Lol.

I actually agree with most of your statement, except for “DIRECT”. That’s not part of my claim, and it shouldn’t be a goal of yours.

The terrain has been rigged so that all the direct, the locally advantageous, locally practical solutions lead back to the same toxic equilibrium. We are stuck in a historical basin of attraction and need to escape it.

The only long-term stable/viable solution, the only solution that honours our responsibility to future generations, is to avoid the immediate direct solutions, the ones that the manipulated incentive structures are set up to anticipate, and to do what you described. I’m not claiming it’s easy, or likely to happen, merely that it’s our only chance to save our species from itself.

The scale at which we exert political control has been increasing consistently for, approximately, the last 10k years. The rate has been accelerating too. There’s no reason to believe that the current hodge podge of 300 or so regional factions (nations) is the natural or final solution, and every reason to expect that political/economic power will escalate to the global level, and soon.

We should be focused on ensuring that transition is peaceful and collaborative, that the solution we converge on is fair and sustainable. We should especially be concerned with preventing that transition from being a dominance play by the players currently holding the greatest defacto power (i.e., economic, transnational corporations, and military, the USA).

One major impediment to this is the idea that all we—the ordinary people all over the world—can do is fight amongst each other at a national level about relatively trivial social issues (i.e., by voting for the marginally less bad alternative in our national elections). We can, and should, organise and strive for a democratic, fair, well-designed global political system that keeps economic power in check.

Other major impediments are the lies that a) the only alternative to the current system is totalitarian communism, or other 19th century political models, and b) that we—you and I—need to have a perfect solution in hand already. We can demand, via our respective nations, that the world’s best minds come together and design the best system possible, and that was transition to that system peacefully and rationally.

The trouble is, the world isn’t neatly divided into oppressors and victims. Each human has many, many identities and factional affiliations—mother, Christian, Mongolian, nerd, working class, jogger, AI avoider, manager, voter for whichever party, drug non-user, scientist, tribe member, entrepreneur, posh, conspiracy-recogniser, ethical shopper, activist, Perth resident, woman, etc, etc, etc.

What determines which of those identities is salient at any given time? Which of the lines that cross cut our societies defines who will fight whom when violence becomes the norm? Those are hard questions.

The kind of violence you’re advocating for—populist violence, mob violence—isn’t a targeted, controlled force that you can unleash on a specific target. It’s a breakdown of the social contract, of the sense of safety and trust that keeps people following the co-operative rules of civil society. Before unleashing it, you want to be confident that the lines people will divide along when their lives, their families, their future are at risk are actually rich-vs-poor.

That does not seem likely today. Reasons:

• historically, the lines along which our species have divided for violent factionalism have been ethnicity and geography. These are the natural attractors. Convincing the masses to see themselves differently (i.e., the people who look/speak/think differently to me are my friends, the people similar to me but richer are my enemies) when the shit hits the fan takes serious effort and preparation.

• the information networks that shape how people identify themselves are controlled by the rich, they are actively working to prevent this.

• people today, in my experience, seem to most strongly identify with left-vs-right political affiliation (possibly due to that network manipulation). If anything, this is the fight they’re itching to have: to defeat the other poor people for their different opinions about transsexuality, etc.

The seven richest people in the world all own media networks. They know that violent societal breakdown is a possibility and are much better prepared to channel that chaos to their advantage than you are.

This doesn’t mean that you should give up. But advocating for violence at this point is inviting disaster. That violence will hurt you, not them.

That would be nice 🙂

Yes, this we agree on. It’s likely impossible and we’re running out of time. But that doesn’t mean that violence is an effective solution. It will just accelerate the decline into factionalism, a state in which the wealthy will be even more advantaged.

Right, and how are you ensuring, in this age of intensifying populism, captured information networks and unbridled individualistic greed, that once you release the genie, violence will only be used for that purpose?

Very curious about the deleted comment that inspired this response.

Because violence won’t solve the problem. We need global coordination. Violence just turns us into squabbling regional and ethnic factions.

We need a global solution. The scale of economic power is larger than the scale of our democratically controlled political power. Nationalism won’t save us.

You have me at a depressive phase, exhausted from my work week, so I fully agree with you. However, I know the more optimistic version of me would say:

But we overcame feudalism, we abolished slavery. These were also systems where the (incentives * power to change things) were strong and aligned to preserve the status quo. Still, our ancestors made the choices that made the world better for us, rather than for them. There must be a prosocial kernel in us, a drive we could appeal to if we could just broadcast a coordination signal loud and reliable enough.

I live in a remote town with a sizable population of city-raised, university-educated workers. I’m surrounded by people fully committed to both the liberal and conservative worldviews. Both groups have shitty individuals, exploiting the beliefs and biases of their faction for their personal advantage (the liberal ones tend to be smarter and more insidious, but all the worse for it; the conservatives dumber and more direct). But the majority of both groups are well-intentioned, caring people who would and do sacrifice for others. They’re just all convinced that fighting the mostly good people in the other faction is what’s right, rather than working together to change the game entirely. The challenge is to convince, to coordinate, not to defeat.

Thanks for the chat. It’s rare to have an intelligent dialogue on here, especially when politics is involved.

I feel that if you can perceive/understand a problem and it’s consequences, you become morally culpable for solving it, however hard that might be.

By “generation”, I mean all the people alive today, and in the last century or so, rather than those discrete named decadal generations. Collectively, especially in the face of climate change and the accelerating consumption of non-renewable resources, we know that our actions could doom countless future generations. It’s our responsibility to build a sustainable world. But instead we choose cheaper prices and immediate advantages for ourselves and our factions (nations, ethnic groups, political parties, cultural identity groups, etc).

Yeah, this is exactly the dilemma we’re facing. Some days I feel like it’s impossible, our species is doomed and it’s our generations’ fault. This was the pivot point where we had the knowledge, the technology, the potential to organised ourselves to sustainably share this planet in perpetuity, but instead we chose short-term greed and factionalism.

To your opening question: in two dimensions, you can stay still in one while moving along the other.

We’re in a complex multidimensional space of political/economic possibilities, but the current discourse keeps everything focused on a single left/right dimension as though that’s all that matters. By ensuring you’re only seeing that battle, always fighting the other half of the population, they prevent any possibility of change in other directions (e.g., massive capital market reform/redistribution).

I’m not American so can’t speak to your detailed points about Republicans, but the same left/right, liberal/conservative division is happening everywhere, as well as the simultaneous acceleration of the polarisation of wealth, erosion of wealth redistribution systems and rapid destruction of our global environment for the short term gain of the ultra wealthy.

Insisting that you must constantly fight the other half of your country’s population is an error. You are being distracted and misled. So are they. You don’t win by beating them. You win by convincing them to stop fighting too.

By the same logic, the more either party wins, the more the Overton window stays fixed on the current systemic status quo being the only viable, or even imaginable system.

Both parties are unambiguously serving the interests of their respective elites. They’re just using different tactics to distract their respective audiences. In both cases the core strategy is to evoke the strong emotional intuition that sacred values are being violated. For conservatives, those values are tradition, and especially sexual norms. For liberals, it’s the protection of vivid victims.

The only actual solution is to stop fighting your enemies and start working together to actually redistribute power and reform the whole system.

Oh, worth putting out there, the other tactic I see often is to create the impression that the only alternatives are 19th century political philosophies: capitalism vs communism, etc. In reality, there is a massive space of potential global political and economic systems we could adopt, and we’re in a much better position to work together as a single species to scientifically explore that space and design a stable global system than we were 150 years ago. But we can’t get started while everyone is convinced that all they can do is vote for their team in the next election.

And the other half genuinely think that their team of bought politicians are the good guys…

Oh my sweet summer child. How have the jailors convinced you that half of them are on your side and it’s just the other jailors that are keeping you here?

Lipps is back home in Tennessee

she lost her home, her car and even her dog

At least there’ll be a lot of very relatable music…

These are excellent insights, well articulated. Thank you.

Genuine question. I agree with you. How many of us do you think there are?

To me it seems obvious that we can do better. We could have a fair, sustainable, non-hierarchical, global system, where the people making big collective decisions are genuinely prosocial and competent. Surely if enough of us coordinated our efforts, we could bring this about?

But the older I get, the more people I get to really know, the more I find this to be a very, very rare perspective. Most people seem to believe in the current system. We must be divided into competing regional factions (nations) and within those have a power hierarchy based on wealth, and individually be primarily motivated by greed.

Let’s be more specific. Which of these do you think is most likely:

1. folk like us—willing to sacrifice our immediate interests for a prosocial future—are common, but something is keeping us isolated (e.g., our communication networks—mass media, social media, etc—are being manipulated)

2. folk like us are currently rare, but most people just conform and imitate. If our position was sufficiently publicised/promoted, the majority of people could potentially get on board, we could change the world.

3. folk like us are rare, and most people are and will always be genuinely selfish. This system, where the strong exploit the weak economically, but in a way that leads to global economic growth, is the best we can do as a species, because most of us will always be selfish and short sighted.

Hey, thanks for taking the time to express a nuanced and complex viewpoint. You’re exactly the kind of person who gets lumped in with Nazis by the divisive, black-or-white stance championed in this post.

I’d hoped that Lemmy would have more mature discussion like this, but as you can see in this thread, it’s the same style of “join in the simplistic hatred or be considered the worst kind of enemy” bigotry here too.

There’re two claims being made here.

1. Nazis are bad, we don’t like them, and

2. anyone who expresses disagreement with the statement “fuck Nazis” must be a Nazi.

Most people agree with (1), but to many, me included, (2) is obviously false. There are many, many reasons people would disagree with “fuck Nazis or you are one”, besides being a Nazi and wanting to defend them. Some just dislike profanity. Some don’t want to generalize a historical term to today’s distinct political factions. Others, like you, recognise that reality is complex, that this finger pointing, name calling strategy is something Nazis do too, or simply that it’s not the way intelligent progressives should act.

I genuinely believe that this"call everyone a Nazi" bullshit is part of what’s fissioning our social network into antagonistic factions and causing us to waste our meagre collective political capital arguing about which bathroom a few people should use instead of solving our real, pressing global economic and environmental crises.

Now, queue someone replying to insist I must be a Nazi because I didn’t just jump on the hate bandwagon…