Aug 07, Year 1 of Publication
“Everyone has problems; No one is to blame for mine,” is the first principle of the failed religion that saved two nations from tearing themselves apart in the Twenties and put a stake through the heart of the six Bishnap false religions.
It was an unlikely candidate for that honor, since it tried to accomplish its practice without a god that has a personal interest in humanity, but it was more than the social movement it started out as, so I’ll keep calling Pragmatic Compassionism a religion, and you can argue with each other about it in the comment strands.
Little remains of this once very popular religion’s actual tenets, aside from a greater tendency to use turn signals and practice zipper merging on the freeway, but the ripples from what happened because of the Pragmatic Compassionists’ goals is hard to overstate.
You may think that the Swinger Generation (so named for their part in moving the pendulum back toward earlier social norms, and NMwhatchudu, don’t call them GenAlpha anymore) was not trying to help society, but I think that, while they were doing what some today term Enlightened Selfishness, they were also trying to address some of the social ills they saw around them, with everyone blaming someone else or some deity or spirit for all their difficulties.
It makes sense, in hindsight. Hating other people or blaming them for things is counterproductive in the long view, even if they did have something to do with your misfortune; we’ve seen over and over that people who mistreat others get it back with interest. Never mind that most of the people who got blamed for things in the Twisted Twenties had nothing to do with what they were blamed for.
And the first step was obvious, if slow to be adopted: gentle backlash against the hate. Telling people who responded to hateful comments that engaging with a rager was not done, that it just end courage them, and that it should be taken elsewhere if pursued. After a while, people stopped responding to hate with anything more than “(pity)” and the ragers, not getting much attention, gave up.
Of course, the introduction of autonomic weighting and dislike magnitude helped with this, but most of you will already be familiar with that. It’s enough to say that when a hate content gets a magnitude 3 dislike ratio, people realize they’ve misread the room.
It really simplifies to another of the PCs’ maxims: When you see poop on the ground, you don’t gotta pick it up.
And once people saw they had permission to not be held hostage by ragers and their hate, they stopped being held hostage by unreasonable demands. As a society, we started looking at what was demanded and saying, “You’re welcome to do that and want this, but you don’t get to demand that I do this or believe that, so you can have it. Earn it.”
Some PCs had a problem with this stance, claiming it was not compassionate, but another movement was also emerging: the Rational Sovereignists. They held that for anyone to demand you agree with them was tyranny, and the only exception they held was in roundly driving down anyone who used the platform to excuse abandoning their responsibilities. Opponents argue that responsibility violated sovereignty, but the RSs held firm that people choose their responsibilities, and that familial responsibilities, to the point of reason, were a small price for the provision they gave you without your negotiating for it.
Both movements endured strident criticism, but both movements were born out of an atmosphere that criticized everything and everyone, so they sported the enlightened shrug and kept moving forward, resisting even attempts by media and government to characterize them as not caring about “The Us.”
The PCs continued to gain tractions as people became fatigued of consuming hate and finally seeing a way out of it. And amazingly, the platforms aided them by disincentivizing problematic behaviors. Because people wanted better, and they rewarded the platforms that did better, and our society became a little bit more compassionate, because it was suddenly the most practical thing to do, thanks to these quirky people and their quirky religion that claimed to not be a religion.
What do you think has had the biggest impact since the Twenties? What made the biggest improvement? What’s the most important thing society still needs to work on? Let me know in the comment strands!