this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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This is also implying that common everyday people actually have control or can influence the situation.
While a wealthy few in the world are the ones that can actually drive change for the better but refuse to because it would affect their wealth and power.
90% of the population wants to do something
10% of the population owns everything
The 10% who have all the control don't mind watching the world burn as long as they keep their mansion.
90% of the population can't do anything because they don't have the wealth to influence anything
100% of the world is completely fine with this situation.
90% of the population can't do anything because they're not organized. Collectively, we have power.
I think most of us are resigned to this situation.
We're not good at popular organizing. We're very good at finding ways of othering factions, which the elite are glad to utilize.
We're good at consolidating power. We're not good at utilizing that power to serve the public. Hence billionaires don't even think of charity work except as a means to preserve power.
The human species may be doomed to extinction or a cap on technological progress. We may just be tribal hunters too attached to dominance hierarchy to reach into space and colonize other worlds.
Or we may be stuck in a perpetual cycle where we just form feudal empires that poison the world for another epoch.
The solution — if there is one — is sociological. We figure out a way to diffuse political power so it can't be consolidated. We fix dominance hierarchy and tragedy of the commons. We figure out a way to teach people that everybody (even the ones that disgust us) are part of the community and deserve regard.
Until we find it, we'll continue to let elites hold all the resources and poison the earth with impunity.
This is the final jeopardy question... We need to focus on how to shape society to be resistant to power consolidation. Otherwise any progress is temporary at best
From an evolutionary perspective, only the ones who survive matter.
So in that spirit, the only way to create a society resistant to power consolidations is one that actively recognizes, seeks out and annihilates said power consolidations.
As otherwise, they will annihilate everything opposing them -- as history tells us.
There are gentler social traditions to distribute wealth and power so as to avoid consolidation. Probably the post-colonial world is beyond that point.
A scary prospect, to be sure, but in the grand scheme of things.. "The secrets of evolution are time and death" as Carl Sagan said in Cosmos.
Mother Anarchy loves her sons.
Addressing fundamental flaws in the human psyche is absolutely a worthwhile endeavor.
I get the impression that, millennia from now, it might be possible for a person to look back on what humanity was before such technology was discovered. But, I'm a product of my time. I cannot fathom how that would be practical and ethical to achieve. That said, I am absolutely open to the discussion.
I always thought a significant majority wanted change, but I recently learned that a surpassingly large amount of people are against it outside of my social bubble. Even young people (about 20yo).
A lot of people seem to make up their minds about these topics with very little information. They blindly repeat the things some politicians spout, even though it’s complete BS. And when I question them about it they seem to actually know very little about it. They get uncomfortable and try to avoid the discussion, but their opinions still mostly stay the same.
It’s frustrating, and it has given me a lot less hope that we will be able to deal with it.
That is it. Most people want climate change to end, but without any change for themself. That however just does not work.
The good news is that as soon as the systems of phasing out fossil fuel are in place, that momentum helps to keep it running.
I hope you're right
I think that the true number is somewhere between 30 and maybe 60%. People are very resistant to change.
If you follow this, this is the "give up" argument. Fuck that. I'm not giving up.
They can, but the trouble is they have to be willing to go to prison (or be killed by police) for eco-terrorism.
To me the saddest part is that it’s more like 99.99% of us want and know how to fix things, but 0.01% control everything. There are something like around 3000 billionaires worldwide…