• bastion
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    3 months ago

    Perhaps, that they get off on the whole process of projecting “this person is so awesome and can’t fail!” because it feels good and gives them hope, and what’s wrong with good vibes anyways, amirite? …along with that goes a lot of physical resources and torrents of surface-level emotional support.

    …until the person buys into it wholesale because it’s all they’re fed, and, because they think they can’t fuck up now, they start fucking up. Once they start fucking up, opinion starts turning. As opinion turns, the emotional support dries up. Obsessive adoration becomes obsessive hatred, person by person. What was manageable when everyone helped is no longer manageable when everyone fights you. You feel betrayed, and care about the people less. You make more shitty decisions. A feedback loop occurs, until the person realizes (well enough) what’s going on, and ducks out of the race, or buys into the negativity and adopts that as their self-view, or (occasionally) just handles the strain and breaks on through to the other side.

    Meanwhile, people got to feel hope (yay, wasn’t that nice?!) and “justified” hatred (i mean, clearly he’s the asshole! What a fucking power mongering dickhead!).

    And, what do you need after all that? Hope! Let’s find something positive to think about!

    It’s cringey. That’s not to say that Musk’s behavior isn’t also cringey - it’s just clear to me that the cringe isn’t centralized on him, it’s well-distributed. There are a LOT of people that are just as trashy - and it’s generally the people that are all about burning him down (most of whom were all about building him up before).

    The fun part is - even though I find it all really interesting, cringey, etc, at the end of the day, I kindof don’t care. I’m just watching people get what they deserve. I wish they deserved better, and maybe they will someday - but their own behavior has 'em locked in a loop.

    We all fuck up sometimes, but at least it’s somewhat self-limiting, even on the massive collective scale.