cross-posted from: https://corteximplant.com/users/x00001/statuses/112491302665199252
(title added by community mod)
Pirated for Alt TextImage description: the yaer was Two Thousand and twenty-four. I took a puff of my Electronic-Cigarette, inhaling the vapours. my mobile terminal buzzed in my pocket, a flat slab of microchips and glossy touchscreen. I ignored it....... probably another Electronic-Mail
(Originally published on corteximplant.com: 2024-05-23) - Click the Fedi-Link to visit.
This is my hypothesis, that our tendency towards small-society thinking and taking more than our share of the commons without maintaining it is going to steer us right into one great filter or another. The climate crisis and plastic crisis seem respectively driven by number-go-up thinking by industrialists who are driven to increase their own wealth and power even when they cannot utilize what they have except to seek out even more.
Taking a page from Zach Weinersmith, we might invent a sociological trick that allows us to retain self-awareness of this and adjust our behavior to one more large-community minded, which would be a path out of plutocracy sustained by any means necessary. (In the end, with the Soviets shelling Berlin, Hitler blamed the German people for not being fierce enough.) Otherwise, we're just going to devolve into fascism and enemy-within rhetoric (accompanied by purges and genocide), which is terribly convincing for large swaths of the population.
Well, I offer this for consideration: the other half of my earlier sentence stating "but people do not" is that "Technology changes". i.e., we are going through a cultural wave adapting to modern circumstances, particularly the internet. There is no guarantee that democracy will survive this adaptation.
Specifically, democracy requires an educated populace. Perhaps some EU nations can handle it, but can people in the USA, or the UK, or Russia? At one point long in the past, other nations were depressed from WWII, but the economy of the USA was inflated. That was a long time ago though. And disinformation these days can spread much more readily than someone having to travel here from another country to make speeches first-hand in every location that they want to reach.
Worse, we were warned - the founding fathers gave us this crucial warning even as before the nation was born. Originally, the only ones allowed to vote were cis, white, land-owning Christian men who rather than tilling the fields, loafed around all day long reading books for fun & chatting about philosophy mainly b/c they were bored. Expanding that to include non-land-owning men, and women, and blacks who weren't even considered "people" (well, 3/5ths you know...) was a good thing, but now we have the opposite situation where someone turns themselves into a puppet to vote however their preacher/pastor/minister/priest/shepherd tells them to - which isn't ideal under even the best of circumstances, if we assumed full friendliness (and seeing as how that is not the case, definitely is less than ideal now).
This is a main reason why I have lost faith in democracy - aside from places like the USA having a plutocracy rather than that, and the Electoral College, and the 2-party system encouraging neither party to do anything and instead merely blame the other side for all of society's ills, even on top of all of that, voters are irresponsible, and yet WE are somehow the ones IN CHARGE!?!?!?!
Particularly the Boomers, who have the most time to vote, and along with voting alongside religious values, choose to keep the stock market as their highest priority b/c their stock portfolios with retirement savings literally depends on that. You mentioned the "number-go-up" thinking, but why are they the ones in charge? Retirees voting in their own interests, and influencing their most-easily-led children to do the same, is one reason. Another that I can see is that the companies that survive in this climate are not the ones that are the most responsible, especially long-term, but rather those that are the most ruthless. They are too big to fail, too big to jail, and so those who hold themselves back to "play by the rules" get hostile-takeovered while the likes of Bezos & Musk & Cook & such run Amazon, Xhitter, Apple, Google and what-not to take over the world.
"While the cat is away, the mice will play." - this is not a new saying, but it takes on exaggerated meaning now, vs. the 50s & 60s when government was more powerful, and actually used e.g. its anti-trust powers. People are the same now as then (well, not totally - there are cultural shifts at work too, so here I only mean foundationally, so that's quite debatable I suppose how much this applies), but our circumtances are a bit different.
I made a previous comment about how to attempt to move forward within the existing systems. But, you might be right about the "by any means necessary" part being needed. In any case, most people including myself are mostly just talk and very little action, and too most of us are not quite sure that we even know which direction we should be heading in - e.g. is getting rid of plutocracy really the goal that we all want? THEY will try to divide us into thinking that it is not, in any case, and since liberals tend to eat our own, it will work; while on the other side the conservatives will harden their ranks and vote together despite any dissensions within their ranks, which gives them a decided edge in any future conflicts.
And liberals... I for one don't know what our core values are supposed to be - neoliberalism? Trans rights - which are supposed to be "people's rights", but there are definitely some lines there, like should someone who has testosterone in their body be allowed to compete in sports against someone who does not? Also, especially if we knew that the conservative and middle-ground Americans would push back against such viewpoints, why not do something rather about school shootings, or the wage gap - I'm not saying to entirely forget about human rights, but why make it such a central focus, when children are DYING (yes, sadly trans ones at higher rates too...) from shootings & poverty. Every choice to put energy & attention into is another choice to step back from something else.
Well, this is getting long - sorry. TLDR: I somewhat agree with you but there is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path, and even more of a gulf between knowing a potential destination and finding a pathway to get to there from here.:-)