What’s a thought pattern that’s way too common and damaging to society?
Assuming the worst about people.
It’s so common and pervasive that even as I was reading the comments thinking about it, I fell for it while reading one of the comments.
I don’t owe you anything.
Well, that’s the social contract that define’s society. It’s literally damaging to society.
Anyone I’ve heard say this IRL is usually mid act of going out of their way to antagonize everyone around them for absolutely no reason.
on the flipside, ime this can look like drawing necessary boundaries too.
Words can cause harm, but can’t change minds.
anthropomorphising pets. IMO it’s a mental condition.
Climate change ignorance on the other hand is existential to civilisations existence and is being ignored, so humans are able to jump through all sorts of mental hoops
That all men are evil, I admit I’m a sinner of this. My terrible experiences make me think men are evil but I know that’s wrong and toxic I’m working on it. I must admit tho that these experiences constantly happening are making it too difficult 🙃
Trauma responses are hard. I think it’s great you’re actively working on it and are conscious of your own biases, that’s huge. Good luck!
You just haven’t gone far enough; all women are evil too.
I read something the other day that sorta explains this. I felt the same way you do. But what I read was that women know that all men aren’t evil. But they aren’t sure which one’s are. It just clicked in my head and helped me understand the mentality.
Way too many young people (in the west, I’m not sure about elsewhere) are extremely pessimistic about the future. They aren’t necessarily wrong they also feel like they don’t have any control. It definitely opens a window for radicalisation, but it’s just sad to see.
I’d say nihilism and apathy. Of course life has no objective meaning, it has the meaning we assign to it. I remember someone telling me “humans are selfish, we can’t change things for the better” or something to that effect. It really pissed me off. With that attitude, you sure as shit can’t. If we all came together, we absolutely could force positive change.
The fact that life has no inherent meaning is my primary motivator to give it meaning. No one decides what I mean except me, and I say I mean something.
That’s now how the internet rules go. WE, “the comment section®”, decide what you mean and you know it!
That discomfort, or your feelings in general, are a reliable indicator of morality or good/badness
Its the root of a lot of chauvinism, but also just a common thinking trap you see across many different subcultures and spaces
Was going to say Spectrum B/C disorders, C/PTSD, which comes from trauma, toxic environments, and sometimes some different brain workings. The most tragic part is, these conditions are extremely treatable, a couple are reversible, with good, ongoing talk therapy and shadow work, which is so very inaccessible to those who want them and often easily accessible to those who don’t.
“Most toxic” depends on who’s annoyed this week, but there are a few recurring mental habits that reliably rot discourse without even trying.
My biggest pet peeve is probably moral absolutism, often disguised as clarity. That’s the mindset where everything gets forced into clean categories of pure good vs pure evil, with zero tolerance for the rainbow of nuance.
Next up is identity-as-proof. If someone is in Group X, then they must believe Y, and any counterexample is treated as an anomaly or betrayal. It saves effort because you don’t have to think, just sort people into bins and react accordingly.
Then there’s algorithmic certainty syndrome, which is more modern and a bit more subtle. People get used to feeds that reinforce their priors so efficiently that disagreement starts to feel like statistical noise. So instead of updating beliefs, they just escalate confidence. Nothing says “epistemic humility” like being completely wrong with confidence.
Another one is transactional morality: “If I’m right, I’m allowed to be as harsh as I want.” Which turns every disagreement into a license for cruelty, as if correctness automatically comes with behavioral immunity.
And underneath a lot of it is something simpler and more disconcerting: comfort with not understanding things before judging them. People are so eager to tell others what they are by labeling them and defining them rather than simply talking about themselves (you… vs. I…)
Anti-intellectualism
Making fun of people for reading or learning or knowing “too much” about a thing
i don’t see anyone making fun of it, but i do seem people characterizing intellectuals as either disconnected and stuck up; or depressed and childless; or godless and doomed to hell for it and all of it is done with the vaguely hidden intention of warning everyone else against intellectual pursuits or else they’ll end up like disconnected, depressed, and/or godless.
Probably not the worst, but my personal worst that comes to mind is manosphere bullshit that spreads like wildfire among men who aren’t happy with their life. I can sadly even see it with some friends, they don’t fully buy into it but most men are vulnerable to it because it’s an easy “solution”.
Hivemind Mentality.
You cannot ever say one is allowed to freely express themselves, but then turn around and shut down any opposing viewpoint that even includes ones you don’t like to hear. Everyone wants to hear themselves talk and even more, wants those to echo them.
It is even worse when it’s operated under zero tolerance. Okay so at that point, freedom to express yourself is out the window. Mind as well not have any opinions.
Transphobia, racism, misogyny…
Believing that poverty is a moral failure. Though that’s been an issue for millenia.
I guess it is more a thing of Western countries. Max Weber suggested that the Protestant Reformation, led to the belief that economic success was a sign of divine favor, legitimizing wealth inequality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism
In the case of the Soviet Union, Marxist-Leninist doctrine treated poverty as a product of class exploitation under capitalism rather than personal failure. Official discourse emphasized that unemployment, homelessness, and destitution were systemic features of bourgeois economies. Within Soviet society, this translated into a strong normative expectation that the state bore responsibility for guaranteeing employment, housing, and basic welfare. While in practice shortages and inequalities persisted, the cultural script did not legitimize blaming the poor; instead, marginalization was often interpreted as a failure of planning, bureaucracy, or remnants of pre-socialist class structures.
A comparable ideological orientation can be found in the People’s Republic of China, particularly during the Maoist period. Under Mao Zedong, poverty was framed as the legacy of feudalism and imperialism. Campaigns such as land reform and collectivization were justified precisely on the premise that peasants were victims of structural oppression rather than agents of their own deprivation. Even in the post-1978 reform era, although market mechanisms reintroduced inequality, official rhetoric continues to stress “poverty alleviation” as a state-led responsibility, culminating in large-scale programs aimed at eradicating extreme poverty without moralizing the poor as individually culpable.
That efficiency is an absolute good.
