Greed and people not understanding that it’s not a coincidence that there is 1% owning 99% of wealth. A large majority of the 1% are not “self made men” that “built an emporium from nothing”.
I’m not talking about some communistic solution where we hunt down Elon Musk and take everything from him.
I’m just say saying that it’s fucked up that a lot of people think it’s ok that Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Steve Bezos etc have or have had periods where they built extreme wealth and paid no taxes at all.
So essentially, capitalism.
You can’t take something from someone that wasn’t really his. The wealth was extracted from the labor of hundreds of thousands of workers… We’d just be taking it back.
Distrust in science
Solution: Better education
More broadly: an inability to discern good sources of information from bad sources of information.
Same solution though: education.
Yeah, it’s shocking how many people still believe the lockdowns were a good idea despite so much evidence to the contrary in Sweden, etc. and now skyrocketing inflation and interest rates.
Ideology. Like adopting a strict ideology and then refusing to hear anything from any other ideology. Like sometimes Capitalism is the solution, sometimes Socialism or Government intervention is the solution. Usually it’s a mixture of both. But no we must divide strictly into our little boxes and demonize anything else.
And of course social political issues which are bound up into ideology no matter if it makes sense or not. Of course that is the wedge used to divide people while the powers that be fill their pockets. By all means let’s all argue about who gets to use what bathroom while food becomes unaffordable and housing becomes a pipe dream.
Based entirely on your comment, I would say the issue isn’t the concept of ideology, but the fact that the ideologies that matter the most and the ones that spread the fastest aren’t the same. After all, the idea that no one should starve is itself an idealogy.
People keep trying to govern based on an old book written thousands of years ago.
We have evolved, our minds have evolved. We now know it’s unfair to treat women unequal. We now know two same sex gender persons can have a family without problems. Why do people keep trying to rule the world with a book written thousands of years ago?
Everybody, can we all just pause a moment before we tell people how to live their lives?
If someone wants to wear stripes with spots, why do people feel obligated to have an opinion on that? If someone enjoys collecting their toenail clippings, how does that hinder your own ability to live how YOU want?
Nobody is perfectly “normal”, but we all pretend to be, just so we can mock the ones who don’t try to hide their true selves as well.
Why is it anyone’s business?
I think pretty much all problems can be tracked down to financial inequality. We could live in Utopia if money was distributed better.
Capitalism has led us to believe the only true value of something is financial. Education shouldn’t just be about positioning you for a good career. We’ve substituted human morals for religious dogma. We need David Lynch to do one more season of Twin Peaks.
Make politicians work for minimum wage. That way the minimum wage will be guaranteed to be livable, and people will not get into politics in pursuit of money, but for the right reasons like “making the country/state a better place” and other hippie BS.
Nah, then even fewer people will go into it than now, and those that do will have made their money elsewhere / family wealth like it is already.
I don’t know if that’s true. It might actually open it up for activists that basically work for free now. Obviously these things will not cause immediate change, but after a few election cycles, perhaps we would see something. This would require other regulations to work best, like actually making bribes illegal and denying all outside income, like the Presidency in the US is supposed to. We need to get to a point in which politicians are public servants first and foremost.
You should definitely look up how China works - where local politicians have to be civil servants first, and pass exams, etc.
It’s far from perfect either since it means the high-level politicians are all civil servants, but at least it puts a minimum level of meritocracy - and also means the “Deep State” of civil servants is clearer.
Just to clarify, do you mean how China works on paper or in practice?
- Tax accumulated wealth and use it to level the playing field (land value tax, inheritance tax, wealth tax) - it is accumulated wealth that should be taxed, not income.
- Invest in education and research heavily, and focus on STEM + Medicine - stuff like algebra and programming should be taught much earlier.
- Destroy the vestiges of extreme conservatism like monarchism and religion (still very prevalent in Europe).
- Invest in Nuclear Fusion and electrification to alleviate environmental problems without “de-growth”.
- Punish violent crime much more severely (it shouldn’t be the case that a few criminals can commit 100+ crimes freely).
- Introduce a child licence for having children (like we already have for adopting dogs!)
- Introduce ID cards, digital ID, full genetic sequencing and fingerprinting, etc. - this helps both criminal investigations and the delivery of services and healthcare.
The way things are going is scary though. My salary in real-terms has plummeted around 30% since I started a new job 2 years ago due to the weakening currency, high inflation, increasing utility bills (the energy crisis, and inflation), and high interest rates affecting the mortgage at renewal and the maintenance fee (that just went up 15% today!). And I’m lucky to still keep my job, I know a lot of people who haven’t been so fortunate.
And then the so-called “Left” push for “de-growth” and reducing consumption - just making us even poorer (already living without a car is restrictive and a hassle, but it’s so expensive now), doing nothing to combat violent crime, and more concerned with fringe issues like the LGBTQIA2S+ community.
I honestly think if things carry on like this we’ll see the resurgence of real fascism as people face severely declining living standards and lose patience - just look at Zemmour and Bukele for example. And such concentration of power never works out well in the end.
You misconceive what is “degrowth”, it is surely not about making people poorer, outside the rich… Degrowth calls for a radical reassessment of what needs to be produced vs. shrunk, how, by whom, for whom, and under what ownership system. So degrowth has never been about shrinking ‘everything’, ‘everywhere’. And it is not something we could do in the current system, there is nothing to compensate if we ban cars right now or tax carbon for the most vulnerable, hence degrowth is about redistribution.
So I agree with 90% of this, and I don’t understand why you’re getting downvoted. That being said, the one thing I can’t get behind is worse punishments for violent crime. I’m not saying violent crime is good, but basically all of the evidence suggest that worse punishments do nothing to curtail it, and in fact make it more likely. The longer someone spends in prison, the less likely they are to reintegrate into society. If the goal is to reduce violent crime, rehabilitation is far more effective than deterrence.
Introduce a child licence for having children (like we already have for adopting dogs!)
Eugenics already?
Not eugenics but just ensuring that they have a fair start in their life.
It’s bizarre that if you adopt a dog they’ll check how much room you have, any criminal record, your income source, etc. - but you can have a child with none of that.
And then society and the child end up paying for it - via benefit payments, crime, drug problems, etc.
Just simple things like paying a 10k deposit, no recent violent criminal record, etc. would go a long way.
You’re basically saying minorities shouldn’t have children. 10k is insane. If anything, certain things should be subsidized.
People stopped listening to themselves, listening to their insides and listening to other people. Everyone is busy, so no one has time anymore to focus. Instead of understanding each other, polarization is preferred, because the later is quicker and easier. People need to slow the hell down again.
But overall the world is still on a good track, a lot of young people care more about certain topics than when I was a kid. That’s overall a positive thing. There are also less wars going on world wide, despite us being more and more under time and resources pressure.
If I could hammer one thing into peoples mind, it would be to to abandon the doom culture and understand that humans are by nature nice, helpful and good people. Only our environment makes people do shitty things and everyone working against this mountain of fake psychology “humans are evil by nature”, does a net positive to our society. People are shit because we treat them like shit not because they are bad.
Personally, I feel like most of the problems in the modern world come down to issues of scaling. We evolved our brains to coordinate in small bands of people, but we try use those same brains to coordinate groups of hundreds of millions.
The larger an organization (corporation, government, npo, etc.) gets, the worse they get at coordinating around a central goal or set of values, and the more likely they are to evolutionarily optimize around something entirely divorced from the values of any individual member.
A company of 100 employees is entirely capable of creating a high-quality product, compensating their workers well, and avoiding anti-consumer practices. This doesn’t mean they’ll always do this, but it’s possible. Meanwhile, a multinational corporation of millions of people, even if run by the most ethical CEO on earth, will always gravitate toward maximizing profit at the expense of everything else. Even libertarians recognize this as a fundamental flaw in unchecked Capitalism.
Similarly, a government of a few thousand people can create a good constitution for an orderly society, but in a massive government of a country of 300 million people, trying to make any sort of effective, positive political change is borderline-impossible because everyone has different goals that gridlock each other. Even proponents of large government recognize this.
It’s tempting to believe in some sort of easy action that could fix this, but truth be told, I think any simple solution would be horrifying, and I think any good solution is going to take an incredible amount of thought and be more complex than the sort of thing you’d see every day on the internet.
