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14 days ago

Sporvogn linje 18 i Wroclaw 🇵🇱

#tramwaj #trampictures #tramentusiast #tramway #sporvogn @wroclaw

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Posted On: October 20th 2026, 10:43 am

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@wroclaw

Sporvogn linje 18 i Wroclaw 🇵🇱

#tramwaj #trampictures #tramentusiast #tramway #sporvogn @wroclaw

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Why do abusers want you to be sad, to be scared, to be insecure, and to be anxious? Why do controlling institutions like a strict school, a bad boss, or a cult run on fear, guilt, and low-level misery?

Well, 350 years ago, Spinoza offered an answer.

Spinoza argued that every emotion does one of two things. Either it acts to increase your power or it decreases it. The ones that increase it, he calls joyful, and the ones that decrease it, he called sad. So fear is a sad emotion, and so are guilt and hatred, because they drain you of power.

Imagine if somebody called Sonia, who works at a company run on fear. Sonia is told that her department will be cut and her review was borderline, so she should be grateful for having any job at all. Nothing is forcing her to stay there. But Sonia now works late. She says nothing in meetings and does exactly what she’s told, because a frightened person polices herself. This is why Spinoza thought that sadness can become political, because he argued that the great secret of tyranny is to keep people afraid and to dress their fear up as a kind of religion.

300 years later, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze argued something similar, where he said that the tyrant needs sad people because sad people go looking for a tyrant. And so Spinoza leaves us with a test to understand other relationships and institutions. Does this person, does this thing, make me able to act more or act less? Because whatever wants to control you will always prefer you to be powerless.