![](/static/253f0d9b/assets/icons/icon-96x96.png)
![](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/3f6f8c7f-8f4e-48a6-b56f-748fb4d05eb0.png)
We’re all going to be foolish from time to time in life, and I sure know I’d sincerely appreciate a kind hand when it’s my turn.
It depends on your net worth. I see Americans wish death on homeless people for lowering property values and insisting they did it to themselves. I see Americans telling student loan debtors who committed the crime of buying the lie and improving themselves being laughed at for their struggles.
Meanwhile a wealthy person can go to a fancy rehab for years of acting like a belligerent, intoxicated asshole, be called brave for it, and have their job with massive salary waiting for them after it all.
Second chances (and third, and fourth…) are for capital holders. Poor people half to walk a tightrope from birth and be both lucky and perfect to improve their station, with plenty of people ready to scold them for trying the moment they fall.
It’s a numbers thing and it’s why empathy tends to diminish as population swells.
Here it feels like community, like one’s opinion is appreciated. Reddit became a place to hope you get acknowledged at all, where swaths of the community came solely waiting to shout others down and win a fight.
Unfortunately, for all of Reddit’s faults, that wasn’t a reddit thing, that was just a glaring, crippling defect inherent to humanity. As numbers increase here, that old familiar reddit apathy and antagonism will return. Just play the game of what would you be willing to do, not just rhetoric, for a random person in your circle of friends vs someone from your town/city vs the world. Psychologists call it psychic numbing.