What’s a thought pattern that’s way too common and damaging to society?
That a life has to be made worth something instead of it being intrinsically valuable.
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.
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.
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.
Transphobia, racism, misogyny…
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 🙃
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.
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.
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 like it so it must be bad” in relation to all kinds of media. So many people can’t accept that something just isn’t meant for them. There are literally thousands of games, movies and albums getting released every year so if you don’t like something, just don’t buy it and move on instead of complaining to (and sometimes about) those of us who are looking forward to it.
Edit: this might not strictly be the most toxic behavior but it makes social interactions super annoying, even in small groups and it seems to coincide with people who are overall fond of forcing their personal views and beliefs on others.
I think you nailed it when you wrote " forcing their personal views and beliefs on others". That is what we see happening now with people trying to control others. We see it in government and with religion. It is trickling down to where the common person feels it is not only okay to do, but that they must do it to compete with others and get ahead.
It does also sometimes stem from people’s inability to elaborate. Like if you dislike something, there’s a reason you hate it. That’s why I especially hate reviews like “it’s mid” or “it’s goated”/“it’s peak” like they barely help.
I think a lot about how “good” and “fun” are two different things.
You can have a game that’s a fascinating exploration of a theme that really unifies mechanics and story, but is an absolute downer of misery to play.
You can also have a game that’s a glorified slot machine with bugs, no real player input, and abusive monetization, but people’s brains light up playing it.
There’s some subjectivity of course, but sometimes I see games that are good at what they’re trying to be, but I don’t have any fun with them. Some people seem to demand those overlap all the time.
I would say that‘s an entirely different point. If someone likes to literally watch paint dry, who am I to invade their discussions tell them they shouldn’t? Let people like what they like even if you personally think it’s neither good nor fun.
What I was trying to get at is something can be worthwhile even if you don’t personally enjoy it.
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”.
That with hard work, grit, and determination you can become wealthy in the USA too.
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!
Conservatism, probably. The whole in-group supremacy thing is pretty bad.
In-group suoremacy isn’t restricted to conservatism though, sadly.
Words can cause harm, but can’t change minds.
“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…)
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
