Cyanide & Happiness

Littering is seen as more common than it really is in the public perception thanks to all kinds of cynical messaging from industry groups, like, for example, Big Tobacco and the infamous “Crying Indian Ad”.

This messaging has the effect of shifting the blame of environmental devastation away from industry and onto individuals, much like how the fossil fuel industry popularized the term ‘carbon footprint’ and shifted the onus of fossil fuel emissions away from the fossil fuel industry and onto individuals.

As for the disgusting types of comments depicted in the next panel of the comic, a great deal of that is generated by bots to divide us. It also doesn’t help things in this particular case that only 1 of the 2 main parties/sides in the world’s most “important” country (important and dominant culturally, economically, etc.) is willing to consider any changes to approaches to widespread availability of guns. Creating division is as easy as having bots go around blaming anything (even victims!) except the relative ease of access to guns in the US.

This comic sadly plays into exactly the kind of thinking that leads to defeatism and broad mistrust. The common person is not, in fact, bad.

In fact, it is instead a relatively small number of psychopaths that perpetuate many of the kinds of problems depicted in this comic. The CEOs of any given Big Oil or Big Tobacco company are almost inevitably psychopaths. And we almost cannot help but continue to give power to these kinds of people. They are, after all, often the only ones who think so highly of themselves and their abilities to even offer to take on a leadership role. Sometimes they crave little more than the power itself. And they are the ones with the most power to steer the directions of messaging towards individual blame and individual misdeeds, rather than towards faith in the common person and blame on the corporations they lead.

In other words, the comic’s author is falling right into the trap of being led to see the world misanthropically. When you think “the problem is people,” instead of “the problem is a few people,” there is very little to do except become depressed and inactive.

To solve many of the world’s biggest problems, we literally just need more of the people who first doubt that they themselves could be a good leader to instead raise their hands, instead of letting only the psychopaths and narcissists raise their hands and rise to power.