel or selfish, but because we are a reflection of our environment.
Young children want to explore, play and make friends, but they have to contend with a world which offers none of those things nowadays. Exploration is killed off because we force them to go through the conveyor belt of institutions and credentials, preferring the quest for the "right" answer over the natural inclination to learn about your environment and yourself. Likewise play is dead, because it isn't useful, useful to the self that is. And relationships are secondary to the growth of the technological system, which requires us to attend to its needs because our own social needs, and then atomizes all of social reality, rendering it as homogeneous as possible, and leads to a constant change in social arrangements, which is why people frequently move around the world and lose contact with old friends.
Should we be surprised then that so many people are deeply afraid of authority, to the point where asking for help is seen as a personal failure? They are afraid to ask for help because a part of them doesn't feel like it is safe to do so, because school heavily punishes anyone who doesn't follow the rhythm which is imposed onto them. Whenever a child struggles in school, they do not receive this as feedback that they do not understand something and would need some guidance to navigate their difficulties.
Instead, it is treated by the teachers and the parents as a personal failure: the child is bad, or dumb, which means that we must make them feel bad about it. Let's shout at the child so that they feel afraid of having low grades. Or nowadays, the opposite thing is done, where children are made to feel good about themselves all the time, even if no one knows how to do anything. But the fundamental coupling between performance in school and someone's intrinsic value as a person is missed, because within society, you are only your identity, what can be described, assessed, compared and be made useful, not you as a conscious person.
Or what about work? Should we be surprised that people, especially younger ones, do as little as they are required to do by their position? There is nothing in the past, what they've observed about their parents' jobs, or in the present, their current job, that informs them that one gets rewarded in any significant way for being diligent at work. If anything, it leads to a bunch of stress, on top of extra responsibility, since the most productive workers are solicited even more by those around and above them. The people at work, especially the managers, are not on the side of the workers, so why act like they will not try to extract as much value as possible from you?
I suspect that the vast majority of companies underpay their workers somewhat, because they know that most people desperately need money in the short term to pay their bills, since they cannot afford the financial burden and uncertainty of quitting their job for potentially another, which will very likely have the same problems. Economists talk of a job "market", as if there was a symmetry between those providing the jobs and those taking them up, but the reality is anything like that, as any regular person knows. The reality is that regular people are a few paychecks away from not having any money in their bank account, meanwhile a company could probably stave off the disappearance of any single employee for many months. This means that workers are significantly more in need of the job than the employer, which is why the former hardly have any bargaining power compared to the latter, especially for those who come out of school or who are lower class.
All of this, and much more, is why I am anti-system. There is a fundamental asymmetry between individuals and systems: the former depend on the latter for even their basic needs, whereas the latter ruthlessly optimize for their own power, destroying all the things we care about in the process. A system can only meet certain quantifiable, utilitarian goals, and even then with many trade-offs, which is why we have decently working computers and cars, but not anything great even in the domain of technology.
Leave the domain of the utilitarian though and the value of systems is not just zero, but blatantly negative. We live in a cultural wasteland, filled with atomized and apathetic people, because they have no greater whole to contribute to, and no real community to turn back to when things become difficult. Culture and community are not things that are quantifiable, nor are they useful to the technological system, which is why they are consistently on the wayside, destroyed by the result of externalities, the same way that natural ecosystems are.
The idea that a company has actual rights is a kind of insanity too. It's almost like we are upholding those demonic (this word is not to be taken too literally) abstract entities, such as companies onr institutions, as more important than human lives. They influence us in obvious ways, due to the fact that we have to interact with them to go about our life, but as soon as we tr to influence them, we get me with push back and ideas such as "it wouldn't be good for the economy", or "it wouldn't work anyway, they would find a loophole", or "they just do what they are incentivized to do". A total inversion of what life is supposed to be about.
I believe that this anti-social trend of our world is why so many have now retreated to the screen: video games, social media, pornography, because the world at large feels so hostile and cold. Not that this is an excuse for escapism of course. We are all, at the end of the day, responsible for our lives, even if no one in particular is to blame for the state of the modern world.
But all of this highlights a simple reality that our calloused heart might not feel, which is that humans need a supportive environment in order to thrive, otherwise they fall back down to a life of mere survival, of mere habits and unconsciousness.
Many people struggle with staying afloat in the modern world, with juggling their basic needs, and this is not because people have become weak or unable to do anything difficult, even if there is some truth to that, but because fundamentally, no human being can function very well in the utterly atomizing and anti-human world that modernity has brought about. We need a stable and nourishing soil to root ourselves into, so that we may grow into healthy, whole beings. Without it, we wither away and look everywhere for a sense of safety, even becoming cynical that there is no such thing as thriving, only selfishness and constant abuse. But our heart knows better than that deep down.
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Collectivemisery Jobs Justification Fear Boundaries Slavemorality Lowtrust Leviathan Atomization
2026-04-02