The alternative is primitive tribal life, I think we can make government work, it’s improved a fuckton in the last several centuries, but it takes a lot more involvement and a lot less apathy than people have been showing about the whole thing lately.
“the alternative is primitive tribal life” is classic Capitalist propaganda.
You’re absolutely right though, we have progressed incredibly far. It’s almost as if we have all the knowledge and tools to build a truly inclusive society that provides a dignified standard of living for all people, yet there are stubborn and powerful groups interested in maintaining economic heirarchies and exploiting biases for political gain…
“the alternative is primitive tribal life” is classic Capitalist propaganda.
We can have a functional society without rampant capitalism controlling everything if we all really wanted it enough. The idea that it’s “capitalism or stone-age tribalism” is a false dichotomy that reactionaries who hate authority push. Mommy can’t hurt you anymore. It will be okay.
i don’t think we can make a government that works, what we can do is create a broader system of governance that functions.
it’s pretty fucking wild that we just let a tiny fraction of the population decide things on a national scale for years at a time, with little way of interacting with these people and with it just being accepted that most people don’t know what they’re voting for, if they vote at all…
From what i’ve learnt over the years the system that seems most likely to work well is something much much much much more based around local communities and constant actual human interaction, like instead of the most important elections being the national ones they should be the quarterly local elections where you decide who from you actual community represents you, based primarily on actually trusting them as a person you personally know.
You are absolutely right that we are ignoring community to a disastrous degree, our lack of communal spirit is allowing the worst people to gain the most power because we don’t care about who supports those worst people and only focus on spectacle.
But we still need broader systems, if we just have small communities, we end up with medieval feudalism the moment one community needs something their neighbor has.
We can’t get rid of the human need to “get ahead” it’s hardwired in, even in the most equitable system, there will always be someone who says “I want more.” And they will exploit and game the system until they get it. If there aren’t guardrails and laws and systems to enforce those laws, those kinds of people will immediately resort to force and we have, yet again, armed raiders who then become powerful enough after killing and raping enough of their neighboring communities that suddenly everyone sees them as the central power.
Our problem isn’t that we don’t know how to government, our problem is we’re broadly still too dumb to handle the abstraction required to manage such large systems. We haven’t had that “reckoning” yet that will slap our whole species down a peg and say “You need to value intelligence” and I genuinely don’t know what will do it at this point. We had plagues and wars and genocides and it made people cling to ignorance harder.
I might be peaking on my cynicism here but I am not sure we can rise above our limitations as a species. It might take several thousand more years of people building civilizations and having them reduced to ashes again and again before natural selection creates a species that can work together for a common good. But I kind of don’t think we’ll even be humans anymore at that point.
Rising above our limitations as a species is the field of religion. The current mainstream western religious meta is super toxic, but the entire point of dedicating ones life to meta-narratives is to transcend the limitations of our human instincts.
Just like, treat your meta-narrative with a healthy dose of skepticism or you fall right back into human nature. From my experience i feel confident in saying all meta narratives are fictions
Community. This is the overpowered meta that makes our species work and why we have highways and sewage systems and AI and MRI machines and a global logistics network… we did things as a community and it made the impossible happen, far more magic and use than any kind of faith or belief system, but we have a toxic relationship broadly with community. It conflicts with our individuality and we get stuck in emotional states that prioritize the self.
It isn’t wrong, it’s just an obstacle we need to be as aware of same as we’re aware that we crave calories but we need to limit our intake. We need carbohydrates to survive but we also need to balance it.
genuinely cannot think of a government that doesn’t suck ass
It’s not all around great but I think New Zealand has a pretty decent government
The alternative is primitive tribal life, I think we can make government work, it’s improved a fuckton in the last several centuries, but it takes a lot more involvement and a lot less apathy than people have been showing about the whole thing lately.
“the alternative is primitive tribal life” is classic Capitalist propaganda.
You’re absolutely right though, we have progressed incredibly far. It’s almost as if we have all the knowledge and tools to build a truly inclusive society that provides a dignified standard of living for all people, yet there are stubborn and powerful groups interested in maintaining economic heirarchies and exploiting biases for political gain…
We can have a functional society without rampant capitalism controlling everything if we all really wanted it enough. The idea that it’s “capitalism or stone-age tribalism” is a false dichotomy that reactionaries who hate authority push. Mommy can’t hurt you anymore. It will be okay.
i don’t think we can make a government that works, what we can do is create a broader system of governance that functions.
it’s pretty fucking wild that we just let a tiny fraction of the population decide things on a national scale for years at a time, with little way of interacting with these people and with it just being accepted that most people don’t know what they’re voting for, if they vote at all…
From what i’ve learnt over the years the system that seems most likely to work well is something much much much much more based around local communities and constant actual human interaction, like instead of the most important elections being the national ones they should be the quarterly local elections where you decide who from you actual community represents you, based primarily on actually trusting them as a person you personally know.
You are absolutely right that we are ignoring community to a disastrous degree, our lack of communal spirit is allowing the worst people to gain the most power because we don’t care about who supports those worst people and only focus on spectacle.
But we still need broader systems, if we just have small communities, we end up with medieval feudalism the moment one community needs something their neighbor has.
We can’t get rid of the human need to “get ahead” it’s hardwired in, even in the most equitable system, there will always be someone who says “I want more.” And they will exploit and game the system until they get it. If there aren’t guardrails and laws and systems to enforce those laws, those kinds of people will immediately resort to force and we have, yet again, armed raiders who then become powerful enough after killing and raping enough of their neighboring communities that suddenly everyone sees them as the central power.
Our problem isn’t that we don’t know how to government, our problem is we’re broadly still too dumb to handle the abstraction required to manage such large systems. We haven’t had that “reckoning” yet that will slap our whole species down a peg and say “You need to value intelligence” and I genuinely don’t know what will do it at this point. We had plagues and wars and genocides and it made people cling to ignorance harder.
I might be peaking on my cynicism here but I am not sure we can rise above our limitations as a species. It might take several thousand more years of people building civilizations and having them reduced to ashes again and again before natural selection creates a species that can work together for a common good. But I kind of don’t think we’ll even be humans anymore at that point.
Rising above our limitations as a species is the field of religion. The current mainstream western religious meta is super toxic, but the entire point of dedicating ones life to meta-narratives is to transcend the limitations of our human instincts.
Just like, treat your meta-narrative with a healthy dose of skepticism or you fall right back into human nature. From my experience i feel confident in saying all meta narratives are fictions
Community. This is the overpowered meta that makes our species work and why we have highways and sewage systems and AI and MRI machines and a global logistics network… we did things as a community and it made the impossible happen, far more magic and use than any kind of faith or belief system, but we have a toxic relationship broadly with community. It conflicts with our individuality and we get stuck in emotional states that prioritize the self.
It isn’t wrong, it’s just an obstacle we need to be as aware of same as we’re aware that we crave calories but we need to limit our intake. We need carbohydrates to survive but we also need to balance it.
we gotta take back our parks from the night y’all