I also wish all my problems would go away magically
Maybe it’ll be the same day my Mrs. Right appears. It’s been so long, the universe must really have a romantic surprise up its sleeve for me! Squee!
Remember everyone, if your utopia relies on the idea that everyone just peacefully gives up their power, it is doomed to fail.
IMHO: We all should strive to be the change we want to see in the world. But sometimes it’s even enough to just be the person that you wish to see in the world more often.
Tbf the chance I want to see in the world is “common sense” tho, so not much I can get better upon to help.
Like people are geniuenly trying to make fascism popular again so what am I supposed to self-improve at, punching?
IMO: punching would be useful in keeping fascists out of a community, if nothing else helps.
Unfortunately it seems to me that the nazis are being way better at self-improving their punching. At least here in northern europe, they frequently hold training camps with pretty rough sparring.
Ugh. Sons of Odin or whatever still a thing, or some new groups?
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The industrial mechanisms that promote climate change would not die with capitalism.
What would die is the goal of limitless growth (and limitless externalities). And it would presumably put the decision making about the right tradeoff between “industrial mechanisms” and the climate back in the hands of the people… instead of leaving that choice to self-interested billionaires.
If capitalism collapses, we’re most likely going back to feudalism, not ten-forward to Star Trek.
I wish to highlight that between the Bell Riots and the Phoenix, ST predicted that there would be both the Eugenics Wars and WW3, which leave the world so badly broken that the only “nations” that remain are the Western Alliance and the Eastern Coalition. Alameda, CA gets completely blown off the map; and it’s not the only such place.
It’s not a pretty picture, when you look at the history they gloss over.
For a while. Maybe the rest of our lives. We’d come out of it eventually.
Maybe in 1000 years democracy will have a resurgence and we’ll have a global democratic government.
Until people get complacent and it stops working and the whole thing collapses in on itself resulting in a return to feudalism.
While i too yearn for the downfall of capitalism, pre-capitalist societies were still responsible for environmental distruction, slavery and genocide.
As long as individuals or a small elite have enough power to enforce their needs over the needs of everyone else, we’ll always have capital-b Badnesses.
We have to usher in the collapse of perminant heirarchies, whatever form they take.
We really need the death of money more than we need the death of capitalism. Because you’re right, even before rampant capitalism, we still weren’t really great to each other.
What’s amazing to me is I’m perfectly content to live and let live. My neighbors, friends, family, all of us…ain’t got no beef with anybody. Why does this fail so badly when scaled up?
There’s a lot of neuroscience showing that social power suppresses empathy in the brain. Status, privilege, wealth, etc. make almost everyone less able to consider the pain of others.
Most of us can be reasonable with people we know. But the socially powerful are making most of the important higher-scale decisions, and they are neurologically the least capable of making good decisions on behalf of others.
Or that’s how i see the problem.
Well that makes the problem even more blatantly obvious…the problem is social hierarchy. It’s impossible to have equality and hierarchy simultaneously…they are mutually exclusive.
They (the ruling classes) are vastly outnumbered, yet they manage to gain control over the masses below them, such that we must support them or the whole thing crumbles.
They’ve got the supporting class believing that we need them…but really that couldn’t be further from the truth.
The problem is, though, as soon as one ruler is gone, another replaces them, and that one is equally corrupt. And the cycle repeats.
But conversely, I don’t see how a non-hierarchal society could function, because that implies there must be some sort of order, mediation, and enforcement, which automatically means that some people will have authority over others, no matter how you slice it.
There are lots of ways to organize people that aren’t heirarchical, or that dilute or limit power rather than concentrating it.
Directly voting for laws, appointing officials by sortition - like being picked for jury duty, pushing decisions down to neighbourhood councils, consensus decision making, a culture that always permits insulting the successful and plenty else has been suggested.
It all comes with drawbacks of it’s own, of course. And having grown up in a heirarchical society, it can be very hard to imagine anything else, until you read about all the times and places where people have organized themselves differently.
Before there was money there was debt. Debt goes back thousands and thousands of years.
My neighbors, friends, family, all of us
That’s exactly why. You described a band, a tribe, a group. People not in that group are not in your band / tribe / group. So, you don’t really need to share your wealth with people from outside your group. Nobody can know and love 8 billion other people. Humans are still fundamentally apes, and that’s just not in our ape nature.
We have to usher in the collapse of [permanent hierarchies]
That would be nice, but is it realistic? It’s not just that humanity has always had hierarchies. It’s that it seems to be a feature of even the animal kingdom. It also seems like when people try to create a system without hierarchies, someone steps into the power vacuum. The end result is that things are even worse for the people at the bottom.
Maybe a better plan is to accept that human animals are going to end up having hierarchies, and instead of trying to completely eliminate them, instead aim to shrink them as much as possible while still maintaining a functional government that at least somewhat answers to the people at the bottom.
I was careful to say perminant heirarchies for that reason. Bao Jingyan said that power originates in the contrast between the weak and the strong, and the cunning and the naive. I’m inclined to agree.
But we can have social institutions that break up and flush out these natural channels of inequality, rather than institutions that metastize them into heirarchies.
Aristotle discussed a then-current idea to redistribute all personal wealth above 5x the poorest citizen. We could tax all inheritance above say 500k at 100%. Eliminate all personal debt every 7 years.
There’s a lot we can do to make heirarchies more temporary.
Yeah, but nothing is perminant, (or permanent). All hierarchies are temporary because everything is temporary.
Aristotle discussed a then-current idea to redistribute all personal wealth above 5x the poorest citizen
People have come up with ideas since forever. I’m sure the first philosophy on the redistribution of wealth was “Unga bunga, bunga unga bunga!” The problem is putting those ideas into practice. So far, when people try to eliminate hierarchies, the result is that someone comes in and takes advantage of the people who don’t think there’s a hierarchy.
Humanity itself may be temporary, but it seems like the idea of hierarchies will outlive humanity.
My sweet summer child… We missed our chance. The revolution isn’t coming. Or maybe it will happen and then we will die anyways. The climate is fucked. There is no unfucking it. We can fuck it a little less than we currently are every year, but that isn’t going to save us.
The effects of this will rival the Permian extinction in the near term and in the long term, barring a miraculous turnaround through geological processes after a few thousand years, it will certainly be worse.
For reference, the Permian extinction wiped out 90% of ALL LIFE. Like 75% of land based life and 95% of all sea life (of which there was considerably more) at the time died out. It was caused by a sudden and severe increase in atmospheric greenhouse gasses over the course of several thousand years. We are outpacing that by orders of magnitude. So we could quite conceivably reach the levels seen during that time and we could do it much faster, giving all life even less time to adapt to the worst catastrophy in the history of life.
We’re boned, my dude.
We haven’t crossed the point of no return. We are accelerating because we keep press on the acceleration. If we stopped (as we did temporarily during Covid), stuff would get back on track. We have to act now
We’re a lot more likely to Balkanize and divide
I think we might see some form of separation.
Central planning economies have ruined the planet disproportionately compared to their liberal, market economy counterparts. Consider the USSR: compared to the US, a better environmental record might be expected due to their command economy. To the contrary
Total emissions in the USSR in 1988 were about 79% of the US total. Considering that the Soviet GNP was only some 54% of that of the USA, this means that the Soviet Union generated 1.5 times more pollution than the USA per unit of GNP.
Their planners considered pollution control
unnecessary hindrance to economic development and industrialization
and
By the 1990s, 40% of Russia’s territory began demonstrating symptoms of significant ecological stress, largely due to a diverse number of environmental issues, including deforestation, energy irresponsibility, pollution, and nuclear waste.
And this generously glosses over the extent of water contamination, hazardous dumping of toxic & nuclear waste into oceans, etc.
Humans are the problem, and the planet is better off without them.
Woody Allen, as flawed as he is, had a good quip about enjoying whatever brings you pleasure without feeling guilty.
The world isn’t going to get better. Evolution created a system where those bereft of morals make the rules. It’s literally in our nature to lie cheat and steal. Current humans are a statistical anomaly, aside from the tastier class.
you gotta make it happen.
Covid 2.0 could definitely do us all in.
Because lard ass orange pile of shit is not preparing the world for a new pandemic and instead is destroying green energy and allowing AI to waste and pollute the environment.
i’d be glad if it did honestly
lol.
Why wait? Fucking help it collapse
Waiting is usually not the best option. like, you can wait until the trash goes away on it’s own, but it might take longer than you expect, with consequences you might not.
Just saying…
Let climate change solve itself, woah
