The boot of capitalism is on our necks, but I’m not sure my countrymen are worth fighting for. Americans may be too far gone. Maybe I should just leave.
The desire of intelligent, hardworking people to just live their lives and be left alone means we’re eternally condemned to be ruled by those who are absolutely unfit for the job. Anybody smart enough to be a good leader wouldn’t have the job.
That we will continue to exploit other humans for material comfort, and justify it with more or less overt racism - black and brown lives just can’t matter, otherwise we’d have to give up our privilege and things. Make their countries unlivable and let them drown trying to get out.
There’s a well-known quote about how capitalism seems inescapable, but so did the divine right of kings. The problem I have with it is that we didn’t get rid of kings. If anything, men like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, they have more wealth and power than kings could ever even dream of. All that’s really happened is that royalty has been obfuscated; they no longer need to be the face of the kingdom. They can buy elected leaders to achieve their goals, purchase media companies in order to control the narrative of the peasantry, and they never need to step in the spotlight. It makes me think that humanity will ultimately never be able to rid ourselves of these parasites; there will always be dragons.
Obligatory: everyone should read The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. (The aforementioned quote is hers.) Science fiction anarcho-comminist community depicted as having tangible benefits/detriments.
Evolution of Homo Sapiens was inevitable which means destruction of the entire habitat and all species in it is also unavoidable.
People who choose to suppress a growing power with the idea that they can easily win,
then make it look like they’re the victims when the victims decide to fight back,
and then choose to never negotiate a losing battle/war
apart from demanding that the winning party makes concessions to let them win,
deserve to die.Bonus points for those people who fly banners of freedom and progressiveness
while their organizers get paid by doing the bidding
of oppressive conservative foreign agents
who want their country to regress for their own gains of power.
And while displaying their wicked pop-culture chants, posters and gestures,
are often demanding their government to retract a reasonable proposal such as
‘murder, and that includes any incel strangling his perceived girlfriend to death,
should be made illegal, even if you’re on a vacation’
or ‘stop taking money from foreign agents’
that are mild copies of laws from said foreign agents’ country.And even more bonus points for the appointed new leader
legitimized through a so-called international award of good behavior.And I say this because while all the hypocrisy is absolutely infuriating,
to top it off by trying to chop off the hand
that tries to give you mercy, then there’s no redemption.Climate change will kill q huge part of the world population within the next 50 years and we’ve known about it being a thing for over a hundred years and yes nobody could be arsed to stop it.
And stop it was literally what they could do. Cars could have gone for electric much sooner. Public transportation should have been much, much bigger. Bicycle first cities
So much that could have been done but wasn’t done because that would not make a select view anti social rich
Soon most of us will.doe from climate change effects
Historically, the only thing we’ve found that lowers wealth inequality is inevitably large scale war and death. And i don’t expect that to change before the next time it lowers.
It can be expressed by a graffiti that I saw on the side of a bike path in Montreal, in French: “L’humanité ne court pas à sa perte, elle y va en voiture”. Or something like “Humanity is not running to ruins, it’s taking a car”.
As much as I want to blame giant corporations and capitalism for a lot of our societal problems, this sentence resumes so well how common people also enable all of this by refusing to change and just going with the easiest option. I know we won’t reach our climate change goals. I know because when I say I organized my life around the fact that I don’t need a car, everyone tells me that they couldn’t live without a car, that it’s very useful, and that I should get one. I’m not even a real adult as long as I don’t have a car. I’ll feel so much freedom when I’ll have a car. I should just get a car! Just get an electric one! Like, instead of encouraging people to live without a car, the vast vast majority of people will actually encourage others to get one.
So yeah, we’re not “running” to our loss. We’re wasting energy to move our fat asses in individual motorized multi ton metal cubes to go there faster. It’s so useful! So practical! So fast! There’s no time to waste. Like Marge Simpson once said: “Outta my way, Nature!”
It’s a giant metaphor for the rest of our society. Same with all the AI hype, food delivery apps, and over consumption in general. We’re digging our graves out of excessive “convenience”, and cars are one example of this.
It’s not an uncommon opinion, but:
People are horrible by default. We are generally mean, stupid, and crazy and have to learn to be otherwise, and most of us never achieve such mastery.
I actually hold the opposite opinion; that most people are generally good, or at the least, focused on their own problems most of the time.
This isn’t just personal experience (I’m old so have a bunch) but one example is that I watch a lot of travelling vlogs, mostly motorbikes. Whenever a rider has a breakdown, even in the middle of nowhere, someone will be along and will help. Even allowing for a general positive bias of the media, those who would take advantage of that situation are a tiny percentage.
What does happen though, is that those who aren’t good can abuse the goodness of others to gain power and influence, so are statistically more noticable.
I’ll counter and say that it’s culture/conditions-based. Humans have a range of available/possible behaviors/thought patterns and they are reinforced/shaped by their surroundings/the system they live in. There are and have been egalitarian societies that aren’t full of “mean, stupid, and crazy” people.
“The idea that the key features of successive societies and human history have been a result of an ‘unchanging’ human nature […] is a prejudice that pervades academic writing, mainstream journalism and popular culture alike. Human beings, we are told, have always been greedy, competitive and aggressive, and that explains horrors like war, exploitation, slavery and the oppression of women. This ‘caveman’ image is meant to explain the bloodletting on the Western Front in one world war and the Holocaust in the other. I argue very differently. ‘Human nature’ as we know it today is a product of our history, not its cause. Our history has involved the moulding of different human natures, each displacing the one that went before through great economic, political and ideological battles.”
“The world as we enter the 21st century is one of greed, of gross inequalities between rich and poor, of racist and national chauvinist prejudice, of barbarous practices and horrific wars. It is very easy to believe that this is what things have always been like and that, therefore, they can be no different. […] The anthropologist Richard Lee [said]: “Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality, people lived for millennia in small-scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalised reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations.” In other words, people shared with and helped each other, with no rulers and no ruled, no rich and no poor. […] Our species […] is over 100,000 years old. For 95 percent of this time it has not been characterised at all by many of the forms of behaviour ascribed to ‘human nature’ today. There is nothing built into our biology that makes present day societies the way they are. Our predicament as we face a new millennium cannot be blamed on it.”
-Chris Harman - A People’s History Of The World: From The Stone Age To The New Millennium*
edit: and adding a short video https://youtu.be/Est6nay4Z5E?t=18
edit: some books that are on my TBR that might be worth checking out:
- Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
- Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness
- The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World
- Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (“shows how new findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast human nature in a radically different as the supreme altruists and cooperators.”)
The Assholes will always win
Ethan Cohen’s poem “The Drunken Driver Has The Right Of Way”:
"The loudest have the final say, The wanton win, the rash hold sway, The realist’s rules of order say The drunken driver has the right of way.
"The Kubla Khan can butt in line; The biggest brute can take what’s mine; When heavyweights break wind, that’s fine; No matter what a judge might say, The drunken driver has the right of way.
"The guiltiest feel free of guilt; Who care not, bloom; who worry, wilt; Plans better laid are rarely built For forethought seldom wins the day; The drunken driver has the right of way.
"The most attentive and unfailing Carefulness is unavailing Wheresoever fools are flailing; Wisdom there is held at bay; The drunken driver has the right of way.
"De jure is de facto’s slave; The most foolhardy beat the brave; Brass routs restraint; low lies high’s grave; When conscience leads you, it’s astray; The drunken driver has the right of way.
"It’s only the naivest who’ll Deny this, that the reckless rule; When facing an oncoming fool The practiced and sagacious say Watch out — one side — look sharp — gang way.
“However much you plan and pray, Alas, alack, tant pis, oy vey, Now — heretofore — til Judgment Day, The drunken driver has the right of way.”
We love to blame the big corporations and governments for where we are, but both are products of our society and people. George Carlin said it best, selfish ignorant people vote for selfish ignorant leaders. All of this is a product of a society who allows it. Big tech and corporations exist because we as a society give them money. Social media algorithms and ads and everything exist because they work. We sit here and preach linux, and preach getting off of it, but we are the minority. The majority don’t care and happily go along with whatever is given to them, and they vote and purchase just like it.
Climate change is a big one for me. I see people every day saying we need to hold companies accountable - and we do, but goddamn if we all stopped using oil every day, natural gas for cooking, choosing to bike or take a train over driving or flying you know what? Those companies would be forced to change because they wouldn’t be making money off of us. If even just 40% of Americans stopped using Oil the “big oil” companies would be looking at bankruptcy or minimum desperately trying to modernize to stay on top. We can’t shift all of the blame on them, we continue to purchase their products because it’s easier. Everything in the end is a consumer good, and if we voted/purchased differently as a society then things would change. The fact is is that people either don’t care, or worse don’t want to change.
yeh but nah
they infiltrate our environmental groups. legally and illegally coerce us & our our “leaders”. have been systematically attacking, undermining & removing funding for renewables & climate research for decades. environmental protesters are “legally” assaulted, kidnapped, beaten & sometimes killed by their hired goons, meanwhile neo-nazis march with impunity.
it’s not simply a matter of them offering one alternative and just letting the market decide. they engage in unbelievable levels of corruption, coercion, deception, even genocide to steal natural resources from first nations people.
meanwhile the public, barely keeping their heads above water, exploited, subjugated & worn to the bone, oftimes struggling to survive, make almost the only non-choice they can barely even choose from.
yes the majority are to blame, for alot, but also recall we’re talking about an average, likely poorly educated person going up against billion dollar brainwashing machinery (oftimes utilising research paid for with our tax dollars initially performed for therapeutic use, now weaponised in a twisted perversion of their original intent)
like you aren’t wrong. but there is alot more to the story.
carlin is certainly on point in his quote you cited, and you are right this is perhaps the most difficult to reconcile aspect.
let us weigh this alongside another poignant quote of his:
The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you.
The irony being their pov is just regurgitation of propaganda by these companies that consumers are to blame.
Best we continue to change nothing because what’s the point! Here’s my credit card fill 'er up please and thanks!
Preach!
Come on man, isn’t Lemmy cynical enough already?
Self examination is the first step to fighting cynicism.
Just please, less cynicism
Why are you cynical on cynicism?
I believe we live in a very duplicitous world were greedy old people don’t mind seeing the world burn if they can get richer. The more you learn about the world the shittier it seems. I expect humanity will go extinct either because of climate change or due to achieving AGI and everyone being rendered for materials to make more money.
The disorder we see isn’t proof that the world is doomed. It’s proof that those old bastards don’t have the reigns like they used to. They’re cracking down not because they have unending strength, but unending fear.
Nothing will get better.
