The Era of Suicidal Lunatics
Trigger warning: this article talks about lunatics.
THE world has entered a cycle of wars and economic perils. There's no sign of that stopping any time soon. As a result, some people have become desperate and are looking for vengeance, in effect trying to attack other people instead of trying to improve their own lives. They wage a war of attrition that is collectively detrimental. Put another way, they become a yoke on society.
This isn't unprecedented. It happened about a century ago when people went nuts and sought to harm people around them, seeing they had little (or nothing) left to lose.
Wrongly perceiving (wrongly because societies are better off when the group is cooperative) it as a zero-sum game, they tried to take other people's homes, jobs etc. by undermining or even killing them. For instance, it's wrong to assume that attacking the founders of the GPL, of Linux, and of GNU will somehow - miraculously - get one ahead. It's somewhat of a "nazi" mentality.
Thankfully we've done well for ourselves and for the sites. We're on solid ground and very productive. This morning I spent 4 hours painting our fences and brushing tiles with steel, having started the work this past weekend. It's like a form of exercise (exceptionally so, especially the brushing) and it is very rewarding.
Suicidal lunatics, however, have a "scent" for people whose life is happy and productive. So they try to prey on them and make it their personal "project".
What they're doing is, at best, becoming a nuisance and time-consuming. When they go too far we report them to the police.
I am fully aware that people who have nothing and occasionally contemplate suicide don't really care about being reported to the police. But eventually they can be arrested and their obsession will end behind bars, albeit not the mental illnesses, burnout, envy etc.
A world or a society can withstand the burden of suicidal lunatics only to a certain point. What tends to happen is, society gravitates or turns to the right and seeks to eliminate them, so they're just playing with patience and harm civil liberties (at the end of the day they attack the very cause they claim to stand for). █