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I think this response is beautiful. This was the standard response of the laissez-faire economist and the social liberal pre-2024. It has dominated western politics and was basically the default position of anyone who drank water, breathed air, and wanted to not be fucked with. Leave well enough alone, what I do is my business. You don't have a right to tell me what to do, and I don't have a right to tell anyone what to do.
I also think that this response is very dated. Partly as a result of the way the internet systematically crushed the vast majority of social barriers to information, partly because of the wilful detonation of social structures and institutions (What if people are excluded? Well, then everyone needs to be excluded! Wait, why'd they let that in? Screw this, I'm outta here!).
There is a fantasy of man as an island that has never gone away.
It is still possible, for some, to a limited extent. For the rest of us, who don't hunt, kill and butcher our own meat, make our own clothing, craft our own domiciles and generate our own electrical power, we have to engage with society in some way. But that breaks the fantasy. We wish to think of ourselves as alone, fully in control of our own destinies, that society loses more from us not participating in it than we lose by not participating in society.
I think we're past that. Isolated as we are, we are all easy pickings for those who've managed to coordinate meanness. I think that's also why people have such poor reactions to this poor creature who has sold her body to a crowd for attention. They are concerned with great ideas, like the collapse of pair bonding, stable male-female relationships, and what this signals for both sides of the fence, as well as the governments that rule them. Maybe some of them are concerned for her mental well-being, who knows. It's a tug of war between those who see society as something to be preserved, shaped in a way that benefits them, or at least in a way that doesn't make their lives actively worse, and those who couldn't give a hundred fucks about society.
We do not care for the crackhead. What he does with crack is his business. But we do not live near him either.
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