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…

Thanks, that makes more sense. I especially like the public toilet analogy. Afterlife beliefs really do bring the urinal home.

I don’t understand how this makes sense:

If you stop existing after death whatever you decide to do now doesn’t matter any more.

How does existing after death make the things you do matter? How does not existing make them not matter? I genuinely don’t understand what you mean.

Not trying to trivialize your position, just make sense of it, but I think the hidden assumption is something like: you are an algorithm for trying to create good experiences for your brain/human; the things you do matter only if they, ultimately result in better experiences for you; if, eventually, you have no experiences, there is no point striving for anything?

Is it something like that? That still doesn’t really make sense to me. Even if we accept the assumptions, why wouldn’t creating good experiences for your human temporarily, just until you die, matter?

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…

LOL

Joke’s good enough it deserves a comment in addition to the upvote.

Derp. Now I get it. In my defence, I’m also an Aussie so understandably thick. But I live in the Arctic now, where we’ve got all three bears. But the scary white ones stay away from the woods.

Thanks, this is really interesting!

I mean, if your partner’s right and has demonstrated it, you could just update your perspective and be right too…

Got a source for that claim?

A polar bear in the woods? They’re an aquatic mammal that lives on sea ice… Where are you from?

I need the home-work separation, or both suffer. I constantly get distracted from work with home stuff, and can’t be fully present with family at home because I’m thinking about work.